Transcript of ABC’s Q&A in which precious minutes are wasted as I try to explain the term ’skanky hos’

Melinda Tankard Reist: What would have been controversial would have been if Tony Abbott had said: “I want my daughters to be skanky hos.” Then you might have had a controversy.

Satyajit Das: Sorry, what is a “scanty ho”?

Melinda Tankard Reist: Skanky ho. Whore.

Satyajit Das: What is that?

Rebecca Huntley: I’ll show you after.

Satyajit Das: You’re on.

Rebecca Huntley: We’ll just go out.

Barnaby Joyce: It’s a derivative.

Satyajit Das: It’s a derivative?

Lindsay Tanner: It’s a family show.

Satyajit Das: It’s a family show?

Lindsay Tanner: It’s a family show.

Melinda Tankard Reist: It’s a rough term for a loose woman. Skanky whore…

Satyajit Das: Oh, right…

Melinda Tankard Reist: You obviously don’t listen to enough rap music.

Gerard Henderson’s take on Q&A, with special empasis on the skanky ho educational segment.

Interview on 3CR ‘Right Now Radio’

Interview with Mia Freedman about Collective Shout.

Sarah McMahon’s guest blog post ’Promoting gastric banding to 14-year-olds: malnutrition and maintenance on the menu’ reprinted in On Line Opinion. 

Emma Rush’s guest blog post ’The market is eating our children’ repirnted in On Line Opinion.

It was a remarkable case of playing fast and loose with the truth – even by the standards of the Australian Sex Party (ASP).  Kids Free 2B Kids expose on ‘pseudo’ child pornography flooding corner stores, milkbars and petrol stations (including 7-Eleven and McDonald’s-Fuelzone) was turned into a claim that Australia had banned small breasted women in pornography.

This attempt to turn a very serious examination of ‘teen porn’ magazines promoting sex with little girls, rape and incest into a joke, made its way around the world before you could say ‘what the…?’ Australia was sent up for having problems with ‘itty bitty boobs’ and slammed for discriminating against women with small breasts.

Crikey was first to blow the lid of the ASP charade. It seemed no one else bothered to check the ASP’s claims against reality.

What is true is that those with small or no breasts (or with breasts airbrushed out) are deliberately used in ‘teen porn’ titles to show that young girls are desperate to be penetrated by older men. But it’s not only that they are depicted as ‘flatties’ or ‘tiny’.  While unverified claims are made that the women are over 18, even if true, they are posed as children – surrounded by soft toys, holding hand puppets, wearing pig tails, braces, bobby socks, sucking lollypops etc.

Here’s an example (deliberately cropped). This is from a magazine imported by a company owned by David Watt, an office bearer with the Eros Association, which launched the ASP.

I have written about this before in this blog, in Unleashed and On Line Opinion

These images – which the sex party wants to protect so much it flicks the spin switch to overdrive -  arouse men to sexualised images of ‘children’. Where’s the media/blogger/twitterverse concern about that?  Buried under a mound of small breasts.

Julie Gale of Kids Free 2B Kids has documented the facts that stacks of these magazines are wrongly classified by the Classification Board or never go through the classification system, in a detailed submission to the Compliance and Enforcement Working Party of the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General. Ironically, the October submission hasn’t been forwarded to any members of the working party, apparently because the secretariat doesn’t want to be seen to be distributing child porn.

Relates links: see Kids Free 2B Kids statement Australian Sex Party Fakes It

Underage p-on sold in corner milk bars article- The Australian April 3, 2009

Clive Hamilton has written a commendable piece about the way artistic men who commit sexual crimes are considered above the law and deserving of  special treatment. I’ve been thinking a lot about this since a piece in The Australian last week defending Roman Polanski who was just so clever and such a wonderful person and how tawdry it was that he should be subjected to the law. What I found especially troubling was the depiction of  Polanski’s assault of a girl as  ‘sexual intercourse with a minor’, with no mention of the fact that he drugged and raped her (vaginally and anally).  ‘Sexual intercourse with a minor’ disguises what really happened to the girl, who was only 13 at the time.

Creators of beauty are capable of ugliness

Clive Hamilton
Sydney Morning Herald, January 11, 2010

Also worth reading on the same issue is Gail Dines “Hollywood rape: why Polanski is getting a free ride”.

And Jenny Diski in the London Review of Books, offers thoughtful and personal commentary.

And this is a must read – Wendy Murphy takes on Whoopi Goldberg over her statement that Polanski’s behaviour wasn’t “Rape rape”.

To explore the whole issue in more depth see ‘The Gaze that Dare Not Speak Its Name: Bill Henson and Child Sexual Abuse Moral Panics’, by Dr Abigail Bray, in Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls.

The Government announced this week plans to introduce legislation for mandatory filtering of the internet at Internet Service Provider (ISP level).

This of course brought out all those who want no restrictions to the internet, arguing that the plans will mean we’ll end up living in a place like North Korea and controlled by the Taliban.

The plan is for ISPs to block blacklisted material rated Refused Classification. This is material that is already not allowed in other mediums because it is so graphic. It includes child porn, rape porn and bestiality.

The government will also provide incentives to ISPs to offer optional ISP level filtering of X and R-rated pornography.

The UN Save the Children Fund made the ridiculous claim that it would mean parents would relax about their children’s internet use. Save the Children should be welcoming anything which might lessen the multi-billion dollar trade in children’s bodies.

Any material which depicts sexual violence against women and children or which incites crimes of violence against women and children should not be allowed. Anyone justifying it should not be called a civil libertarian but a sexual assault libertarian.

For some compelling articles in favour of filtering, see:

Clive Hamilton: Web doesn’t belong to net libertarians 

Abigail Bray: Googling S*x

Steven Conroy: The truth about net filtering

Let Stephen Conroy know you support the proposed legislation.

Senator Stephen Conroy
Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
Level 4, 4 Treasury Place
Melbourne Vic 3002.

senator.conroy@aph.gov.au.