Fifty shades of ambiguity make OZschwitz porn laws a perverse joke

SHOULD Fifty Shades of Grey be banned? Australians clearly don't think so. On any typical train carriage, you'll find at least one reader unabashedly engrossed in Ana Steele's romps with Mr Grey and his Red Room of Pain. Yet a film with the same content - that is, a movie combining real sex with bondage - must, by law, be refused classification. How does that make sense?

Fifty shades of ambiguity make OZschwitz porn laws a perverse joke Zahpornlw23031220120815

The disparity seems even more peculiar given the censors' historical obsession with banning novels. Lawrence, Nabokov, Miller, Roth, Orwell: you could run a credible literature course out of books Australians were once banned from buying. In theory, novels can still go to the Classification Board. In practice, they almost never do, probably because the famous literary anti-censorship cases made rating books seem deeply unpalatable.

It's merely one example of the prevailing weird classificatory hotchpotch. In some respects, federal censorship law reflects a New Left libertarianism: the code's proclamation that ''adults should be able to read, hear and see what they want'' comes, almost word for word, from Don Dunstan's Labor policy from 1969. But the classifiers are constrained by specific legislative prohibitions, such as the ban on bondage and other fetishes. Most significantly, films containing actual sex cannot feature violence - which seems reasonable, until you realise the stipulation forbids any violence at all, even if entirely unrelated to sexual activity. In other words, a pirate-themed adult movie featuring a sword fight cannot be legally screened.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/fifty-shades-of-ambiguity-make-porn-laws-a-perverse-joke-20120815-248xs.html#ixzz23gCDo2wJ

Fifty shades of ambiguity make OZschwitz porn laws a perverse joke

Fifty shades of ambiguity make OZschwitz porn laws a perverse joke

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