My night in a porn cinema surrounded by strangers

“Tonight you are going to see pornographic and explicit depictions of oral sex, non-gory simulated injury, abuse of power, boxing, nurse outfits, gas masks, school outfits, caning, masturbation, sensory deprivation, anal plugs, bondage, rope bondage, simulated psychological torture with a spider, and spanking…” 

So begins an evening at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), where the aptly named Content Warning—a curatorial duo comprising creative and romantic partners Harlan and Helena Whittingham, two Leeds-based artists, the latter of whom is the founder of Lover Management—have commandeered one of the gallery’s cinema rooms for an evening of VHS fetish clips on the theme of “uniform.” The above overture of possible triggers is delivered by Helena, who stands in front of the cinema screen in a pair of shibari-themed tights from designer Sinéad O’Dwyer. Listening to her intently, the crowd is somewhat hard to pin down. 

While the project is still something of an IYKYK secret, Content Warning’s bimonthly Friday night screenings attract a much broader audience than one might imagine. Splayed across the venue’s old-fashioned, red velvet seats are a mix of latex-wearing kinksters from the BDSM scene interwoven with curious cinephiles, and the generic art-or-fashion-adjacent folks who tend to signify that an event in the UK capital has reached a certain level of cultural cachet. “The audience has grown largely organically, and we don't always know who's coming or how they found us: which is one of the things we love about it,” explain Content Warning (Helena and Harlan opted to answer interview questions jointly).

The eclectic audience is partly down to the events’ placement within one of London’s most respected contemporary art venues. This, the duo explains, encourages spectators to perceive porn and fetish content as more than simply an erotic or masturbatory aid, but rather as cultural forms in their own right. “The ICA as a space lends a certain seriousness [to the project] and gives people permission to engage with the material analytically as well as viscerally,” they say. 

The project emerged naturally from the couple’s own intellectual interest in porn and kink. Around 2022 they began perusing archives of NSFW material housed within East London’s Bishopsgate Institute; a cultural centre which contains extensive queer and kink archival material. “Content Warning started casually about four years ago when we began going on dates to the UK Fetish Archive. We spent hours and hours looking through donated collections—VHS tapes, catalogues, magazines—and became completely engrossed in the material,” Content Warning explain. “Hunched over a TV/video combo, watching all of the films they had; there was no official plan at first. We both come from art backgrounds and have a shared history of curating exhibitions, so looking at this material through a curatorial lens came quite naturally.”

Having gained the trust of Stefan Dickers, the Special Collections and Archives Manager at the Bishopsgate Institute, the duo were granted access to a vast supply of pornographic material and ephemera that expressed diverse sexualities. This shaped how they think about programing, they tell me. “One of the things that struck us early on was the intimacy of looking at someone else’s private collection,” they explain. “These were pre-internet assemblages, tapes copied and recopied, bootleg compilations of favorite scenes, catalogues cut up and collaged. You could feel the personality of the collector in the way things were assembled. That idea of collage and montage ended up influencing how we structure screenings—combinations of scenes that riff on a theme, rather than screening feature-length films or collections of short films in their entirety.”

Community viewing

Back in the film theater, the lights dim and we spectators are transported into a world of fantasy and fetish through short clips or excerpts of longer features which grapple with themes of power, authority, and control. We’re welcomed into the back of an ambulance as a paramedic and his patient go for a scenic drive, complete with a hand job; we then witness some sweaty sparring in a boxing gym; this, followed by a troupe of army recruits being put through their paces and, naturally, plenty of rubber and latex figures throughout the evening. 

Contrary to the siloed, hyper-secretive nature of watching internet porn, much of the power of the screening is the communal nature of the viewing experience, and the crowd clearly revels in it. For those embedded within kink and sex positive subcultures, the screenings provide a rare opportunity to engage with fetish and its history without an expectation of actually participating in sexual play. “For fetishists, there's a genuine appetite for community events that aren't sex parties—somewhere to meet like-minded people in a more social, less pressured setting.” It feels less like a sex venue, where there’s a sticky sexual heat and expectation in the air, and much more like we’re all watching a pantomime: sometimes, the crowd might guffaw at a particularly cheesy exchange, or clap and woop after a standout moment. 

There’s also, no doubt, an appeal to the medium itself: VHS is having a resurgence among art and film circles and lends a “real cinephilic pleasure” to the event. Beamed from the projection room via a ghostly light, the tapes sometimes stutter, crackle, or jam, creating a certain spontaneity and lending a sort of friction to the viewing experience—one which greatly contrasts the high-gloss, hyper HD visuals of most contemporary, commercial porn. For Helena and Harlan, the medium of the content is as important as the content itself, and what it expresses. “Materiality is really important to us. There’s a kind of material fetishism that mirrors the content itself,” they explain. “Our first programme was called Rubberists, which focused on rubber and latex fetishism and was very consciously in dialogue with the tactile, analogue quality of the tapes.”

The Content Warning ICA screenings also allow for a level of explicitness impossible for the increasingly censored digital culture at large. “Presenting analog material within the communal context of the cinema screening allows us to create a safe space where access can be managed,” Helena and Harlan explain. “This is incredibly important within a wider context of online censorship, where platforms tend to ban certain bodies, kinks, or expressions while allowing others, and legislation like the UK’s Online Safety Act increasingly requires ID verification to access adult material online. These measures are often framed as protecting children, but in our view, they also disproportionately affect consenting adults.”

However, Content Warning is keen to avoid becoming uncritically nostalgic for a prior period of erotic culture—especially given the ways that the digital era has allowed porn performers to gain greater agency. “It’s easy to feel nostalgic for physical media, given the all consuming role that digital images play in our lives,” they say. “However, from a production standpoint, the accessibility of digital technologies has democratized the production of porn in a way that's given much more power to performers.”

What’s certain is that these ICA screenings allow us to witness a snapshot of underground culture from the 1980s and ’90s, at a time when VHS also democratized porn in its own way—allowing individuals to consume it in the privacy of their homes for the first time, rather than in designated theaters. The internet would within decades render the VHS revolution obsolete, but this first technological innovation would have felt shocking enough. “The people making these videos in the ’80s and ’90s had no way of knowing what the internet would do to porn and how completely it would transform both culturally and economically,” they explain. 

This encourages us to consider the intricacies of our own erotic culture as we grapple with the impending changes wrought by AI; we may in particular wonder about what we’ll miss in future. “For all its criticisms, platforms like OnlyFans have been genuinely revolutionary for the independent creator—it's given sex workers more agency and made the industry safer in ways,” Content Warning says. “So who knows what our current moment looks like in retrospect; perhaps the OnlyFans era will feel as distinct and distant from us as these vintage fetish films do to us now.”

The isolation antidote 

The duo are conflicted about our strange cultural moment—rich and varied enclaves of community-led erotic subcultures exist within a landscape of escalating censorship at the government level. “Right now, in the UK and London specifically, there’s a genuinely healthy amount of sex, kink and community spaces, which feels like something worth celebrating,” Content Warning explain. “At the same time, it's also a deeply censored [moment], with the Online Safety Act (OSA) and other legislation (around strangulation and step-porn, for example) having a really big impact on contemporary creators. We hope things for the community improve in this regard.”

Rather than advocating for further restrictions, the pair would recommend a more considered approach to porn, something which their events encourage. “Perhaps viewing porn collectively (both digital and analog) can act as an antidote to unhealthy viewing patterns or feelings of affective disconnect associated with digital content online,” they say.

This is how they understand a large part of Content Warning’s community value: allowing for porn to be placed in the context of community creates opportunities to discuss aspects of porn that individuals might find problematic, as well as those that they might particularly enjoy or want to celebrate. “The collective viewing experience is definitely what makes these events special. We’ve had multiple people say to us that coming to our screenings has shifted how they view porn or helped them overcome feelings of shame,” they explain. “It’s equally easy for anxieties to develop around the way we think about porn or sexuality when things go unspoken. Talking to audience members after the screenings and hearing what they found hot, interesting, or funny is definitely our favorite part of the events.”

The screenings also allow like-minded individuals to share space and spark up conversations that may continue on after the event. Helena and Harlan appreciate being able to create an environment where people won’t feel othered or marginalized due to their erotic interests, but where engaging in sexual activity is not a must either—an inclusive, open, exploratory setting. “It’s really nice to create space for these communities to engage and for people to meet like-minded people,” they explain. “Sex parties or play events aren’t necessarily for everyone; it’s a privilege to be able to create additional spaces for these scenes to exist.” 

If you’re curious about exploring a like-minded community of your own, you can make meaningful (and surprising) connections on Feeld. For more on the spaces we co-create together, delve into interiors and intimacy in A Fucking Magazine Issue 3: Rooms with a View.