LONDON — The Earl of Erroll, a British nobleman with an inherited title dating back to the 15th century, gave a speech to the House of Lords supporting state intervention in adult content through a revamped Online Safety Bill, claiming that online porn “normalizes anal sex and blowjobs” which “are just really not about how to go around wooing a woman.”
The 73-year-old hereditary peer — whose full name is Merlin Sereld Victor Gilbert Hay, and who is the 24th consecutive Earl of Erroll from the Hay family — delivered the speech during a discussion on how the U.K. can revive 2017 age verification legislation that was abandoned in 2019 over implementation difficulties.
Boris Johnson’s Conservative government has been adamant in prioritizing this initiative, amidst a campaign of “porn panic” stoked by the entire U.K. media establishment, from the BBC News to The Times to right-wing tabloids and even the supposedly progressive Guardian newspaper.
The Earl of Erroll told the House of Lords this week that he was concerned about the abandonment of the 2017 age verification mandate, adding that “the thing that really worries me isn’t just the extreme pornography — which quite rightly has been mentioned — it’s just the stuff you can access for free, which is what you might call the teaser stuff just to get you into the site.”
“It normalizes a couple of sexual behaviors,” the unelected nobleman continued, “which are just really not about how to go around wooing a woman, because most of the stuff you see upfront is about men almost attacking the women.”
“I’m afraid it normalizes — should I be absolutely precise about it because I think people pussyfoot around it? — it normalizes anal sex and blowjobs,” stated Hay, who was born in 1948 and succeeded his mother, a countess, in 1978 as Earl of Erroll and his father as a Baronet in 1985.
'Some Funny People'
“I’m afraid I don’t think that is the way you go about a relationship, a start of a relationship,” he continued. “Starting off children at the age of 10, 11, goodness knows when they start watching this stuff, that this is how you should treat a girl when you first start going out with her, probably in your early teens, is not a good idea and you could have stopped it.”
“And for some reason the executive decided not to, and I’d love to know who it was in there that kept blocking it, because I think there’s some funny people in there and it really worries me,” concluded the nobleman, whose family motto is “Serva jugum,” Latin for “Keep the yoke.”
The Earl of Erroll’s speech “came as peers considered the Digital Economy Act 2017 (Commencement of Part 3) Bill at second reading,” the PA News Agency reported. “This was tabled by DUP peer Lord Morrow in an attempt to implement the age verification part of the 2017 legislation, thereby introducing some protections sooner and allowing the Online Safety Bill to build on them.”
Lord Sharpe of Epsom — a Conservative appointee to the House of Lords — praised the new Boris Johnson-endorsed version of the Online Safety Bill for “going further” than the 2017 Act “by ensuring social media is covered by the measures.”
The clear implication of that “going further” is that platforms that are currently open to sex workers and adult performers, like Twitter and Reddit, could be the reclassified as “pornographic websites” in the U.K. unless they comply with the proposed new British law.