Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/29/australia-bans-japanese-hentai.html
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Australia also bans many different varieties of foam dart guns too
So big titted anime girl figs and powerful dart guns are deemed a public threat in a county with a ton of killer spiders and watermelon sized pinecones that can maim.
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when mrs. navarro and i traveled in australia in 2014 we noticed both the influences of asia and asian immigrants in the culture as well as the poorly hidden anti-asian racism among the anglo-australians. even worse than the anti-aboriginal racism among them.
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“I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of weebs suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”
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Racism explains a lot of the weirdness of this ban.
Otherwise we would be led to believe that Asia is the only source of porn and porn related accessories in Australia.
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Well I never thought the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand would lead to this.
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no offense to any australian mutants here, but the casual racism among so many of the white australians we encountered took australia permanently off the navarro family shortlist of countries to emigrate to in case of disaster.
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If any aussies reading through this thread can see the youtube video included in the page below without an VPN, consider that being an indicator that there’s alot hypocrisy going on with that regulation
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Where in Australia did you go?
(curious Aussie here)
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Banning it is obvious censorial racist nonsense. That said, I remember reading a convincing explanation that in Japan, a lot of this material originates as advertising for teenage hookers on the margins of Japan’s pop music industry. That would make for some interesting examples of context collapse, were specific victims/workers be connected to some specific artwork under abstract discussion.
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Aside from the obvious bigotry at play here, hentai itself is also often highly problematic because much of the sexuality it contains is flagrantly misogynistic.
See exhibit A; Legend of the Overfiend.
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we spent 3 and a half weeks and were in sydney, uluru, cains, and then sydney again.
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Though the summary is based entirely on a statement from the importer. There is no formal statement from the Australian Government. One possibility I can see is that the material is incorrectly categorized. like if it is really adult oriented material it has to have appropriate permits.
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Best I can say is its a large, diverse country and yes, there is a lot of racism around.
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because so few of our friends here in texas travel and have such a truly primitive concept of other places, we explained our travels as “flying in to new york city, then flying to the grand canyon, then heading to miami, and then back to new york” to which most of our listeners responded with “oh, it can’t be that big, can it?”
yes, it really is.
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Yes, the level of backgound racism is apalling here in Australia…something a lot of people “learn at the mother’s knee” and are unaware of in their daily lives.
The Hentai ban is due to some insignificant minor party guy called Senator Stirling Griff, from South Australia. He is claiming they depict child porn.
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What are we talking about here? Animated porn and comics? I don’t see how that is directly linked to teenage hookers, and certainly not ORIGINATING. Unless there is some underground stuff I don’t know about that the article you mentioned talks about.
That would make sense if they were treated as just anime, but it should be treated as porn - if there are different laws.
I could also see a moral panic about some of the content. Japan is… weird. Some times even gross. (Not that a lot of regular porn isn’t also gross.)
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As well as a lot of creepy/problematic shit involving minors etc…
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For sure; but that creepiness goes well beyond the genre of hentai…
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