   SexReligious notions of original sin and the abomination of fornication instilled the shame with which we regard all matters relating to sex. This has led to the censorship of sexual language and imagery from the media. The collapse of these restrictions was directly advocated by Nick Zedd, who published a manifesto calling for a new kind of taboo-breaking cinema which he named the Cinema of Transgression. (The 1985 Cinema Of Transgression Manifesto was originally attributed to Orion Jeriko, Zedd's pseudonym.) Zedd started making underground films in the early 1980s, though his most extreme production is the confrontational, hardcore short film Whoregasm from 1988. The Lord Chamberlain's role as British theatre censor ended in 1968, though it took thirty years and a Dutch theatre-company - Toneelgroep - to bring unsimulated sex to the stage. Toneelgroep toured Britain with their play Buff (directed by Gerardjan Rijnders) in 1998, a monologue in which a redundant theatre critic rails against the blinkered pretension of contemporary theatre. Attempting to attract his attention, his wife and son perform increasingly explicit acts, including unsimulated masturbation and ejaculation. As actor Fred Goessens, playing the critic's son, began to masturbate, a kettle was placed on a stove, and Goessens timed his orgasm with the whistling of the kettle: a genuinely taboo-breaking moment in an exciting and energetic play. The only comparably explicit theatrical performances are those of the lesbian band Rockbitch, who were often prevented from performing in Britain as their concerts were punctuated by the group fingering and fisting each other mid-performance. (They released a live video in 1997 titled Bitchcraft.) With the abolition of central regulation in the form of the Lord Chamberlain, censorship of the stage became determined on a local basis by town councils, thus Rockbitch could perform in some towns yet not in others. It was this inconsistency which led to the group regretfully retiring from live performance in 2002. Some performance art events have been enlivened by the concurrent projection of sexually explicit material, notably two performances from the same year (2002) by Ron Athey and Tadasu Takamine. Athey's performance Joyce included a triptych display projecting three extreme scenarios: the artist masturbating in the shower, the artist fisting a woman representing his mother, and a man slashing his arms with a razor. The footage was projected below a stage, also segregated into three sections, on which Athey and his entourage dangled naked from ropes and swings. Takamine's performance Kimura-San featured footage of the artist masturbating a friend who is unable to speak or move unaided. In relieving his friend's sexual tension in this way, Takamine extended the boundaries of traditional 'personal care', and in presenting it to audiences he challenged the stereotypical equation of disability with asexuality. As the footage was projected, Takamine strapped his head into an ergonomic metal cage, smashing panes of glass with his head and grinding the shards with his forehead. The combination of metal and flesh in this brutal spectacle is a recurrent motif in modern Japanese culture. A third (and even more explicit) example of a performance accompanied by explicit footage is the multi-media spectacle XXX (2002) by the Spanish theatre-company La Fura dels Baus, which was performed in Britain in 2003. In XXX, inspired by the Marquis DeSade (and directed by Alex Olle and Carlos Padrissa), the live performance of simulated sex is supplemented by footage of psychedelic disembodied erections, hardcore penetration shots filmed in extreme close-up, and even a few seconds of internet-sourced footage featuring a woman being penetrated by a horse. (An equally brief equine-penetration clip was included in Robinson Devor's zoophile documentary Zoo in 2007.) 
Obscenity In The MediaIn art photography, sex is most explicitly represented by Jeff Koons, whose narcissistic Made In Heaven series (1991) features the artist having sex with his then-wife, former porn model Ilona Staller. Koons's photographs are perhaps the most provocative works caught up in the long-running debate surrounding the division between art and pornography. In fact, they deliberately resemble pornography with their extreme close-ups of penetration (Ilona's Asshole) and their demeaning images of Koons ejaculating onto Staller (Exaltation). Koons's photographs were published uncensored by Taschen in 1992, and since their Koons monograph Taschen have become synonymous with explicit art books. They excelled even themselves with Forbidden Erotica (2000) by Mark Rotenberg and Laura Mirsky, a collection of Victorian hardcore images distinguished as perhaps the only book in Britain with an uncensored hardcore photograph as its cover image. Robert Mapplethorpe's acclaimed X Portfolio photographs depicting gay sex achieved world-wide notoriety when American senator Jesse Helms criticised the state funding of a Mapplethorpe retrospective in 1989. Helms came to epitomise the reactionary, religious, and conservative contempt for any remotely challenging artworks. A lavish monograph of the photographer's work (Mapplethorpe, 1992), featuring many of the X Portfolio images, has twice been seized by police in Britain, though has never actually been prosecuted for obscenity. Mapplethorpe's most startling image, singled out for condemnation by Helms, is Helmut And Brooks (1978), which depicts a man's arm inserted up to the elbow into another man's anus. This hardcore fisting image is not Mapplethorpe's most controversial photograph, however; that honour belongs to Rosie (1976), a portrait of three-year-old Rosie Bowdrey in which her dress does not quite obscure her nakedness. Rosie has been seized by the police from a London art gallery, and several other galleries have refused to exhibit it on police advice. Indeed, any art exhibition featuring photographs of naked children, regardless of the context, is liable for prosecution in the current climate of moral panic. (Nude photographs of children by Graham Ovenden, David Hamilton, Nan Goldin, Tierney Gearnon, and Annelies Strba have also been seized by UK police as potentially obscene. In America, the FBI investigated photographer Jock Sturges after raiding his studio, though no charges were brought.) In contrast to the raw, black-and-white images of Mapplethorpe, the photographic series A History Of Sex (1998) by Andres Serrano is bright, glossy, and stylised. Serrano explores the full gamut of human sexuality, including a woman masturbating a horse (Red Pebbles). Surprisingly, the most graphic sex ever seen on British terrestrial television was broadcast on the mainstream channel BBC1: An Everyday Miracle, an episode of the science documentary series The Human Body (Christopher Spencer, 1998), illustrated the process of human fertilisation using microscopic cameras. Two ejaculations were shown, in extreme close-up, the first time such footage had ever been transmitted on British terrestrial TV. It was almost a decade before comparably explicit material was broadcast again, when Channel 5 filmed an ejaculation from inside the vagina in A Girl's Guide To 21st Century Sex (2006). Potentially obscene artefacts can be legally disseminated only if they have demonstrably artistic merit, educational value, or restricted distribution. The defence of artistic merit was central to the overturning of the Lady Chatterley's Lover ban in 1960, as witness after witness attested to its literary qualities. The BBC initially justified The Human Body's TV ejaculations as educational and scientific, though those vital few seconds are always mysteriously omitted whenever the programme is repeated. A defence of educational merit was central to the decision in 1991 to permit hardcore sex in ground-beaking sex-education videos such as Simon Ludgate's The Lovers' Guide, the law making a clear distinction between acceptable sex-education and unacceptable pornography. The salvations of the extraordinarily explicit images published by Taschen are the books' expensive cover-prices and concomitant limited print-runs: they are purchased only by a small and 'cultured' demographic, and are therefore deemed too obscure to offend or corrupt mainstream sensibilities. The BBC2 UK television series Taboo by Sam Hobkinson (2001) featured presenter Joan Bakewell flicking through hardcore porn magazines in a sex shop, and, as she turned the pages, some of their images were briefly visible. The series also included Bakewell reciting extracts from The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name, using its status as a documentary about artistic taboos to transgress the taboos themselves. Such academic analyses of censorship are often given greater freedom than the uncontextualised artefacts analysed by them. For example, brief hardcore images were cut from the thriller Cruising (William Friekin, 1980) whereas the same footage was permitted in the documentary The Celluloid Closet (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 1995), the context being central to the acceptability (or otherwise) of the images. Cable and satellite television channels, available only by subscription, are less strictly regulated than terrestrial TV; indeed, it is technologically impossible to censor satellite broadcasts beamed across national boundaries, and the virtual boundaries of the internet are similarly unregulated. European hardcore arthouse films such as Romance are screened on UK cable television without restriction, though UK terrestrial broadcasters generally exercise far more caution. The main exception to this rule is Channel 4, founded specifically as an alternative to the mainstream populism of other terrestrial channels. Channel 4 can be justly proud of its various barrier-breaking decisions, not least of which was its uncut screening of Idioterne in 2005. With its 1991 Banned UK television season, Channel 4 prided itself on screening previously prohibited material, and the season included Sex And The Censors, a documentary by Michael Jones and Nicholas Fraser assessing our increasingly liberal attitudes towards cinematic sex. The programme featured Derek Jarman discussing film censorship while a previously censored scene featuring an erection (from his 1976 film Sebastiane) was projected behind him. Monographs of photographs by Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe published in the UK have included occasional images of erections, and, as noted earlier, Taschen has published much more explicit material. A book by Alexia O'Neil (Size Counts, 2004), which explored the significance of the erection, also included several photographic examples of its subject. In Britain, the publication of material with a tendency to 'deprave and corrupt' public morals was curtailed by the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. The popularity of sensationalist 'pulp fiction' novellas from America led to many prosecutions under the Act, and thousands of convicted titles were listed in an annual (and highly classified) Blue Book issued by the Home Office during the 1950s. The Act was revised in 1959, introducing a defence of artistic merit, which lead to the acquittal of Lady Chatterley's Lover the following year. DH Lawrence's novel, originally published in 1929, was a watershed for British society, the first in a series of liberal milestones throughout the 1960s. The vindication of Lady Chatterley enabled other works of literary merit to avoid prosecution, though in the 1970s there were still high-profile obscenity trials and several convictions of counter-culture magazines. Underground comics (published in defiance of the Comics Code) and Punk records were also prosecuted, though in many cases the convictions were overturned on appeal. The Obscene Publications Act was extended to include films in 1977, following several unsuccessful prosecution attempts in the 1970s. This extension of the Act's remit would become most evident in the 1980s, when films were released on video. Technology is always ahead of the censor: satellite television enables foreign channels to broadcast pornography across the airwaves to Britain and, in the virtual world of the internet, legislation is anathema. Similarly, domestic video cassettes were introduced before any thought was given to the regulation of their contents. Thus, films banned from the cinema screen suddenly became available on tape. The press (especially the vitriolic Daily Mail) began campaigning for legislation against these 'video nasties', dismissively summarising them as 'gore', 'splatter', 'slice-and-dicers', and 'stalk-and-slashers'. The Director of Public Prosecutions was urged to act. In 1983, the DPP issued a list of objectionable videos, some of which had actually been prosecuted while others were simply deemed suitable for prosecution. No distinction was made between these two categories, and consequently local police forces began impounding virtually any horror video they saw. There was also considerable inconsistency in the prosecutions themselves, with films being exonerated by some courts yet convicted by others. Meanwhile, the DPP's nasties list was continuously revised and expanded, to reflect the various convictions and acquittals. In some instances, films were condemned not because of their actual content but because of their outrageous video covers. Many titles were acquitted more often than they were convicted, and were eventually removed from the list. Some have been subsequently rereleased, and only a handful remain banned in Britain. 
The Mainstreaming Of PornSex and the cinema have a long relationship, first demonstrated by the production of pornographic Stag reels ('blue movies', 'cooch reels', 'beaver reels', or 'smokers') from the 1890s onwards. A landmark ruling in 1957, that nudist films were not obscene, led to a flood of softcore 'sexploitation' films variously termed 'roughies', 'kinkies', 'ghoulies', and 'nudie-cuties' (the first being Russ Meyer's The Immoral Mr Teas from 1959). Sexploitation became increasingly explicit, and increasingly violent, following Herschell Gordon Lewis's gory Blood Feast (1963), until eventually even hardcore pornography gained mainstream recognition. Porn (or 'porno') was brought from the back-streets to the mainstream in the early 1970s by two directors: Alex DeRenzy and Gerard Damiano. DeRenzy directed several ground-breaking documentaries on pornography, including Pornography In Denmark (1970) and A History Of The Blue Movie (1971) which featured uncensored clips from Stag films. Michel Reilhac made a similar compilation in 2002, Polissons Et Galipettes. DeRenzy's documentaries, mostly focussing on the landmark legalisation of hardcore by Denmark in 1969, emphasised pornography's historical and cultural significance, and porn came to be recogised as a subject for study and discussion rather than prosecution. However, DeRenzy was at heart a sensationalist. The documentary nature of his films was a convenient excuse to distribute hardcore porn under the guise of respectability, and his influence on the intellectualisation of pornography was accidental rather than planned. Most notoriously, he directed the tastelessly exploitative Animal Lover (1971), a manipulative 'documentary' featuring zoophile Bodil Joensen. Deep Throat (1972), by Gerard Damiano, became porn's cross-over hit, as Damiano recognised that, with changes in structure and publicity, hardcore content could be rendered acceptable to a wider audience. (Inside Deep Throat, a documentary about the film's unexpected success, was directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato in 2005.) Unlike most previous porn films, Deep Throat was feature-length, with a script and a plot, its sex scenes thus being justified by their narrative context. The film played in mainstream cinemas, with its success being dubbed 'porno chic'. A similar trend existed in Japan, initiated by Tetsuji Takechi's taboo-breaking Pinku Eiga film Hakujitsumu from 1964 (which he remade in 1981), and the Roman Porno films produced by the Nikkatsu studio (such as Shogoro Nishimura's Danchizuma Hirusagari No Joji, 1971). Japan also has an extensive market for bawdy (Ecchi) and pornographic (Hentai) Anime, which can be sub-divided into several specific genres. For example, Yaoi cartoons feature gay characters (though are aimed at a female audience), Shonen-Ai are gay cartoons aimed at a male audience, Yuri and Shojo-Ai feature lesbian characters, Shota are erotic cartoons featuring young boys, and Lolicon are similarly erotic Anime featuring young girls. The success of Deep Throat also led to a number of experimental hardcore films (including Jean-Francois Davy's 1975 documentary Exhibition, and Bo Arne Vibenius's self-explanatory 1974 rape-revenge production Thriller: En Grym Film) playing the 'midnight movie' circuit, occupying spots usually taken by softcore exploitation films. This cross-over was not always successful, as the films, such as Thundercrack (Curt McDowell, 1975), were often too graphic for the arthouse audience and too avant-garde for the usual porn audience. In an infamously unsuccessful example of porn cross-over, acclaimed actors such as John Geilgud and Malcolm McDowell appeared in the Roman epic Caligula (1979) and later disowned the film when its director, Tinto Brass, later inserted six minutes of hardcore pornography. Though largely removed from public cinemas, pornography is now ubiquitous online and on video. John Stagliano's The Adventures Of Buttman (1989) video led to the Verite-style Gonzo sub-genre. Porn has been appropriated by the Hip-Hop performer Snoop Dogg for his video Doggystyle (Michael Martin, 2001). In 1998, Pierre Woodman's porn film The Pyramid (1997) was submitted for classification to the BBFC. The Board did not censor the film's hardcore footage, and gave it an 'R18' certificate which confined it to licensed sex shops. This was something of a landmark decision, as it marked the first occasion on which hardcore pornography was legally available in the UK. The BBFC's decision in this case was especially extraordinary as they had not consulted the Home Office prior to making it. Consequently, the Home Secretary ordered a reversal of the new, liberal, policy. The BBFC relented, and resumed their previous position, removing all hardcore footage from the porn films they received. The distributors, pleasantly surprised by the BBFC's liberalism and frustrated by its swift abolition, launched a legal appeal. The appeal was successful, and the government was effectively over-ruled. Consequently, consensual hardcore is now permitted in 'R18' films. Though the BBFC does certify material at the borderline between erotica and pornography, or pornography and arthouse, it still refuses to certify blatantly exploitative material. For this reason, Hardgore (Michael Hugo, 1974), an outrageous combination of gore and porn, is unlikely ever to be passed uncut by the BBFC. There are a handful of exploitation directors who specialise in particularly graphic combinations of sex and violence, and the most notorious is Aristide Massaccesi. Massaccesi always directed under pseudonyms; his Emanuelle In America (1972), credited to the pseudonymous Joe D'Amato, was released in the UK only after its scenes of genuine horse-masturbation were removed. (Tom Green masturbated both a horse and an elephant in his 2001 comedy film Freddy Got Fingered.) Ian Kerkhof's The Dead Man II: Return Of The Dead Man (1994), which begins with a graphic 'Roman shower' sequence, has never been submitted to the BBFC, although a film with a similar sequence (Lukas Moodysson's Ett Hal I Mitt Hjarta, 2004) was approved by them ten years later. Michael Caton-Jones's Scandal (1988) was cut by the BBFC to remove brief hardcore sex from its orgy scene, and Joel Schumacher's Hollywood thriller 8mm (1999) was cut by the Motion-Picture Association of America to remove background images of hardcore porn. 
Arthouse HardcoreDuring the 1960s, several artists produced short, experimental hardcore films, the most famous being Carolee Schneemann's Fuses (1965), Andy Warhol's Fuck (1968), and Barbara Rubin's Christmas On Earth (1962). Helmuth Costard's short propagandist film Besonders Wertvoll (1968) features a close-up image of an erect penis which ridicules the German government before ejaculating towards the camera. Later, artists incorporated footage from pornographic films into their work, as in Peggy Ahwesh's The Color Of Love (1994) and several films by Tony Wu (Making Maps, 2003; More Intimacy, 1999). The first time an erect penis appeared in a non-pornographic, commercial, narrative film (as opposed to experimental films or pornography) was in 1966, when Ingmar Bergman included a brief image of an erection in Persona. Since then, there have been many art films featuring brief erection sequences, and this forbidden image has been permissible in these cases precisely because the films received only a limited art-house distribution. In the 1990s, European art cinema became noticeably more explicit, with brief, contextualised hardcore sequences incorporated into an increasing number of arthouse films. In Gaspar Noe's Seul Contre Tous, for instance, the central character visits a porn cinema and we view the sex film with him. Later, the film teases the audience with a caption warning that those of a nervous disposition have thirty seconds to leave the cinema, evoking the 1950s gimmicks of William Castle. Noe also directed a short hardcore sex-education film for French television (Sodomites, 1998). Catherine Breillat has directed several explicit French studies of sexual politics (including Romance and Anatomie De L'Enfer), though the most graphic example is Baise-Moi, an exploitative combination of hardcore porn and violence which was banned in France. The portmanteau film Destricted (2005) addresses the issue of arthouse hardcore head-on. Its raison d'etre is to explore the outer limits of sex in narrative cinema, and it consists of seven short films: Balkan Erotic Epic (Marina Abramovic), Hoist (Matthew Barney), Sync (Marco Brambilla), Impaled (Larry Clark), We Fuck Alone (Gaspar Noe), House Call (Richard Prince), and Death Valley (Sam Taylor-Wood). Tom Hingston attempted a similar exercise with his book Porn? (2002), in which he commissioned several fashion/art photographers to produce a series of images exploring the nature of pornography. Thunska Pansittivorakul, an independent Thai director, has produced several sexually explicit short films. Sigh (2001) includes double-exposed, out-of-focus, hardcore images of two men having sex. Vous Vous Souviens De Moi? (2005) includes scenes of a man with an erection. Voodoo Girls (2002) features masturbation footage from internet pornography. Endless Story (2005), a slideshow of the director's snapshots, includes pictures of hustlers posing with erections. This Area Is Under Quarantine (2008) features close-up footage of two men having sex. In the split-screen Unseen Bangkok (2004), a profile of a male hustler, the subject is shown stroking his erect penis and, in a covert porn video, a man masturbates while taking a shower. In the tender Middle-Earth (2007), two nude men sleep next to each other, and, in the film's playful conclusion, one of the men slowly develops an erection. A similar sequence depicting gradual tumescence appears at the start of Matthew Barney's De Lama Lamina (2004), and such a transformation is the central feature of John Broughton's short film Hermes Bird (1979). Films such as these are less strictly censored in the UK partly because, having foreign-language soundtracks, they are all subtitled in English. It is felt (somewhat condescendingly) that subtitled films will appeal only to a limited audience prepared to seek out these films at arthouses rather than the mass audience at the multiplexes. More recently, the British films Intimacy and Nine Songs have both been certified uncut despite their hardcore content and English-language soundtracks. Indeed, we can be pleasantly surprised by the flexibility of British obscenity legislation from the late 1990s onwards. The days when split-second erections caused moral panics are over. The BBFC accepts that shock, abjection, and sexual realism are legitimate exercises, and differentiates them from exploitation and pornography. The contextualised hardcore scenes popularised by the New French Extreme are now almost commonplace in art cinema, and only rarely attract the censor's sissors. The following non-pornographic films include images of erections and have received either mainstream or arthouse distribution:
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