Labour MP tries to get Lad Mags on the top shelf.

Labour MP Claire Curtis-Thomas has introduced a bill to limit the availability of sexually explicit magazines and newspapers.
The ten minute rule bill had been heavily trailed, sparking debate in newspapers and internet sites about these new "semi-porn" publications.
The House listened to the MP for Crosby in silence - it was a telling contrast to Clare Short's attempts to ban Page 3 girls in the 1980s. On that occasion the Tories booed and ogled Short, belittling her stance as mad feminism.
Curtis-Thomas is no great orator, yet she managed to make a moving, principled speech. I was struck at one point that she was truly shocked by the nature of these publications, and it made me question why I had not questioned my own attitude to them.
She started by telling the House she could not quote from the publications in question, The Daily Sport, FHM, Nuts and Zoo. The Speaker had judged their content too explicit to be said out loud in the company of adults - yet children have access to it in every newsagent in the country.
Curtis-Thomas did not call for censorship - she did want MPs to be aware of what young boys were reading, to question the effect it must have on them. She quoted the thousands of adverts for chatlines, hard core porn and prostitutes in the pages of "newspaper" The Sport, illustrated with hundreds of images of women. She spoke with grim disgust at lad mags that offer breast enhancement for readers' girlfriends as prizes, the glorification of mysogyny that these publications represent.
The attitude of retailer WH Smith was pilloried as profiteering from pornography, unwilling to take responsibility to anyone but their profit margin. Curtis-Thomas proposed a new government office to oversee a new enforcable code. These publications should display warnings and be restricted in terms of display and age of sale. Similar precautions work well in other media, such as the TV watershed, film classification and internet controls for children.
A ridiculous woman called Angela Watkinson rose to oppose the Bill. No, I had never seen or heard of her either. According to Wikipedia she is the MP for Upminster.
Watkinson told the House of her own experience with The Sport - she found one in her postbag one day and had a flick through. In a bizarre comment from a Conservative, she said she saw nothing morally wrong with the content. The women who willingly participated in these pictures had after all been paid.
The bill "took no account of the women portrayed", as if their right to be exploited was somehow under attack from this child-protection measure.
Her almost breathtaking ignorance of the reality of the porn industry led her to refer to some images of models wearing nothing but a "comely expression" -- to giggles from some of her more puerile colleagues. A flash of the Tories of old.
Diverging wildly from the point, then declared that the lack of a magazine aimed at teenage boys was the real problem here. Why, she wondered, had no publisher filled this gap in the market, as they had for girls.
Labour MPs looked puzzled at this foray into magazine marketing - was Watkinson seriously suggesting that teenage boys would then skip over the breast-obsessed Zoo or Nuts for a boys' version of Jackie? Has she ever met a teenage boy??
Having shown ignorance of the nature of pornography, the workings of the mag trade and the sex-fuelled reality of a teenage boy's existence, Watkinson then seemed to remember the nature of the bill.
A clear definition of pornography and an extension of the Obscene Publications Act to include the offending publications would be enough. Watkinson finished by saying she supported the bill as "trying to do the right thing the wrong way."
You never would have guessed she cared.

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