Porn, pantomime and protest: the politics of bawdiness as feminine style

This article explores the significance of the recent ‘Face-Sitting’ protest that took place outside Westminster in 2014. A carefully staged response to changes to pornography legislation that criminalized particular sexual practices pertinent to women’s pleasure, this porn-panto protest put the spectacle of the ‘kinky’ woman and her desires centre stage. The activists’ unique use of fetish dress, class and humour is explored in relation to the protest by brothel keeper and campaigner Cynthia Payne in the 1970s/1980s. Payne deployed bawdy humour and a particular high camp use of ‘kinky’ dress and English etiquette to undermine contemporary sexual norms. The 2014 protest also clearly reclaimed two traditional roles within English pantomime: the Dame and the Principal Boy. These examples will be used to examine the political function of humour in relation to cross-dressing and the ‘woman-on-top’. Ultimately, this study argues that ‘bawdiness’ is a politics that offers us potential promise but not without critical limitations established through media representations.