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From an article in the Herald, 16.8.90.
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? The following text was from an article in the ????
? New Zealand Herald on Thursday, August 16 1990 ????
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FORGET HOMEWORK, COMPUTER KIDS DISCOVER ELECTRO-PORN
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By BEN HILLS writing in the
Sydney Morning Herald
It is getting on for midnight and the crack of light under young Danny's
bedroom door shows he is still up. You walk in, and there he is still
tapping away on his Amiga computer. Instead of watching television or
hanging out in the streets, he is hard at work on...
The screen blacks out, then lights up with a spreadsheet of Australian
agricultural exports. Danny swings around on his chair, his finger still on
the dump button, and gives an innocent smile:"Sorry, mum,just got carried
away with this interesting homework..."
"All right, just another 10 minutes." You shut the door, and give an
indulgent smile to your spouse. "It's just the best thing we ever bought
him."
Back in the Bedroom, young Danny reboots his system and the image he was
really interested in coalesces on the screen. It is a naked couple - the real
thing, not a line drawing or cartoon animation.
He takes his computer joystick in hand and manouvers the matching parts
into place, watching as his score clicks up for the number of
successful penetrations.
AD 2001? No way. This is just a sample - and one of the more inoffensive
samples at that - of the sort of electronic pornography that is available to
now to any half-literate home computer hacker in Sydney.
Welcome to lovebytes - the censor's ultimate nightmare.
Sale of X-rated videos might be banned everywhere outside the Northern
Territory and the Australian Capital Territory. Imported films without a
Censorship Board classification might be illegal. States might have
restrictions on the display of explicit material, or its sale to under-18s.
But for the cost of a local phone call, anyone with a home computer and a
modem can log into any one of hundreds of electronic bulletin boards -
preferably one which taps into an overseas network - and obtain a
memory-bank-full of material, some of which would bring a blush to the
cheek of the Marquis de Sade.
Forget about Dungeons and Dragons, Batman and Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles - the hottest games on the Sydney home computer hit parade this
winter have names like Party Games, McPlaymate, and Animal House.
Twenty years ago, Marshall McLuhan said television would make the world a
village. Cheap, user-friendly computers have created the global brothel.
Without much trouble, I arranged a meeting with a young man who preferred
to be known by his nom-de-modem of Crudd. I was shown a selection
which ranged from soft-core shots of Penthouse centrefolds to the latest La
Cicciolina movie (The Rise and Fallof a Roman Empress) to Animal House,
which features various unspeakable acts with dogs, donkeys and chickens,
to "interactive party games" in which the player(s) can compete.
Most of the material is taken from an overseas network of bulletin boards
- there is much demand for the output of military installation in the
American Mid-West where bored computer operators create much of the
raunchier electro-porn.
But, thanks to a $750 gadget known as a digitiser, a local cottage
industry has sprung up in do-it-yourself dirty discs.
"There's no control over it at all," says Crudd, who admits to having
embarrassed a girlfriend by using computer technology to graft her head on
to an explicit Penthouse chassis and transmit it to friends.
The technology explosion that made this possible has left regulators
floundering in its wake. Most of the state vice squads contacted had not
heard of love-bytes - or (when it was explained) did not know whether they
were breaking any law.
The first move to ban computer porn has come from a member of the ACT
Legislative Assembly, a self-styled broadminded former policecman named
Dennis Stevenson, leader (and sole member) of the Abolish Self Government
Party.
Two weeks ago he tried, and failed by one vote, to legislate to ban the
booming trade in X-rated videos in Canberra, the national capital's biggest
export industry.
Mr Stevenson says he was shocked at the material which his staff were
able to obtain with a cheap Amiga computer from bulletin boards around
Australia and overseas.
"I have a couple of printouts on my desk right now, and even though the
quality is not that good, you can see they are explicit ... not the sort of
stuff you'd want in the hands of 14 or 15-year-olds."
He says computer pornography is worse than X-rated videos because:"The
kids don't need to use the family video. They can do it in the privacy of
their bedrooms ... anyone who knows how to use a computer and a modem can
obtain this stuff, and the parents wouldn't have a clue."
But the matter of enforcement is, understandably, vague. Police raids on
home computers? Tapping the billions of bytes that flow down the
phone-lines? Restricting PC sales to those over 18?
"The first stept is obviously to make it illegal to sell or distribute
this material, and I intend to do this by reintroducingmy bill to ban
X-rated videos with a section including computer material. We will just
have to see where we go from there," he said.