Sex and violence are two topics that tend to generate a lot of heat. It's understandable from a sociological perspective given they have been forces central to our evolution and are in many ways innate to us. They are also phenomena that most societies and governments have tried to control; for good and not-so-good reasons. Case in point are our censorship laws, part of which has recently been reviewed by the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Reference Committee. The committee's focus included the sexualisation of children, and you certainly won't get an argument out of me about the excess sexualisation of children through advertising. The committee also focussed on sexual images available to adults, lamenting the fact that films with R18+ ratings which should generally only simulate sex, in fact sometimes show the real thing. Later, it goes on to say that real sex, currently permitted in X18+, should be completely banned. However, as Sydney Morning Herald journalist Tim Dick (pardon the pun :) stated in his recent article:
for the minority of adults who do want it (real sex), we not only say they cannot have it, but that it is a criminal offence to sell it in most of the country. X18+ is far from anything goes. No sexual violence, no fetish, nothing demeaning to anyone involved. It allows for consensual, run-of-the-mill sex, the activity which gave life to the vast majority of us....The rule for violence in an R18+ film? ''Violence is permitted.'' Not sexual violence, but anything else goes. So sadistic, realistic, serial killing like that inWolf Creek is fine, but show real rumpy pumpy and we run for the hills.Mr Dick puts in a nutshell what to me is totally crazy. Consensual see, available with the X18+ classification is currently illegal in most of the country - save Fyshwick and the Northern Territory. But why? Real consensual sex is how humans connect with their intimate, romantic partners - plus of course how humans tend to produce babies... and this should be banned from the adult eyes??? Meanwhile, violence of the most grotesque kind - with the exception of the sexual of course - is made accessible to any adult. That our esteemed Senate committee is happy to maintain this anachronism seems nuts. Have I missed something or are things really very topsy-turvy?
I actually think that my thoughts are not that out of kilter from the average. When one of the polls published in the Saturday 2 July Sydney Morning Herald News Review asked "On stage and screen, is real sex or scenes of violence more concerning to you?", 68.2% of the 1460 respondents said Scenes of Violence were, while only 11.5% said Real Sex was - the remaining 16.6% saying neither. It seems to me that the censorship regime has a bit of a sexual obsession going on (maybe some prudish, Victorian hang-over), that seems to be blinding it to what are majority community concerns. In my mind, portrayals of violence should indeed by scrutinised, but adult Australians should not be restricted from accessing images of real, consensual, run-of-the-mill sex. This approach may engender a healthier outlook for our society overall, one which is sex-positive, while on the other hand questions the wide-spread messages of destructive violence.
