This week has seen a highly significant obscenity trial taking place in Britain – the first in some time (as far as I know) where the defendant has pleaded Not Guilty. Michael Peacock – aka Sleazy Michael – was arrested after selling six DVDs featuring extreme BDSM, piss play, fisting and other hardcore gay activities to undercover police officers – something he readily admitted too. However, it was claimed by Peacock and his lawyers that the material was not obscene. And they turned out to be right – it took a jury less than two hours today to find him not guilty on all counts.

It’s a remarkable verdict – porn doesn’t get much more hardcore than the material included in these films, and the ‘torture’ scenes were pretty much what the recently enacted ‘extreme porn’ laws were designed to make illegal. The fact that all participants in films like Impressive Impacts were consenting adults is apparently neither here nor there. It’s the impact (impressive or otherwise) that this material will have on otherwise wholesome viewers – the sort who might buy porn movies from a man called Sleazy Michael without having a clue as to their contents and then rapidly develop an otherwise non-existent interest in deviant sexual activity, possibly raping and pillaging as they go – that we have to worry about. The corrupting effect on those other people. The feeble minded. The less sophisticated. Or, as BBFC head James Ferman so tellingly said when justifying the ban on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, “the car worker in Birmingham”.

Just as significantly, this is exactly the sort of material that the Crown Prosecution Service and the police have long claimed was still considered obscene by juries – urination, torture, degradation, etc. That’s why the BBFC justify cutting such material from R18 movies.

But the jury in this case – and again, I emphasise, this is the first case in years to go before a jury – clearly felt otherwise. And why wouldn’t they? Apart from being shocked by the material – and despite efforts by the prosecution to confuse them by implying that ‘disgust’ was a valid reason for conviction – it’s very likely that most sensible people would find legal terms like ‘deprave’ (‘to make morally bad, to debase or corrupt morally’) and ‘corrupt’ (‘to render morally unsound or rotten, to destroy the moral purity or chastity, to pervert or ruin a good quality’) to be as dated and ridiculous as the 1959 Obscene Publications Act itself. And those definitions are not some ancient hangover from the past – that’s how the law was defined to the jury in this case, alongside a claim that a line had to be drawn over what is morally acceptable.

In fact, throughout the case, the prosecution tried to blur the obscenity laws with what is morally acceptable activity – the idea that these very acts, while legal to perform, were somehow beyond the pale and that issues like consent were hardly a decent defence. In many ways, it was the BDSM lifestyle that was as much on trial as the films (notably, Peacock is also an escort who is well known on the gay BDSM scene). That the jury acquitted is not only a tribute to their common sense and the case argued by advocate Sandra Paul, but also perhaps a sign that sexual minorities are no longer to be treated as convenient political scapegoats by politicians who you suspect would still be making homophobic comments if they thought they could. Even The Sun can’t get away with homophobia now, but perverts are fair game, with much the same hysteria aimed at them as was once aimed at the gay community. Remembering the sneering comments from various Labour politicians towards the BDSM community as they forced through the unnecessary Extreme Porn laws, as well as the notorious Spanner case where several men were imprisoned for performing entirely consensual sex acts, this verdict is a welcome move forward.

It is to be hoped that the dubious precedent set by the Spanner case – effectively saying that you cannot consent to being injured during sex (boxing is still okay though – that’s a legitimate reason to be hurt or killed) – will no longer be considered relevant after this case, though the CPS have already been spinning that this verdict does not set a precedent. As always, it seems that one conviction changes the law, while a hundred acquittals count for nothing, as anyone looking for an uncut copy of The Evil Dead in the 1990s could tell you. Theoretically, it’s entirely possible for the police to arrest and charge someone in exactly the same circumstances – indeed, over exactly the same films – tomorrow.

However, as the BBFC in particular have made much play of cutting watersports and fisting because it was still considered obscene, their position is now undermined, and it’s possible – though by no means certain – that they will have to rethink their rules (in both cases, the restrictions are ridiculous: pissing scenes are currently allowed as long as the fluid doesn’t make contact with anyone else – unless in an ‘art’ film like Taxi Zum Klo, in which case it’ll be passed at 18 – and fisting is restricted to the ‘four finger’ rule, much discussed in the court case, which means that as long as the thumb remains outside, it’s fine. Make sense of that if you can).

Of course, the authorities have long shown a willingness to disregard such acquittals. Back in 1974, John Lindsay was acquitted of selling hardcore porn in a much higher profile case, yet the police, customs and the BBFC were still claiming vanilla hardcore was illegal as late as 1999. And in 1997, I wrote of a London magistrate dismissing a case against an unlicensed sex shop selling pissing and flagellation videos because ‘no jury is going to convict them’ (not that this stopped the police in Manchester from arresting me a year later on entirely trumped-up and unsubstantiated obscenity charges…). Whether this latest high profile case finally renders the OPA irrelevant is anyone’s guess. There were still 71 prosecutions last year under the law, and as most – if not all – saw the defendant pleading guilty, the police and the CPS can still point to convictions.

Perhaps, rather than having it abolished, the law is best left to simply fade into obscurity, another disused anachronism – the alternative, after all, could be worse. The BBC, reporting on the case, felt the need to speak to the 21st Century Mary Whitehouse, Mediawatch’s Vivienne Patterson, who claimed the case showed that the OPA needed ‘tightening up’, commenting "There is not a list which says what is obscene and what is not. It makes it incredibly difficult to get a conviction on that. As a society we are moving to a place where porn is considered as kind of fun between consenting adults, but porn is damaging."

In other words, because a jury didn’t agree with my backward sense of morality, it’s the law and not me that’s wrong. It’s a laughable approach, especially as juries have in the past had no problem convicting people for much less under exactly the same law, but in a country where recent legal changes have been enacted with just such a hard and fast list of forbidden images being used, we should remain vigilant. Politicians are all too happy to listen to the bleatings of the tabloids and the fanatics under the misguided impression that they represent the majority rather than a small but very vocal minority.

Today’s verdict – reached, lest we forget, by twelve randomly selected members of the public and so a more accurate depiction of sexual attitudes than any self-selecting organization or leadingly worded petition - is cause for celebration, but not for complacency. The fight is far from over.