Porn is a safety valve, big business, a cabinet of curiosities, a staging theatre for many contradictions and inversions: male submission, female dominance, intricate identity and gender crossings, and the validity of female desire. Pleasure is misunderstood in a society where is commodified, exchanged and consumed displaced into food, wine, cars....Discusses the works of Jane Burton, Mary Fallon, Catherine Mackinnon, Marcia Pally and W.H.Auden.
Women need to fight for an alternative pornography. Women need a pornography that addresses all the alternatives of our sexuality, in every format, so that there's something for everyone....Farmer interviewed porn star Lydia Lunch on her visit to the MRC in Adelaide.
Editorial: hypocrisy in our attitude to sex. It is both celebrated and maligned, and the censorship laws allow young people to view explicit violence while classifying sex for adults only, based on psuedo-scientific analysis of 'normal' or 'aberrant'. This history of public attitude from the Enlightenment on, libertinism a radical opposition to status quo, advertising and porn, and artists exercising self-censorship.
Much of the vibrancy of Hong Kong's contemporary culture manifests itself in unexpected new forms...explores how four artists construct images of sexuality within the compact (post?) colonial environment.
Gone from Carrick Hill before it became a public collection are three Stanley Spencer erotic paintings and William Dobell's 'The Duchess Disrobes' (two versions). Smith examines the nature of the collection of works by Sir Edward and Lady Ursula Haywood.