Rebel Britannia

12th December 2014:

A mass face-sitting demonstration took place outside the Houses of Parliament on this date.

You heard me. I -

("One moment, please: 'face-sitting'?"

"Ah yes, m'lud. If it should please the court, I am instructed that face-sitting is a form of ... ah ... courtship, popular in certain of the more outré circles."

"Indeed. Splendid. Please continue."

"I am obliged, m'lud.")

The government of the day, with its usual consummate grasp of national priorities, had decided to ban certain acts from inclusion in pornography produced legally in the UK. Face-sitting was one of these activities, apparently on the grounds that it was life-threatening. (Note to self: poss murder method for serial killer novel?)

The protestors took objection to this interference in the ancient liberties of the free Briton on a number of grounds. One was sexism: didn't this law amount to the criminalisation of female pleasure? Some pointed out that the new regulation could damage Britain's balance of trade, since face-sit fans would buy imported porn instead of home-grown. And workers in the erotica industry decried an assault on their livelihoods.

The protestors, numbered in the hundreds, chanted "What do we want? Face-sitting! When do we want it? Now!" They were - disappointingly or sensibly, depending on your view - fully dressed, and in fact some of them were rather more than fully dressed, wearing goggles, snorkels and diving masks.

Press pictures showed men in warm tweed jackets, lying on blankets, while women in jodhpurs, gloves and scarves, clutching hot drinks, face-sat them. And when the demo was over, presumably they all went home for a nice sit down.

Oddest protest ever? Well, maybe, but it's had competition over the years.

In the deep winter of 1838, in Elland in Yorkshire, a Poor Law commissioner arrived to begin his awful work of impoverishing people. The local women became briefly famous for "rolling him in the snow," which is a neat way of humiliating an enemy and keeping yourself warm at the same time.

Also in Yorkshire, this time in 2016, when a local Tory MP, Philip Davies, told a right-wing gathering that "feminist zealots really do want women to have their cake and eat it," a group of his constituents, calling itself Shipley Feminist Zealots, protested by holding a sale of home-made cakes. Using the hashtag #nocakeforphilip, they raised £124 for a women's refuge and another charity aimed at preventing male suicide. A Facebook group called Feminists Eating Cake - pictures of women stuffing their gobs with gateaux - gained more than 1,000 members. One of the organisers said "It's about equality for both the sexes. We thought a bake sale would be a great way to make that point."

One of the other methods of demonstrating against the new Poor Law in 1834 was the church boycott, in which entire rural congregations would rise from their seats as one during a service and walk out. One such event, in Wiltshire, took the form of people leaving the church and "smoking pipes in the cemetery." It is surely to be regretted that the face-sitters never thought of adding pipes to their protest for that final touch of class.

*

Sources:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-30454773

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/what-did-a-mass-facesitting-outside-parliament-look-like-9921273.html

www.buzzfeed.com/emilyashton/this-is-how-women-in-philip-davies-constituency-responded-to

Captain Swing by Eric Hobsbawm & George Rude (Verso, 2014)

Perish the privileged orders by Mark O'Brien (New Clarion Press, 2009)

Wiltshire industrial history (WaterMarx, 2011)