At the end of July, I watched my dream shatter into pieces, with a sound I couldn’t ignore. The illusion I’d clung to for years — that we were slowly, imperfectly becoming a more honest, open-minded world — was exposed for what it was. An illusion.
The UK passed a law demanding ID verification to access adult content, under the pretext of protecting children. Twitter didn’t just comply — it overdelivered, extending the restriction beyond the UK to the EU and (from what I understand) parts of the US. This isn’t just another digital policy shift. It’s a shift in our collective conscience — or lack thereof.
I’m not a politician. I’m not a celebrity. But since 2015, I’ve been trying — through my writing, my drawings, and my very small voice — to make honesty a little easier. I’ve written stories that speak to young people discovering themselves, drawn bodies that celebrate being seen rather than judged, and tweeted and blogged about nudity as something human, not shameful. I’ve tried to remind anyone who would listen that freedom — real freedom — starts with truth. Especially about ourselves.
So yes, I’m angry. Not just for me, though my art is now effectively banned. Not just for those of us who create honestly. But for the generation we’re claiming to “protect” by teaching them shame instead of self-awareness, fear instead of boundaries, and obedience instead of thought.
The Freedom of Skin
A while back, I wrote about skinny dipping as an act of self-love. The idea was to explore how nudity can feel like truth made physical. For me, it always has. No masks. No roles. Just skin and light and water. And a rare moment when your body doesn’t need to perform or apologise.
Even Freud and Jung — rarely united in opinion — saw nakedness in dreams as a symbol of authenticity and liberation. It’s a way our subconscious says: Here I am. This is the real me. So how have we reached a point where saying that aloud is considered a threat?
I’ve always used the word nudist, not naturist, because I don’t want to dress the truth up in a more “proper” name to make it palatable. That’s what this law is doing. Dressing up control as care. Shame as safety. Repression as virtue.
And we’re falling for it. Again.
What Are We Really Protecting?
In a brilliant post titled Welcome Back to the Dark Ages, my friend TLB writes:
“This is not about safety. This is about shame—shame of our bodies, shame of our instincts, and shame of our humanity.”
He’s absolutely right. And the cost of that shame is not abstract. It’s measurable, and it’s dangerous.
When you make something taboo, you don’t eliminate it. You just drive it underground. And when teenagers are guaranteed to look for what you’ve hidden, they’ll do it in riskier, more secretive ways. Unregulated platforms. Unsafe sites. Shadows instead of conversation.
In trying to stop them from accessing porn — which they’ll do anyway — we’re handing them a loaded gun and walking away. We are not protecting them. We are isolating them. And we are punishing curiosity as if it’s a crime.
When Seeing Becomes a Threat
There’s a part of me that still wants to believe this is just a misguided law. A miscalculation. That it will change. But I’ve seen too many patterns to stay naive. Over and over, institutions call for “decency” and “safety,” but what they mean is silence. Obedience. Disappearance.
Art featuring nudity — censored. Queer expression — silenced. Sex education — gutted. Honest depictions of human experience — flagged as harmful.
What are we so afraid of seeing? Our own reflection?
Because to be seen, truly, without armour or performance, is terrifying. It demands vulnerability. And vulnerability isn’t profitable. It isn’t easy to control. But it is human. And we’re slowly outlawing it.
What Happens Next?
I don’t know. I wish I could end this with certainty, or even with hope. But right now, I feel a bitter mix of disappointment, sadness and fury. Still, I won’t retreat. And I won’t pretend. Because what this law attacks — what all shame-based laws attack — is the ability to be real.
And I believe, even now, that truth matters.
I’m gay. I don’t have children, and I never will. Which means I’ll never have to sit across from a son or daughter and explain why they should feel ashamed of being who they are. I won’t need to look them in the eye and tell them that something as beautiful and natural as sex is something to be feared, hidden, or punished. And I won’t be the one who has to explain how the very generation that grew up under the blessings of the Sexual Revolution — that tasted the freedom their predecessors fought for — decided to undo it all.
But others will have to. Because they are parents.
Maybe one parent will pause. One young person will feel less alone. Maybe someone will read this and realise that freedom isn’t the threat — shame is.
Because when honesty becomes illegal, when skin becomes scandal, and when instinct becomes something to punish…
we don’t become safer.
We become lost.
And maybe, just maybe, enough of us will realise that before the hope of the world — the new generation — turns to ruin.
Yorgos KC
Safety is just a hypocritical excuse. Neither the goal nor the outcome!
I’m glad I was lucky to meet you on a freer and safer Twitter, where I could enjoy your art. ❤️
And also thanks for the mention!
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I’m glad I’ve met you, too! 💖😘💖
As for the mention, it’s only natural! You’ve wrote an exceptional article on the subject, and I’m using much of it in this post. Not mentioning the original author would be, at the very least, unethical! 💖
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I believe in everyone’s inalienable right to be themselves, to achieve their full potential, and to live good lives. That means I believe in your right to be gay. That means I believe in every trans person’s right to be who they feel they are inside. That means I believe goodness does not depend on sexuality.
But.
I am a mother.
I’m also a gamer and just recently I discovered the obscene games sold on gaming platforms such as Steam.
These games are the worst of porn – paedophilia, snuff, S&M, the sick dreams of every Andrew Tate wannabe out there.
And these games were available to anyone with the money to buy, including pre-teens.
Let me repeat that – pre-teens.
Your writing is gentle and loving.
Your art is beautiful.
Who the lovers are is irrelevant, how they love is irrelevant. It’s the loving that matters.
The obscenity being banned is the opposite of loving. It’s the very worst form of ugly. It’s the very worst of humanity made-for-profit. That is what these laws are supposed to protect against.
I hope that your writing and your art will not be hurt in the process, but these regulations are necessary.
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It would be nice if this were what the law was actually targeting – but it isn’t.
Thanks to this law, teenagers seeking porn (which is roughly… well, all teenagers) are now criminals. They won’t be able to find it legally on regulated platforms that police know about, like Twitter, PornHub, BlueSky, and the like. Instead, they’ll either fake IDs (a criminal act in itself) or wander into the unregulated corners of the internet where there’s no safety net at all. Both options are far more dangerous.
I don’t believe the lawmakers are naïve. They know this as well as I do. They simply don’t care. Like every fascistic law or movement, they hide behind a noble-sounding excuse: “protect the children”, “safeguard religion”, “honour the country”. Hitler didn’t announce, “I want to conquer the world, so please die for my ambition.” He said, “Let’s make Germany great again” (not his exact words, but you see the point).
And just as Hitler sacrificed Germany for his real goal, these lawmakers are willing to sacrifice the young generation for theirs. Forcing teens into illegal behaviour before adulthood, exposing them to dangerous environments, and increasing the risk of blackmail is not protecting them – and they know it.
The excuse works because there are honest people who genuinely care about the stated goal, and who will even give up some of their own freedoms for it. And then there are the rest of us, who oppose the oppression but hesitate to speak up for fear of being painted as “against the children” or “against the country”.
What this law does achieve is tying every internet activity – not just porn – to a face and an ID. For “safety”. Hitler also invited homosexuals to register “for convenience”. Once they were filed, they were arrested and executed.
Even before this law, cookies and existing digital tracking were enough to catch illegal activity within minutes – for mostly-law-abiding citizens, anyway. Those with the skills and means to avoid detection will still do so. In fact, some will profit handsomely from creating sites that bypass age verification, offering dangerous content directly to teens. Meanwhile, everyday people have their online activity permanently linked to their identity. What once took the Gestapo vast manpower and time now takes seconds.
“The world has changed,” people say, “things like that could never happen again.” Really? In the ’90s, Gorbachev legalised homosexuality in the Soviet Union. Many who celebrated back then their right to exist probably never imagined they’d lose that right again – but here we are. In the US, rights are being rolled back even during Biden’s presidency. Where I live, a party that openly promises to make homosexuality illegal again has a disturbingly strong following. If they gained power, should I trust that Musk (or anyone like him) wouldn’t hand over a ready-made list of our names and addresses?
Even if they never win, do we trust this data not to be sold to whoever wants it? Maybe not for targeting gay people – maybe for something else.
And for a “good cause”? Let’s pretend for a second that’s true. Twitter enforced this UK law across the entire EU, even though the EU hasn’t adopted it. Why? On the exact same day, Twitter flooded NSFW timelines with suggested accounts of 13–15-year-olds. Protecting them? Hardly! After a backlash, they changed those suggestions to a blank “For you” page. Their official statement? “We know that yesterday there were some undesirable accounts in your ‘For you’ page…” No admission, no accountability!
BlueSky didn’t block non-UK users – but British users suddenly needed to show ID just to access DMs. Why?
Forgive me, but “It’s for a good cause” doesn’t convince me.
As for my art – well, apparently anything depicting a nude body is “porn”. Because simply seeing a nude is assumed to harm children beyond repair. Strange, then, that Florence has managed to survive since 1440, when Donatello’s nude David became the city’s symbol, later replaced by Michelangelo’s nude David for over 500 years. By this logic, Florence should be a wasteland of corrupted souls by now.
So yes, my art is affected. I just hope WordPress will continue to stand by its policy of accepting nudes and nude art.
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You have valid points, Yorgos, and I don’t deny that there will be a downside to this regulation, but the internet has become a ‘world’, or multiple worlds, and the ones making money over fist at the moment are the bad guys.
You talk about teens being forced to access the Dark Net because they can no longer legally access porn on the ordinary net. Well, when I first learned about the payment processors bowing to pressure and forcing Steam et al. to delete about 150 ‘games’…that was when I first saw what those 150 odd games were /about/. The Dark Net was there. And I’m not talking about nudity or simple sex – gay or straight. I’m talking about the most perverted type of sexual activity.
And of course teens were going to buy it, and play it, and become aroused by it, and come to believe that /this/ is how a sexual relationship should be.
That brainwashing-for-profit is what has turned so many young men into Andrew Tate wannabes. They have been taught to hate women, and gays, and trans people, and everyone else who doesn’t conform to what they are taught is ‘normal’…and ‘good’.
I believe in regulation because without it no human society would survive. Yes some countries use regulations as a weapon, but you are wrong if you believe that persecuting artists and young people in general is the aim of /this/ regulation.
Politicians have to bow to public pressure. Pressure from parents like me because if they don’t, they will be voted out at the next election. Assuming it’s a democracy. In authoritarian states, anything goes.
So, do I believe you have a right to your opinion? Yes. Do I believe that I have a right to mine? Yes.
I hope we can meet in the middle on this, one day.
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First of all, I’ve never said that *you* have no right to your opinion, just in case. And also, I believe you are a good person, and that you have good intentions.
Contrary to those who made this law and those over-enforcing it.
Using “heroin” to overcome “morphine addiction” – today when we know from experimentation how much worse and more lethal “heroin” is – is not a solution. Not to mention that we force “heroin” to “morphine addicted” children, “sugar addicted” ones, and to those who simply have a healthy appetite for some “sweet”. Forcing teens to the Dark Net won’t protect them from seeing what you (and that’s you, not the lawmakers) want to protect them from seeing. On the contrary, even those who wouldn’t normally watch that kind of porn they’ll watch mostly that – because that’s what they’ll mostly find. And that’s not the worst effect this law has on the teens.
The deterioration of democracy has been apparent for a long time now. This law is just one more piece of evidence. The more we allow fascistic laws like this one to exist the further democracy will deteriorate and the more possible it becomes for a real authoritarian system to take over.
Whether this law sacrifices the children to attack us, or we took the bullet because the target is behind us and the easier way was to kill us first, I don’t know. I suppose it’s the latter, though. And that’s why I won’t forgive this law for sacrificing the children, for killing us, and for targeting the ones behind us, because they are not those you want to be. If the target was what you’d like to believe it is, if the goal of the lawmakers was to protect the children, there are ways much more effective, less harmful and less fascistic to achieve that. If that was the case, I wouldn’t have raised an objection. As you may know, even before this law I flagged all my art as adult content, even though it wasn’t necessary on Twitter. I’ve always been on the teens’ side.
You and I have different opinions about what would be the best for the children, but you and I – whether you believe it or not – want their best. If you and I, or people who actually cared for them, were to sit and discuss, we could find a middle ground. Under this law, this middle ground can’t exist, because this law knowingly and intentionally harms the children and people like me, in order to harm who knows whom else.
You know me for many years, so you know I don’t speak politics. I needed to speak up for this one, though. I’m neither a hero, nor an activist. I always admit I’m just a chicken. Chickens are not meant to fight. They are meant to love cocks – and that’s a good thing for the chicken – and they are meant to be slaughtered and eaten – and that’s not really a good thing for the chicken. This law does do the latter.
I’ll stop here, Andrea. I’m tired. Really, really tired. Next time the little wolf I take care of decides to bite, I won’t stop him. I see no reason to do that.
So that’s my last fight, and I won’t yield.
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-hugs- we have been friends for a long time and we will REMAIN friends for a long time to come. Sometimes it’s good for friends to disagree so that we can appreciate the areas where we /do/ agree even more.
XX
Meeks
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💖💖💖💖💖
😘😘😘😘😘
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A exceptional honest and valued posting on the reality that is facing all of us. I applaud and appreciate your commitment to the “cause!” Impressive posting! Inspirational and courageous! 😉 Naked hugs!
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Thank you very much!
I’m more well known for being a chicken than courageous, but I just couldn’t not speak up for this.
Love and kisses!
😘😘😘💖💖💖
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Even a chicken defends the sense of fairness and values! Keep up the good work! Naked hugs! 😉
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