Sex, Drugs and the Electoral Roll

‘We must grit our teeth and see for ourselves. We shall come out unscathed.’

Elderly British morals campaigner, Lord Longford, on hearing that his government committee would have to go to Amsterdam in the late 1960s to see what a regulated porn regime looked like.

The 1990s and the 2000s in Australia saw some of the most vigorous censorship debates since the London Oz trials of the 1960s. As the CEO of Eros, I was involved in many of these through Senate Committee hearings, industry statements, media appearances and meetings with the chief censor and other staff at the Classification Board (formerly the Office of Film and Literature Classification [OFLC]).

The debates centred on four main areas. Explicit X-rated sex, material that was degrading or demeaning to women, censorship of the internet, and the line between child porn and art. In many of my submissions, I asked politicians to articulate whether they thought sex or violence should be on the top level of the censorship-ratings scheme. Apart from Eros’s, there were almost no calls to consider violence a problem in entertainment media. In 1984, a ban on the ultra-violent R-rated slasher film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, was overturned. Just a few months later, in 1985, almost every state in Australia had banned the non-violent, sexually explicit X-rating. It was a portent of things to come. The publicity around the X-rated bans created a smokescreen under which the cult of video violence bred exponentially and was ignored by morals campaigners and politicians.

Australia’s twenty-year-old state and federal Classification Acts are riddled with inconsistencies, untruths and unpopular notions. For the average person, they are impossible to read, and many lawyers even struggle with them; I frequently backgrounded defence lawyers trying to pull cases together for clients who had been busted with X-rated videos or unclassified magazines. The Classification Code, upon which the Act is based, uses the ‘reasonable adult’ as the final arbiter in most matters, and it promotes a morality scale where this reasonable adult says that real acts of non-violent sex are more ‘offensive’ than real and/or depicted acts of murder, rape and serious assault. It does this by restricting depictions of explicit, non-violent sex acts far more than acts of (seemingly) explicit violence. The truth of the matter is that this reasonable adult doesn’t exist in the homes of ordinary Australians. They only exist in the parliaments of Australia.

Sensing an approaching censorship storm, we decided to put down some stronger roots and buy ourselves an office closer to the designated national associations area of Deakin West. We went back to the vice-regal suburb of Yarralumla, which was the adjoining suburb, and in 1995 purchased a lovely little 1950s weatherboard cottage only a stone’s throw from Robbie’s original Yarralumla house in Hooker Street. After being denied a housing loan by the four major banks because we worked for the sex industry, we finally borrowed the money from the Police Credit Union—later to become the Police Bank. Over the years many people would wink knowingly when hearing that the sex industry’s headquarters were bankrolled by the Police Bank.

When the first federal Classification Act came into being in 1996, it legislated language in the X-rated category more prescriptively than in G-rated cartoons. Any language in an X-rated film that suggested violence or non-consent had the effect of causing the whole film to be banned, even if the bad language had nothing to do with the sex. You could still say ‘fuck me’ in an X-rated film, but you couldn’t say ‘fuck you’. It was now called ‘assaultive language’ and was said to be a form of sexual violence—even if it occurred while the actor was portrayed having an argument with the pool guy.

Equally, the new rules around violence in this non-violent category were ridiculous alongside the violence that was permitted in the MA and R classifications. If a knife was on a table in a room where two people were having sex, the whole X-rated film could be banned because someone could have reached for it and stabbed their lover—even if the knife was only there to butter the toast. It came at a time when X-rated producers overseas were starting to respond to the many calls for realistic and plot-driven porn rather than vacuous, mechanical sex scenes.

Of course most dramatic, action or comedy films have a modicum of bad language and some aggression. The new laws meant that most of these more creative films never made it to Australia and porn was dumbed down again, this time by the policy-makers and not the porn moguls.

During the early years of Eros in the 1990s, it became obvious that Kerry Packer’s Australian Consolidated Press (ACP) was making more out of porn than anyone else in the porn industry. His two ‘P mags’, People and The Picture, actually shaped the porn industry until the advent of the internet. By 1996, The Picture magazine was selling more than eight million copies a year, and along with People pulling in more ad revenue than Cleo and Women’s Weekly—most of it from porn videos. Although most of the X-rated video companies produced their own monthly catalogues, The Picture and People were effectively national X-rated catalogues and included interviews with porn stars and even a bit of politics surrounding the industry. At around the same time, Rupert Murdoch’s empire was making more money from prostitution than any brothel ever did by advertising sex workers and brothels in the Daily Telegraph where, in the absence of effective discrimination laws, they could charge five and six times the amount that they did for ordinary ads. Murdoch would later also profit handsomely through Foxtel’s adult channel in hotels.

My first real interaction with the OFLC happened back while Eros was still preparing to launch in 1992. People magazine had just run a cover with a young woman on all fours with a gold-plated dog collar around her neck, tethered to a chain made of pearls. A small cover note read, ‘Woof! More Wild Animals Inside.’ It was a landmark publication in Australian censorship debates. At the time, a young advertising executive in ACP, Craig Ellis, had taken Packer’s publisher, Richard Walsh, to task over the cover during pre-production, saying in his opinion it was offensive and he could foresee a major shit storm over it. Walsh told him to concentrate on advertising and leave the editorial decisions to him because he had personally authorised it. Craig Ellis would later take over the second publicly listed adult products company in Australia, sharonausten. com, and become a lifelong friend.

When the magazine went on sale, feminist groups around the country went ballistic. They walked into newsagents, tore up offending copies and picketed Packer’s offices on Park Street in Sydney for days. They claimed that the cover would fuel all sorts of hate speech and sexual assaults on women because it made them look like animals and at the beck and call of men.

At the same time, the cover of People’s stablemate, Cosmopolitan, had featured the black supermodel Naomi Campbell with a cover note saying, ‘You too can have a body like this’. There was no protest here. I argued in the media that this was actually a far more damaging and enduring image for women than the dog collar, which was a bad-taste spoof at worst and would disappear just as quickly as it appeared. Richard Walsh didn’t help his cause much, either, when I heard him argue on radio that People magazine was an important addition to the literature of the nation and that without it the working man would have nothing to read.

Packer convened an urgent meeting of his executives on the issue. Also feeling the heat over the issue was the Chief Censor, John Dickie. He called an emergency meeting of all parties to his offices in Darlinghurst to work out a way to placate those who had been offended. Eros was invited because Packer’s adult magazine section, and indeed most of the major adult-magazine distributors in the country, had joined us.

Sensing an opportunity to get a step ahead of their adult counterparts, the mainstream magazine distributors Gordon and Gotch (who also distributed some adult titles) proposed a system of compulsory classification for any magazine that was deemed ‘beyond the pale’. Eventually this became the dreaded ‘Submittable Publication’, which was defined in Section 23 of the Classification Act 1995 as: ‘A publication that contains depictions or descriptions likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult, is unsuitable for a minor to see or read, or is likely to be refused classification, is required to be submitted.’

After 25 years of operation, this law has only ever been applied to sexual content—and then mainly to that published by the adult industry. This has resulted in major publishers like Penguin being able to republish novels and coffee table books with content that would never be allowed in an ‘adult’ magazine. For example, Anaïs Nin’s classic erotic anthology, Delta of Venus, opens with a graphic short story about a 40-year-old man having sex with a twelve-year-old and her fourteen-year-old sister. It’s beautifully written, but how is this not ‘unsuitable for a minor to read’ when a benign topless photo of a 30-year-old woman is said to be unsuitable? A hunting magazine that shows a smiling shooter cradling a freshly slaughtered deer with blood running down its neck . . . How is that not ‘unsuitable for a minor to see’? I’m not arguing for more censorship here, and certainly not of Anaïs Nin. However, a level playing field would be nice.

Some of the discussions I had with censorship authorities at that time were just mental. In the early 1990s, South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland all maintained a separate state censorship office running alongside the federal government’s OFLC. The cost to the taxpayer was huge and unnecessary. Frank Morrissey was the WA State Censor. He was a nice, softly-spoken man in his early forties who looked like he had a wardrobe full of brown cardigans. In late 1992, I received a call from the advertising manager at ACP, Mike Byers, to say that Frank had just banned an edition of The Picture magazine in WA and would I go over there and try and sort it out? The offending article was an eight-framed photographic cartoon of the magazine’s ace reporter, ‘Tubs Grogan’, and his adventures with a stuffed beaver.

Tubs Grogan was in fact Pat Sheil, a respected journalist who would run Column 8 in the Sydney Morning Herald in the years ahead, and also run for the Sex Party against Malcolm Turnbull in Wentworth. The cartoon showed Tubs and the beaver heading off to the Hellfire Club one day where the beaver is put through a range of sado-masochistic practices. As I sat in Frank’s pokey little Perth office, he tried to tell me that the cartoon represented an act of bestiality and was therefore offensive in the State of Excitement.

‘But, Frank, it’s a stuffed beaver,’ I said. ‘It’s not alive. It has no existential configuration, so it can’t be said to feel anything.’

Then he reached down into the little locked cabinet from whence The Picture magazine had come and pulled out a copy of Australian Sexpaper. This was a Category Two restricted publication that was all about explicit and crazy sex. Frank gingerly opened it to a page that showed a woman in her kitchen with a large zucchini inserted into her vagina. I looked at it and pulled on that frontal lobotomy look that people have when there’s nothing really to say but they think there should be.

‘What about that?’ he asked. ‘I’m banning it because it’s an unnatural act.’

I’m not much of a size queen (the largest thing that had been in my vagina was probably a Jimmy Jane Whopper Dong one night after a lot of alcohol) so for a moment there I pondered the occupational health and safety aspects of the monster vegetable. Then, for some clarity, I asked, ‘Why is it unnatural, Frank? It’s no bigger than a baby’s head.’

For a moment he seemed flummoxed, as if he had never thought about childbirth being a natural act. Then he turned his gaze away from me, deftly placed the two magazines back in their special cabinet, and showed me the door.

The debate over women’s labial lips first came to me in 1999, after the OFLC introduced revised guidelines for publications. Some Eros members who published unrestricted magazines with nudity started to be selectively banned because of what the OFLC called ‘relished’ nudity—and, no, it didn’t mean the models were covered in chutney. It was just more jargon from the censors. ‘Relished’ nudity existed, they said, where there was too much ‘genital emphasis’. If a nude photo showed a model with neatly fitting labial lips that butted up together to form a tight crease, the image was said to be incapable of causing offence because that represented ‘discreet genital detail’. However, if the inner labial lips protruded in any way through the outer lips (called an ‘outie’), the image was said to be ‘emphasised’ and therefore capable of causing offence. I issued an urgent media release claiming that under this spurious logic, a circumcised penis should also be capable of causing offence because you could see what was under nature’s little tarpaulin. Male penises, they said, could only be held to be offensive if they were erect.

It was a ludicrous proposition. To get around the censorship imperative, the editors of these unrestricted magazines started airbrushing their model’s vaginal lips together in a process that became known as ‘clamming’—so called because the vulva was made to look tightly shut like a clam.

Between 1999 and 2000, the number of banned publications in Australia rose by an extraordinary 600 per cent. In 2001, one of my Eros members, Australian Women’s Forum, attempted to publish an article about the increasing numbers of women presenting for vaginal plastic surgery. To illustrate the story, editor Helen Vnuk included photographs of different vaginas to show women the wide variety of shapes and sizes, and that they were all normal. When she submitted her finished artwork to the OFLC, she was told that it was unacceptable for an unrestricted magazine and she would either have to take them out or ‘clam’ them. Failing that, she would get a Restricted Category 1 classification, which meant the magazines would have to be shrink-wrapped in plastic and subject to a reduced point of sale. Things went from bad to worse for Australian Women’s Forum, and later that year the magazine closed because readers could not get the information they wanted in an unrestricted publication. Circulation dropped from 45,000 to just 16,000. Helen Vnuk later wrote a book on the whole saga called Snatched: Sex and Censorship in Australia.

In the week following the hanging of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, at the end of 2006, grainy video footage emerged of the event that was quickly all over the internet and playing on some news networks. The OFLC had previously classified a number of films that showed these sorts of executions as R-rated, the most famous a film called Executions that showed an hour of grisly real-life scenes of people being put to death in a variety of ways and offered up to the viewing public as entertainment. I thought that there was a need to house this material in a special restricted category of its own.

Only weeks before the Saddam video was released, one of my Eros members from WA, the listed company adultshop.com, had lost an appeal to have a stylish, non-violent, sexually explicit film called Viva Erotica reclassified as R. The decision was appalling on many levels. By insisting that the film carry an X-rating, the OFLC was saying that this film and its consenting, adult love-making had the potential to cause more offence than a film that showed people being machine gunned in the streets, hung from lampposts or fried in an electric chair. It was a reprehensible view of the electorate’s values that was not supported by a Neilsen poll at the time: only 22 per cent of the national survey thought that the reasonable adult found depictions of explicit sex offensive, while 76 per cent said they should be available on a restricted basis to adults. The X-rating meant that Viva Erotica would be banned from sale in all states, whereas the OFLC had made Executions available everywhere.

So I thought I’d catch out their hypocrisy and their cant by submitting the three-minute film of Saddam’s hanging for classification. When they gave it an R-rating (which they had to give it to be consistent with previous violent classifications), I would call them out over their decision. But in a four person to three judgment, they banned it with a Refused Classification rating. It was one of the most politicised decisions ever made at the OFLC. Clearly, they had seen me coming. Rather than take on a sex versus violence debate in the media, which threatened to make the then attorney-general, Philip Ruddock, look out of touch, they opted to fall on the sword of gross inconsistency in their classifications.

The increasingly forensic nature of classification in Australia did not stop here. Following the pioneering work on women’s sexuality and female ejaculation by Professor Emerita Beverly Whipple in the United States, adult films featuring this phenomenon boomed. Whipple’s book that described the phenomenon, The G Spot, was a bestseller and articles in the New Scientist and on Norman Swan’s ‘Health Report’ on ABC radio, had also raised public awareness of this largely hitherto unknown aspect of female orgasm in Australia. But although Whipple appeared to say that female ejaculation, squirting and urination were three different physiological processes, each with their own distinct chemical markers, the Classification Board was having none of it. To them, it was all New Age nonsense. If you depicted any fluid coming out of a vagina in a book or a film (except blood but that was another fetish in itself), then it would be treated as ‘urolagnia’, which is the technical term for a ‘golden shower’. Under the Classification guidelines, this is an offensive fetish and is banned. This flat-earth interpretation of basic female biology was then applied to potentially send people to jail.

In 2010, one of my members, abbywinters.com, was prosecuted for selling a Refused Classification film because it featured a depiction of what the Classification Board claimed was urolagnia. When I saw the offending film clip, I realised the young woman who had brought herself to orgasm was clearly a squirter; this was a depiction of a form of female ejaculation, not urination. Under our classification laws, male ejaculation is not considered an offensive fetish and is not illegal to display in a restricted classification book or film. So why were women being discriminated against in this most visceral of ways?

It was no minor point, either. Abbywinters.com was the leading adult-content producer in the country at the time, with hundreds of young women and men producing hours of sexual content for the website. Garion Hall, who ran AbbyWinters, had purchased an old bluestone church in the hipster suburb of Fitzroy in Melbourne and turned it into a paragon of ethical porn production. I had been there several times and was impressed at how water was being recycled off the roof, staff were given regular breaks for exercise, and wholesome food was encouraged. Models and directors were handed a brochure on how to make ethical porn before going out on a shoot. It contained all sorts of advice, even down to a list of local hospitals and doctors if there was a medical emergency. This was something different and the punters were responding in kind.

The revenue streams and the basic illegality of selling porn in Victoria, however, had not gone unnoticed by a Herald Sun crime reporter, Keith Moor, who had it in for AbbyWinters. But prosecuting an online company for selling X-rated material where the transactions all occurred in another country wasn’t easy. Finding a refused classification film on the premises was a much more serious offence—and an easier one to lay charges over. A film showing urolagnia would fit the bill, and when the police found the squirting film, Garion Hall faced a possible prison sentence.

Twenty-two people have made up the Classification Board over the years, chosen, as described on the website, for being ‘broadly representative of the Australian community’ and ‘drawn from diverse areas, age groups and backgrounds’.

The squirting debate made a mockery of these statements. I’m not sure how widespread this phenomenon is, but I’ll put my hand up to the odd squirt, and I have quite a few girlfriends who would as well. My rough estimate is that 50 per cent of women have had some sort of experience of it. By denying the existence of female ejaculation, the Classification Board members were almost saying that none of them had had personal experience of it. In any case, the public was not being represented. As a postscript to this story, Garion Hall was fined $6000 after police dropped most of the charges against him. The AbbyWinters company fled Australia days after they were prosecuted and relocated to the Netherlands where everything they did was deemed perfectly legal.

Personal smear and character assassination were never far from the job of defending porn. It was something that just went with the territory and I tried hard in those early days as a lobbyist to develop a thick skin. Looking back, I don’t think I did this as well as I should have, but I wasn’t born a rhino and the barbs thrown by conservative politicians did take their toll. Des Clarke’s reign as Director of the Classification Board from 2000–04 was cordial and without incident. Then in November 2007 the NSW MP Fred Nile made a speech in parliament that would have seen him sued by both Des and myself had he not been protected by parliamentary privilege.

I have received copies of emails sent between Robbie Swan and his partner, Fiona Patten, of the Eros Foundation who are actively involved in the importation and sale of prohibited goods, which they bring into Australia and seek to put through Australia’s classification system. The movies, on DVD or videotape, have been refused classification due to violence and underage actors. In some cases, they use actors of legal age who purport to be children and are intended to depict children.

Then he went a step further and alleged a criminal relationship between us and the Chief Censor, as well as the head of the ACT X Licensing Scheme, Tony Brown.

There was a similar unhealthy relationship involving Des Clark, former director of the Office of Film and Literature Classification. Those relationships are a cause for great concern. When Des Clark was leaving his role, Robbie Swan of the Eros Foundation said, ‘I will send him a nice, original, erotic Indian miniature painting as a thank you for what could be considered as a good term as director.’ I am very concerned about these close relationships between pornographers and people in charge of film classification, or people working for the Commissioner for Fair Trading in the Australian Capital Territory. I call on the federal and state governments to investigate these relationships to ensure that public servants are not breaking the law.

I wish the ACT and NSW governments had taken Nile’s advice and set up an investigation. It would have made fascinating reading and allowed me an opportunity to defend myself against his deceitful allegations.

In reply to the spray, the President of the NSW upper house, Amanda Fazio, did defend us.

‘There is nothing sinister in industry groups giving small gifts to departing heads of regulatory bodies,’ she said. ‘The notion that an erotic miniature could be said to form the basis of an unethical and illegal relationship is an extreme point of view that is not sustained by normal business practices.’

She was right. A senior executive in Treasury might get a gold watch when they leave the job, and a former PM might get a leather-bound copy of his speeches. So what do you give the Chief Censor when he leaves? It was obvious. You give him a turn-of-the-century Indian erotic miniature painted on the back page from a 200-year-old copy of the Koran!

Nile’s epitaph to this fiasco rolled on ten years later when a NSW Department of Parliamentary Services report showed that computers in his office had accessed porn sites up to 200,000 times. Nile told an enthusiastic press conference that his staff had been told to access the Eros Foundation and Sex Party sites to see if we had links to hardcore porn sites. Yep, 200,000 times, just to make sure . . . Of course, Nile didn’t do any of the accessing, either. He told journalists that he had given his login and password to a junior researcher and that he’d never watched any porn in his entire life. It was a more damning admission than he could possibly have comprehended.