Photo by Flickr user Wombatunderground1. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Feminist* author Courtney Martin, widely respected-by-feminists* blogger at premier feminist* website Feministing* quotes Australian feminist* porn-for-women blogger Ms. Naughty by way of decrying…

...censorship prompted by decidedly non-feminist Australian Senators Barnaby Joyce and Guy Barnett. The censorship in question? Small breasts, which at least in Joyce and Barnett’s understanding of anatomy, are found only on underage girls.

Quoth Martin…

So many jokes come to mind here, but I’m going to leave the analysis to Ms. Naughty on Australia’s weird ban:

Why ban small boobs? I can only assume it stems from paranoia that flat chests somehow stir up the pedophiles. And you only need to mention that “p” word to start a full-scale moral panic in Parliament.

Shall we put such hysteria aside and look at what this ruling is saying to Australian women? Basically, it’s classing a certain normal female body type as obscene. It’s declaring all flat chests to be automatically juvenile, something that should not be viewed by anyone because of a fear that it will stir up “base instincts” in certain people.

“Can the Classification Board be any more insulting or sexist?”

Read the quote in context here.

For what it’s worth Barnett and Guy have also pressed the board to outright ban all depictions of female ejaculations and, even weirder, they’re evidently working to restrict photos where inner (but not outer!) labia are visible.

So far anyway the comments at Feministing have been pretty positive in the sense that even those who aren’t totally thrilled by porn still think impositions like this are going too far.

In fact, pretty much around the world people of all stripes are taking a… pretty dim view of the board’s actions.

So I’m going to be contrary and try to give the stupid morons the benefit of the doubt.

Opposition to the small-breasts ruling have been pretty hyperbolic and the analysis has sounded a bit slippery-slope-y so I thought I’d look around and see if I could find the real scoop.

Turns out there’s not a lot. In fact the only credible source of a pro-small-breasts-ban line of reasoning comes from the the Australian anti-censorship site that seems to have broken the original story, SomebodyThingOfTheChildren.com.

According to them the Australian Classification Board says their intention is to ban only images of underage models. Well, and images of small-breasted of-age adults if they might be mistaken for underage models.

In other words even though there’s surprising unanimity in choosing to illustrate articles with photos of actress Keira Knightley, it’s at least somewhat likely magazines and videos depicting her wouldn’t be covered by the ban because she’s known to be an adult.

On the other hand, publications the board evidently has completely banned include 18 U.S. C. 2257-compliant U.S. magazines with titles like Barely Legal, Finally Legal and Purely 18. In other words publications that expressly intend their models to be perceived as of-age adults… and who, since the publications are under perpetual threat of F.B.I. investigation, are verified to be actually of-age adults.

Which means that, yup, even if accusatory articles are hyperbolic the underlying story appears to be accurate: in Australia pornographers are now officially required to discriminate against women with small breasts.

Senators Barnaby Joyce and Guy Barnett, and no-doubt Russ Meyer approve.

\* I’ve been debating a bunch of anti-feminists who claim all feminists are man-hating, hairy-legged, lesbian-separatist, female-supremacist sex haters lately and, at least according to them this post, nor Courtney’s, nor Ms. Naughties can exist, let alone say anything that isn’t straight-up conservative about erotic images of adult men and women. So I thought I’d emphasis the point. Not that it would matter — they’re inclined to see feminism as an evil monolith than Mary Daly was inclined to see men, period, at all. So I thought I’d rub it in.