Regulatory Fantasies

The author recalls her labia being airbrushed in magazine centerfolds to meet classification requirements for “discreet” genitals. She recalls a film shoot involving G-spot ejaculation where the squirting was edited out of the DVD cut. To find out how Australian classification law began prohibiting fetish in the first place, she visits the Eros Foundation Archives and discovers that it all began with politicians watching porn in parliament.

This chapter examines trends, patterns, and regulatory attitudes toward pornography. It situates government approaches within a distinct lineage—one with an obsession with body fluids, a phobia of fetish, antiquated understandings of safer sex, and attempts to maintain the place of sex within heteronormative, able-bodied, cis-centric configurations of intimacy. Such approaches involve confiscating and destroying pornographic artifacts and preventing the production of content that could actually disrupt normative sexual scripts. Performers critique regulatory frameworks as out of touch, misdiagnosing the problems, and failing to improve their material situation. While they produce anxiety and threat of arrest, pornography laws also invite disobedience. These findings speak to the law’s productive power, eliciting the generation of alternative ethics and standards. Producers find pleasure in their contempt for unjust laws, their transgression of discriminatory prohibitions, and their status as sexual outlaws.