I don’t want to be rude but I am going to have to be. Lots of people like to watch people doing rude things to each other. This is called pornography and there are laws about it, chiefly covered by the Obscene Publications Acts.

There are many reasons not to like porn: its treatment of women, its violence, its idealised body shapes, its freaky body shapes, its focus on male fantasy, its naffness, its numbing monotony, its obsession with stuffing orifices with everything imaginable, its total distance from sex as it’s mostly had. And for everything I just said there, I could find you some porn that is exactly the opposite. It is a niche market.

The porno-industrial complex is spooked and in decline because of webcams and the whole DIY ethos, but it is still a huge business. The nasty gonzo stuff is out there, the torture and rape stuff is a few clicks away. Child porn, the big concern, is not porn at all. It is documentary evidence of a crime.

I well understand the feminist case against much pornography. Women are objectified, gagging, nothing more than a body of holes to be nailed. Porn should be better. I don’t mean scented candles and Michael Bublé, I mean stuff that portrays female desire in all its myriad forms. If you are in the business of marketing fantasy, it’s just possible that women’s fantasies are as diverse as mens.

The internet has changed everything. Children can now easily access porn, boys have it as screensavers on their phones and there are endless panics about this. No one really wants to acknowledge that porn is a part of life, except the flood of women who worry about their partners being “addicted” to it.

One pretend answer is censorship. Why anyone in their right mind would hand any more power to the state over what they can see is utterly beyond me. If feminists think that government has women’s interests at heart, they are deluded. Most of what we all find immoral is already illegal, and it can’t be made any more illegal.

So now we have an utterly ludicrous new set of rules (the 2014 Audiovisual Media Services Regulations, which have amended the 2003 Communications Act). These consist of a bizarre and random list of sexual practices that are now deemed unacceptable in UK-made porn. This is supposedly to protect children from watching stuff that you generally have to pay for online; so, for those children who have credit cards, then? In other words, what is available must now be in line with what is already out there on DVD in the UK.

Here is some of the bonkers arbitrary stuff that must not be shown: spanking, caning and whipping beyond “a gentle level”. What? Peeing if it is “consumed”. They are laissez-faire about “amputee insertion”. Don’t ask me. Enemas are OK as long as the contents are not eaten. Men’s ejaculate may be consumed, women’s not even shown. Moderate BDSM play is fine as is “trampling”. Face-sitting is not. Gagging on a penis is hunky dory. “The use of power tools” is unacceptable. Bondage is OK as long as not all four limbs are tied up. And so it goes on.

Look, I don’t know what floats anyone else’s, er, power tool but I do know that this quango has drilled into the inner realms of insanity. And this is the problem with censorship. Who are these people to decide the permissible fantasies of others? No one has to watch filth. There is always The Great British Bake Off. Why has money and time been spent on this unworkable list? If anyone does want to see any of these banned acts, they still can online.

Increasingly, we see legislation made in some archaic vacuum where the internet does not exist. Furthermore, many of these now-censored activities are to do with female pleasure and the activities of dominatrices. Why is it OK to show a male ejaculation but not a female one? What are the qualifications of those who cobble together these rules?

The kind of porn everyone condemns, that which is accessed by kids, is made by mainstream conglomerates. Here it is fine for women to dress as schoolgirls and gag over penises and be ejaculated on. What it is not OK to produce in this country now is the kind of fetish stuff where women kidnap and punish City boys while making them read out seminal feminist texts.

The larger point, though, is that all this effort has gone into producing unenforceable legislation. Meanwhile, no one heads up the inquiry into sexual abuse, and rumours of a Westminster paedophile ring abound. Rotherham, we know, was the tip of the iceberg. If we actually wanted to protect children, we would.

These new rules only apply to video on demand, and to content that is produced in this country, but it is striking that lesbian, gay and BDSM porn is being targeted here.

It is incredible that a committee of serious people has seriously come up with legislation that bans me from paying to watch a woman sitting on a man’s face, whereas in TV shows such as The Fall women’s fear is pimped as stylish titillation. And that’s how censorship works: it creeps in through any available orifice. Is this consensual? No. Policing fantasy never is.