An "extreme pornographic image" is an image which is both--
(a)   pornographic, and
(b)   an extreme image.

Well, that settles that, then.

The really poisonous part of the bill is in the definition of an “extreme image” as one of life-threatening, genital-damaging, corpse-interfering or beastie-bothering activity in which “any such act, person or animal in the image is or appears to be real” (italics mine). Now, bestiality and necrophilia are already illegal acts, as is (still controversially) consensual genital injury. An image of any of these activities is evidence that a crime has been committed. What this bill further proposes to criminalise is verisimilitude in the simulation of such acts for purposes of sexual arousal (if you simulate them just to disgust or horrify people, presumably that’s OK, at least insofar as disgust and horror are distinguishable from sexual arousal).

What is the thinking behind this? It is that certain unfortunates have an inexplicable fascination with scrotum-perforation or being fucked by horses, and that if you show them images of what looks like those things happening it will legitimate their fantasies and encourage them to go out and do these things for real (whereas otherwise they will presumably curl up into little passive balls of sick self-loathing, of which they will hopefully eventually die).

This may in fact be so; but it cannot have escaped the attention of anyone who does not confine their televisual exposure to gardening programs that a great many regrettable propensities and activities are freely depicted on a nightly basis for the delectation of a considerable audience, none of whom need fear prosecution for the satisfaction of their depraved appetite for murder, torture, arson, fornication, larceny, bigamy and ballroom dancing. My daily journey into the bowels of Euston tube is circumstanced by countless posters advertising sex-and-sadism thrillers and misery-lit blockbusters in the most blood-curdling language: “Revenge is sweet. Revenge with a chainsaw is sweeter”; “A story of a childhood irreparably marred by impalement”; “Don’t look now, or he’ll stab you in the eyeball”.

It’s true that nobody very much has a kind word to say for collectors of donkey porn, and this of course makes them an easy target for this sort of legislation. But think about the form, rather than the content: think about what it really means to be saying that certain sorts of pretending are just too dangerous to be allowed, and specifically because they turn people on.