Melbourne's Sexpo, the adult entertainment extravaganza currently enjoying its seventh season, raises important questions about how pornography fits within Australian culture.

On its arrival in Townsville in 2011, manager Rob Goodwin was keen to frame Sexpo as a lifestyle event that should be welcomed in any Australian city seeking to cultivate its tourist industry. Sexpo isn't just about sex.

It's a persuasive position. This year, the Australian Sex Party had a booth at Sydney Sexpo. They believed that connecting sex with politics was a great way of getting Australians to think about citizenship. Australian media scholar Alan McKee shares their conviction. McKee is a long-term critic of the position that pornography is bad for society. In fact, he thinks the reverse is true. His research argues three points.

First, when you talk to ordinary porn consumers-and there's a lot of them about-you tend to find moral people with a well defined sense of right and wrong who feel, very passionately, that pornography should only be available when it features adults engaging in consensual, enjoyable sex. Coerced performances are entirely unacceptable to these folks.

Second, like Goodwin, McKee believes that pornography is best understood as an entertainment industry; something that works in the same way as, say, popular television.

Third, the marriage of sex, retail, tourism and politics, as dramatised by Sexpo, exhibits the positive social value of commercial media culture. Good porn lets people be who they want to be, and shows the benefits of letting the media market do its thing.

Pokies are killing the stripper industry, the newly crowned Miss Nude World says.

Cassandra Jane, a 15-year veteran of the industry, says the industry is dying in her hometown of Melbourne.

"When I started 15 years ago we had all these big names, big costumes, big props. There were 42 venues in Melbourne and we'd rotate through them over three weeks,” she said.

"Then the pokies came in … now there's only two venues left out of those 42. I'm the only one left from 15 years ago.

"It's dying, it's really sad. People probably think you're just a stripper, but I'm a showgirl. It takes talent to keep a room full of people – women and men – to keep them entertained.”

Ms Jane was Miss Nude Australia last year, and won Miss Nude World 2013.

The Australian Sex Party says in some jurisdictions you cannot get an adult entertainment license if you have pokies, and said in other places stripping has suffered the same fate as other live entertainment.

"We've seen live entertainment venues die all over Australia and pokies had a lot to do with that,” president Fiona Patten said.

She said both conservative politicians and feminists put pressure on politicians to strangle the adult industry, but argued that pokies are a worse "adult entertainment” than stripping.

"But you wouldn't want the breasts to distract from the gambling,” she said.

Customs: Setting New Agendas on Censorship, Privacy and Morality
Tuesday 27 November 5:00 - 6:00 p.m. (venue Building 67 room 202)
Institute for Social Transformation Research
University of Wollongong

The Institute for Social Transformation Research Presents a Public Talk by Fiona Patten: President of the Eros Association and the Australian Sex Party

In conjunction with the workshop New Media Regulation and Cultural Literacies -- The Need for Evidence-Based Policy http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/research/istr/workshops/UOW134983.html

For catering purposes please rsvp Professor Mark McLelland This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by Friday 23 November

What it is legal to possess in Australia can now be illegal to import. At Australian borders it can be illegal to possess images of acts it is legal to perform. What may be legal to write about can now be illegal to depict in an illustration. Material that may have been legally downloaded onto a computer can be illegal to import as a DVD or a publication. In fact the same material that has been legally downloaded may be deemed illegal if found on a computer or phone at an Australian border. The addition of a question about ‘pornography’ on incoming passenger cards has caused thousands of people to reveal the personal contents of their mobile phones and laptops. Customs agents equipped with magnifying lenses pore over adult publications and seize any that may have an image, often smaller than a postage stamp, which they consider to be offensive to a ‘reasonable adult’. The importing of commercial erotic master discs for classification purposes has been completely stopped through an overzealous reading of Section 4 of the Customs Act. In Australia you cannot sell a film unless it has been classified but you can no longer import an adult film for the purposes of editing it and classifying it!

Over the last 10 years, Customs have increasingly seized and destroyed media that people have imported into Australia for their own personal possession, using legislation that was only ever intended to prohibit the commercial sale of such material. This represents an unacceptable level of interference in people’s private lives and their democratic rights to possess and own material that most often depicts or describes completely legal acts and behaviour. Customs officers are increasingly insisting on unrealistic interpretations of the law, positioning themselves as the de facto moral policy of the nation. In this presentation Fiona Patten, who has over two decades of experience as an advocate for the adult industry and as a campaigner for the right to privacy, discusses her recent experience in several court cases challenging Customs’ seizure of adult material. She discusses the limitations of the training sessions offered to Customs officials by the Classification Board and talks about her time spent with Customs officers as they pore over adult DVDs and publications searching for potentially offending images. Fiona argues that Customs have developed an overzealous surveillance regime that is out of synch with the spirit of the actual regulations and calls for increased public scrutiny of the manner in which adult materials are policed at Australia’s borders.

More Information: http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/research/istr/workshops/UOW137030.html

High Tea and Strumpets
With Scarlet Alliance, Australian Sex Workers Association and Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP)
Saturday 1 December
2pm-4pm
$20
FREE for Performance Space Members
High Tea (including tea, sandwiches, petite fours, prosecco and strawberries)

Sex workers from Scarlet Alliance and Sex Worker Outreach Project will host a hatter's high tea party with a twist. Like Alice you will be able to glimpse an alternate wonderland. Here you will be guided by costumed sex workers who will serve you a course-by-course insight into sex work, empowerment and myth busting. Indulge your voyeuristic curiosity this World AIDS Day as your fearless hosts challenge everything you thought you knew about sex work.

BOOK NOW!

• http://www.performancespace.com.au/2012/clubhouse-festival-club/