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20 August 2006

A column published in the "Sunday Star-Times"

JON BENET

Four years ago the Wanganui district council sought to impose its moral authority by banning a touring production of genital origami.

A group of elastic young Australians had turned their boarding school stunt into fleshy entertainment and wanted to display their wares in the River City. They had starred at various fringe festivals where one consumes too many drugs and too much booze and so anything infantile instantly appeals.

However, the Wanganui burghers were outraged. That their fine Royal Opera House should be used for such depravity was a foreskin too far. The morals of the rest of western civilisation may have gone to Hell in a handcart but they would be damned if the River City was going to attach itself to this mobile Sodom.

For days, weeks, months even … the mayor, the council and just about every busybody born within Christendom – and a good deal who were not - determined to have their say. Fundamentalist church groups soon got involved and reams of local newsprint were devoted to ‘Puppetry of the Penis’.

The Battle of the Scrunched Scrotum was on.

As is the case in such contretemps, there could only be one winner. The show’s promoters. Sure, they were obliged to find a new (indeed, warmer) venue but the attendant publicity was priceless. Their display sold out – in Wanganui and throughout the country - thanks to both the novelty and the media attention.

That such a dispute might flare in provincial New Zealand is not surprising. The countryside still aspires to the old fashioned notion that there is a time and place for everything … and woes betide if you get the order out of sequence. One man’s art is another’s artifice; one woman’s tit is another’s titillation.

Which accounts for both the New Plymouth and Tauranga councils currently being in bother for seeking to promote an art gallery and a museum respectively with ratepayers’ money. Tolerance extends only so far when it touches others’ pockets.

Yes, but how to explain all those sophisticated, monied metro types getting themselves into such a lather this week over a few boobs being displayed on the back of bikes? The annual Exotica celebration is about to occur and porn promoter Steve Crow has traditionally advertised the erotica convention with some silicone breasted ladies flashing themselves on Queen Street.

I actually observed one of these exhibitions first hand and they are curiously unsensual. Some of the boob jobs on display last year were so bad that you’d swear that the girls had breastfed an entire tribe of Appalachian hillbillies prior to jetting over to Enzed. Others had those impossibly round, circular mounds that looked more like reverse crop circles than invitations to wanton desire.

But, as a stunt, it wasn’t too bad. People glanced, people gawked, people muttered gorblimey. It ranked up there with the pendulous displays of petulance from a couple of feminists in Wellington who implored Prince Charles to keep his hands off their body. They wished.

And the latter case is illustrative because the judge who heard the subsequent disorder case – a woman – dismissed all charges. How could anyone get offended by a pair of tits, she opined.

Well, they can in Auckland. They can impose double digit rate rises on their constituents, junket their councillors on business class around the world, and attack anything organic that grows on Queen Street. But flash a pair of mammaries and the city council will twist itself into knots seeking to ban the potential display.

Which sums up local government in a nutshell. It is irredeemably petty. And attracts the crazies like flies to a cowpat. I doubt there are more demented individuals than those who take the sector seriously. It either needs the government to aggregate all the disparates or be hit by an asteroid. Probably the latter.

Although it’s not been a good week for the crazies. After a decade of appalling maltreatment by the media and moralists, it appears that the murderer of Jon-Benet Ramsay was not a Ramsay after all. Numerous TV documentaries have been screened in this country that posited the little 6-year old as the victim of a family conspiracy.

Instead we find that a sicko trawling through Thailand was the probable perpetrator – a man known to the Ramsays and originally suggested by them as a potential suspect. The Colorado couple underwent the same hysteria that attended the Christchurch civic crèche case almost a decade before – suspicious and small minds sabotaging any attempt at justice.

Some of that same rush-to-judgement could also be discerned in recent New Zealand media reports of young children in this country. The ‘Bay of Plenty Times’ recently printed the photo of a house at which a young child died – of natural causes. Its early and sensationalist coverage clearly suggested foul play.

Similarly, Police launched a supposed homicide investigation of three month old twins last weekend in Wellington – but now all indications posit cot death as the cause. In short, our media is as guilty as the Americans in seeking the most lurid and prurient of explanations whenever calamity strikes.

Which may also be why the ‘boobs on bikes’ controversy has plumbed such ridiculous depths. That the media are as titillated as anyone and that naked breasts excite newsrooms more than the average punter. There is lasciviousness in the average journo that would not be out of place at a swingers’ party.

At what point then do the press play spectator, and at which point agent provocateur?

mlaws@radiolive.co.nz
ENDS