In a clear case of ‘just cause we don’t live there doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care,’ the U.K’s Audiovisual Media Services Regulation (AVSR), restrictions introduced on 12/1/2014, cut a wide, some would say decidedly anti-feminine swath through the adult media/porn community in England. The AVSR regulations seemed purely draconian (banned were ‘spanking,’ role-playing as non-adults, physical/verbal abuse-even if consensual, female ejaculation and a host of others) many naughty media producers actually fought, and some won, against. A fight that has taken to now to get clear of (and not everyone got clear of it.)

The lovely, wise and now victorious Pandora Blake was one such producer who fought against the AVSR restrictions…and won. But she has battle scars from her victory to be sure. Pandora runs/stars in and shoots the content for the feminist spanking porn “Dreams of Spanking” site. Below is the 1st part of a 2 part interview with this very forthcoming champion fighting the good fight for you and me over a very important subject (and if it can happen there you can bet your spanked bottom it can happen here…if it isn’t already.) Ladies and gentleman, lovers of freedom and kink, may I introduce, Pandora Blake…

Ladies and gentleman, lovers of freedom and kink, may I introduce, Pandora Blake…

You actually had to take Dreams of Spanking offline for a year, right?

Yes, when ATVOD (UK’s Authority for Television On Demand) ruled against me in August 2015, I had to comply with their ruling that I take my site offline because legally speaking their decision was valid until successfully appealed against. So as well as taking the site down, I filed my appeal to Ofcom (Ofcom are a UK media ‘regulator’) with the help of a barrister provided by Backlash-that’s a non-profit organization dedicated to helping people affected by laws against obscenity and BDSM in the UK. After that, it was a long wait while Ofcom considered my appeal and decided whether they were going to uphold ATVOD’s decision or overturn it.

It took them ten months to decide that ATVOD had acted unjustly and that I was allowed to reopen my site. By that point it had been offline for nearly a year, I lost a huge amount of sales, and traffic is still much lower than it was before the ban.

Do you think you were singled-out because you criticized the new laws, spoke up on high-profile U.K. media, as much as the fact that you operate a kinky (albeit a fun) site?

This is an interesting one. I’m far from the only producer in the UK operating a BDSM or spanking site. One way of looking at it is that it simply depended on how high profile you were: a small clips store might be able to escape notice, whereas the fact I was on the news and on BBC Woman’s Hour talking about the impact of the new law called attention to my work. I knew from the start that speaking out was a bad business decision, but morally, I didn’t feel like I had a choice.

Another way of looking at it is a bit more sinister. If you look at the ratio of producers who were targeted by ATVOD and the sort of content they created, there definitely seems to have been a bias towards femdom and male submissive BDSM content. A lot of small-scale producers-especially pro-dommes, even if they were only on clips4sale rather than running a membership site-were investigated by ATVOD and closed down.

Dreams of Spanking is radical in that it provides a variety of gender orientations, with people of all genders in both dominant and submissive roles. For me, this is an essential part of shooting BDSM porn in a feminist way-ensuring that there aren’t any expectations that anyone will perform a certain power role on the basis of their gender. But apparently, this also meant we didn’t conform to the standards of acceptability that see submissive women as natural and okay, and submissive men as subversive and obscene; and I believe that this was definitely a factor in why my site was singled out.

The moment women are in charge and men are being submissive, suddenly it’s seen as threatening to the status quo.

So it could even be more a bias against women then against kink overall that the AVMS had a prejudice/fear of?

I think the guidelines can definitely be read that way, yes. People with cunts aren’t allowed to be dominant in certain ways, but people with cocks are. So a penis-owner can ejaculate all over someone, but a cunt-owner can’t ejaculate on anyone; and it’s fine to gag someone with cock, but facesitting is banned. You can have gangbangs, double penetration, and there’s no upper limit on cock size, but fisting is “too dangerous.”

The ban on squirting is the most outrageous from my point of view. In an age where so many of the criticisms leveled against porn are concerned with the ways in which it’s sexist and male-centric-we hear about how it’s awful that women are sexually objectified in porn, that the climax of a scene is a man’s orgasm and the woman might not have one at all, seems utterly absurd, and very damaging, to introduce laws that criminalize the most visible, undeniable expression of female orgasm.

Believe me, I have lots more good stuff (and even different pictures) for part 2 with Pandora. Until next time check her site out here: http://dreamsofspanking.com/