Why Are Squirting Vaginas So Much More Offensive to the UK Government than Ejaculating Penises?

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

As any connoisseur of British-made porn ​now ​knows, the Audiovisual Media Services Regulation 2014 that came into effect yesterday now means British pornographers are banned from depicting the following: fisting, spanking, aggressive whipping, verbal abuse ("Cor blimey, you ain't 'alf a crap shag"), caning, and strangulation. That sort of thing. Pack up the camcorder and the lube-proof tarpaulin, lads. Fun time is over. Put the cane away, Linda. Not now. Not anymore.

As many have pointed out, the new law is pretty sexist. Men are allowed to jizz where, when, and in whatever high, arcing trajectory they like, but for some reason female ejaculation is now outlawed in case someone confuses it with an especially loud, screaming piss. Face-sitting is forbidden but face-fucking is A-OK. The dividing lines between what is and isn't an OK thing to get off to seem arbitrarily drawn and really moral judgement-y.

Why can't two consulting adults have a big, sexy wee together on camera? Who are you to stop them, EUROPE?

It's not like the outlawed sex acts are even especially weird. Bondage is now banned, despite 52.1 percent of women and 46.2 percent of men having  fantasized about it before. Same goes for spanking and whipping, which 23 percent of women and 39.6 percent of men have fantasized about. I personally have a fantasy where Kim off of How Clean Is Your House? comes to my house and firmly makes me tidy my room while telling me what an idiot I am, and even that couldn't be made into a porno now, because it would constitute verbal abuse.

It was the ejaculate ruling that was most baffling, though. What, precisely, is the difference between a squirting vagina and a jizzing cock? Are we not all human? If you cut us, do we not bleed? If you arouse us, do we not make a damp stain with our junk? What makes one vaguely viscous sex liquid more acceptable to spray around the room than another?

Well, we asked the Jizz Police, aka the  ​British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). As part of the new amendment (the new Audiovisual Services regulation is in fact an amendment to the 2003 Communications Act), video-on-demand services are the ones most affected, as they now have to be brought in line with the BBFC's previously standing rules on R18-rated DVDs – ones that have been in effect for a while, but are under sudden scrutiny now everyone's porn suddenly has to be diluted down and piss-less.

So, essentially: What's the difference between male and female ejaculate, in BBFC terms?

"The BBFC is required to seek to avoid classifying material that is likely to be considered in breach of the Obscene Publications Act," the BBFC told us. "According to the advice we take from the police and the CPS, sex works featuring  ​urolagnia [the gaining of sexual pleasure from urination] are likely to be considered obscene.

"Therefore, unless it's very clear that what is being shown is indeed 'female ejaculation,' as opposed to urolagnia, the Board's position has to be that scenes of this nature featuring liquid that might be urine have to be cut. The situation is further complicated, for us, by the fact that medical advice we have taken has suggested that some scenes submitted to us that purported to show 'female ejaculation' were, in fact, urination."

Basically, some scientists in lab coats and BBFC board members in suits gathered in a lab together, and they still couldn't make out from the 80-minute emotional roller coaster that is XXX British Hardcore 32 which bits were pissing and which bits were squirting. I mean, they were tapping at clipboards and looking through books. "Is that piss?" they're saying. They're squinting in and pausing. "That looks a bit pissy to me. Can't have piss. This is a jizz-only country. No pissing, no swearing. Look, that man there; he isn't covering that lady in his semen in a very polite way. And that is unacceptable."

As the BBFC tells us, a lot of the judgment being passed on squirting is because, in the sample porn they've seen, they've come across a lot of smoke-and-mirrors disguising of piss as squirt juice in an effort to circumvent obscenity laws.

"It can indeed be difficult to distinguish between the two," we were told. "The problem with urolagnia is that it's likely, in the case of sex works, to result in a work being found obscene. That's a legal test rather than a matter of BBFC judgment." But, come on. Jizz comes out of the same hole as piss. Why can't the same logic that is applied to penises also be applied to vaginas? What does this all mean for your porn?

You can still watch porn. It's just, if you paid for it and it was manufactured in this country, it's going to have a lot less verbal abuse and spanking in it. What does it mean for your sex life? No new laws have been passed on that. But censorship-wise, we've just taken a really big step backwards and reclassified some pretty vanilla sex stuff as offensive. Apart from double anal, weirdly. Double anal is still safe and sound. Double anal: It's your time to rule the Western world.

Follow Joel Golby on ​Twitter.