SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Evidently, Peter Acworth has had enough of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s “ridiculous war on pornography.” Over the weekend, the Kink.com chief executive — a British national who resides in the U.S. — posted a video message to Cameron in which the pornographer quite convincingly dismantled many of Cameron’s arguments in favor of blocking, by default, all online pornography in the U.K.
One of Acworth’s key objections: Banning sexually explicit images effectively would ban sexual education. The point seems doubly impassioned when delivered by Acworth, considering he has said he began his first BDSM-themed website after an encounter with pornography taught him he isn’t alone in being aroused by bondage. The discovery relieved lifelong anxiety and confusion about whether he was “normal,” he has indicated.
“How does one determine where pornography stops and educational material starts?” Acworth asks in the video. “Strikes me as extremely problematic laws put in place. So you’re telling me if I go to a library in England, I’m not going to be able to look at sex educational websites because they will potentially be filtered. That seems to me to be denying the British people information they need to have.”
Acworth also cites research countering anti-porn activists’ claims that internet porn leads to increases in sex crimes. According to Acworth, at least one major study found that rape in the U.S. has declined 85 percent since the dawn of the public internet.
“If it were true to say that pornography caused heinous crimes, one would think heinous crimes would have skyrocketed in direct proportion,” Acworth notes in the video. “That is not the case. During this period with the proliferation of pornography on the internet, the incidents of rape, heinous crimes such as rape, have actually plummeted; gone down enormously during that same period. And so, if anything, there is a correlation in the other direction. So, the basis for this ridiculous war on pornography is evidence which is fundamentally flawed, in my opinion.”
Acworth, 43, defies the stereotype of internet porn moguls as horny losers who began their online empires in their mother’s basement because that was the only way they could get laid. Cambridge-educated, Acworth was a PhD student in finance at Columbia Business School in New York when, in 1997, he founded what would become Kink.com. Since then, the company has become one of the world’s largest producers of fetish-driven adult entertainment.
This isn’t the first time he has tried to initiate a dialogue with Cameron. In July, Acworth penned an open letter to the UK Prime Minister. The letter ran on both his blog and on BehindKink.com, the company’s news site.
So far, Cameron has acknowledged neither effort.
[SIZE=1]Image: Kink.com founder and CEO Peter Acworth, left, and British Prime Minister David Cameron.[/SIZE]
