I have heard a lot of stuff offhand that i’m inclined to believe are nothing but urban legends.
Such as in Britain it is illegal to show an erect penis on film,or photos?
Or that in Japan it is illegal to show any genitalia?
Anyone got the straight dope?
I’ll start by nitpicking.
You are not asking about international pornography laws. You are asking about different national pornography laws.
AFAIK, there are no international laws or treaties regarding pornography.
I’ve seen one Japanese "art film’, called IIRC “In the Realm of the Senses” and filmed maybe 25 years ago, that had genitalia shots.
I have accidently:D downloaded some Japanese pornography using a P2P service. Indeed the genitalia was blurred. There has been more than one incident therefore eliminating a rare instance.
It is indeed illegal to show genitalia in an “obscene” context. The logic of the sensors, though, completely escapes me. For instance, I recently went to see the Mexican film “Y tu mama tambien,” which features quite a few shots of genitalia. The logic seemed that if the context was sexual, the shot was blurred, shower scenes on the other hand were ok. However, a documentary about Indian holy men, featuring 80-year-old naked men had pixelation all over the place.
This is probably due to a certain relaxation of censorship standards. For a long time, genitalia = obscene = genitalia. Most of the problems come from the fact that the current legal definition of obscenity was formulated in 1951 and is as vague as it is dated.
Nagisa Oshima’s “In the Realm of the Senses,” set off at the time (1976) a furious debate about obscenity and, of course, art. The movie was indeed blurred in its Japanese release, which led Oshima to proclaim that the movie that was being shown wasn’t the one he shot.
The Japanese situation indeed was for a long time that genitalia or even pubic hair could not be shown in a sexual situation or even in a Playboy-type nudie publication. This led to blacking out, pixellation, blurring, and in the case of drawings/paintings/animations, non-lifelike caricatured genitals or just blank groins. (*)
However observation of Japanese films/video over time tends to indicate that this has been either amended or lapsed into unenforceability. Simple plain visibility of pubic hair/genitalia seems now OK, and with actual sex you get things like “thin mosaic” in which there is but the faintest pixelling or a very, very thin black line exactly at the point of penetration but hiding as little as possible. It seems the mosaic remains more something of an “industry standard”, where “respectable” AV producers will adhere to the older style of censorship.
subAnd yes, the latter has a connection with why Japanese porno cartoons became so known for tentacle-penised aliens or demons and characters who had not grown pubes. It’s what they could show.[/sub]
There is an international treaty regulating child pornography. Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography.
This does explain anime like Ghost in the shell,and videogames like Xenogears.
I always thought the blank groin thing was just a way to avoid a R rating,or the Japanese version of it.
I suspect the internet had a great deal to relaxing Japanese laws on genitalia - The government realised in couldn’t control anything. I rememer a time when most of the internet porno from japan was pixellated to hide the naughty bits, but all one had to do was download a separate program to depixellate it (p.s I could never be bothered).
You are right that an erect penis couldn’t in principle be shown in the UK for many years, but recently it has been OK for video release. The only cinema films showing anything have been “art” films such as “the idiots”, as we all know that if it is art is OK.
On TV it is still a no-no, but ingenious TV makers have shown (on `sex educational’ programmes) them using thermograms or siloutte
“In the Realm of the Senses” was re-released in theaters last year. It still had the explicit shots covered, but less so than a regular porno movie would. It also seemed rather half-heartedly done: the lead actor would be standing with a blurry orange circle covering his penis. He (or the camera) would then move, and the circle would slowly slide over to where he was, never quite catching up. It was rather comical, but still detracted from the film.
As for porno films, since the censoring is obviously done after the film is shot, there are pre-editing copies of many videos floating around with no censoring, and a sizeable black (or at least gray) market for them has sprung up.
Drawn depictions of genitalia (both still and animated) seem to be in a fuzzy area: some manga artists lovingly draw everything in full detail, some give their characters vague gray splotches for naughty bits, some cover the offending parts with black rectangles, and some make the genitals invisible, but then draw everything else (hands, mouths, fluids, etc.) as if the genitals were there. It might depend on the editorial policies of the individual magazines, but I’ve seen some cases of wildly different ‘censoring’ styles within the same magazine, so the artist’s personal taste also plays a part, I guess.
If you’re thinking about smuggling uncensored porn into Japan for your friends, beware: the customs agents at the airport will play tapes they find in your suitcase, at the very least giving them a quick fast-forward scan. On two occasions, they’ve taken my videos (they were American TV shows, nothing illegal, although I wonder what they thought of the MST3K Godzilla epsiode?) off to a separate room while I (and everyone behind me) waited for about five minutes. Somehow, I suspect that many of the tapes they confiscate never make it beyond their ‘inspection’ room.
You still can’t get away with it here in the US. A guy’s schlong is the most taboo form of nudity in American cinema. A flaccid one is a guaranteed R and an erect one a guaranteed NC-17 or X.
I know Jack Valenti says there are no specific rules but I know of no R rated film containing a ‘stiffy’.
I’ve wandered into a few hentei sites, and I can attest that the “blank groin” technique is one of the strangest things a Westerner can encounter. It’s like an X-rated Jerry Springer episode: Porn stars with no vaginas