25
June
2008
A man in Western Australia has been arrested for receiving porn movies through the mail from overseas. His house was raided by customs officials who seized more than 100 DVDs and he is expected to be charged with breaching importation regulations for “pornography and objectionable material”, listed thus:
Includes computer games, computer generated images, films, interactive [...]
Posted: Censorship
17
June
2008
If you’re not already familiar with them, this is from the BBC comedy series The Goodies. Pretty much every Australian kid who grew up in the 70s and 80s watched these guys at 6pm on weeknights on the ABC. They had a fairly large influence on my sense of humour.
This sketch was part of an [...]
Posted: Censorship, Quirky, Weird, Funny, Videos
12
June
2008
A while ago I made a little site called ExExExChurch which is my response to the way some religious groups are fixated on the idea of “porn addiction.” The name is a play on one of the worst culprits, XXXChurch, a insistent rabble of lunatics who believe that masturbation is a sin.
Anyway, via Fleshbot I [...]
Posted: Censorship
6
June
2008
I fondly remember the genuine quirkiness of the first episode of Malcolm In The Middle, mainly because of the opening scene when Malcolm’s mother Lois answers the door topless.
Caroline: I’m here because I think there is a tremendous opportunity for Malcolm. Could you maybe put a top on?
Lois: They’re just boobs, lady. You see ‘em [...]
Posted: Censorship, Popular culture, Quirky, Weird, Funny, Sex and Women
23
May
2008
Every time I’ve started to blog on this story it’s escalated, and now it’s just crazy.
Police have seized artworks and are expected to lay child pornography charges against photographer artist Bill Henson and the Roslyn Oxley9 gallery in Sydney. This is because Henson’s works included several photographs of 12 year old girls in the nude.
In [...]
Posted: Censorship, Sex and Women
21
May
2008
I read on Petra Joy’s blog today that her award winning bi scene from Female Fantasies was cut out of some copies of her film at the behest of a dealer.
Male bi sexuality and female/male role reversal is still a major taboo in mainstream porn. So this scene was censored by one of my big [...]
Posted: Censorship, Porn
20
May
2008
A disturbing development in US free speech law - you can now be prosecuted for writing “obscene text.”
Author Karen Fletcher was arrested a couple of years ago for offering explicit stories about child torture and sex on her members-only website. Today she has decided to plead guilty to obscenity charges, saying she has agoraphobia and [...]
Posted: Censorship
9
May
2008
I have a piece of paper that says I can be a teacher. I have no intention of using it unless I’m desperate because teaching in 2008 is a shit job that is undervalued and underpaid.
But I suspect that I would have no hope of employment even if I did go mad and decided I [...]
Posted: Censorship, Ramblings
7
May
2008
You may already be aware that Britain is about to pass a law which outlaws the possession of “extreme pornography” (details here.) The law is based on moral hysteria and very bad science and is being shuffled through parliament in a much larger bill full of other issues such as privacy and immigration. Interestingly, the [...]
Posted: Censorship, Porn
7
March
2008
The Australian government seems determined to go ahead with plans to filter the internet at ISP level, making people “opt in” if they want to see adult sites.
While the story itself is distinctly biased, the 51 comments listed after it cheered me up immensely. About 95% of them are against ISP filtering, and all make [...]
Posted: Censorship, Porn
9
January
2008
We may have a new government but it looks like they’re going to be just as painfully conservative in some areas as the last lot. On New Year’s Eve (nice sneaky date for it) the communications minister Stephen Conroy announced a plan to filter internet content at the ISP level. This despite the fact that [...]
Posted: Censorship, Porn
5
December
2007
On Monday the Melbourne tabloid the Herald Sun ran this dodgy article about an unnamed Australian website. The article is long on self-righteous moralising but extremely light on for names.
It asserts that the website is running photos of “teenagers”, that the models are exploited and that the websites charges money to remove photos if [...]
Posted: Censorship, Porn
26
November
2007
I’ve stumbled across another dodgy example Christian anti-porn extremism.
This page asserts that the domain just4ladies.com was originally a “pioneering porn site for women” and was in operation as far back as 1995. It then gushingly praises the owner, Michele Washam, for converting it into a Christian site.
Naturally I was curious to discover this when I [...]
Posted: Censorship, Porn, Porn for Women
22
October
2007
I had to laugh at this terribly worried article about how the racy articles in Cosmopolitan automatically lead children to “the hard stuff.”
For some parents and one community leader in Gainesville, magazines like Glamour, Cosmo, and Vanity Fair are sending the wrong message.
“You’re just telling teenagers to come out there and get some,” Kathy Imes [...]
Posted: Censorship, Ramblings
17
October
2007
The lovely Ell told me about a new campaign from the Eros Foundation that just may make me forgive Robbie Swan for those other stupid comments about banning porn in the NT.
They’ve started the I Love Sex Campaign, setting up a handy page that allows you to send emails to politicians, defending the right to [...]
Posted: Censorship
24
September
2007
There’s been a landslide of depressing things happening here in Australia with regards to censorship and privacy issues.
Depressing News Story 1: Australian police can now tap phones and monitor emails for 45 days if they suspect a person is “believed to be connected with child pornography.” I don’t think there’s a lot of checks [...]
Posted: Censorship, Porn
14
September
2007
Well, bugger me with a fish fork. Australia’s Eros Association - which is supposed to be the lobby group for the adult industry here - seems to be perfectly OK with the government’s plan to ban Aborigines from owning porn.
The racially dubious laws make it illegal to own adult material in remote Aboriginal communities [...]
Posted: Censorship, Porn
6
September
2007
Right, so this post won’t seem very relevant to non Australians but I just have to voice my glee at the stunt pulled by The Chaser team today.
They set up a fake motorcade with Canadian flags and made it past two checkpoints (I’m sickened there’s such a thing as a “checkpoint” in my country right [...]
Posted: Censorship, Quirky, Weird, Funny
27
August
2007
Three cheers for 16 year old Tom Wood who, in half an hour, proved that the new Australian government-approved porn filter isn’t worth the smear on an IT expert’s underpants.
He’s shown that spending $84 million on compulsory net filtering software is a complete waste of money because teenagers know how to get around that kind [...]
Posted: Censorship, Porn
16
July
2007
The German author of a children’s book has pulled the plug on an American book deal because the publishers demanded that she censor images of nude art in the background of her story.
It wasn’t even the painted reclining nude woman that caused a problem. Nope. Instead, the publishers were up in arms over a nude [...]
Posted: Censorship
11
July
2007
I’ve spent a bit of time mulling over this interview between Susie Bright and author Debbie Nathan (thanks to Violet Blue for the link). They discuss sex panics and censorship and Debbie bravely puts the question out there about whether there’s as much child pornography as popular belief (and the government) suggests.
It’s a question worth [...]
Posted: Censorship
10
July
2007
It’s depressing, but not surprising. The Australian government’s plan to prevent aborigines in remote communities from accessing porn has sparked calls for more censorship.
Mr Anderson said that by banning pornography flowing into NT Aboriginal communities, the Howard Government had effectively conceded there was a link between watching the material and acting in dysfunctional ways.
“I think [...]
Posted: Censorship, Porn
29
June
2007
Dating site Mingle has come up with a very viral way of getting themselves out there - this automatic blog rater.
Unsurprisingly, Ms Naughty is an NC-17 blog according to their American-based rating system. They came to this conclusion because:
This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
* porn [...]
Posted: Censorship
22
June
2007
I can’t believe that’s the title of this post.
The Howard government has announced an “emergency” plan to deal with widespread child abuse among aboriginal communities, especially in the Northern Territory. Beyond banning alcohol and resuming control of communities and land, the government plans to ban X-rated porn.
More information here.
While I’m all for preventing child abuse [...]
Posted: Censorship
18
June
2007
You learn something new everyday. I’ve discovered that in the UK the unofficial rule for deciding whether a photo of a naked man was obscene was called the “Mull of Kintyre Test.”
In Britain it was against the law to publish photos of erect penises. Of course, “erect” can encompass a whole range of turgidity and [...]
Posted: Censorship