On The Offensive
crowd was suitably aghast and Owens concluded her speech by explaining that the venue intended to host the 2011 Night of the Sense had, at short notice, pulled out of the agreement, saying they were scared that consensual acts of BDSM on their premises could endanger their license. Owens added: “I’ve said before now, if we ever get raided by the police again everyone should stop what they’re doing and we’ll call it an art installation!”
With the room still chucking, Anna Arrowsmith - better known as Anna Span - stood up and outlined her own take on sex and politics. As a director of adult films since 1998 and a Liberal Democrat candidate for last year’s General Election, she’s uniquely placed with a foot in both camps.
Arrowsmith has been a highly visible defender of pornography, speaking at many debates and adult film festivals for many years. She also felt it was time
to be more proactive against the ‘anti-porn league’, wanting the media to report the wider story, such as her university debates where students had never yet failed to support her position - that porn isn’t bad and adults should have the freedom to enjoy it if they wish. Arrowsmith went on to target the religious conservatives, especially in the US, as being a huge danger to liberty. Able to use religion for their moral arguments rather than empirical evidence of harm, she mentioned that for the second time AIM - the STI testing clinic for many adult performers in the US - had been closed down following pressure. Since leaving St Martin’s College of Art and Design,
she’s been in a constant state of self-defence for her whole career and stressed by the same old unproven accusations, she told the now hushed room. She explained how she gathers research from academics to back up her fight. “Porn is not to blame for women’s
body image problems,” was one point, but many more were expressed, including that exposure to sexual imagery still happens around the age of 14, just as it did a generation ago when boys - and girls - would access their parents’ or older sibling’s porn magazine collections. The Internet wasn’t sexualising children and that parents needed to take some responsibility for what their children had access to. Arrowsmith also dismissed ‘Porn Addiction’ as a tabloid hook, saying research into dopamine and the physiological changes porn triggered showed it was a sociological effect, not a biological one.
Urging the adult industry to unite, she unveiled
WeConsent.org, a website she’s been working on to allow the other side of the story to be told. The one where the pornographers aren’t the bad guys, and some of them aren’t guys at all. She hopes, to organise a movement against the creep of censorship under the
Barnett: “Go on the attack”
Sexual freedom campaigner Tuppy Owens
Arrowsmith targeted religious conservatives 53
Erotic Trade Only June 2011
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