This column is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.I don’t watch porn often, but when I do, I typically go straight to the step-relation categories. Or, you know, haphazardly type “strp brorher caufht” into the search bar with my free thumb because who uses the categories anymore. I don’t have any siblings, blood-related or otherwise. What’s the appeal, then? Transgression, plain and simple. Being turned on against your own moral judgement, being lightly manipulated, wanting something you can’t have: all these age-old erotic currents can be found running somewhere beneath the surface of even the most perfunctory “sharing a bed gone wrong!” videos.Are these things ethical on paper? Almost certainly not. Might your soul benefit from some quiet rumination on your enjoyment of them? Probably. Do they require state intervention? I wouldn’t have said so, but in April the UK government decided otherwise and banned both incest and step-incest porn following a vote in the House of Lords. Tragic news for me, personally. But also an ideological house of cards.The UK government is currently engaged in a high-profile War on Porn. In the last few years, various pieces of digital legislation have been passed under the guise of protecting women and children from “harmful content.” The Online Safety Act 2023, ostensibly designed to stop children stumbling upon elbow-deep fisting videos and the like, has saddled websites with a legal obligation to verify the age of its users. In practice, this means that everyone is now required to surrender formal photo ID or credit card information to third-party services running checks for any site hosting—quote unquote—“adult” material, from xnxx to r/cider. (For context, the act has proven so technologically and culturally illiterate that Ofcom, the enforcing regulator, is being sued by 4Chan.) Meanwhile, a number of amendments have been made to the Crime and Policing Bill, making screenshotting nudes without consent, tributing, the production of choking porn, revenge porn, and all forms of incest porn criminal offenses. This has been done in the name of minimizing real-world violence against women and girls, with the government’s legal counsel drawing parallels with the figure of 500,000 children who are sexually abused in England and Wales each year.There are obvious problems with equating a fictional scenario acted out by porn performers with, say, an actual person nutting on a picture of someone they don’t know and flinging it around Snapchat. On top of that, most of these bans will be difficult to implement; the ban on step-incest porn being the trickiest because consensual relationships between step-relatives aren’t actually illegal. Currently, only incest itself is a criminal offense. If two people are solely related by marriage, The Sexual Offences Act considers it incest only if “they live or have lived in the same household,” or one person “is or has been regularly involved in caring for, training, supervising or being in sole charge of” the other. Suffice to say, such rich character background is rarely forthcoming in titles such as “Step Sister Stuck in Washing Machine AGAIN!” That’s partly why the ban passed with such a gossamer thin margin (144 in favor, 143 against). But all of this is moot anyway, because the checks can be entirely circumvented with a VPN, which is what most people are doing. However, the whole thing raises a more interesting question: Is it possible to legislate a fantasy out of existence?There aren’t that many taboos left in the Western world. In the UK, there is a prime-time dating show on Channel 4 in which people select their potential partners by the sight of their genitals. Every other trip to the cinema involves watching Barry Keoghan slurp Jacob Elordi’s spermy bath water out of a plug hole, or Dudley from Harry Potter getting bummed at a BDSM biker orgy. YouTubers are getting cucked for views. Bonnie Blue is on morning television talking about how she makes over half a million a year banging 18-year-olds in a roving minivan. As far as sexual transgression in the mainstream goes, I think it’s safe to say the horse bolted around the time 13-year-olds started emailing each other links to Tub Girl.Imagination cannot be governed by the same laws that contain our livesAs a result, incest has become culturally mainstream. It was a significant plot line in season 3 of HBO’s White Lotus, when two brothers did hand stuff during a drunken threeway. It’s been prominently featured in every franchise from Game of Thrones to the Gossip Girl reboot, and passed around TikTok (along with piss, pegging, and every other subversive sex act) as a meme. In the 2017 BBC mini-series Taboo, the protagonist (Tom Hardy) enters a relationship with his married half-sister (Oona Chaplin). Speaking about it in the context of contemporary sexual libertarianism, Chaplin told Vanity Fair: “Sex has become a very public-display type of thing […] Where does the taboo lie now? I think it’s in incest.”Depictions of taboos in fictional contexts are not endorsements. Where are the legal lines drawn, then, between depictions of incest in porn versus TV or film? In my opinion, porn should be treated first and foremost as a form of entertainment. To treat it as anything else sends the wrong message about the role it should play in people’s lives: a simulation or exploration of desire, not a reality. Imagination, whether it runs riot in a novel or on X Hamster, cannot be governed by the same laws that contain our lives.As we’ve seen repeatedly with the sex industry and drugs trade, banning something people want rarely gets rid of it, it just pushes it out of plain sight. Human sexuality being how it is, to further condemn a taboo is doubly counter-effective. In a world where everything is pornographic, it is, ironically, the most erotic move the government could have made. I don’t relish the prospect of going to prison for getting fucked and filmed by someone pretending to be my brother, but it does add an extra layer of risk to the proceedings. Besides, no one can stop me if I don’t put it on the internet.Emma is the author of Gabrielle, a newsletter about sex and desire. Follow her on Instagram @emmaggarland.This column is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.The post In Defense of Incest Porn appeared first on VICE.