Double standards that damn S&M enthusiasts

Her day job might've been working in a chip shop but she knew how to handle a cat-o-nine-tails. My best friend's bare bum hanging out of his trousers looked especially defenceless. She'd come out of the Yellow Pages - not just for the nasty things in life, but for the really nasty things, too. After his whipping, we examined the damage. The angry welts on his arse clearly amounted to actual bodily harm. Had he consented? Was meekly lowering his trousers the same as giving the thumbs up?

The House of Lords ruled in the so-called 'Spanner' case, named after the police operation, that you couldn't consent to ABH in sadomasochistic sex. In his judgement, Lord Templeton said that, "Pleasure derived from the infliction of pain is an evil thing. Cruelty is uncivilised." The participants in the Spanner case, which involved gay men filming the

torture of each other's genitals, would disagree. It was entirely consensual. They volunteered to have their foreskins nailed to bits of wood. No one ended up in A&E explaining how they happened to become so uncomfortably attached to faux-Regency coffee tables. Their lordships, shocked by the disparities in age between the nailers and the nailed, felt that a line must be drawn to protect those who couldn't protect themselves. The line they drew is not at all straight but slithers across our peculiar attitudes to what is and what isn't acceptable.

In the case of Wilson, where a husband branded his wife's bottom with his initials, the Court of Appeal held that Spanner didn't apply because a consenting married couple could commit acts that led to mild injury. The doctor treating the burns clearly thought otherwise when he reported the couple to the police. Is nicking some other guy's penis with a knife worse than scarring your wife? After another 'grass up' from a doctor, the Court of Appeal ruled that there was no