UK Sex Sells News

Glasgow City Council has decided to ban new lap dancing venues but has decided to allow current clubs to continue trading.

So Glasgow's three existing  lap dancing venues were given licences this week. Seventh Heaven, Diamond Dolls and Platinum Lace were granted three-year sexual entertainment venue (SEVs) licences by the city council.

Poverty creation campaigners were less than impressed. The Glasgow Violence Against Women Partnership had called for the applications to be rejected. Kristi Hay, from the Partnership, said this decisions will afford Glasgow the opportunity to become the sex capital, adding: A city for stags, sex tourism and sex entertainment.

Lawyers for United Sex Workers, a branch of the United Voices of the World (UVW) union successfully helped out against Bristol Council's bid to ban lap dancing. The group has now applied to help out in a legal case in Edinburgh where dancers are trying to reverse a moralist ban on lap dancing clubs in the city.

Lawyers for United Sex Workers have applied to the Court of Session to be allowed to participate in a judicial review of plans that will cost the loss of 100 jobs.

The council voted in March to close all four strip clubs in the capital.

For years campaigners, including Labour councillors, police and feminist groups, - have urged Bristol Council to ban strip clubs. The only problem for this miserable coalition was that the strippers themselves wanted to carry on stripping to earn a living.

Adult performers were celebrating on Thursday after persuading a majority of the city's council to reject the proposed ban on strip clubs and other sex entertainment venues.

One self-described exotic dancer told the council's licensing committee:

Stripping has allowed me to have a flexible enough schedule to pursue my dream career while simultaneously enabling me to live a comfortable life - not living in constant stress due to living from paycheck to paycheck.

Such was the strength of feeling among the female dancers and performers that Guy Poultney, a Green Party councillor, received a round of applause when he accused women's rights groups of arguing that we should discount the voices of some women in order to empower them and to restrict their choices in the name of equality and take away their jobs for their own good. He also said they were acting as if some women can't be trusted to make choices for themselves.

 

Your Choice was a friendly porn video producer and distributor who became particularly well known for its Your Choice Viewers Wives series of videos compiled from video submissions from its own viewers.

The company started out in the dark UK times before the legalisation of hardcore porn. In the 70s Your Choice started running a mail order service where customers would select videos from a catalogue and make their orders via an office in the Netherlands. The orders were then fulfilled via agents in the UK who would make copies to order from smuggled master tapes. Your Choice were very successful in the market because of their good approach to customer service.

After the legalisation of porn in 2000, the company continued to operate online from the Netherlands, but very much still targeting a British audience for its now legitimate exports. At this bumper time for porn sales, Your Choice advertised with Melon Farmers, and the company was a pleasure to work with.

The advent of free porn tubes sites very much diminished sales, but Your Choice continued on until closure in 2019 when trading challenges and Brexit made the company unviable.

Now Oliver Carter of Birmingham City University has written an interesting article detailing the rise and fall of Your Choice.

See his full article Satisfaction Guaranteed [pdf] from cambridge.org .

Oliver has also been involved in a research project that explores the cultural and economic history of the British pornography business, and has an upcoming book book on 8mm British hardcore pornography and its regulation coming out later this year.

A new law has come into force in the UK (and anywhere else in the world if involving a UK national). There are new offences for breath play without consent and breath play with consent that results in serious harm.

In Part 5 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 (protection of children and others), after section 75 insert—

75A Strangulation or suffocation

(1) A person (“A”) commits an offence if—

(a) A intentionally strangles another person (“B”), or

(b) A does any other act to B that—

(i) affects B's ability to breathe, and

(ii) constitutes battery of B.

(2) It is a defence to an offence under this section for A to show that B consented to the strangulation or other act.

(3) But subsection (2) does not apply if

(a) B suffers serious harm as a result of the strangulation or other act, and

(b) A either—

(i) intended to cause B serious harm, or

(ii) was reckless as to whether B would suffer serious harm.

United Sex Workers are crowd-funding to launch legal challenges against strip club bans across the UK, starting with a judicial review against Edinburgh City Council. We desperately need your help 203 any contributions you can offer will help us fight to keep our livelihoods afloat and our workplaces open.

Strip club bans violate workers' rights at a time of severe economic crisis. They form part of a wider attempt by the state to oppress precarious workers and dictate what women and other minorities can do with their bodies.

We **cannot** stop this without you, so please donate and share!

Background:

On the 31st March 2022, Edinburgh City Council voted in favor of a nil-cap on Sexual Entertainment Venue (known as SEVs) licenses - effectively shutting all Edinburgh strip clubs as of April 2023 and forbidding any new ones to open. The consequences of this for workers, including strippers, bar staff, and security, will be devasting.

This nil-cap is a result of one of the several SEV consultations that have taken place across the UK where workers' voices have been completely ignored. It leaves hundreds of precarious workers unemployed during a time of unprecedented financial insecurity and rising living costs.

Nil-caps are plainly unlawful as they discriminate against women and other marginalised groups, such as people with disabilities and migrants, who make up the majority of strippers. If Councils continue to adopt them, the consequences for workers across the UK will be devastating.

We have a legal team in place to challenge the nil-cap's compatibility with the Equality Act 2010 and are confident we will win. But we need your help!

The Phone-paid Services Authority (PSA), the censor for premium rate services (PRS) in the UK is to hand its responsibilities over to telecoms censor Ofcom by late 2023.

Subject to approval from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) , the PSA will then cease to operate as an independent body. The PSA says that it anticipates Ofcom will assume responsibility for regulation in the second half of 2023, with PSA staff transferring to Ofcom. Ofcom will look to retain the key components of Code 15 to continue regulation in the consumer interest. PSA rules and Code 15 will remain in place until the transfer.

The PSA Chairman, David Edmonds said:

The work of the PSA in recent years has reduced risks to consumer to historically low levels. We introduced in April this year a new set of regulations which further protect consumers. And the industry -- both phone companies and service providers -- is increasingly conscious of its own responsibility to ensure dubious services are not operated. Complaints to the PSA are down by over 90%. We are also conscious of market trends and as a result the Board decided that future regulation of an industry increasingly dominated by larger players would be better served by an organisation with the capacity and breadth of Ofcom rather than a free-standing body. We already work closely with Ofcom who designate the PSA to deliver the day-to-day regulation of the market, by approving our Code of Practice. We look forward to working with them on this transition.

This proposed transfer of responsibilities has already been approved by the Ofcom board.

An outdoor poster ad for Get Hard, an online gay sex toy store, seen in January and February 2022, featured a person wearing a gimp mask and a background of aubergine and peach emojis. Large text superimposed in-front of the person's face said GET HARD and ANYONE CAN GET INTO IT!. The ad also included the URL www.WeGetHard.com.

The ASA received two complaints. The complainants challenged whether the ad was:

1. offensive because they believed it was overly sexualised; and

2. inappropriate for display in an untargeted medium where children could see it.

Get Hard Ltd said they used the tagline Get Hard. Anyone can. Get into it! to encourage an attitude of passion, grit, empathy, affection and self-care, that could be reached by anyone.

Get Hard said they wanted to encourage people to be open with themselves and have fun with the topic of sex, rather than the over serious and frigid attitude they believed was held by many people.

ASA Assessment: Complaints upheld

The ad was displayed at an outdoor poster site in London, which was an untargeted medium and where the image was likely to be seen by children and adults.

The ad featured a person in what appeared to be a gimp mask and large text that stated GET HARD. We understood that a gimp mask was an item of clothing worn by some people during sex who liked to be dominated. We considered that the image of the person wearing a gimp mask, which also emphasised their open mouth, was overtly sexual. We also considered that the text GET HARD was likely to be understood as slang for an erection, which we considered was sexually suggestive. We further understood that the peach and aubergine emojis were commonly used as references to a bottom and a penis, respectively, and often had sexual connotations. Taking the image of the person in the gimp mask together with the references to getting hard and the use of peach and aubergine emojis, we considered that the ad was overtly sexual.

We concluded that, because the ad was overtly sexual and was displayed in an untargeted medium where it had the potential to be seen by a large number of people, including children, it was likely to cause serious and widespread offence and was irresponsible. We concluded that the ad was unsuitable for outdoor display and therefore breached the Code.

The ad must not appear again in outdoor advertising. We told Get Hard Ltd to ensure that their advertising was suitably targeted and to exercise caution when preparing ads for display in outdoor space.

Edinburgh's moralist councillors have voted to ban lap dancing clubs. The city's regulatory committee voted to ban sexual entertainment clubs in the city from April next year by a majority of five to four.

Councillor Cameron Rose claimed that the Scottish government's policy of preventing violence against women and girls gave a national definition which included commercial sexual exploitation, defined as lap and pole-dancing as well as stripping.

Performers and managers from Edinburgh clubs gave evidence at the online meeting. Alexis, who has worked as a dancer for 15 years, said she was proud of her job and did not want to find another job because being a performer did not fit into the committee's moral values. (We are) educated women making educated decisions about what's best for our lives , she said.

United Voices of the World, a union representing exotic performers, said it would go to court in a bid to overturn the decision, and said it would request a judicial review.

Danielle Worden, legal case worker for the union, said:

The union is extremely disappointed that the council has chosen to disregard its legal obligations and the relevant evidence by adopting a policy that discriminates against women.

Not only does this violate the Equality Act 2010, it is an act of cruelty to remove the livelihoods of hundreds of workers as we enter the worst economic crisis since the 1970s.