Pornography, sexual content and obscenity

According to this and this (both articles in Polish unfortunately!) Poland might be facing a full ban on pornography in the near future. The new legislation that some politicians want to bring in (perhaps they'll be in the minority, we shall see!) will make it possible for someone to get a prison sentence not just for distribution but even for possession of any kind of pornography.
No definition of what constitutes pornography is given in this proposal, which sort of brings me to what I want to discuss (other than how stupid our current government is I mean ;-P). I've always felt that the limit of what's ok and what's not ok as far as sexual content goes is a fascinating discussion topic. Of course it's largely about taste and I don't think I'm going to come up with any reasonable conclusions, but if you have any thoughts I'd love to hear them :)

Not so long ago in India, there was a legal complaint against the kissing scene between Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai in Dhoom 2 (imdb page, trailer on youtube). A quote from IndiaGlitz reads:
According to the complainant, the women felt offended after watching the scene and it promoted vulgarity in society, especially among the youth.
Now for anyone who read the Polish articles on the pornography ban you might have noticed that those are almost the exact reasons for which some of PiS want a full pornography ban in Poland. In case you're wondering, here's the scene which we're talking about (the actual kissing happens late in the clip and sorry for the lack of subtitles but didn't find a clip with them):

It's not even as if there's no kissing in commercial Indian cinema, so it's hard to say why this particular kiss was so controversial. In the end, the kiss was cut.

But even a Western perspective of what's ok and what's not may sound just as ridiculous at times. Having been rambling about Equus on this blog I'm going to link to a Guardian article which uses Equus as a starting point to write about the history of nudity in British theatre. Apparently 40 years ago only female nudes were ok in the theatre and only if they didn't move. If they moved they were automatically considered obscene.
Not that people in the West don't have (what I would call) weird ideas about nudity even now. If you check out some discussions about Equus on-line, a lot of people (many of whom seem to be American) think that Daniel Radcliffe appearing nude on stage is enough to constitute child pornography because he's not yet 18 (he will be in about 6 months by the way). In accordance with US laws this might actually be true, I'm not sure, but I still feel it's a bit weird...

Of course so far I've been writing about stuff which nowadays only a small minority of people in the West would call obscene or pornographic (if at all that is - I'd be shocked if someone considerd the Hrithik-Ash kiss as such!). When we think pornography we generally think about stuff which is more explicit - usually photos or films which show people really having sex rather than just pretending. But there are films which would confuse us even there because they show *real* intercourse and yet they probably wouldn't be of interest to someone who is looking for pornography. One such film is definitely Lars von Trier's The Idiots (imdb page, trailer on youtube), another (although I haven't actually seen it) is Michael Winterbottom's 9 songs (imdb page, trailer on youtube). Both of these were shown at art cinema festivals and entered normal distribution in many countries.
And it's not just with films. If you ever check out some sites which specialize in fetish photography you'll find that most of the photographs are very artistic (sometimes - especially when we're talking about the violent stuff - very unsettling, but still artistic). I'm not sure what it is specifically about the fetish community but they really take photos which are way more than something that's just supposed to turn people on (in fact I've not seen many fetish pics which show people "in the act"). And yet when people hear "fetish" we usually think "obscene". Check out Incubus Choice if you want to see some stuff (though I am warning you - if you click on the link you are straying into territory that maaaany would consider porn, not that I think that should scare you but I'm saying it all the same).

Ok, so I've gotten from kissing scenes to real intercourse and photography portraying naked people tied up. Surely there should be a limit somewhere, right?
Lets look at the law then - I found this article very interesting and useful for this. Law is obviously different in different countries. But what I think is true pretty much everywhere is that it is illegal to supply pornography to people below a certain age (usually 18 or 16 though in Poland surprisingly enough it's 15 at the moment - however most Polish shops dealing with any sort of porn would not sell it to anyone below 18). It is also illegal to force the viewing of pornography on anyone (hey, I warned you about that Incubus site so I've done nothing illegal! ;-P ). The other legislations differ. Usually depicting bestiality is illegal (though I don't think that is true in the Netherlands - I think it is ok there as long as the animal is not harmed in any way). And of course there's child pornography which also has different restrictions and definitions in different countries. Mostly nobody below the age of 18 should be depicted although sometimes it is 16. Shockingly enough until 1999 Japan was extremely liberal about child pornography:
Prior to 1999, the only Japanese statute prohibiting actual child pornography was very limited in its reach, applying only to children under 13 who filed complaints within six months of an incident. A general criminal obscenity law protected minors over 13, but it also specified that the material must depict sexual organs to be considered illegal. Consequently, pornographic materials in Japan often resorted to showing other sexually oriented depictions of children, including abuse or torture, to avoid running afoul of the law.
Most countries also have laws against possession of child pornography (reading through the imdb boards, I'm not sure if this is true but apparently in the US anybody with nude pics of Daniel Radcliffe from Equus on their computer could theoretically be arrested for child pornography - not that there are many non-photoshoped pics of him floating around but I think even those are not legal under US law).
Many countries have laws which seperate child pornography into "virtual" and "actual" penalizing the virtual kind just as much. Virtual pornography is defined as depictions in which adult models are made up to look like children, and artistic or computer simulations of children involved in sexual activity. Now while I can see the logic of this I at the same time can't help but wonder if some of the stuff I've read or seen wouldn't be considered child pornography of the virtual kind. I mean particularly when I think about Harry Potter fan fiction and fan art... there's a lot of teacher-student relationships portrayed in those. To give you some examples, here's fan art showing Snape with Draco, Snape with Harry and another of Snape and Harry. I can see how for some people this might be considered totally sick, but is it harmful?
There have been (more about this in the long article I linked to) attempts at trying to find a link between watching porn and comitting sexual offences, but generally it seems the results depended on who tried to find this out (conservatives found a correlation and liberals did not).

I think I've finally come to the end of this post, but I don't really have a conclusion... I do believe people should be left with a choice as long as it doesn't harm anyone, but when it comes to "mental harm" it's very difficult to establish what is harmful and what is not (other than making somebody watch porn when they don't want to). Obviously if pornography causes sexual offences then something should be done about it (though I'm not sure a total ban would work), but we don't even know if it does (I've even heard claims that it actually makes the amount of sexual offences drop! but unfortunately don't have a link for this). Also I think even describing what pornography is is problematic. I'm not saying that any sort of porn is ok. There is definitely a lot of things happening in the porn industry which are not right - there are many reports of children and women being forced into starring in porn films (and in the case of children even if they did this willingly there would be reasons to say this is wrong).
On a final note, I think it's interesting that porn is apparently a huge economy booster and a pioneer in technology. The BBC article even says that the switch from Beta to VHS happened because of the porn industry.