Up Front by Emma Hart

Alright, I admit it, I briefly took my eye off the Australian net censorship ball. Apparently this made it feel neglected enough to go completely batfuck crazy, and when it comes to this issue, my Batfuck Crazy Bar is high. So, let me tell you a little story, and then we may attempt to draw the moral from it.

On the 16th of March, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) black-listed a page on WikiLeaks, which contained a leaked copy of the Danish net censorship black-list. This list had been put up on WikiLeaks, along with the Thai one, back in December last year. I’d seen a version of the list about a year ago that had been reverse-engineered.

The black-listing was a result of a complaint filed with the ACMA by a user of the Australian site Whirlpool. They published their complaint on that site, along with a copy of the response they received, which contained within it a hyperlink to the WikiLeaks page.

Whirlpool is now liable for an AU$11 000 per day fine for having the link on their site. Whirlpool's host had already been threatened with the fine for publishing an earlier link to another black-listed site, an anti-abortion site.

On the 19th of March, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a story stating that WikiLeaks had now published a list which it claimed was the ACMA black-list, from November last year. The SMH 'understood' that the list had been acquired from a filtering software company. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is adamant that the list is genuine.

Both the ACMA and Senator Stephen Conroy have come out and said that the list is not the ACMA black-list. Both have pointed out that the list at WikiLeaks contains 2395 urls, where the ACMA list at the same date only contained 1370. It should be noted that neither party has said that the ACMA list contains urls which are not on the leaked list.

Nevertheless, the Aussie net went crazy, because according to the SMH:

about half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, [and] Christian sites

MaroochyBoardingKennels.com.au, canteens.com.au ("Tuckshop and Canteen Management Consultants"), and Queensland dentist Dr John Golbrani were understandably pretty concerned that they appeared on the list themselves.

Still, the discrepancy in the numbers, while explicable (duplication of sites, or links added by the software vendor), it was a worry. I held off indignation myself for a couple of days, which was all the time it took for another list to appear on WikiLeaks.

This one is dated March 18th, appeared on March 20th, and contains 1170 urls, including ones people know are on the ACMA list because they lodged complaints about them themselves. It also contains the Peaceful Pill Handbook site, which like the AbortionTV site, would appear to contain no material that falls inside the ACMA's purview.

The prompt appearance of a second, shorter list if anything made me even more suspicious. But here's the key to the whole thing: it doesn't matter if the leaked list is genuine or not.

It was already public knowledge that the ACMA list contains material that is perfectly legal to view – material you could go to a shop and buy. They enforce Section 7 of the Broadcasting Services Act, which includes prohibition of material which contains:

strong depictions of nudity, implied sexual activity, drug use or violence, very frequent or very strong coarse language, and other material that is strong in impact.

There is, apparently, something about the internet that makes mild porn grow horns and tentacles and become super-porn. Denmark’s black-list – intended, just like Australia's, to combat child pornography – contains 'normal' porn sites, even though pornography has been completely legal in Denmark since 1967.

But say you have no interest in porn and don't care if even the most vanilla porn sites get banned.

There's an AU$11 000 fine for linking to a site on the banned list.

You're not allowed to know which sites are on the banned list.

The fine also presumably applies to linking to sites which link to sites which are on the banned list.

And let's go back to that dentist.

"A Russian company broke into our website a couple of years back and they were putting pornographic listings on there ... [but] we changed across to a different web provider and we haven't had that problem since," Golbrani said in a phone interview.

He said the fact that he hadn't been removed from the list was "criminal" and he was scared potential customers may avoid him.

Dr Golbrani didn't know his site was on the black-list. The black-list is secret. He could not, therefore, apply to have his site removed from the black-list. What happened to him could happen to anyone.

Like copyright, censorship is about the future of the internet. How, for what reasons, and to what extent do we curtail its gloriously anarchic and largely free flow of great gobs of information, some of it distasteful? What are we prepared to give up, and to what ends?

However genuine the leaked lists are, it's simply a matter of degrees of fracking awful.

Last word to Stephen Fry.

But the internet is a city and, like any great city… there are also slums and there are red light districts and there are really sleazy areas where you wouldn't want your children wandering alone.

And you say, "But how do I know which shops are selling good gear in the city and how do I know which are bad? How do I know which streets are safe and how do I know which aren't?" Well you find out.

What you don't need is a huge authority or a series of identity cards and police escorts to take you round the city because you can't be trusted to do it yourself or for your children to do it.

And I think people must understand that about the internet - it is a new city, it's a virtual city and there will be parts of it of course that they dislike, but you don't pull down London because it's got a red light district.

Christchurch is Drinking Liberally again this Thursday, 7-8pm at Goodbye Blue Monday. Speaker is Therese Arseneau.

Sometimes, no matter how difficult it might be, we need to accept that amusing stereotypes can sometimes prove true. So let's get it out of the way right from the start. Jo Drysdall is a librarian by day. By night she is Bastet Creations, maker of the most astoundingly beautiful corsets, and she is on a not-so-secret mission to bring sexy back.

Now, I know some of you are thinking, ew, corsets. Okay, sexy in a clichéd kind of way, but hideously uncomfortable and symbolic of the restricting of women's bodies for male appetites. About as classy or genuinely sensual as a Sexy Nurse outfit, right?

We'll have to agree to disagree, because I would wear that in a heartbeat. Try imagining someone wearing that being demure and repressed in anything but play.

Corset-making is an odd profession to find yourself in, and perhaps an odder one to have to refuse to take any more work in because you can't keep up with demand. Jo, through a History degree and an involvement in historical re-enactment, began making corsets along with other historical costuming about a decade ago. The history and construction of corsetry has become an insidious passion.

She's particularly fond of Edwardian and Victorian dress, which is convenient given the growth on interest in things Victorian, especially in Gothic and Fetish culture. Her most recent exhibition, "Corset", is inspired in part by steam-punk, the alternate Victorian science-fiction popularised by William Gibson and Alan Moore.

And what Victorian Adventuress would be complete without this?

There it is: corsetry as strength and power and daring. Despite our clichéd and simplistic views of repressive Victorian attitudes towards sex, that dynamic has always been there. Reading about the history of corsetry, it's difficult not to come to the same conclusion as Jo does:

Corsets have always had an ambivalent symbolism – on the one hand commentaries throughout the last 500 years associate them with chastity and moral restraint (think of the terms "straight-laced" and "loose woman") and yet at the same time they cannot help but be symbolic of female sexuality, with their various designs emphasising the breasts, hips and pelvis. They have always been a focus of male writers' conscious or subconscious obsessions and fears about women, power and sex. At any given time the corset tended to mirror attitudes held about women – it could be used as either a cause or sign of chastity or sexual promiscuity, vanity or modesty, assertiveness or repression.

Indeed, one of the strains of opposition to corseting during the Victorian period was based on the way corsetry interfered with a woman's prime purpose: having babies.

Surely, though, there is something legitimate in the other objections, that corsets restrict a woman's breathing and ability to move, that they pinch and dig in and are just plain uncomfortable?

According to Jo, most women's knowledge of what wearing a corset is like comes from wearing light-weight mass-produced corselettes, the kind that are mostly lace and plastic boning.

Corsets can feel a little odd to us, since we're used to stretch fabrics and loose clothing, but the feeling of being laced into a corset is actually rather nice – supportive and enveloping. They don't pinch or dig in, as they are designed to have a gentle all-over pressure… The bones are spring steel, much stronger than the plastic boning commonly found in formal gowns and corselettes these days. It can't buckle enough to dig in.

One of the things my clients all say when they try on their finished corset for the first time is (in tones of great surprise) "Hey, this is really comfortable!"

For the larger-chested woman, having the weight of your breasts supported by your whole torso instead of suspended from narrow shoulder-straps can actually be remarkably comfortable, and ease pain in the neck and upper back.

Still, there is some restriction when it comes to bending. Jo gives one sage piece of advice to her clients: boots first, then corset.

And not all Jo's clients are women. Some of the corsets she has made for men are to fit a natural male shape, others were made for cross-dressers and designed to emulate a more female shape.

Nevertheless, she still occasionally has problematic reactions to her work. Despite designing for men and women of all body types, she has been accused of making 'prostitutes' clothing'. At the other end of the spectrum, at her first exhibition she found her work being viewed as simply art, static display pieces, by people who were astonished that they were intended for wear. That's perhaps understandable: Jo’s work is both beautifully crafted and simply beautiful.

Attitude problems are always going to persist when it comes to corsets, even though they’re now worn by women who freely choose to wear them and feel attractive and powerful in them.

Given that corsets can and are worn by women of every shape and size (and make the most of every sort of figure!) I’d say they do more for a positive and realistic female self-image than the unrealistically thin models of our catwalks do.

A corset is just an item of clothing, onto which people tend to project their attitudes to the real women who have worn and do still wear them.

Jo Drysdall’s Corset exhibition runs at the Arts Centre in Christchurch until the 20th. Get along if you can: photographs cannot do justice to the astonishing artistry and the sheer sense of fun that goes into these works. Photographs used here are by Phil Anderson. You can see more photos of Jo’s exhibition here and here.

Yesterday I met the nice woman from across the street for the first time. (Not a ninja.) We chatted away amicably for a while, but it made me ponder a phenomenon that seems to happen to me quite a bit. Why do so many people I meet feel compelled to mention their church in our first conversation? Where's our famed Kiwi reticence about religion?

When I wonder this, someone usually points out to me the large pewter pentacle I wear all the time and suggests some degree of hypocrisy. I don't think of that so much as a religious statement, though; more 'fair warning'. It scares off people I don’t want to talk to, and anyone who still has a go at me after that is therefore Fair Game. Why yes, pack of teenagers from Middleton Grange, that does include you, doesn’t it?

So like any good Kiwi, I'm really uncomfortable discussing religion. Even when people are just being friendly and curious ("Are you Jewish, then?") I get awkward and abrupt. Couldn't we just talk about sex or politics instead?

Nevertheless, I keep meeting people who think religion is an appropriate – almost compulsory – topic for discussing with people you've just met. Worse than that, I keep meeting missionaries.

For a while there, you could just about guarantee that if one of my kids made a friend at school, the parents would turn out to be missionaries. The family of my son's closest friend spent a whole year bringing the Word of God to deepest darkest Sydney.

Our old neighbours were lovely. They'd also come here from America specifically to work as missionaries. Now, maybe there’s something I don't understand about missionary work, but this just seems like cheating. Surely if you're going to be missionaries there should be some kind of hardship involved? An essential lack of running water, electricity, and speaking the local language just seem like basic requirements. Also possibly going somewhere where Christianity isn't already the dominant religion. Have you heard the Word of God? Yes, actually, we have. What happened to the pioneering spirit? Is there nowhere you can go and risk getting cooked and eaten any more?

It’s possible that I undermine my own argument here. When my son was about five, we were driving through Timaru with my mother. My boy was reading all the street signs we passed. "Church Street," he said. "Mum, what’s a church?" This was just a tiny bit awkward, as my mother is a church elder, does the flowers, runs the crèche, and was a Sunday School teacher for years. She was my Sunday School teacher, whatever kind of testimony that is.

So if there's a country where you can move in next door to an atheist witch in a civil union raising her children to be good homosexuals, maybe that in itself justifies saddling up for the Conversion Train.

Then there are the apples.

We love our apples, right? We're famous for it. And you know, if you cut an apple in half horizontally, there's a pentacle inside? ZOMG Satanic fruit! No wonder it was apples the Devil used to tempt Eve, even though the Bible forgot to specify. You think the Latin words for apples and evils are the same by accident? And what's New Zealand full of? Apples. Also cows. I'm working on it. There's got to be some kind of Satan-cow connection. Oh wait, it's the internet: somebody's already done it for me.

Maybe I'm paranoid. I just find it difficult to believe that the number of missionaries I run across is proportionate to the number of functioning contemporary missionaries in the country. Surely I'm getting somebody else’s share as well? Or they really are out to get me.

I should add that I don't have anything against Christian missionaries in particular. All kinds of proselytising annoys me. It's just that when the Hare Krishnas knock on my door, they bring samosas. Take a hint.

Almost forgot to mention. Christchurch's second Drinking Liberally is tonight, at Goodbye Blue Monday in the Lanes, 6:30 for a 7pm start. Speaker is Phil Goff.

It was a while before we noticed that there was something not quite right with our daughter. In our defence, it was pretty clear after her birth that there was something not quite right with me.

My midwife expressed her concerns about my seeming tired. I pointed out that I had a newborn and an eighteen month old. Surely tiredness was to be expected. She took my blood pressure. It was 60 over 40. I conceded that she might have a point, given I'd never heard those numbers without somebody yelling "she's crashing! 10ccs of technobabble, stat!".

In all the trooping from specialist to specialist and explaining that it probably wasn't depression elevating my white blood cell count, any worries about our little girl could be easily pushed into the background. In comparison with her older brother, she was a breeze to look after: a sturdy, cheerful, pretty little girl with just a slight tendency to vanish every time you turned your back.

Butter actually does melt. We checked.

Then during our daughter’s standard two year check, our GP asked if we had any concerns. I looked at the top of my girl's head and said, "I don't think she can hear." I don't think I'd even thought that thought all the way to the end before I said it out loud. We weren't too concerned that she wasn't talking, because her brother had been slow to talk as well. He was one of those kids who went from not speaking at all to 'kill the succubus' without anything in between.

That was April. Over the next few months we discovered just how well the sturdy, pretty, incredibly cunning little 'princess' could fake an audiology test. You might think you weren't patterning, but she didn’t need to hear the sound to know when you were going to light up the drumming bunny. Twice we were assured that she was fine. I argued. Finally we were told the only remaining option was to put her through an auditory brainstem response test. This would mean anaesthetising her, with all the small degree of risk that attended. I told them to bring it on.

She loved the Children's Ward and its fulsome supply of Fisher-Price ride-in cars. I had to pin her to the bed after she had the anaesthetic, because she was aggressively convinced she was still okay to drive.

They told us the results before she woke up again, standing in a little room upstairs. There was a point at which the doctor's voice receded, becoming inaudible under a white sea of shock. He was telling us quite important things, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't hear a word he said. I'd been right. My daughter had a severe to profound hearing impairment.

It took three more months to get her fitted with hearing aids and enrolled at van Asch. I can still vividly remember the first time we put those aids on her. She sat on her little plastic chair watching Teletubbies with her brother, fairly incurious as to why we were shoving things in her ears. And then we turned them on.

She went preternaturally still. You could see the desperate panic in her face as her brain scrambled to deal with this strange new input. She was only supposed to have the aids in for an hour or so at a time so she could adjust. She wouldn't let us take them out. She still doesn't like to take her aids out, even when she's going to sleep.

I was asked to decide whether Rhiana would be taught all in Sign, or all verbal. Making a decision of that magnitude for somebody else when I had no idea what their experience was like and couldn't ask them what they wanted was crushing. I've never stopped second-guessing it.

That was the beginning of a long, fraught journey for our family. We fought with teachers who didn’t want to use the microphone for her FM system. We fought a long and ultimately unsuccessful battle to retain her itinerant hours. We fought to get IEP meetings scheduled, and for ENT and audiology appointments. Everything that should have been hers by right, we had to fight for.

We know how lucky we are. We happen to live in the same city as one of New Zealand’s two deaf schools. Our daughter is extremely bright, so it's more a matter of exercising her full potential than struggling to stop her falling behind. At five she was drawing pictures of hills shaded to show how the sun was hitting them. At eleven, she's completely bloody-minded and her new haircut and general style of dress make her look like Starbuck. The new one, not the old one.

This has made me much more at peace with the word 'handicapped'. She was naturally so pretty and clever and talented that she's been given an extra load to carry, just to make it fair on everyone else.

Recent events consuming the Kiwi blogosphere may have got you thinking, as I have been, 'how could I go about making a really shit piece of legislation?'. Now, I have no expertise in copyright law, and there are plenty of other people discussing how this particular stupid law came into being. What I have done, however, is note some trends in the development of stupid law internationally, and I think I know how to go about it now. You don't have to understand law: in fact, it's better if you don't.

Your first step to creating a piece of gob-smacking shite is to get yourself an ideology. This will immediately do away with all the trickiness of moral grey areas, indecisiveness and the concept of there being two (or more) sides to an issue. Things are so much simpler when there's only Right and Wrong and you know you're Right.

Next, look around for a Moral Panic. There are usually a couple of these lying about, and while their targets change through the ages, they're basically all the same at heart. It's gangs or taggers or satanic ritual child abuse in day-care centres or paedophiles behind every website. The important thing here is to be discriminating. You need to get your timing right. Each individual moral panic won't be around for long, so you need to get one that's about to crest. You could try to generate your own, but this could be hard work. If you're okay with hard work you may as well think, in which case this column probably isn't for you.

If you can personalise your moral panic by attaching it to a recent crime, that's fabulous. The relative of a victim (always so much better copy than actual victims) will give you a crumpled emotionally-vulnerable face people will find it hard to argue with. It's pretty safe to say that Britain's Extreme Pornography law wouldn’t have happened without the murder of Jane Longhurst by Graham Coutts, and the efforts of Jane's mother to find someone other than Graham to blame.

Your moral panic should come ready-equipped with a target scapegoat. It'd be especially peachy-keen if this target group is a small minority used to keeping its head down: disorganised, and not very articulate. If you've got your moral panic picked right, it may also be too embarrassing for people to speak up against you in public – who wants to say they're big fans of violent porn?

So if you've got your ideology and your moral panic well chosen, you should be not just argument-proof, but proof-proof as well. So boot camps don't work. So filtering doesn’t stop paedophiles accessing child pornography. So increased access to pornography correlates with decreased violence against women. So Graham Coutts was practising erotic asphyxiation for five years before he started accessing internet pornography. So what? Jane's mother is crying. Something Must Be Done. You don't support murderous pornography do you? Do you? We can slaughter women for sexual gratification now, is that what you're saying? Result: a 50 000 signature petition calling for the banning of "extreme internet sites promoting violence against women in the name of sexual gratification" even though that's completely impossible. (Note that it's apparently still okay to bash men if that's what gets your rocks off. For moral panic purposes, women are children.)

Basically, you now have a free licence to counter reasonable practical objections with emotional screeching. It appears to be impossible to overplay this. Try to insinuate that your opponents are paedophiles as much as possible. Also, accuse them of hysterical over-reaction. That's fun. For extra bonus points, imply that the hysterical over-reaction is faked for political benefit. You know, like yours. Except they can't say that to you, because Jane's mother is crying!

Once you've garnered your media attention and got a few "OMG I need to stand for something" pollies on board, your next step is consultation. Avoid it at all costs. So if you’re proposing a law that affects prostitution, the last people you want talking about it are prostitutes. They might say inconvenient things like 'this law is dangerous and impractical and will get people killed'. They're victims: they're for talking about, not to.

Once the legislative process starts and people can see fine detail in your stupid law (i.e. there isn’t any, just a bunch of very vague terms open to interpretation), you will start getting more questions about specifics. This is the point at which you start reassuring people that, in practice, everything will be just fine. Say something like "We will keep a close eye on how the new law works in practice. We are prepared to look at further changes if they prove necessary. There, there. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. We'll clean up the mess after we make it, not before."

And bingo, Bob's your uncle and he won't be downloading any porn, violating any copyright, wearing any gang insignias or looking sideways at any children, just in case. If you've done your job properly, your new law should be so incoherent and scary that nobody can tell if they’re breaking it anyway.

Next on Up Front Guide: how to destroy a thriving internet community. Stay tuned.