Editorial: You know it when you see it

Photo / Dean Purcell

The Boobs on Bikes parade in Queen St had its highest attendance in 2007. This just happened to be the year in which it was vociferously opposed by a family-values lobby group and the Auckland Mayor of the day, Dick Hubbard, who had called the parade "morally repugnant".

At this year's event, held on Wednesday, the camera-toting crowds were sparse. The obvious inference is that the parade is best treated like the show-off child it so much resembles - by being ignored.

To call the parade - and this weekend's Erotica Lifestyles Expo, which it promotes - morally repugnant rather overstates the case. It also stretches a point to suggest that a bit of boob-flashing or a sexy show that can be seen only by consenting and paying adult customers poses a serious threat to family life.

New Zealanders in general are tolerant, which is not the same as being morally degenerate, and they are suspicious of censorious minorities who want to tell others what to do.

But the billboard that expo organiser Steve Crow unveiled this week is of a different order altogether. By any measure, the image is objectionable in a public context and you don't have to be a purse-lipped prude to think so.

Puerile and dismally witless, it is also quite calculatedly offensive because it seeks not to attract those who are interested but to outrage those who are not. Crow knows that the 50 complaints it has prompted will not even be considered until long after the expo is over and he's banked the proceeds.

American jurist Potter Stewart, finding that Louis Malle's 1958 film The Lovers, about an adulterous affair, was not obscene, famously commented that hard-core pornography was hard to define "but I know it when I see it". To modern eyes, Malle's film is remarkably tame but no reasonable person would regard this billboard as acceptable in 2010.

Whether it is hard-core pornography is a matter for debate but it is beyond distasteful and truly offensive. Crow is terribly pleased with himself because of all the publicity he's received. But the rest of us should make it plain what we think of this sort of cynical marketing.