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"The new porn zeitgeist is hard-core sadwill bem. Hard-core porn turns misogyny into sexual fascism and sells it as freedom. Torture porn, where young women are tied up and strangled, defecated on. Incest adult with women becoming bashed about by dads sexually, grandfathers, uncles, brothers. There will be bestiality porno with canines, horses, with eels. There is Nazi fetwill beh porn, lots of racist porn. There are countless "18 and abused" sites showing young girls being gang-banged while crying, drunk, vomiting, with guns and kitchen knives to their mind.

Feminised gay men being beaten and anally raped by hyper-macho gangs. There will be "retarded oriental adult" also, "retarded and horny", "full on retard porn . Gran adult where old females are usually exposed to the right now required triple transmission and Granny-Tube spat on for getting outdated. . . legless sluts being triple penetrated", amputee porn, dwarf adult, anorexia porn."

This is an extract from a piece written by Dr Abigail Bray in the Sydney Morning Herald last week on the dangers of pornography. Dr Bray will be co-author with Melinda Tankard Reist of the latest Australian collection of anti pornography stories.

On reading this piece I was immediately reminded of a series of articles on the Drum written by Tankard Reist to which I responded with a contrary point of view. Given the publication of their book, and the spate of extracts from it recently, it seems timely to put up my Drum piece again.

One of the big problems I have with many anti porn activists is their apparent inability to distinguish between the rage they feel at the sight of an actor’s cleavage and the rage they feel at violent porn. Problem is, when they obtain apoplectic about rod knickers and dance, they’ve undermined their credibility when they come to protest the hard-core sadistic stuff that I’m sure is out there. It’s all or nothing with them. If you happen to be someone who doesn’t care much about people showing cleavage and do care about violent criminal porn they can’t hear your point of view.

Pornify this

The recent Drum articles by Christian sexual conservative Melinda Tankard Reist are based on appeals to presumed universal truths and values. Melinda will be in the carrying on with company of generating totalising ethnic narratives, instead than locating options to tangible problems ladies encounter.

Totalising narratives quite rightly arouse the healthy ire of thinking people, even more therefore when they are usually sexually proscriptive actually. So, Melinda, pornify this. Faced with these attempts to legitimise as universal the limited authority of one particular perspective, a thinking woman has to lodge her protest.

Censor and ban, ban and censor

It seems there is little in popular cultural representations of female sexuality that escapes Melinda’s disapproval. Even, I see on her website the US underwear company Victoria’s Secret,and twenty something TV star Lea Michele appearing on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine showing cleavage, offends her conservative values.

The latter incurs wrath because Michele is, in Melinda’s terms, "sexifying" herself, and in so doing setting a bad example to the teenagers who watch Glee in which she plays a considerably younger character.

Christian sexual conservatives seem to have embarked on a mission to pathologise the entire world, instead than reasonably offer with inevitable and at periods large pouches of dysfunction. Their solution?