And not only that, but female ejaculation. Really? Really? It's hard to believe someone would be that crazy. And I'm apparently not the only one with doubts. There seems to be controversy over what it really entails, and whether it really happened. I mean, it's pretty farfetced and nutty, after all, of anything to ban in the porn industry.

And let me just say again, in case you weren't aware. I am not a particularly pro-porn sort of person. The mainstream pornography industry is one of the most degrading and sexist towards women of anything. Not because it is erotic, but because it is degrading to women. And don't anyone dare pull another "you're talking about hentai not normal Western porn lol" potshots at Japan. Hentai is degrading, so is mainstream Western pornography. I'm tired of people shifting the blame at other cultures for problems in their own. Like "don't attack Christian fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism is much worse!". As if someone else being worse excuses one from being bad.

But enough of that. Just don't take me as sticking up for the porn industry. What I'm getting at is that this is absurd and over the top and also degrading to women. The whole "female ejaculation" being banned stings of the whole "women are not sexual" Victorian crud(related to slut shaming and all sorts of other social problems). And I don't even know where to start with the whole "flat chest" crud.

I've heard that there's a controversy as to whether this actually happened or whether it is a smear. It sure sounds like a smear. I've heard some people claim that, yes, there was a part that does mention flat chestedness, but also include people around their 20s or "younger looking" adult women. That doesn't honestly make things a whole heck of a lot better. And others insist that there has been no such mention of a ban on female ejaculation or small/flat breasts.

I know this is old stuff, but I've been thinking about it again lately. And it's still relevant, because people are understandably, still mocking the Australian government over it. I'm really starting to hate breast fetishism with things like this.

Please tell me this actually didn't happen and that it's just a smear. Let's revive discussion on this matter, because it is still relevant.

This is news to me, I always Pegged the Aussies as Being England but sunnier.
As for the Flat Chest thing, Before we even get into the Porn, this is sexist against woman for that alone, not all women need boobs that are the size of melons.

pyrate:
but because they portray that girl as someone that is under 18.

At the very least, I find the whole "barely legal" porn sell to be incredibly disconcerting. They always have to add these terrible taglines to everything. And if someone is going to pretend that their adult models are underage, they deserve some kind of consequence.

But can they ban something for merely being "young looking"? If they don't have small or flat breasts as an alone criteria, but all together youthful appearance. People should have to be of age, not appearance, to be in erotica. And "looking 18" can be pretty broad. Teenagers and 20-somethings often share a lot of appearance.

I know that "slippery slope" is considered a fallacy. But if "young looking" being illegal feels as troublesome as SOPA. I don't like it to begin with, and I worry what such a thing could lead to. Maybe not small breasts, but does this particularly ban, say, people with dwarfism or "midgets" from being legal in porn? Where is the line drawn, exactly?

Can't the porn people just drop the stupid "hot teen" tagline crass, and go back to employing anyone of age?

LilithSlave:

pyrate:
but because they portray that girl as someone that is under 18.

At the very least, I find the whole "barely legal" porn sell to be incredibly disconcerting. They always have to add these terrible taglines to everything. And if someone is going to pretend that their adult models are underage, they deserve some kind of consequence.

But can they ban something for merely being "young looking"? If they don't have small or flat breasts as an alone criteria, but all together youthful appearance. People should have to be of age, not appearance, to be in erotica. And "looking 18" can be pretty broad. Teenagers and 20-somethings often share a lot of appearance.

I know that "slippery slope" is considered a fallacy. But if "young looking" being illegal feels as troublesome as SOPA. I don't like it to begin with, and I worry what such a thing could lead to. Maybe not small breasts, but does this particularly ban, say, people with dwarfism or "midgets" from being legal in porn? Where is the line drawn, exactly?

Can't the porn people just drop the stupid "hot teen" tagline crass, and go back to employing anyone of age?

You seem to have missed a few vital points;

There is and probably always will be age restrictions for being in porn, regardless of bust-size, and i'm assuming the age is 18 (could be wrong, i don't know Australian policies, but 18 is the usual). Being "young looking" isn't being banned, only producing porn with the specific intent of making your actress appear underage. Obviously this is fairly vague so i'm guessing it's a fairly loose clause that exists to close up loopholes allowing producers to create what is essentially child porn by making their 18 year old actresses look like 12 year olds.

Also, "barely legal" porn doesn't pretend it's actresses are underage, in fact these taglines you mention specifically state that their actresses are of legal age (just barely). I don't find it particularly disconcerting in all honesty, women are fully aware that they often look best when they're young adults (ie, 18-24 or so), porn producers are fully aware that men find young women attractive, obviously they're going to exploit that gap in the market, same as would happen in any other industry and same that has happened with any other type of woman.

There is porn out there with people of any age, they do employ anyone of age so long as they think theres a market for those types of people, which there generally is. You have gilf porn and milf porn, bbw porn and interracial porn, even dwarf porn, it's no surprise that theres going to be teen porn. I see no reason why an 18 year old shouldn't be allowed to appear in porn if she wishes, and it follows that porn producers should be allowed to hire them, provided they do meet the age requirement.

Blablahb:

Also the broad term of porn being 'obscene' can make it illegal in the UK. It's unsure just how far that law goes, but the wording is so vague that all bdsm porn could be illegal. All you need is some religious crusaders in the police willing to go after it.

Actually we do know roughly how far the law goes, through reference to earlier law on obscene publications. Prior cases have effectively applied precedence.

Blablahb:

Agema:
Actually we do know roughly how far the law goes, through reference to earlier law on obscene publications. Prior cases have effectively applied precedence.

What exactly are those outlines of jurisprudence then, because I've failed to turn up clear cases or policy outlines that show what's being tolerated and what not.

Captcha: Gucci. Well, their ridiculous advertising with famine victims should be banned for being obscene, for certain.

Much of English law is based in precedence, if you want to have a look through the case law and find out what judges have ruled in previous similar cases you'll have your answer as to just where the line is drawn from a legal standpoint. If there hasn't been any cases (unlikely) then you have your answer anyway, considering there's certainly no shortage of BDSM porn here in the UK.

Everytime someone talks about banning porn, or porn being a 'blight on society' I can't help but feel a little discouraged. I hope these people realize that 'just looking underage' is not the same as being underage. Most porn producers are required to legally determine age of participants before anything begins.

oh yeah and it means I get to pull out this chart:

http://www.netfamilynews.org/?p=29402

This shows a huge decline in sexual abuse towards children since the internet became widespread, this includes the 'predators' I was warned about when I was a kid. I also don't see how porn degrades women, it's not like porn producers are saying "Hey this is all women are good for" and Porn is one of the few industries where women are payed more than men.

No, but here in Iceland we may soon have an even worse ban that would make it legal to define certain kinds of pornos as child porn even if they have no children in it so long as the porn actors "look or act in a manner considered to be child like".

That said, I don't know how effective this law will be. I mean technically ALL porn is illegal in Iceland but nobody gives a shit so you can easily buy porn just the fucking same. Perhaps this won't matter at all.

Limecake:
I also don't see how porn degrades women, it's not like porn producers are saying "Hey this is all women are good for"

Oh, can o' worms there.

...

As I understand it, they banned people that looked under 18, as you'd expect. The producers of pornography might then have gone for bigger breasted women to avoid looking under 18, but that was never required as such.

So it's illegal for a woman with big fake lopsided breasts to be in a porno but not one with a flat chest? Sounds like the Australian legislators really like tits...

And female ejaculation? Okay I myself may not care for it, but come on, that can't be the worst thing out there.

Seems a little eerily specific if you ask me... I mean, considering how conservative the Australian government is, why would they not ban lesbian or three way porn, or amateur porno where you can't REALLY tell how old the actors are, or not require porn actors to use protection?

I don't believe all porn to be healthy, but I sure as hell don't trust those in power to make decisions about it.

Mainly because most of them seem to believe all voters are puritans and putting a stop to anything fun would gain more votes.

Sure it's a bit creepy, the schoolgirl themed movies and babysitter and barely legal and 'I fucked my stepdad' etc. (yeah, incest seems to be just fine as long as it's hinted at and not blatant too, although mom/daughter and sisters are fair game.) Yet, I don't wish to see it banned. If we stop 18 year olds appearing, why is 19 ok? or 21, or 40? I for one don't want to live in a world where the only porn is 'Golden Girls' parodies. (woo for the slippery slope argument take to extremes, but still...)

I'm nearly 40 and still find some 18 year old girls attractive and sexy. I also find some 50 year old women sexy too. Doesn't make me a pedo or a granny shagger, just makes me human with a sex drive who has learnt to care less about what I 'should' find attractive. Also doesn't mean I want a relationship with a teenager, just that I'd probably stick it in if there was some dream scenario where it wasn't going to become far far more complicated than the one and half minutes would be worth.

LilithSlave:
The whole "female ejaculation" being banned stings of the whole "women are not sexual" Victorian crud(related to slut shaming and all sorts of other social problems).

There is controversy over what exactly "female ejaculation" is. Several people think that it is actually urine. According to wiki Oz and the UK have taken the view that medicine has determined it to be urine and have banned/restricted it on that basis.

Limecake:
Everytime someone talks about banning porn, or porn being a 'blight on society' I can't help but feel a little discouraged. I hope these people realize that 'just looking underage' is not the same as being underage. Most porn producers are required to legally determine age of participants before anything begins.

oh yeah and it means I get to pull out this chart:

http://www.netfamilynews.org/?p=29402

This shows a huge decline in sexual abuse towards children since the internet became widespread, this includes the 'predators' I was warned about when I was a kid. I also don't see how porn degrades women, it's not like porn producers are saying "Hey this is all women are good for" and Porn is one of the few industries where women are payed more than men.

You most certainly do not get to pull that chart out!
Correlation is not causation. There could be any number of factors that caused that decline in reported incidences. For example, the fact that neglect has increased (see below) but sexual abuse has decreased could be an indicator that police focusing on sex predators has improved, but that's come at the expense of general investigation into neglectfulness. Or it could be something completely different. We don't know.

The chart is dishonest anyway. Look at the 'neglect' line. They say that it shows a 10% decline. If you work from the start of the graph (as they've done for the other categories), it's actually about a 12% increase. Fail.
(EDIT: Broke my numbers - it's actually about a 20% increase. Single fail for me, double fail for them!)

You could interpret that data entirely differently anyway. Take a look at the data between 1995 and 1999. Shows a steep decline in all three categories. This then slows to a stop in the 1999 to 2002 period, and there's another small peak in 2003.
A person could interpret that to mean that the massive boom in internet users (from ~20 million in 1999 up to ~500 million in 2001) made it easier for people to commit sexual offences, slowing the decline in abuse between 95-99. Then, in the early 2000's, police forces developed online techniques to catch internet predators, and the decline continued at a slower rate.

So, using the same piece of evidence, I've used a different interpretation and come up with the polar opposite conclusion. We can't both be right - and in actuality we're both wrong because we haven't accounted for any other factors.
Can you see what I mean? You cannot prove that things are causal just because they correlate.

OT:

LilithSlave:

Please tell me this actually didn't happen and that it's just a smear. Let's revive discussion on this matter, because it is still relevant.

Sorry, I can't contribute on whether it happened or not (I don't know), but my personal opinion is that there's no legitimate reason for banning porn of 'young looking people'. It's not illegal to have sex with a 19 year old who looks younger, because their actual age is 19. Ergo, the porn itself shouldn't be banned.
Instead, you've got to ensure that there are laws to prevent abuse of underage people, laws to prevent coercion, and laws to make studios bear the responsibility of STI checks of the actors they employ.
I agree that it's horribly distasteful (as is most porn for that matter), but you can't ban it on those grounds, or you end up looking like Mary Whitehouse. You also run the risk (as you pointed out) of propagating the whole 'Victorian thing' by banning consensual on the grounds of being unpleasant.

TheStatutoryApe:

LilithSlave:
The whole "female ejaculation" being banned stings of the whole "women are not sexual" Victorian crud(related to slut shaming and all sorts of other social problems).

There is controversy over what exactly "female ejaculation" is. Several people think that it is actually urine. According to wiki Oz and the UK have taken the view that medicine has determined it to be urine and have banned/restricted it on that basis.

This is kind of breathtaking to me. Why not get some decent studies done and figure out exactly what's going on down there before trying to legislate it?

Blablahb:

Agema:
Actually we do know roughly how far the law goes, through reference to earlier law on obscene publications. Prior cases have effectively applied precedence.

What exactly are those outlines of jurisprudence then? Because I've failed to turn up clear cases or policy outlines that show what's being tolerated and what not. Concerns being noted over those laws are all I could find.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/jan/07/obscene-publications-act-future-doubt

This gives an idea of the sorts of stuff that can be got away with in practice. Stuff getting towards torture or severe injury, probably not.

TheStatutoryApe:

There is controversy over what exactly "female ejaculation" is. Several people think that it is actually urine. According to wiki Oz and the UK have taken the view that medicine has determined it to be urine and have banned/restricted it on that basis.

It is not explicitly banned by the UK, it just may fall under the nebulous criteria of obscenity.

As above, however, I doubt you'll find a jury in the country that would be prepared to convict for it.

Porn isn't degrading to women!
It's super degrading....

Blobpie:
Porn isn't degrading to women!
It's super degrading....

Also gay porn?

cobra_ky:
This is kind of breathtaking to me. Why not get some decent studies done and figure out exactly what's going on down there before trying to legislate it?

Things like that tend not to get researched. The medical community still has some hang ups with female biology.

They only recently discovered that most anaemia in women is cause by the exact same thing that causes most anaemia in men, it was just assumed that them strange womens must have something completely different going on.

On the other hand, female heart attack symptoms are different from men, but nobody tends to mention that.

thaluikhain:
They only recently discovered that most anaemia in women is cause by the exact same thing that causes most anaemia in men, it was just assumed that them strange womens must have something completely different going on.

Huh? I figured women (of fertile age) tended to have anemia most commonly simply because of menstruation, leading to a higher loss of blood and iron. I mean, iron deficiency is one of the most common reasons for anemia overall, but I'd assume the underlying reasons would still tend to be different for men and women. What is the case then?

Skeleon:

thaluikhain:
They only recently discovered that most anaemia in women is cause by the exact same thing that causes most anaemia in men, it was just assumed that them strange womens must have something completely different going on.

Huh? I figured women (of fertile age) tended to have anemia most commonly simply because of menstruation, leading to a higher loss of blood and iron. I mean, iron deficiency is one of the most common reasons for anemia overall, but I'd assume the underlying reasons would still tend to be different for men and women. What is the case then?

IIRC, problems with the gastro-intestinal tract. Everyone just assumed it was menstruation, without checking...mind you, that'd mean there'd be regularish patterns of it, they should have noticed it was not the case.

thaluikhain:
IIRC, problems with the gastro-intestinal tract. Everyone just assumed it was menstruation, without checking...mind you, that'd mean there'd be regularish patterns of it, they should have noticed it was not the case.

Not really, since the regular monthly blood loss wouldn't show up in blood work considering the normal life expectancy of a red blood cell is about four times that of a menstrual cycle and the amount of bleeding physiologically isn't that much. So there'd be quite the latency between the blood loss and any possible impact, no clearly visible "up and down".
But you don't have to have constant blood loss for an iron deficiency to develop over time; a chronic, recurring one will suffice same goes for gastrointestinal bleeding, actually. Now I'm interested to find out what gastrointestinal problems in particular you were talking about, though. Got a source for me to check out?

Skeleon:

thaluikhain:
IIRC, problems with the gastro-intestinal tract. Everyone just assumed it was menstruation, without checking...mind you, that'd mean there'd be regularish patterns of it, they should have noticed it was not the case.

Not really, since the regular monthly blood loss wouldn't show up in blood work considering the normal life expectancy of a red blood cell is about four times that of a menstrual cycle and the amount of bleeding physiologically isn't that much. So there'd be quite the latency between the blood loss and any possible impact, no clearly visible "up and down".
But you don't have to have constant blood loss for an iron deficiency to develop over time; a chronic, recurring one will suffice same goes for gastrointestinal bleeding, actually. Now I'm interested to find out what gastrointestinal problems in particular you were talking about, though. Got a source for me to check out?

At this point, I find it rather amusing that the thread was about porn at start.

Boris Goodenough:

Blobpie:
Porn isn't degrading to women!
It's super degrading....

Also gay porn?

I don't watch gay porn, so i would not know about that.

News to me. I thought the whole thing was just another stupid offhand comment by Barnaby Joyce.

Edit: Reading through the comment of the Crikey article linked earlier, there may be an issue with the ACB refusing classification on some (probably) US (apparently an FOI request is required to find out) publications that have small breasted women on the grounds that they 'appear under 18', even though the publications in question have to adhere to strict age guidelines.

That, however is a completely different discussion. Small breasts are not legally banned in Australia.

Edit again: Let me amend that. Depictions of small breasts has not been legally banned. Though if there really was an official Federal Breast Inspector.....

cobra_ky:

TheStatutoryApe:

LilithSlave:
The whole "female ejaculation" being banned stings of the whole "women are not sexual" Victorian crud(related to slut shaming and all sorts of other social problems).

There is controversy over what exactly "female ejaculation" is. Several people think that it is actually urine. According to wiki Oz and the UK have taken the view that medicine has determined it to be urine and have banned/restricted it on that basis.

This is kind of breathtaking to me. Why not get some decent studies done and figure out exactly what's going on down there before trying to legislate it?

well there have been studies done, and while it was shown that its not urine, its still inconclusive whether not female ejaculation is real or not.

keiskay:
well there have been studies done, and while it was shown that its not urine, its still inconclusive whether not female ejaculation is real or not.

This may be a stupid question, but... why does it even matter whether it's urine or not? Why would that matter for any possible ban, rather? There is porn with people literally pissing on each other. Or is that kind of porn banned, too? And if yes, based on what reasoning?

Skeleon:

keiskay:
well there have been studies done, and while it was shown that its not urine, its still inconclusive whether not female ejaculation is real or not.

This may be a stupid question, but... why does it even matter whether it's urine or not? Why would that matter for any possible ban, rather? There is porn with people literally pissing on each other. Or is that kind of porn banned, too? And if yes, based on what reasoning?

I was thinking the exact same thing. I'm fairly certain that female ejaculation is real. But even if it isn't, who cares?

That's not the sort of thing that needs being prevented.

I'm sure glad it's not true, because while I'm not an Aussie, I do love me some delicious flat chest and would hate for my comrades in Oz to be deprived of DFC!

Skeleon:

keiskay:
well there have been studies done, and while it was shown that its not urine, its still inconclusive whether not female ejaculation is real or not.

This may be a stupid question, but... why does it even matter whether it's urine or not? Why would that matter for any possible ban, rather? There is porn with people literally pissing on each other. Or is that kind of porn banned, too? And if yes, based on what reasoning?

its banned in the UK under some kind of obscenity law were you cant show urine in film or tv. i don't get the ban much either since everything except child pornography and bestiality( certain states) is legal in the US.

I remember hearing about the ejaculation story before. It was in New Scientist of all places. Long story short there's not a great deal of funding for sex research and as such there are still many things not well understood. Many female functions (e.g. orgasm) are thought to be consequences of shared physiology with men rather than having a specific biological purpose, which makes them harder to identify. I think it was shown that female ejaculation (as in strictly not urine) does exist, but in many cases of pornography the women in question are actually urinating (and from the womans perspective, it is apparently difficult to tell). That's all I remember.

Captcha: "stranger danger". I'm getting in a habit of relating any Captcha I come across to the topic in question, but given this particular topic I don't think there's any word or phrase that wouldn't appear at least slightly dirty in my mind.