Backlash is a UK umbrella coalition formed in 2005 to coordinate opposition to the “Consultation on the possession of extreme pornographic material,” issued jointly by the Home Office and the Scottish Executive. Its stated position was blunt: the proposals under that consultation were an unjustified assault on freedom of speech and freedom of expression. For BDSM readers this is the campaign group that tried to stop a possession offence from landing on fetish photographs, written smut, and recorded scenes that no prosecutor needed to prove anyone had been harmed making. The fight was not about taste. It was about whether keeping an image could become a crime.
See no evil, and the lawyer on the brief
“See no evil” was the forum and wiki Backlash put up as an independent platform for arguing about the proposed extreme-pornography possession law. The name was the argument. The state was offering a new crime of looking, or of keeping what you had already looked at. The group’s pro bono legal advice came from the lawyer Myles Jackman, who became the public solicitor most closely tied to later extreme-porn and obscenity defences.
Who sat under the umbrella
Backlash was not a single club. It bundled existing organisations that already disagreed with sexual censorship, some of them feminist, some libertarian, some specifically SM:
- Feminists Against Censorship
- Unfettered
- Ofwatch
- The Spanner Trust
- the Libertarian Alliance
- the Campaign Against Censorship
- the Sexual Freedom Coalition
- the Society for Individual Freedom
- SM Dykes
- the International Union of Sex Workers
The Spanner Trust’s presence is the historical hinge. Operation Spanner had already taught British SM communities what a courtroom does with consensual harm. Backlash’s 2005 job was to stop the next statute from moving the same logic from the act to the hard drive. Neighbouring campaigns such as the Consenting Adult Action Network were arguing in the same weather. The consultation became the extreme-porn possession law; Backlash is the record of who tried to stop that step while the paper was still a paper.
