French court defines sex toys as pornography

A French court on Wednesday found the manager of a sex toy shop guilty of violating pornography laws for selling his products within 200 metres (yards) of a school.

The manager of the “Love Shop”, Nicolas Busnel, had denied that the shop’s products such as dildos and vibrators were pornography following a complaint from a Christian group, the CLER Love and Family association.

But the court in Paris nonetheless found that Busnel had violated pornography laws with his shop in central Paris, which is 90 metres from a local elementary school.

The court ordered him to pay a symbolic one euro in damages to the association. He had faced up to two years in prison and a 30,000 euro ($40,000) fine under the anti-pornography law.

His lawyer Richard Malka said he would appeal and denounced the verdict as based on “the most retrograde morality and the most worrying puritanism.”

“France is today the only country in the Western world to consider a vibrating duck as a pornographic object,” he said.

A lawyer for the Christian group, Henri de Beauregard, said he was “satisfied that the law has been applied.”