Censorship

Tuesday, Feb 2, 2010 14:03 EST

The truth behind an alleged ban on small breasts in porn
By Mary Elizabeth Williams

If you’ve ever perused porn (for research purposes!), you know the way it delicately entices those with appetites for what The Knack once referred to as “the younger kind.” The genre that gave us the phrase “barely legal” sure loves that after-school, first-time experimentation! And all those shudder-inducing “tight babysitter” flicks inevitably lead to questions about the line between fantasy scenario and real-life child porn. That’s where it gets murky.

Recently Australia has led a newly energized crackdown on restricted materials — one that allegedly bans depictions of female ejaculation and, more provocatively, “small-breasted women in adult publications and films.” Led by the youth advocacy group Kids Free 2B Kids, the campaign didn’t sit well with the political activist group the Australian Sex Party, who wrote on their Web site, “We are starting to see depictions of women in their late 20s being banned because they have an A cup size. It may be an unintended consequence … but they are largely responsible for the sharp increase in breast size in Australian adult magazines of late.” Yes. That must explain the popularity of big breasts in porn.

A slew of media stories ensued about Australia’s newfound discrimination against the itty bitties, but the truth of the story is more complex. Kids Free 2B Kids has been pushing for a ban on “corner store mags that encourage sex with minors” for well over a year. On the group’s Web site, the organization’s director Julie Gale condemns those periodicals that “encourage the sexual penetration of under-age girls and some of the video/DVD advertisements validate crimes such as incest and rape.” She’s got a legal leg to stand on here – the Australian National Classification code already restricts images that “describe or depict in a way that is likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult, a person who is, or appears to be a child under 18 – whether the person is engaged in a sexual activity or not.” (That purported nixing of female ejaculation seems to be a similar straw man — it appears to refer to the Board’s already-in-place ban on depictions of urine or excrement in sexual conduct.)

More at Broadsheet – Salon.com

The movie comedy, not the magazine

Barely legal Asian woman in skimpy pink bikini

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Why Janet Romano and Rob Zicari have no business being in federal prison.

Greg Beato | October 27, 2009

In late September, as a controversial movie director spent the first week of her year-long sentence at FCI Waseca, a federal prison in Minnesota, Harvey Weinstein didn’t bother to circulate a petition demanding her release. Debra Winger didn’t issue a statement protesting the director’s incarceration and anticipating her next masterwork. Peg Yorkin, founder of the Feminist Majority Foundation, didn’t publicly wonder why the government had spent the last seven years trying to put the director in jail.

Maybe Janet Romano should have drugged and sodomized a 13-year-old. Or, at the very least, had better cinematic taste. Unlike Roman Polanski, Romano has never won an Oscar for Best Picture. In fact, the 31-year-old porn auteur, 
whose credits as a director include Pain and Suffering, I Love to Hurt You, Cannibalism, and Sexual Intrusive Dysfunctional Society 2, has never even won an AVN Award for Most Outrageous Sex Scene.

Still, you’d think many of the creative types rallying around Polanski would be equally sympathetic to Romano’s plight. Essentially, she’s in prison for rape, too—as is her husband, Rob Zicari. But as Whoopi Goldberg might have put it, 
the rape that landed them in the slammer wasn’t actually rape-rape. It wasn’t even ‘70s-style-libertine rape. Instead, it was movie rape, a scene enacted by consenting adults.

via In Defense of Extreme Pornography – Reason Magazine.