LONDON — U.K. “obscenity” lawyer Myles Jackman and feminist pornographer Pandora Blake have organized a protest called the “Backlash Kink Olympixxx,” slated for Oct. 17 outside of Parliament.
Jackman and Blake, along with members from the Open Rights Group, NO2ID and Big Brother Watch, will be campaigning against the risks posed to personal privacy and sexual freedom by the Digital Economy Bill that is currently before U.K. lawmakers.
The Backlash Kink Olympixxx will feature surreal and satirical games, including “fisting volleyball,” a “spanking relay race” and “squirting water fight” in what organizers call a “playful parody” of the sexual acts that are legal to perform in real life, but illegal to represent, possess or publish under U.K. sex laws.
The Backlash Kink Olympixxx, to be held outside Parliament between noon-2 p.m. on Oct. 17, will include speeches from organizers and civil liberties organizations, including Privacy International, Index on Censorship and the English Collective of Prostitutes.
“While the Backlash Kink Olympixxx was conceived as a playful protest, the Digital Economy Bill poses a serious risk of users’ personal sexual preferences being leaked,” said Jackman, who runs Backlash, which defends freedom of sexual expression for consenting adults in the U.K.
The bill, he said, will “adversely affect sexual minorities’ ability to freely express their sexuality and, most frighteningly, imposes state censorship and surveillance of consensual adult sexual content in the U.K.”
“Chinese state censors and surveillance agents will envy this Hadrian’s firewall," he said.
Blake said the Digital Economy Bill “will introduce compulsory age verification for all adult content without any measures to safeguard the privacy of web users.”
“Consensual adult sex should not be criminalized, yet this bill will prohibit the publication of depictions of sexual activities that are legal to perform," Blake said. “We are calling for a joint committee on adult liberty to update our retrograde sex laws.”
