UK Bans Choking and Fauxcest Porn, and Creators Are Freaking Out

The clock is ticking on a UK law that has adult creators worldwide hitting delete. From November 6, amendments to the Crime and Policing Act make it illegal to possess or publish pornographic images of strangulation or suffocation, alongside content showing simulated sex between family members and performers role-playing as anyone under 16. Break the rule and it's up to five years behind bars plus a fine — and possession counts whether the file sits on a phone, a hard drive or in the cloud.

The crackdown grew out of a lengthy pornography review by Baroness Gabby Bertin, a Conservative peer in the House of Lords. She targeted choking in porn after it was linked to real-world deaths, including a 16-year-old Australian girl who lost consciousness in August after being choked consensually during sex. Bertin told the BBC that online porn has normalized a form of sexual violence, and she branded fauxcest a cover story that abusers can use to groom children, citing what the review called anecdotal evidence.

That reasoning is exactly what worries obscenity lawyer Myles Jackman. He has no quarrel with banning strangulation — the risks are documented and UK law already covers it — but he argues the language casts a much wider net, potentially catching breast smothering, jeans facesitting and, by his reading, oral sex. If face-sitting counts as suffocation because airways get blocked, he says, so could anything else that interferes with breathing. Jackman called the legislation, in his words, one of the greatest acts of suppression of free speech in global history.

Creators aren't waiting for a court to sort it out. Alexandra Snow, an adult performer and educator, says the real problem is not knowing how regulators will interpret the text until they start making people's lives hell, and she expects AI image-recognition tools to flag kink content like collaring or leather fetish clips that break no rule at all. US OnlyFans creator Cami Strella estimates 60 to 70 percent of her output involves role-play, including step-family scenarios, and calls her work pure fantasy. Banning it, she argues, only shoves genuinely illegal material further underground.

Britain has form here. The communications regulator Ofcom has already hit sites with penalties of up to 10 percent of worldwide revenue for dodging age-verification rules — long before several US states tried anything similar. Adult industry attorney Michael Fattorosi, based in Italy, says the UK is piling restriction on restriction, and he flags OnlyFans as uniquely exposed: its parent company, Fenix International Limited, is UK-based. He had a blunt warning for travelers, too — watch what's on your phone if you're visiting Britain. OnlyFans says it complies with the law in every market and has proactive safety measures in place.

Platforms are already moving. IWantClips has published fresh guidance for UK users and pulled clips, with a banned list that now names breast smothering, ass smothering, jeans facesitting, BBW facesitting, plastic fetish, scissorhold and butt drops. UK dominatrix Trans Princess Jezebel has begun combing through her IWantClips and OnlyFans libraries for anything that could be caught up in the sweep. The Ministry of Justice's Clara Coleman insists the law isn't about policing sexual freedom, but about cracking down on content that normalizes violence against women — a distinction creators say they can't afford to test in court.