I’m a sex worker, the government got this wrong with its porn crackdown

On paper, the government’s new porn crackdown sounds a brilliant idea.

Alex Davies-Jones, Minister for Victims and Violence Against Women and Girls told Metro it will be illegal to create or share ‘semen-defaced’ images without consent, or depict incest or step-family porn on X-rated sites.

One particular proposal within this crackdown – restricting people from screenshotting or saving intimate images and videos – is being pitched as a way to stop content spreading without consent.

As a dominatrix and kink model who sells adult content online, and has done so for nearly 30 years, you’d assume I’d be cheering them on.

After all, my work is regularly stolen. The whole of my OnlyFans – all 6500 photos and 916 videos – are downloaded wholesale with tedious regularity to wash up on some dodgy website.

To be fair, OnlyFans is pretty decent at getting the cloned content taken down the moment you alert them, but it soon springs up again elsewhere. It’s like a virtual game of whack-a-mole.

Plenty of amateur models tell me they only show their faces ‘behind a paywall’ and I must explain there is no such thing as a paywall. Not really. Once it’s out there, you lose control of it. Unless you’re doing something you’re happy for your mother to see, don’t do it.

Will banning screenshots help? I suspect the new rule might be one of those well-meaning internet policies that sounds great in theory yet completely falls apart the moment it meets reality.

If someone wants to screenshot something, they will. You can block a screenshot button on an app, sure. But you can’t stop someone picking up another phone and taking a photo of the screen. Or screen-recording through third-party software. Or ripping the video file in a dozen other slightly nerdier ways I don’t understand.

The result? The people who respect creators’ boundaries will follow the rules. The people who don’t will simply find a workaround. Which is already the story of the adult internet.

I sell videos and photos through subscription platforms, and the vast majority of my clients are respectful. They pay, they tip, they enjoy the content, they keep it where it belongs.

But the small minority who want to redistribute it aren’t exactly deterred by polite warnings about copyright. If they want to leak something, they’ll leak it. Making it doubly illegal won’t stop them.

Another awkward reality is that adult creators have built entire careers around the way the internet works, screenshots and all.

Regularly I see my images from decades ago popping up on devoted fan sites. Free clips, reposted images and viral moments are often how people discover new creators.

A teaser screenshot on a forum, a cropped clip on social media, or a meme-ified moment from a video can introduce someone to a performer they’ve never heard of before. Is it technically piracy? Sometimes. Is it also part of how online culture spreads? Absolutely.

Plenty of creators quietly accept that a little bit of content circulation can actually lead to more paying subscribers. The internet’s economy runs on attention first, money second.

There’s also the risk that rules like this end up making life harder for the very people they claim to protect. If platforms are suddenly responsible for preventing screenshots of intimate content, their easiest solution might be to host less adult content in the first place.

Historically, that’s exactly what tends to happen. Whenever new online safety rules appear, adult creators are often the first group to get pushed off platforms, restricted by algorithms or buried under layers of moderation.

We’ve seen it before with payment processors, social media bans and advertising restrictions. So, there’s a legitimate fear among people in the industry that ‘protecting porn’ sometimes turns into ‘removing porn entirely’.

None of this means protecting victims of intimate image abuse isn’t incredibly important. Of course it is. Especially given roughly 4.4 million people have experienced threats to share their intimate images without consent in England and Wales alone. Non-consensual image sharing can cause devastating harm, and survivors absolutely deserve stronger protections.

But lumping professional adult content together with revenge porn isn’t always as straightforward as policymakers like to believe.

One is consensual work created and sold by professionals: the other is abuse. Treating them as the same problem can lead to solutions that do real disservice to both.

For instance, the real issue with intimate image abuse isn’t just the screenshot itself. It’s the malicious intent behind sharing the image.

So while screenshot bans might look like a decisive solution, they risk tackling the symptom rather than the cause, and thereby creating a whole new set of headaches for me and my colleagues.

In my line of work, consent and boundaries are at the core of everything I do – which is why it’s ironic the internet still struggles so much with both.

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