The Australian Sex Party's links to pseudo child pornography

Tired of being lectured on the liberating effects of the Australian Sex Party, which fielded candidates in the recent by-elections in Bradfield and Higgins, I sent this to the Courier Mail yesterday.

Re Paul Syvret’s sycophantic puff piece for the Australian Sex Party (December 8). The party should employ him to handle their PR.

The Australian Sex Party continues to spin the line that pornography is a harmless pursuit, despite growing research linking porn consumption with sexually callous attitudes towards women and girls, contributing to violence against them.

The sex industry body, the EROS foundation, launched the sex party. At the same time, its secretary David Watt was importing adult sex magazines that glorify sex with young girls, rape and incest.

The titles imported by Watt’s companies, Namda and Windsor Wholesale, are supplied to milkbars, supermarkets and petrol stations. The publishers claim the girls are 18+ years but the content and images deliberately make them appear younger, and more akin to child porn.

The girls are posed in pigtails, wearing braces, school uniforms and surrounded by soft toys.  They are depicted as desperate for sex with older men.

One young girl is shown exposing her sexual parts, with the words "I'm ready for my first time". She is holding a pink hand puppet. Other headings read: "Virgin Violations, forced entries". Some issues advertise : "Disobedient daughter XXX DVD's...Don't tell mom!" and "All in the family".
All these examples are from magazines imported by companies linked to an office bearer of the Eros Association. Does the Australian Sex Party think this content is harmless and worthy of protection?

A Crikey contributor was also singing the praises of the party this week. "The party also aims to prosecute child p-rnography rings globally…" the article says.

Really? Then why doesn’t it do something about what is essentially child porn which the creators get away with by using young women posed as children?

Maybe Eros should prosecute its secretary for bringing this stuff into Australia?

Gail Dines, in a soon to be published book chapter titled Childified Women: How the mainstream Porn Industry Sells Child Pornography to Men, writes:

“…More men than ever now have the opportunity to masturbate to pseudo child pornography (PCP) images of ‘girls’”. Dines points out that what pseudo child pornography and actual child pornography have in common is their aim to “sexually arouse men to images of sexualized ‘children’”.

And in another powerful paper Thinking through the unthinkable: ‘legal child pornography’ and the commodification of sexually abused children’,  Dr Abigail Bray (who has an outstanding analysis of the Bill Henson issue in Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls), writes that pseudo child pornography eroticizes incest, rape and sexual assault.

That pro-rape pseudo child pornography websites…are able to avoid child pornography censorship laws merely by making an unsubstantiated claim that their ‘models’ are 18 or over suggests that legal child pornography is a more accurate description than the term ‘pseudo child pornography’. But normalizing child sexual assault as merely another ‘tidbit’ on the expanding online pornography menu, legal child pornography also intensifies the normalization of the paedophilic-centered sexualisation of children within mainstream culture.

The Standing Committee of Attorneys-General (Censorship) is supposed to be examining the issue of this kind of pornography in corner stores, milkbars, 7-Elevens and petrol stations (including McDonald’s and their co-branded petrol stations) in April next year (a delay of six months - it was originally to have been looked at in November).

Julie Gale of Kids Free 2B Kids has written a damning submission to SCAG about the stacks of titles she found in Melbourne stores, extolling the delights of sex with children, rape and incest. The secretariat has taken weeks to consider if it can even distribute the submission to the Attorneys-General censorship working party because of the images Gale included which were taken from teen porn titles.

Which is kind of ironic when the magazines are sold at kid’s eye level in the same places they go to get ice-cream. If the images area too graphic to show those responsible for the laws on these magazines, why should they be out in the public domain and so easily accessible?

Remember, these are images which normalise sexual abuse, rape, incest and child porn. They also serve to trivialise women and children who have been and are sexually abused by pedophiles.

And meanwhile, this headline in the Courier Mail last week: ‘Porn not bad for men - study’.

The opening paragraph:

ALL men watch pornographic videos but it does not impact on their sexual habits or their relationships with women, a Canadian researcher has maintained after a two-year study.

And how does Montreal University associate professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse arrive at this remarkable conclusion? With an entire research cohort of…wait for it…20 male porn users.

… after appealing to some 2000 mostly women students to take part, 20 heterosexual men agreed to discuss their sex lives in depth.

And that’s how we know that porn is good for all men, everywhere, all the time.