International Fetish Day and the UK Extreme-Porn Law

International Fetish Day is a political date for the BDSM and fetish communities. It grew out of National Fetish Day in the United Kingdom, first marked on January 18, 2008. The international day landed on January 16, 2009, the third Friday of that year, and replaced the earlier national branding. Some accounts put a first UK celebration on September 4, 2008. The point was to raise awareness of fetish people, to back community members who wanted to be more open about their sexuality without giving up ordinary public life, and to push against the UK offense of possessing “extreme pornography,” which was about to come into force. For readers inside the scene, the day treats negotiated adult fantasy, gear, and SM images as ordinary culture, not as an automatic moral emergency when a government rewrites obscenity law in the language of public panic.

Perverts Wear Purple

The signature action on National Fetish Day was wearing something purple. The slogan was Perverts Wear Purple. Purple was already in circulation as a BDSM color. The gesture did two kinds of visibility at once: it said you belonged to the community, and it let you look ordinary at work and in public the rest of the time. Organizers called it low risk. You could say that what you enjoy is all right without burning a professional identity. The slogan was argued inside the scene. Some people refuse the word “pervert” and will not put back on a label they spent years fighting off. Others treat it as reclaimed language, worn until the insult loses its poison. For one person the word is armor. For another it is a punchline they never asked for.

Ronnie Campbell and the Sunday Sun

The 2008 awareness day picked up a small media farce. Labour MP Ronnie Campbell, of Blyth Valley, seemed to support National Fetish Day without understanding “fetish” or “Perverts Wear Purple.” In a Sunday Sun interview he talked about wearing purple. He later said he thought a fetish was a worry, like worrying about backing the right horse. An organizer using the name Pierced Knight published an email from Campbell’s secretary, Carol Delaney, confirming support for the day and naming purple shirts, ties, skirts, and hair bands as the visible sign. Campbell then wrote to the paper and said his words had been twisted. He said he would never have backed anything called Perverts Wear Purple. The Sunday Sun answered sharply: if he had not misunderstood “fetish” and had not backed the day, there would have been no story. The paper said it contacted him four times to clarify, and that he was still talking about a purple tie or shirt until the last call, when the slogan was explained. The exchange is a short record of how BDSM vocabulary fails in mainstream politics, and how fast a visibility day becomes a tabloid trap.

Ten days before the possession law

The first International Fetish Day, January 16, 2009, drew UK press in part because the extreme-pornography ban took effect on January 26, 2009, ten days later. Writing in The Guardian, Symon Hill argued that people with certain fetishes could become collateral damage in a wider attack on civil liberties. He said ministers had produced a headline-friendly law aimed at sadomasochistic images regardless of context, instead of limiting itself to exploitative and abusive industry practices. Taken literally, the bar was low enough that a couple who photographed their own legal, consensual sex could face a possession charge for that photo. Hill treated the day as a chance to defend adult privacy and proportion in criminal law. For BDSM communities the date is still a yearly reminder: desire that involves gear, power, and intense images needs dungeon skill and political literacy, especially when the state decides that owning a picture is the crime.