Would They Prohibit a Tape Featuring Mounted Police?

Nick Gillespie | July 27, 2005

From the invaluable The Smoking Gun comes news of official Canadian prudery at its best:

There is no governmental report more highly anticipated (at least by TSG) than the quarterly list of "Admissible and Prohibited Titles" prepared by Canada's Border Services Agency....Agents with the country's Prohibited Importations Unit scour DVDs, videotapes, books, comics, and other material to determine whether the titles are suitable for admission into Canada. The nation's Customs Act...bars obscene material, "hate propaganda," and, of course, child pornography....More than half of the prospective imports were stopped at the border, including "Teenage Transsexual Nurses 4," "What a Pisser," "Bi Bi Daddy," and many works produced by one Tom "Ropes" McGurk. Included among the admissible titles were "Have Some Cannelloni, Tony!" and "Frank and Beans" from the Angry Young Man series, and "Bondage Ahoy!"

Whole thing here.

Comments

Nicholas|7.27.05 @ 11:07AM|#

The quarterly reports have been a standard item for humour for years. In the late 1980's, a friend of mine who published a gaming 'zine (incorporating a section named by one of his readers as 12 Pages of Homosexual Crap) regularly got copies for both amusement value and to pass along to activists.

I had to laugh at the entries even then (Elton John albums had been evaluated in the same shipment as gay porn, bondage magazines, and just about every other variant I'd ever heard of). Some of the "found humour" was not just that the government was inspect all sorts of stuff, but that - because the official theory was that anyone exposed to such things would inevitably become deranged - some of the most deranged individuals in Canada must be the employees who had to screen all this stuff.

|7.27.05 @ 11:27AM|#

"Frank and Beans" :)

Franklin Harris|7.27.05 @ 11:41AM|#

I see there is at least one comic book published by Eros Comix on the list. Eros is an imprint of Fantagraphics, which has published many of Peter Bagge's comics.

tomWright|7.27.05 @ 11:54AM|#

Regarding the title:
Wouldn't it depend on who was mounting what, in what numbers, in what positions, and the species involved?

|7.27.05 @ 12:00PM|#

At least it wasn't Back Door Sluts 9..

|7.27.05 @ 12:17PM|#

I hear that's the hottest porno ever made.

If the Canadians can block imports of our media, can we do likewise?

I think we should start with Celine Dion.

|7.27.05 @ 12:33PM|#

Every now and then I think, maybe it's better in Canada. Then something like this reminds me that it's not.

|7.27.05 @ 12:57PM|#

I wonder what Canada does about Canadian-produced 'obscenity'? Prosecute the producers, or subsidize them to promote Canadian?

gtm|7.27.05 @ 1:20PM|#

What percentage of Canadian produced porn is required to be French language original productions?

"Grand Noir Decques, V. 18"

"Le Histoire de Sluts Blanc de detritus"

"partie transsexuelle de fess�e"

"Mon Dieu! Le castor m'a mordu! V. 29"

gtm|7.27.05 @ 1:25PM|#

What percentage of Canadian produced porn is required to be French language original productions?

"Grand Noir Decques, V. 18"

"Le Histoire de Sluts Blanc de detritus"

"partie transsexuelle de fess�e"

"Mon Dieu! Le castor m'a mordu! V. 29"

|7.27.05 @ 2:03PM|#

I noticed "Dogma" as prohibited in the list of DVDs, between the not-so-euphemistically titled "Dog Wedding" and "Double Impact" (sadly not the Van Damme movie). Then I look on the IMDB page for Dogma and see that it's not banned in Canada (13+ in Quebec and 18A elsewhere eh), so presumably this refers to some other movie called Dogma, but how are the Canadian border agents to know which one is banned, eh?

|7.27.05 @ 3:36PM|#

Would the let in 'Buttman & Rocco Go To Montreal'?

|7.27.05 @ 11:41PM|#

The really sad thing is that the same government that prohibits these DVD's, turns around and subsidises locally produced soft core porn through tax credits and grants. We even ended up paying, through the National Film Board, for a documentary on lesbian porn made by Annie Sprinkle.

Seriously though, Canada Customs make the FCC look like libertines. They spent years fighting a small gay and lesbian bookstore to prevent them from importing homosexual erotica.

|7.28.05 @ 10:25AM|#

Well, I live in Soviet Canuckistan, and let me tell you, it's worse than you think.

Some of the "found humour" was not just that the government was inspect all sorts of stuff, but that � because the official theory was that anyone exposed to such things would inevitably become deranged � some of the most deranged individuals in Canada must be the employees who had to screen all this stuff.

Been there, done that. There was a Canadian government study done in the 1980's that addressed exactly this. Their finding was not that since customs agents viewed all this stuff without going batshit, that the thesis was bunk; no, the finding was that customs agents were "exceptional people".

gtm, the internal situation is even worse than that. The Ontario Film Review Board "approves" porn for sale and distribution (really, stickers and everything). No vendor can sell stuff in Ontario without the magic sticker. But you can quite legally drive to Quebec, buy locally produced porn that's just as "bad" as the stuff Customs bans, and bring it back with you to Ontario.

So far as I know, there's no obscenity outside of bestiality, child pornography, and non-consensual acts[1] that's banned within Canada. It's just illegal to bring it in from outside.

Like so much of Canada's idiot laws, it's about protecting us from the evil Americans.

The real humour in all this is that the OFRB must under law be made up of private citizen volunteers. Which means it's almost entirely made up of retirees with little else to do. Grandma Moses gets to decide what porn you can watch, basically.

(In all fairness to these people, I've seen documentaries about the OFRB and the majority of the members seem pretty laid-back about the whole thing, certainly more fair-minded and prone to erring on the side of acceptance than I would expect. But the sight of little old grannies seriously debating just how many men shouldbe allowed to ejaculate on a woman's face before it becomes 'degrading' had me in paroxyms of laughter for days.)

[1] Depending on the wording of the day, sometimes the standard is "degrading to women", in which case Leviathan expands for a while, then some judge has an attack of common sense and it shrinks a bit.