We have so many movies advertised with people holding guns. Some movies make glamorous a spy with a license to kill. Exposing children and adults to scenes of violence are standard fare for TV and movies. Violence as entertainment sickens me. Yet detailed depictions of consensual sex between adults are considered items that should be carefully monitored and even banned.

It's crazy. On occasion I enjoy a bit of non-violent porn with adults consenting to various forms of sexual interaction. Better that than the kind of Anzac spirit which celebrates the ability of Australians to kill and be killed.

...If you are not an expert on the "striatal dopaminergic system or positron emission tomography", I suggest you withold comment on this article.

I think the "Taboo" is probably unbreakable, human beings are hard wired to think of sexual intercourse as always having consequences, even though those consequences are mostly mitigated in advanced societies like ours. This is why there's unanimous agreement that rape is as serious a a crime as attempted murder, back in the day rape would often result in grievous bodily harm and death from infection or during pregnancy. Porn is a luxury item, until recently it was expensive and required a certain amount of effort on the part of the consumer, ie they'd have to go to a book store, a cinema or wait for their purchases to arrive by mail, nowadays it's just taken for granted,it's part of the background noise of consumerism. The comparison to video games works on another level too , they're both formerly niche media consumed by enthusiasts which upon acceptance by the mainstream have become vehicles for mainly low quality "Shovelware" as it's called, cheap productions which are shoveled out the door of the studio. Daring readers might look up the work of the young actress mentioned in the article, I did and her work is exactly the type of low grade handycam shot scuzz I'm talking about.

Aren’t we just so confused when it comes to this sort of thing!

Porn of all sorts is available at your fingertips online via half a dozen clicks of the mouse. R and X rate imagery is all over the internet.

And yet if you so much as dare to expose your nether regions even momentarily at a beach, where lots of people are wearing the scant minimum, then you risk getting tangled up with the law, a big fine and a criminal record, for goodness sake!

The contradiction and absurdity couldn’t be greater.

I was sitting in a café the other day, writing an OLO post on my laptop and using a magazine as a mousepad. It was a girly mag, of the type that is commonly displayed in a newsagency – like People, Picture and Penthouse magazines. The cover was benign. The magazine was not opened, and I was entirely minding my own business.

Some silly woman made a complaint and the manager chatted me about having an inappropriate item displayed in public!

Hey, we humans are incredibly hypocritical and contradictory in all sorts of ways, but when it comes to porn or sex anything that even remotely alludes to it, our duplicity reaches its maximum.

Good on Colin Edwards and Rob Goodwin for bringing Sexpo to Townsville, and thus helping to break down this mindless duplicity a little.

"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"

Either I am badly misreading this or you are making the bizarre and incorrect assumption that pornography consists entirely of depictions of real people having real intercourse. Since the vast bulk of pornography consists of writing, pictures and videos that depict events that never happened -- and often never COULD happen -- I don't see why there is a problem about making it available no matter who or what it features.

If I'm allowed to read fictional books, view fictional pictures and watch fictional films about space pirates, dragons and secret agents surrounded by fawning women, why shouldn't I be allowed to read or view fictional pornography about equally improbable situations which would never be allowed or condoned in real life?

Surprise, surprise! An article that quotes (a) the manager of Sexpo Townsville (b) the Sex Party (c) a pro-pornography academic (and part-time Big Brother consultant) and (d) a rising porn star.

And guess what? They all believe that pornography is all part of a pleasurable lifestyle with lots of benefits to society. (So, in that case, it must be true.)

The bulk of the essay draws heavily from the research of Alan McKee. However, it neglects to mention that McKee’s research is primarily based on interviews with a number of Australians who MAKE porn and a survey of 1000 people who CONSUME porn. I think it would be safe to say that the overwhelming majority of those surveyed were men, who are so into pornography that they don't particularly give a damn about how it affects anything or anyone else – which must skew McKee’s ever so objective and scientific findings just a tad.

This kind of happy pornography research is not interested in how negatively a lot of women feel about the way pornography portrays women, or how negatively non-users of porn feel about the increasing pornification of our public spaces, or how negatively wives and partners of porn addicts feel about its effects on their relationships, or how negatively many porn ‘stars’ feel about being sex-trafficked and/or turning to drugs to keep them going in a sleazy, exploitive industry, or how it entrenches a disproportionate power distribution across the genders.

Just lie back and think of all the good it’s doing our society - because the porn makers, porn sellers and porn users say so.