In a press release issued last year to explain why his Office had banned the Otago University student magazine Critic, which featured a controversial essay on drug rape, Chief Censor William (Bill) Kenneth Hastings described a male pornographer whose profile was also featured in the magazine, as one “who makes a living by filming the extreme degradation and humiliation of women for sexual arousal.” [1]. The man concerned has done well financially making obscene hard-core pornography, just like flamboyant 50-year old New Zealand pornographer Steve Crow – dubbed NZ’s “Porn King” by the media. Crow became infamous in 2002 for seeking unsuccessfully to use the facilities of the Waikato District Hospital to film the birth of his aspiring ‘porn star’ Nikki’s baby, so he could incorporate the birth scene into his sleazy porn film entitled “Ripe” [2].

Crow, who recently failed in his bid for the Auckland mayoralty, continues to promote his most visible enterprise Erotica Adult Lifestyles Exhibitions (“SeXpo”),  promoting it via his “Boobs on Bikes” parades of topless pornstars in various New Zealand cities. He boasts that his business is the largest supplier of “adult” explicit sex publications (DVDs etc.) to the New Zealand commercial market. According to a North & South report, [in 2002] “he, his ex-business partner Fiona Gibb and his company Vixen Direct” faced no less than “135 criminal charges” – pleading guilty to 33 of the lesser charges – relating to the distribution of “objectionable” publications [3]. A Listener report in 2004 notes that he remains perfectly happy to be called a “pornographer” and a “sleazeball” [4]. He is managing director of the so-called “adult entertainment” (porn) empire CVC Group Ltd.

Hastings, like Crow, also has a job dealing with hard-core porn sleaze, earning about $190,000 a year censoring publications featuring the extreme degradation and humiliation of women for sexual arousal, paedophilia, sexual violence, necrophilia, bestiality, sex involving human faeces, and other “objectionable” content. However, one key difference between the two men is that Crow invests his own money into making, watching and selling degrading moral filth, while Hastings gets paid by the tax-payers of New Zealand to watch and re-watch it and study it in excruciating detail.

Hastings, dubbed “Mr Clean” in a recent NZ Herald article [5] and his dream team, predominantly women, operate from a plush office on the 4^th Floor of BP House in Wellington, with spectacular commanding views over the harbour. They write lengthy reports that provide the legal justifications for why this hard-core porn garbage can be viewed by those 18 years of age and older – classifying most of it as serving the purpose of “entertainment” – serving the purpose of adult sexual titillation etc. Hastings would maintain that by writing these lengthy reports detailing the finer nuances of all these explicit and degrading sex acts, etc. they are strictly fulfilling the requirements of the legislation by viewing and classifying the publications. [Read more…]