DESPITE Queensland having the dubious honor of being the nation's sex-shop capital, its adult retail industry is badly regulated and it lacks planning laws restricting the set-up of new stores near schools and churches.
A planning-law review that Planning Minister Paul Lucas announced in April is under way but industry identities want the State Government to go further with a proper legal framework for retailers of adult erotica.
Eros Association chief executive officer Fiona Patten said it was impossible to calculate exactly how many sex shops operated because they were not recognised by law....read more
Fiona Patten, chief executive officer of adult industry group Eros Association, said people who could not access "adult material" online would buy it from sex shops.
Queensland already had at least 116 sex shops - more per capita than any other Australian state.
"If the filtering goes ahead, Queensland will see an explosion of adult shops because, if people can't access adult material online, they'll go to retail outlets instead," she said. "Increased demand will lead to more shops."
Before the last election, the Labor Party promised to introduce internet service provider (ISP) filtering of "prohibited" material including images of sexual abuse of children.
The Labor Party promised to block content using a site blacklist that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) maintains.
The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, said the Government was also considering more sophisticated filtering techniques to allow families to exclude additional online content from home computers. Critics say internet filtering will be too costly, slow download speeds and threaten civil liberties.
They say children will "get around" the filters and parents will incorrectly believe their children cannot access pornography.
Keith Boswell, who runs three BeDaring Adult Shops in south-east Queensland, said some traders had complained of a downturn in business since the economic slump, while others reported business as usual.
"There is enormous demand for non-violent erotica in Queensland, so I think adult stores are probably more resilient when it comes to discretionary spending," he said.
"If the filtering goes ahead, I think some people who prefer to look online will be embarrassed to go into stores."
Protests against the proposed filters were held in Brisbane and other centres around the country on Saturday.
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LINCOLN, Maine — Town Councilor Thora House doesn’t want an adult entertainment center on Main Street.
That’s why the planning board tonight will discuss and possibly reword the town’s special amusement permit to specify what businesses are allowed to offer, she and council chairman Steve Clay said Sunday.
“They might specify what is not ‘special amusement,’” Clay said Sunday. “It came up because every year we give special amusement permit renewals to [town businesses] and Thora was concerned that there was nothing in the ordinance that prohibited anything.”
Peter Phinney, the board’s chairman, did not immediately return a telephone message seeking comment Sunday.
At House’s request, the council referred the matter to the board at the council’s meeting earlier this month, Clay said.
Lincoln has no adult entertainment centers, such as businesses that feature exotic dancers or sexual paraphernalia. Nor were Clay and House aware of any such businesses with plans to open in Lincoln. Some town convenience stores sell adult magazines.
Businesses must apply for special amusement permits in order to offer karaoke, live music and jukeboxes, among other things, House said. She has voted against the last two special amusement permits the council approved because she believed the ordinance lacked definition.
House is not necessarily against adult entertainment centers such as strip clubs in town, she said, but would want them at least placed in discreet locations — definitely not on Main Street.
She asked that the board consider rewriting the ordinance to reflect three entertainment levels. Jukeboxes and G-rated entertainment would be first; then more restrictive live and more adult-oriented entertainment, such as comedians who use adult language; and adult, or X-rated, entertainment, she said.
“When somebody comes to me for an entertainment license, I want to know what that means,” House said. As it stands, “There is nothing there; they can do whatever they want.”
The Benicia City Council will take its first crack at the adjusted law, which addresses the likes of strip clubs, adult book stores and other entertainment not for minors.
The fact that the law's update, which sets a number of restrictions on adult businesses, cannot just ban those businesses has riled residents in recent months.
Dozens of residents attended a recent city Planning Commission on the law. They urged the commission to throw out the restrictions and just say no to those businesses. City staff and commissioners explained that federal law prohibits banning the establishment of strip clubs and their like, but allows the city to set certain hoops for the business owners to jump through first.
The law attempts to mitigate "undesirable secondary effects" of adult businesses, according to a city staff report. Some hypothetical effects the city wants to avoid include increased crime, blight, reductions in property values and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
The public hearing, set for Tuesday's city council meeting at 7 p.m., comes more than a year and a half after the city set a moratorium on all new adult entertainment. Out-of-town business owner Robert Amatrone, who put out feelers on the city's adult entertainment laws in May 2007, was the council's impetus for updating its city codes....read more
Preston Lewis In yet another sign that the sex and gambling industries are blurring the lines where one form of adult entertainment stops and the other begins, one of the premiere events of the new year will be the AVN Adult Movie Awards, to be held at the Mandalay Bay Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. This is essentially the Oscars for sex films.
Just as the gambling industry in general, and recently online casinos in specific, have endured legal assaults due to stigmas and mistaken assumptions about the nature of the business, so too has pornography had to suffer social alienation and legal persecution before achieving acceptance.
Yet, the x-rated movie industry may offer hope for the future for gambling aficionados. Even though participants in the porn field were threatened with lengthy prison sentences in the Seventies and the Eighties, porn has become socially cool. Jenna Jameson is an idol to many young girls, and porn goddesses regularly earn mainstream work, once unthinkable when porn work made actors and actresses lepers.
So, even though currently online gambling operators are relentlessly pursued by federal law enforcement, advertising a sports wagering service earns long jail terms, and millions are forfeited to the government, gambling can expect that laws will soften as the immutable truth sinks in, as it did with porn: America likes it.
Meanwhile, Las Vegas continues to snuggle ever closer to sex industry brands. Penthouse is searching for a Strip casino to buy, and Playboy operates a club at the Palms casino and an online casino under its own brand. Strip clubs are working deals with casinos to provide eye candy by supplying girls to lounge at resort pools. And the Girls of Glitter Gulch strip club wants to install slots.
So, the Adult Video News Adult Movie Awards will take place at Mandalay Bay on January 10th, hosted by noted fornicator Belladonna. What could make more sense? With tickets running from $107 to $240, it's a sure sellout. After all, whether the government likes it or not, people love porn and gambling.
December 1 is World AIDS Day. ORMOND BEACH -- From 1991 until a few weeks ago, Ormond Beach had a law that banned all sexually oriented businesses. Before 1991, there were no laws on the books that governed strip clubs, adult bookstores and similar X-rated operations. If someone had tried to open a gentlemen's club in Ormond Beach during all those years and was turned down, he or she could have won a court argument about their First Amendment rights being violated and walked away with a tidy sum of damages. That person also could have located pretty much anywhere he or she wanted inside the city limits, and operated how they wanted, and there would have been no city laws to stop them....read more
Americans aren't waiting until quitting time to get their X-rated kicks on the Internet.
Office workers view more porn sites at their office than at home - and are doing it 23% more than just a year ago, Newsweek reports in its upcoming issue.
"People are looking for an escape," says Steve Hirsch, CEO of Vivid Entertainment Group, an adult online video provider.
Many white-collar workers believe their bosses are too busy to notice their dirty Web surfing, Dawn Adams of the consulting firm HResults tells Newsweek.
"Managers are dealing with so many issues right now that sometimes people are able to hide out and no one knows what they're doing," she says.
Another possible factor may be that porn is no big deal for some Generation Y workers."You're looking at a younger consumer who has grown up with pornography being out there in the pop culture," said M.J. McMahon, publisher of AVN Online magazine, which tracks the adult video industry.
The increased volume of on-the-job smut surfing doesn't just mean lost productivity or an increase in sexual harassment lawsuits.
There's also an increase in computer viruses, adware and spyware that wind up in corporate networks. They can wreak havoc on companies and also expose wayward employees.
Adams said she fired an executive for spending hours a day on adult sites. The skin sites repeatedly crashed his computer.
"That's how we found out," Adams said.
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