Honi Soit... revisited

The shame lies in the mind of the viewer.

The University of Sydney's student magazine, Honi Soit, this week had to gather up copies of the current issue. The front cover featured a set of pictures of, well...:

The front page of the University of Sydney rag, Honi Soit, featured a montage of graphic, unretouched vulvae - pubic hair et al - belonging to 18 students who stalk its hallowed halls.

There were black bars covering the middle of each picture, but apparently it was too translucent so the determined reader could peer through the censor's bar.

I saw a couple stories on this yesterday, mostly via @BexStevenson. And not a single one noted the delicious irony here. Recall what Honi Soit means. It comes from the Latin Norse French* phrase uttered by King Edward so long ago, or at least the story goes. Here's Hume's rendition:

A vulgar story prevails, but is not supported by any ancient authority, that at a court ball, Edward's mistress, commonly supposed to be the countess of Salisbury, dropped her garter; and the king, taking it up, observed some of the courtiers to smile, as if they thought that he had not obtained this favor merely by accident: upon which he called out, "Honi soit qui mal y pense,"—Evil to him that evil thinks; and as every incident of gallantry among those ancient warriors was magnified into a matter of great importance,[*] he instituted the order of the garter in memorial of this event, and gave these words as the motto of the order.

In this case as well, the shame lies in the eyes and mind of those taking offence at the magazine cover.

Previously: Seamus on Kapiti's logo...

Update: A few weeks ago, a reader at SciBlogs complained that Matt Nolan hadn't explained the acronym LVR in discussing Loan-to-Value Ratio regulation. Another commenter pointed out some disturbing alternative meanings of LVR, related to this post's topic.

* Je ne sais quoi est arrive ce matin quand j'ai ecrit ceci. Toute la phrase est francais; je ne suis pas familier avec le mot 'Honi', mais le restant est francais. Pardonnez moi!

Reader mailbag: censorship edition

Loyal reader Lliam Munro sends me the following:

Hi, Eric.
I know you periodically blog about censorship so I thought I’d alert you to this in case you’d not seen it.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/9018880/Retailer-fined-over-banned-movies 

I wondered what sort of movie would get banned in NZ so checked IMDB for the two films that generated the fine, which were Megan Is Missing and I Spit on Your Grave.

Without debating the artistic merits of the films, neither of which score very well on IMDB, I did think it noteworthy that one of the banned films Megan Is Missing, which is apparently a found footage film about two girls being murdered by a psycho they meet online, is endorsed by a father whose daughter was murdered by someone she met online and who has become an advocate for online safety.  He thinking it should be required viewing for teenage girls.

So, I thought it was interesting that in New Zealand, Fishpond are being fined $4,200 for providing access to a film that the father of a murdered daughter thinks could raise awareness of safe online behaviour.  Admittedly, by the sound of it, you’d be just as likely to scar your daughter for life, but I still found it noteworthy.

Cheers,
Lliam Munro

I'm not likely to watch either. But I hate that I can't watch either. This is entirely inside-the-asylum kind of stuff. How much better are we really than parts of Alabama that ban sex toys?

Bathmophobia

Richard Thaler had a term for people with an irrational fear of slippery slopes: bathmophobes. He counted Glen Whitman among their ranks for warning that Thaler's "nudge" architecture could would up proving rather illiberal in practice. I worried, in my Mont Pelerin address, that by reducing the costs of paternalism, Nudge seemed more likely to expand the range of paternalism rather than transform existing paternalisms into softer alternatives. Paternalism gets cheaper so we get more of it. I suppose I'd have been a bathmophobe as well.

Anyway, here's Thaler on the bathmophobes:

For example, you may not be familiar with bathmophobia, which is an abnormal and persistent fear of stairs or steep slopes, or a fear of falling. Less well known is “nudgephobia,” also known as the Whitman-Rizzo syndrome, which is the fear of being gently nudged down a slope while standing on a completely flat surface. This phobia is sometimes associated with other disorders such as the fear of being given helpful directions when lost; the fear of obtaining reliable medical advice when sick; and, in rare cases, some have even suffered from a fear of having someone recommend a book or movie that you will really like.

...Another basic point that Whitman does not recognize is that paternalism of some sort is inevitable. Consider the following common problem. Most firms have an open enrollment period in November when employees can elect their benefit package for the following year. At my employer, the University of Chicago, you have a few weeks to log on to the appropriate web site and make your selections. The question is, what should the employer do for those employees who forget to log on? (Professors’ reputations for absent-mindedness are well deserved.) For each of the choices the employee has, the employer needs to select a default option for those who do not log on, and normally the default is either “same choice as last year” or “back to zero” (meaning, decline this option). At Chicago the default option for the health insurance plan is the same as last year.

...Presumably, if libertarian paternalism creates a slope risk then real paternalism must generate a “cliff” risk. But have we seen this in history? In America we started as Puritans but moved away from it. When Prohibition was passed into law it did not lead to a slew of other paternalistic interventions. On the contrary, once society got to see prohibition in action, the law was eventually repealed. Is there any evidence of a paternalistic slide? The only example Whitman gives is smoking, where there certainly has been a progression of increasingly intrusive laws passed. But there are several problems with this example. First, most of the anti-smoking laws are based on externalities, not paternalism. People do not want to fly, eat, or work in smoke-filled environments. Indeed, many smokers favor such laws. Note that while smoking bans are not nudges, they are shoves, even these shoves do not seem to have led to a batch of similar crackdowns in other domains. I have not seen any municipality institute a ban on loud talking in restaurants, for example, though come to think of it… .

In short, the risk of the slippery slope appears to be a figment of Professor Whitman’s imagination, and clear evidence of his bathmophobia. 

Remember that old Simpsons episode where Lisa convinces an amnesiac Burns about the merits of recycling? And he goes on to recycle the ocean into Little Lisa Slurry? And Lisa recoils in horror at the evil she helped enable?

I wonder if that's how Richard Thaler's feeling now. Perhaps he should be. Why? This.

I suppose it's all fine. After all, there has to be some default position on whether you wish to have a censored internet package. The choice of default "porn and dangerous thoughts allowed" will have consequences, as will the alternative of "porn and dangerous thoughts not allowed, unless you tell your ISP that you like porn and dangerous thoughts and maybe get put on some list because of it". The government cannot help but to influence outcomes by its choice of the default position. So why not ban dangerous thoughts by default. It's still Libertarian Paternalistic, because you can still opt out. And really, why would anybody need to have access to websites including "violent material", "extremist and terrorist related content", "anorexia and eating disorder websites", "suicide related websites", or websites mentioning alcohol and smoking. We know those are all bad things; the government tells us so. Switching the default is a perfect Thaler-inspired nudge.

And it's not just me calling this a nudge policy.

The Independent notes the filters implemented by the four main private internet providers will be "default-on," meaning users must explicitly choose to turn them off. Users can decide to keep certain filters while turning others off.

Making the filters default means most people will keep them, according to Open Rights Group Executive Director Jim Killock. "We know that people stick with defaults: this is part of the idea behind 'nudge theory' and 'choice architecture' that is popular with Cameron."

According to Cameron, the new parental control settings will be turned on for all new broadband subscribers "by the end of the year."

If anything, I've been inadequately bathmophobic. Here's what I wrote about this exact policy back in 2010 when it first came up:

I'm going to bet that this doesn't wind up being implemented. Here's Hansard of the debate. The Minister seemed pretty lukewarm on pushing through regulatory changes; I'll guess that the latest reports are bargaining position for either getting ISPs to do more to push subsidized Net Nanny variants to folks who want them, or for concessions on other issues altogether. Dick Puddlecote is livid (rightly so) but I'd be shorting the iPredict contract at prices higher than $0.35. It's pretty disgusting that a coalition that includes the Lib Dems would be even making noises in this direction.

I was wrong.

Since we're into the range of policies-I'd-previously-thought-implausible, let's turn back to my review of Nudge in the Christchurch Press a few years ago, in which I wondered whether Sunstein and Thaler would be happy with choice architecture at the ballot box.

While Sunstein worries about our decisions over investment plans or our weakness of will at the buffet table, I worry about our decisions at the voting booth. We vote infrequently, there’s no feedback from our personal voting decision to any policy outcome (unless you happen to hit Lotto by breaking a tie), the voting decision is complex and we may have little grasp of the issues at stake let alone our own positions on those issues. In my own research, I’ve found that only about half of voters in 2005 could place National, United Future, and Labour correctly on a left-right spectrum, for example, and that individuals’ political knowledge independently affects their policy and party preferences even after controlling for income, education, race, employment, gender, and other demographic characteristics. And so I think we (by which I mean you) need a nudge. Under my libertarian paternalistic voting system, your electoral enrolment would be linked to your census details. You’d then answer a brief questionnaire when entering a computerized voting booth, and I’d tell you, through the computer’s algorithms, for whom you should vote. Trust me: I’d be choosing the option that really would be best for you, if you only understood all of the policies supported by each of the parties and had a PhD economist’s understanding of the likely effects of these policies. You’d still be free to pick some other candidate or party, but you’d have to first reject the default choice I’d pick for you. The remaining options would then be presented in an order designed to maximize the chances of your choosing the next best option.

I trust that you find this kind of scheme repugnant. I’d find it great, so long as I got to be the choice architect.

I'd given this as reductio; I wonder whether Cameron mightn't be thinking about implementing it.

Ideas have consequences.

Update: James, in comments, notes that part of this is already up for mobile broadband:

This filter is already in effect in the UK for all "mobile broadband". It's called "content lock" - and about e.g half Lindsay Mitchell's blogroll is classified as adult content by the UK's current filter (Offsetting Behaviour is currently OK).
How do you unlock it - easy. Go to a website and enter your details. All you need is a credit card. A UK credit card. With a UK Postcode. Which, of course, I don't have.

I'm glad that Offsetting isn't on Cameron's banned list as yet.

Previously:

• UK Nudges
• Libertarian Paternalism Is An Oxymoron
• From Nudge to Shove
• Nudge Nudge
• Nudge thyself
• Wink Wink, nudge nudge, say no more (in which this porn nudge was first discussed)

More on the censorship bill

So Parliament is debating legislation that would let the government put you in jail for longer for possessing objectionable materials. You'd think this would mean that they have some authoritative list of what's banned and that they'd keep it up to date so that if standards change over time, you couldn't be hauled in for something that was objectionable in 1960 but would be considered tame today.

Well, no.

I'd noted a few problems here. No Right Turn lists a few more; he also points to one list of banned books. If you do a full text search, "Marijuana" shows up 33 times in the list of 1310 books. Six books about growing psilocybin mushrooms are also prohibited. A bunch of books about lesbians are prohibited; it's hard to tell whether those books are banned because they include depictions of children, other currently prohibited content, or whether somebody in the 1960s reckoned lesbianism was objectionable per se. A lot seem to be hangovers from days of yore.*

On that list is "Fanny Hill". I'd noted that one previously and emailed the Censor's Office about it. Here's the state of play. 

Dear Eric

Thank you for your emails.

The 1981 decision of the Indecent Publications Tribunal classified a paperback edition of Fanny Hillas Indecent, meaning its current classification (under the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993) is Objectionable. You are correct in your reading of the Gazette entry, that this decision applies to the illustrated edition which contains sexual photographs and in the words of the Tribunal ‘appears to be little relationship between the text and the photographs’. This classification decision remains in force. The Gazette entry is the extent of the information we have on record for the Tribunal’s classification decision.

The 1965 decision classifying a paperback edition of the book Fanny Hill: The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure as restricted to those aged 18 and over also remains in force.

The Classification Office is not undertaking a project of reclassifying historical decisions. Should a person wish to have classification decisions such as these revisited, they would need to apply for a reconsideration of the decision under section 42 of the FVPC Act.

A classification decision on a publication, by either the Indecent Publications Tribunal or the Office of Film and Literature Classification, applies to identical versions of the publication. For example, it would be in breach of the classification to import, possess, or distribute the banned version of the book (as classified in 1981), including possession or distribution online. The Classification Office is not responsible for enforcing the classification law – this is done by enforcement agencies such as Police, Customs and the Department of Internal Affairs. We encourage people to contact us if they’re uncertain about the legal status of a publication they wish to access.

I hope this information is of use to you – please feel free to contact me if you have any further questions.

So the Censor's Office has prohibited one photographically illustrated edition of Fanny Hill. But, it does not know which one, except that the photographs have the models in period costume and that the photographs have little relationship to the text. Maybe there is only one edition published prior to 1982 that fits that description. Maybe there are dozens. You can get up to 10 years in jail, under Judith Collins's bill, if you have the wrong one.

An illustrated Fanny Hill, even if it contains no photographs of children, could be considered to meet the new Section 132B(2) definition of "describing, depicting, or otherwise deal[ing] with sexual conduct with or by children, or young persons, or both". The text describes a girl in her mid-teens. And while the text itself is not forbidden, an illustrated version could be: Japanese comic books are banned for depictions. Repeat offences under this provision carry the presumption of imprisonment and up to 10 years in jail.

And just look at Section 124A(1).

A person of or over the age of 16 years is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 3 years if he or she intentionally exposes a person under the age of 16 years (the young person) to indecent material (whether written, spoken, visual, or otherwise, alone or in combination) in communicating in any manner, directly or indirectly, with the young person.

The preamble says that this is to prevent adults from sexually grooming children. I'm no lawyer, but it looks like it also can throw you in jail for 3 years if you're 16 and show something to your 15-year-old friend.

The Select Committee has a lot of work to do on this one.

* Here's Censor R.S.V. Simpson's decision from 1972 on the book "Portrait of a Lesbian", by Samantha Golden. It's currently listed as a collectible by Amazon.

The first-named 11 books [including Golden's] can be grouped together. There are some minor differences of quality among these books. What they share is the intention of exploiting morbid sexual interest through the fictional portrayal of various forms of sexual activity.

They demonstrate in their grossly exaggerated incidents, their exclusion of any experience that is not sexual, their reduction of human relationships to the juxtaposition of organs and their crude, repetitive language, the worst kind of commercial pornography. No book in this group has any element that would require qualification of the view the Tribunal takes of them as blatantly indecent.

The Tribunal classifies these books as indecent.

There are plenty of things on the current list of banned books that simply should not be there. They're relics of a time when homosexuality was illegal. Increasing the penalties for possessing works classified as Objectionable has to go hand-in-hand with a purging from the list of works that should not be there.

Objectionable publications [Updated]

Two years ago, the New Zealand Police tried to have banned a few issues of NORML's "High Times" magazine. As I had a short piece in one of the relevant issues critiquing the ludicrous New Zealand Drug Harm Index, I would have been a contributor to a banned publication, had the Censor's Office decided to give the police what they'd wanted.

Individuals knowingly in possession of objectionable materials can receive up to five years in prison.

Among the books banned by the New Zealand Censor as Objectionable (or under classifications brought over from prior censorship tribunals, including "indecent", "unconditional indecent") are:

• A Guide to Growing Marijuana in Cool Climates
• Indoor Marijuana Horticulture
• Indoor Marijuana Cultivation
• Inside Linda Lovelace (available from Amazon here)

You can search the Register of Classification Decisions; alas, they run everything through a back end that precludes direct linking to decisions. 

The Office has been reviewing some of its old classifications; "Bloody Mama", which had been banned by the Indecent Publications Tribunal in 1971, is now listed as "unrestricted". I expect that if you were in possession of something that was banned in 1971 and has not been revisited, you might ask that it be re-examined; I don't know the extent of the legal risks. 

The banned book list includes a lot of titles that indicate they would be of interest to the homosexual community, to the S&M community, to growers of marijuana, and books whose titles suggest incest or paedophilia. 

If you search on "Fanny Hill", a 1748 book (Wikipedia), you'll find a film classified R18 (1984), a book classified Indecent 18 (1965), an audio recording deemed not indecent (1975), a book deemed indecent (1981), and various others ranging from R16 to indecent. I have absolutely no clue whether, in New Zealand, it is legal or illegal for me to go to Project Gutenberg and download the text of Fanny Hill. Drilling to the Gazette decision, it looks like a specific edition of the text was banned because of accompanying photographs; there is no indication of that the pictures were of minors.* The 1965 decision restricted possession to those over the age of 18; I expect that that is the decision that continues to hold for the text.

Booksellers NZ writes:

There are approximately 1300 titles which are ‘objectionable’ (banned) in New Zealand. Approximately 1225 were classified as indecent by the Indecent Publications Tribunal (IPT) in the period 1963-1994. The remainder are decisions of the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC).

Unless a more recent decision has been made on any title, a classification decision is still in force. For example a book banned by the IPT in 1963 will still be banned, unless the edition is sufficiently different to constitute a new publication.

Most books which have been ‘banned’ deal with weapons and drug manufacture and other criminal acts, dog fighting and the sexual exploitation of children and young persons. It is likely a number of older titles if they were classified today, under current legislation, would still be classified as ‘objectionable’. This is because of the activities that these books support.

A couple of months ago, Ronald Clark was jailed for downloading Japanese anime cartoons. Now Clark was hardly a harmless guy: the Daily Mail reports he had prior convictions for indecently assaulting a teenaged boy. And maybe a guy like that should have a ban on possessing manga as part of his post-release conditions if the psychologists reckoned, for this individual, that they were more complement than substitute for actually hurting kids. But it seems a bit 'inside the asylum' that you can be arrested for bringing Japanese comic books into the country, despite that absolutely nobody was harmed in their production.

Why bring this up?

The Government is increasing the penalties for being in possession of objectionable publications. Nobody's going to defend those who produce child pornography. And even those who view those produced images or films do harm by increasing demand for those products; some argue that viewing such films or pictures adds additional harm by re-victimising the subject even where the subject never knows it's happened.** But not all people convicted as being in possession of objectionable materials are either producers or consumers of actual child pornography.

Here's The Press:

Most than 400 people had been convicted of the offence of having objectionable material between 2004 and 2011, most of which where sexual images of children.

Of these, only 33 per cent were jailed. ''That is totally unacceptable and I think we need to deal with it and this is what this bill is all about,'' Ms Collins said.

''I'm telling the judges that we're changing the law so that they can get tougher and of course they are bound by sentencing guidelines.''

Now here is the Bill. Everything in the General Policy Statement talks about the evils of child pornography.

A key purpose of this Bill is to implement the Government's post-election action plan to increase penalties for producing, trading, or possessing child pornography. The Government's objective is to ensure that sentences for child pornography offences reflect the seriousness of the offending and send a strong message that the exploitation and abuse of children will not be tolerated.

To achieve that key purpose, and otherwise improve objectionable publications and indecency legislation, this Bill—

• increases maximum penalties for possession, import, export, supply, distribution, and making of objectionable publications – which include child pornography publications:

That's all well and good, but "which include" is a bit broad. Looking further into the preamble, we find:

Clause 6 amends section 131A, which relates to offences of possession of objectionable publications, knowing or having reasonable cause to believe that the publications are objectionable. The current maximum available penalty for an offence against section 131A(1) committed by an individual is imprisonment for a term not exceeding 5 years, or a fine not exceeding $50,000. The amendment increases that maximum available term of imprisonment from 5 years to 10 years.

Clause 7 inserts a new section 132B, which contains a presumption of imprisonment for certain repeat offenders. New section 132B applies (new section 132B(1)) only to an offender who—

• has been convicted of and is to be sentenced in respect of a specified publications offence committed after the commencement of new section 132B (the repeat offence); and
• before the conviction for the repeat offence was entered, had been convicted of 1 or more specified publications offences committed before or after that commencement.

A specified publications offence (new section 132B(2)) is one against a provision specified in section 132A(1)(a) to (e) if the publication that was the subject of the offence does (to any extent) any or all of the following things (specified in section 132A(2)(a) to (c)):

• promotes or supports, or tends to promote or support, the exploitation of children, or young persons, or both, for sexual purposes:
• describes, depicts, or otherwise deals with sexual conduct with or by children, or young persons, or both:
• exploits the nudity of children, or young persons, or both.

Again, look at the "any or all". This looks to include Japanese comic books if the judge thinks that reading manga promotes child exploitation. And it might include 1748's Fanny Hill, depending on which decision of the Censorship Office you want to run with  if you have an illustrated edition.*

I'm no lawyer, but this doesn't look like the "Outside of the Asylum" kind of legislation for which I thought we here aimed. Hopefully the Select Committee will fix things so you can't get 10 years in jail for looking at comic books. And gawd help you if there are any instructions for growing marijuana somewhere in the comic's text.

* UPDATE: It is impossible for me to link here to the Gazette decision of 5 February 1981, but the text suggests that it was a specific issue of Fanny Hill that included a series of photographs that was banned. There is no indication in the decision that the photographs were of children. Here is the text:

A sample copy of Fanny Hill was imported commercially and seized at Auckland in September 1980. As the importer has disputed forfeiture the Customs Department has referred the publication to the Tribunal for classification, prior to the commencement of condemnation proceedings pursuant to the Customs Act 1966.
Fanny Hill is a paperback publication, supposedly based on the original classic by John Cleland. Samples of these writings have been selected from the original book, and used in conjunction with a series of photographs which place considerable emphasis on sexual activities, to give an impression that the paperback is an accurate precis of the original classic. In fact, there appears to be little relationship between the text and the photographs, even though the photographer has dressed his models in period costume. In view of the nature of the publication, there is a distinct lack of honesty of purpose. Accordingly, though the original classic is not indecent, we classify this edition of Fanny Hill as indecent.

So the original .txt should not be viewed as indecent. Wouldn't it be nice if the database search said as much!

Update 2: The Censor's Office has confirmed that the one illustrated edition is the one that is banned. However, the Censor's Office also does not know which edition that is. The only thing they know about it is what is in the Gazette. So if you have some pre-1982 illustrated version of Fanny Hill, it may or may not be the one deemed objectionable by the Censor in 1981. If it is, then you can go to jail for a decade. If it isn't, enjoy!

** It being impossible to discuss the pros and cons of such a view without risking being fired, I will abstain.