  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, 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. Finally, the comedy show Kim Noble Must Die (2009) featured video footage of Kim Noble ejaculating. 
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 and their demeaning images of Koons ejaculating onto Staller. 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 worldwide 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 controversial photograph is 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 (1993 and 2009), Ron Oliver (1993), Will McBride (Zeig Mal!, 1974), David Hamilton (The Age Of Innocence, 1995), Nan Goldin (Klara And Edda Belly-Dancing, 1998), Tierney Gearon (2001), Annelies Strba (2002), and Richard Prince (Spiritual America, 1983) have also been seized by UK police as potentially obscene. In America, the FBI investigated photographers Jacqueline Livingston (1978) and Jock Sturges (Radiant Identities, 1994) though ultimately 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. 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). 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. 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 early 1950s. In the same era, over a hundred 'saucy postcards' were also declared obscene, including many by the artist Donald McGill. 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. Later obscenity charges against novels (Last Exit To Brooklyn in 1968; Lord Horror in 1991) were overturned after appeals, as was the conviction of the underground magazine Oz #28 in 1971. The Sapphic novel The Well Of Loneliness, convicted in 1929, had already been republished in 1949 with no subsequent prosecution. Visual art was still targeted, however: prints of Aubrey Beardsley's Lysistrata illustrations were seized by Scotland Yard, twenty paintings by Jim Dine were also confiscated, and Gustav Metzger was prosecuted for his Destruction In Art Symposium, all in 1966. The Obscene Publications Act was extended to include films in 1977. 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 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 thirty-nine objectionable videos which had either been successfully prosecuted by regional police forces or were deemed "suitable for such prosecution". Most of those titles have subsequently been rereleased, either cut or uncut; only a handful remain unavailable, though so much time has elapsed since their prosecutions that rereleases would almost certainly be legally permitted. 
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 American 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 de Renzy and Gerard Damiano. de Renzy 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. Alex de Renzy'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, de Renzy 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). 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), by Dance-Metal band Rammstein for their video Pussy (Jonas Akerlund, 2009), and by Dirty Stop Out for their video Cuntro Classics I (2009). In 1998, Pierre Woodman's porn film The Pyramid (1997) was submitted for classification to the British Board of Film Classification. 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. There are a handful of exploitation directors who specialise in particularly graphic combinations of sex and violence, and the most notorious is Aristide Massaccesi, who 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; later, Tom Green masturbated both a horse and an elephant in the 2001 comedy 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 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 (and particularly French) 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. 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. The gay short film compilations Boys On Film II (2009) and Boys On Film VI (2011) also include brief hardcore scenes, the former featuring Julian Hernandez's explicit Bramadero (2007). 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). Thunska's first feature-length narrative film, Reincarnate (2009), is also his most explicit work; it was followed by The Terrorists (2011), which combines sex wih footage of state-sanctioned violence. His short film 2060 (2012), an extract from the feature-length Supernatural (2013), ends with photographs of Thai military massacres. The following non-pornographic films include images of erections and have received either mainstream or arthouse distribution:
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