Hot sex and the censor's new position
By STEVE DOW, THE AGE
Sunday 24 June 2001
A risqué business gets riskier
Feature: Are we a nation of wowsers?
Helen Vnuk said hers was the funniest job in the Australian magazine industry.
Each morning in the mail, photographs from all over the country of naked men seeking fame would spill on to the desk of her Sydney office.
Then there were the lurid written tales for the Wet Spot, to which readers of Australian Women's Forum would submit their short, erotic stories and receive $50 if their effort was published.
Readers were, well, tickled pink to see their erotica in print.
But not everyone shared the joke.
Gemkilt Publishing told Ms Vnuk and her two staff - a deputy editor and art director - just over a week ago that, after 10 years and with circulation down to 17,000, Forum would cease publication with its July 11 issue.
The reason for the decline from a peak circulation of 45,000 several years ago?
According to Ms Vnuk, it was simply that the conservative rules of the Office of Film and Literature Classification - and, more importantly, their interpretation by its board - meant that the magazine could no longer meet the demands of its readers. It was not always thus.
As Ms Vnuk approved the last proofs this past week, she lamented that when the magazine started a decade ago it was allowed to get away with far more.
Some years ago, she said, it was possible to run articles about fetishes.
But no more. Spanking and bondage were banned in pictures or text, according to the OFLC, she said. Further, women's erotic tales have to be censored, and photographs altered so that vaginal detail cannot be seen.
And, somewhere along the line, she said, photos of sexual positions were banned.
A last-minute censorship of one photograph of a couple simulating a position was mostly blacked out in print so that no one could tell what the couple was actually doing in the picture.
By coincidence, before Gemkilt's decision to close Forum, Ms Vnuk had signed a book deal with Random House to write about censorship in Australia.
She was due this week to interview her publishing nemesis, OFLC director Des Clark, for inclusion in the book.
"We wanted the magazine to be as hot and steamy and exciting as possible, and the situation really frustrates me," Ms Vnuk said.
She said the magazine fulfilled an important role in giving women power to voice their fantasies, as well as providing information about how to experiment safely with role-playing and fetish types of sex.
Too much sex was based on guilt, Ms Vnuk said.
She hoped that Forum had enabled women to throw off the shackles of guilt and to see sex as fun.
"It's really quite frightening," she said as she packed up her office.
"Most people aren't aware of how restrictive things are becoming with magazines and X-rated videos."
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