Last month I persuaded a few dozen people to have a “squirting water fight” outside parliament to highlight the absurdity of UK sex laws. The digital economy bill – currently at committee stage – is an outrageous attack on the sexual liberty and personal privacy of adults in the UK. It will destroy the livelihoods of many adult industry workers, particularly webcam performers and DIY porn producers such as me. Making and selling our own content online gives us autonomy over our work – but the mandatory age verification and censorship this legislation will impose on online porn will take that away.

I own and operate Dreams of Spanking; a niche BDSM (bondage, domination, submission and masochism) site with films expressing my personal sexual fantasies. Running my own website gives me total freedom to do what I want on camera, with the people I choose. Authentic and performer-centric sites such as mine are exactly what the porn industry needs – but small-scale independent websites will be devastated if the digital economy bill is passed into law.

I’m no stranger to censorship. Last year, Dreams of Spanking was unsuccessfully targeted under the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014, because my consensual BDSM videos depict spankings that leave marks. After a traumatic, invasive investigation, I was forced to take my site offline – and I was left in no doubt that the law considers kinky sexualities such as mine to be obscene.

I sought legal help, and eventually won my appeal and reopened the site. But I had a mere four weeks to enjoy my victory before the digital economy bill was presented to parliament, and I realised that I was going to face being criminalised all over again.

‘Our fetish isn’t harmful to society.’ Photograph: Pandora Blake

I can’t help that I like spanking. I’ve known I was fascinated by the idea since childhood, when I read about it in books and wondered what it felt like to experience. I kept my interest secret, feeling ashamed without really knowing why. As I entered puberty, I felt like a freak.

It wasn’t until I got online in the late 1990s and found free previews for online pornography (which I wasn’t legally old enough to view) that I realised I wasn’t alone. For the first time, I began to understand that maybe I wasn’t the only person on the planet who found the idea of spanking erotic after all.

This is why I make BDSM porn: I want to send the message that there’s nothing wrong with being kinky, and to help isolated individuals feel less alone. There’s nothing wrong with us; our fetish isn’t harmful to society. On the contrary, it does great harm to criminalise sites that are a lifeline to people with marginalised sexualities.

By bringing in mandatory age verification the digital economy bill will force homegrown porn out of business. Feminist, queer and indie porn sites are labours of love. We don’t make much money, and can’t afford to securely age check every site visitor. We bring much-needed diversity to the adult industry, and disrupt the homogeneity and heteronormativity of mainstream porn. We empower performers, depict authentic self-expression and subvert stereotypes. It’s our sites that will disappear if this becomes law – not the behemoths of traditional porn, which are far more likely to be stumbled across by those not ready for that content.

Not only that, but age checks requiring users to submit identifying details to prove their age will enable record-keeping on a global scale. Do you want a private company to own a database of every porn site you’ve ever looked at – and would you trust a “tube site” to keep that data safe? Me neither.

Most worrying is the list of “prohibited content” – material that the digital economy bill seeks to ban entirely. This is based on the BBFC classification guidelines, which excludes an awful lot of consensual sex acts from R18, the highest category. Acts that are legal to perform in the UK, but not legal to depict in porn, which includes fisting, watersports and female ejaculation (if the fluid lands on another person, or is consumed).

What message are we sending to young women by criminalising porn that depicts a visual, undeniable representation of female sexual fulfilment? Do we really want girls to think that the way their bodies naturally respond to pleasure is obscene?

The UK’s laws around sex and porn need bringing up to date. The BBFC rules ultimately derive from the Obscene Publications Act – a law dating from 1959, when it was still illegal to have gay sex, never mind film it. It’s absurd that this law should still be controlling what we can do with our bodies.

If we want to help young people stay safe online, we need to teach privacy skills and how to critique the media they will inevitably encounter online. We need to make sex education mandatory in schools – and we need it to answer the questions young people are asking, such as: how will I know when I’m ready to have sex? And when I am, how can I make my partner feel good? Attacking online porn is a cheap way to score political points – and it’s a distraction from the real issues.