When adults so compartmentalize their activities or desires they often fall prey to approving or allowing strict controls on their own behavior to insure their social participation.

As long as this lack of assertiveness continues we will be plagued by moralists with absolutist versions of sexuality.

At some point you just have to say, “Fuck Society” and stand up for what you believe in.

At the risk of shamelessly plugging my own blog, I’ll nonetheless link to a my post on the topic, as it gives some background about AbbyWinters and its troubles with The Herald-Sun:

http://bppa.blogspot.com/2009/06/abbywinters-raided.html

Seems that her main concern was images ending up on other people’s sites. AW would have little control of that.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,25642,22907748-5014115,00.html
Offshore porn thwarts watchdog
By Keith Moor, Herald Sun
December 11, 2007 05:51pm

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22858702-662,00.html
Porn exploiters attacked
Keith Moor
December 03, 2007 12:00am

Interestingly, offences associated with production, distribution and possession of objectionable publications are one of the few places in New Zealand law where it’s a question of strict liability: if you possess it, and it’s deemed now or in the future to be objectionable, you don’t need to _know_ it’s objectionable in order to be guilty of a crime. There are some other issues with the legislation as written: for instance, sloppy wording means that all members of Police have inspector powers (search and seizure) under the law, including the tea lady, mechanic and part-time emergency call-takers.

I think the main difference between New Zealand and Australia is the way the laws are applied. For now at least, censorship in New Zealand has taken a relatively tolerant and common-sense approach whereas in Australia it seems the government and official bodies are increasingly leaning towards censorship and increased restriction of materials.

Of course, our worst “porn scandal” in recent years was when they did a sweep of the NZ Police intranet system in 2005 and found 5000 “inappropriate” images in the accounts of 300 officers. (I’m led to believe that most of those were topless photos of model Rachel Hunter that circulated in a chain email, though, and only 3 of 5000 were actually deemed to be legally objectionable. And no-one remembers what the Commissioner was being criticised for in the week leading up to that stunning revelation…)

No charges have been laid, no hardware confiscated and the police were “polite and amiable.” If the Herald Sun hadn’t been on a witch hunt nothing much would have happened. I expect they’ll continue to beat their drum of moral outrage until “something is done.” Perhaps we can all expect raids in the future.

Australian censorship laws are fucked, pure and simple.

we saw a raid on an art gallery a while back, one of australia’s most respected and commended photographers, here and overseas, had his work conviscated by police for featuring subtle pre-pubescent nudity. an ART gallery.

even two weeks ago, we had a satire comedy show taken from us, off the air as one of it’s sketches ‘outraged’ a small minority. heck, even the prime minister decided to jump on board and express his disgust, just like he did with the art photography above, to get his two cents in.

small (minded) population – outrage spreads fast.

(i hope they never find out about kink.com!)

So the newspaper needs to sell more copies and get a good “sexy!” story in, let’s go ahead and sic the cops on publishing we don’t agree with? That people actually want to buy instead of those boring newspapers?

Keep it classy, Herald Sun.

I don’t mean to offer our system is perfect, far from it. But it is vastly superior to the government mandated systems in place on other countries.