Australian Law, A-Cup Pornography & the Big O
Sunday, January 31st, 2010
The world seems to be going a little crazy over the last few decades with the rise of religious fundamentalism and the equally prolific rise in the availability of legal and illegal pornography. The latest additions to Australian pornography laws, bordering on the ridiculous, are a ban on A-Cup breasted women in print and film and a ban on female orgasm (via BoingBoing). These both exceed the X Rating and meet the Refused Rating for Australian censorship.
This is kind of crazy not only because of the bizarre way we’re treating A-Cup women as though they have a physical deformity that will bring predators out of their shells, but also because it assumes the statistics are normally distributed. By that I mean the statistics represent as a bell-curve with equal tails on either side – the conclusion, if that were the case, would be that the problem sits with the majority of men who, exposed to A-Cups, will become predatory pedophiles. That’s an interesting assumption.
Malcolm Gladwell’s article in the New Yorker titled Million-Dollar Murray: why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage (February, 2006) – republished as the full version in What the Dog Saw (pages 177-198) – looks at a very similar false assumption of a normal distribution. When, in fact, homelessness (and dare I say people who become pedophiles due to exposure to A-Cup pornography) are a distribution the shape of a hockey stick. That means its a relatively flat line until you get to the extreme end and you have a big fat bump. Like a hockey stick, not like a symmetrical bell curve.
What that means is that Barnaby Joyce’s A-Cup ban is plainly stupid based on emotion rather than solid science. Its a solution aimed to address the normalised (bell curve) distribution not the hockey stick shaped distribution. As Malcolm Gladwell points out the solution to problems with these distributions are to fix the problem. Locate and address the hockey stick end, not the middle of the fictitious bell curve.
