l'Islande et la pornographie

[jujux]

Je commence un sujet qui fait pas mal de debat en ce moment en Islande:
la "pornographie"

Un groupe international de l'industrie du film adulte avait decide de sejour en Islande pour un periode de plusieurs jours. L'evenement, Snow Gathering, devait etre accomode au Radisson SAS du centre ville.

Mais voila, cela n'a pas plus a tout le monde et il y a eu des manifestations:

02/18/2007 | 11:00

Protests against porn conference in Iceland

The Icelandic Counseling and Information Center for Survivors of Sexual Violence (Stígamót) has openly protested against an adult film industry conference scheduled to be held in Iceland next month.

Stígamót sent a letter protesting against the event this week, signed by the organization?s spokesperson Gudrún Jónsdóttir, to the Icelandic government, the parliament, Reykjavík City Council, Reykjavík Chief of Police and the National Commissioner of the Icelandic Police. Ruv.is reports.

In the letter it says: ?Dear persons of authority. In Iceland we have shown that if we do not want representatives of organized crime in our country, we can stop them. [?] At Stígamót we do not believe this conference should be tolerated. We challenge you [?] to prevent it.?

Stígamót became aware of the adult film industry conference, titled ?SnowGathering,? through a press release from PR Adult News, which was issued on January 27. It is cited on Stígamót?s website:

?Freeones.com announced today the date for the second SnowGathering. It will be held in Reykjavík ? Iceland, from the 7th till the 11th of March 2007. SnowGathering is a chance to conduct business, meet new people and discuss business developments [?]."

In the press release, owner of Freeones.com, Maurice, is quoted saying: ?This year we are aiming for approximately 150 attendees. [?] We have chosen Reykjavík because of the possibilities of multiple in- and outdoor activities and its infamous nightlife.?

According to Stígamót, Freeones.com links to pornography websites such as Sleazydream.com, which among other things, contains information on how to access prostitutes in Iceland.

?Pornography is prostitution in pictures and prostitution is the reason human trafficking thrives. [?]. Pornography is prohibited in Iceland,? the letter from Stígamót states.

Le Radisson SAS decida d'annuler les reservations pour le festival au vu des pressions.

02/23/2007 | 11:38

Porn conference in Iceland canceled

Organizers of SnowGathering, an adult film industry conference, decided to cancel the conference yesterday, which was to be held in Iceland next month, after the Radisson SAS Saga Hotel canceled their bookings.

?If we weren?t going to commit a crime in this country, then why should we have been outlawed? This doesn?t make any sense,? Cristina Ponga, a SnowGathering organizer, told mbl.is.

She added that she suspected the owners of the hotel had subdued to pressure and that she did not expect any other hotel to welcome the SnowGathering attendees.

?FreeOnes.com cannot support or understand the decision taken by the hotel since we have done our utmost to comply with all the wishes and demands requested by the hotel after the whole media explosion,? Ponga wrote in a statement on SnowGathering?s website.

?Legal assistance has been sought in this matter since FreeOnes.com believes the cancellation and the consequent financial losses (both material and time-wise) have been carried out without any legitimate or legal grounds,? she added.

Director of the Radisson SAS Saga Hotel Hrönn Greipsdóttir said revoking the decision of receiving the SnowGathering attendees had been necessary due to opposition from the public and authorities, as Fréttabladid reports.

?It is clear that those who work in the tourist industry here are faced with difficulties if they have to evaluate and categorize tourists who come here even if nothing illegal has occurred,? said Erna Hauksdóttir, managing director of the Icelandic Travel Industry Association.

RÚV reported yesterday that guests staying at the Radisson SAS Saga Hotel can purchase access to pornographic material that they can watch in their hotel rooms and raised the question as to why guests are not allowed to talk about pornography.

Greipsdóttir said offering guests the opportunity to watch adult films in their hotel room is a service offered at all hotels in the Radisson SAS hotel chain. But now Saga Hotel is considering whether it can be exempt from that rule, she added.

?We are very satisfied with this result,? Gudrún Jónsdóttir, spokesperson for Stígamót (the Icelandic Counseling and Information Center for Survivors of Sexual Violence) told Morgunbladid.

Katrín Anna Gudmundsdóttir, spokesperson for the Feminist Movement in Iceland, said: ?We feel this is a great victory for the liberation of the sexes and it is very good to see the nation unite in rejecting pornography.?

Maintenant les organisateurs de la conference cherchent des compensations de la part de l'hotel.

03/07/2007 | 11:37

Porn conference organizers want compensation

Advocate of Reykjavík District Court and lawyer at the law firm Opus, Oddgeir Einarsson, has confirmed that the organizers of SnowGathering, which was to be held in Iceland this month, have sought their legal rights.

The estimated 100 attendees of the adult film conference had booked rooms at Radisson SAS Saga Hotel in Reykjavík. The planned conference was criticized by many, including Mayor of Reykjavík Vilhjálmur Th. Vilhjámsson, so Saga Hotel revoked the hotel reservations of the conference attendees.

According to Fréttabladid, a lawsuit against Saga Hotel is being prepared. Einarsson said data is currently being gathered and that a decision about the next step will be made soon.

On penserait que donc c'est une histoire plus ou moins finie... Mais non...
La semaine derniere une femme nommee Guðbjörg Hildur Kolbeinsdóttir a ecrit sur son blog une article des plus virulents sur la presence de "pornographie" sur la photo de couverture du magazine publicitaire du centre commercial Smáralind. Le magazine est publie tous les ans a la meme periode: juste avec les confirmations des adolescent islandais.
La couverture presente donc une jeune fille de 13-14 ans entouree de peluches avec un ballon dans les mains. Elle est ou la pornographie la dedans!!!!



Bref Guðbjörg Hildur Kolbeinsdóttir a ete la risee du pays et a enleve le message de son blog.

Dernier affaire en date: A akureyri, un homme est arrive au poste de police avec un magazine erotique islandais. Il veut que le magasin soit poursuivi pour vendre de la pornographie.... C'est bien joli tout cela mais il a bien fallu qu'il achete la revue pour l'ammener a la police. Il n'avait qu'a pas l'acheter!!!

03/09/2007 | 11:30

Man challenges pornography laws

A resident in Akureyri brought a copy of the Icelandic erotic magazine Bleikt og blátt (?Pink and blue?) to the police station to report a crime. He had been told pornography was illegal in Iceland, but that the term was hard to define.

?The police officer who I gave the magazine to didn?t know what to do,? Ólafur Eiríkur Thórdarson told Fréttabladid. He said he found it strange that magazines he considered pornographic were sold in stores when pornography is illegal.

?They will let me know on Monday whether anything will be done in this matter. I am not against pornography but I think it?s ridiculous to base laws on wishy-washy terms,? Thórdarson said.

[Myriaðe]

Bonjour Jujux ,

Le gars d'Akureyri n'a pas acheté le magazine , il l'a trouvé chez son coiffeur .
Quant au commissaire , il rendra son verdict lundi , le temps de potasser le magazine durant le WE .

Sacrés farceurs les Islandais .

[ipsilon]

Sacrés faux puritains surtout, oui!!!

[jujux]

Je suis du meme avis que Lionel... Ils sont un peu hypocrite en ce moment. Les islandais sont loins d'etre des anges. Icelandair en a meme fait une pub:

Complaint over Icelandair's "sexist" advertising rejected
Airline Industry Information, Dec 2, 2003

AIRLINE INDUSTRY INFORMATION-(C)1997-2003 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

A complaint in Iceland against a series of advertisements for national airline Icelandair has been dismissed by a committee for equal rights issues.

The advertising was claimed to be sexist and degrading to women, and allegedly suggested that Icelandic women are loose or promiscuous.

The controversial ads, which appeared on posters in London, UK, featured slogans such as "One Night Stand in Reykjavik" and "Fancy a Dirty Weekend in Iceland?". One in the London Underground called on travellers to go to Iceland to "pester a beauty queen".

The equal rights committee dismissed the case because it was not in a position to judge advertisements appearing in foreign media, as Icelandic equal rights laws only apply in Iceland.

Et une 'tite video des nuits "puritaines" islandaises: video

[Chris]

Le gars d'Akureyri n'a pas acheté le magazine , il l'a trouvé chez son coiffeur .
Quant au commissaire , il rendra son verdict lundi , le temps de potasser le magazine durant le WE .

Non, non, le gars d'Akureyri, il l'a acheté avec ses kronur, le magazine !
Il s'est sacrifié pour sauver la moralité de l'Islande ! C'est le héros de sa paroisse !

Quant au commissaire, il ne rendra pas le magazine lundi. C'est une pièce à conviction.
(Tiens, à propos de pièce, je me demande si ce ne sont ces pages là qui tapissent maintenant les murs des vestiaires du commissariat ? ).

Chris.

[jujux]

Editorial in Grapevine:

No Love for Porn!
by Marvin Lee Dupree
Published in: Issue 3 on Thursday, March 08, 2007

One of Iceland?s main selling points has always been ?purity?, a trait on which Icelandair has capitalized with the tantalizing phrase, ?Come and take a break from the world?. Maybe I have read too much literature, but when I see Geysir ?erupting? I cannot help but wonder if foreigners consider us a sex-crazed country. Furthermore, every advertisement from Iceland seems to stress how alluring our women are; beautiful, yet easy (in their heads meaning sleazy and good looking). It is not a stretch, considering that some of Icelandair?s more recent ads are pictures of scantily clad ladies, frolicking in the Blue Lagoon inviting, one assumes, the male population of other countries over for some manic and wild nights in Reykjavík.

Put these things together, and it seems as if it were only a matter of time before the porn industry came to sink its teeth into ?pure Iceland?, i.e. at least the enticing escapism of the country. Most people are aware of the group of porn moguls, including the ?almost Icelandic? (Western Icelanders) brothers who, in their quixotic quest to provide the world with porn, denounced their Icelandic ancestry. Harsh words indeed. Now it seems that Iceland has been branded the antithesis of The Netherlands, or rather the culture of Amsterdam. I consider this to be a good thing because most foreign male visitors are not exactly going there for the windmills, Edam cheese, wooden clogs and Dutch cuisine.

I think the same thing can be said of the so-called porn conference. These people were not coming here to witness or partake in any Icelandic culture. They wanted to talk about porn, introduce porn, and maybe, let us not delude ourselves, make contacts here in this country. A porn conference by its nature is not like any other convention, neither is a KKK convention. Not that racism and gender degradation are the same thing, they just seem to stem from the same root: A total lack of empathy for a fellow human being.

Sadly, many Icelanders deemed it appropriate to take part in some mass hysteria of apologies by writing semantically horrendous written comments on the homepage of the conference, with more spelling errors than sense. Are we actually apologising to purveyors of smut? What next? Will we apologise to Holocaust deniers if they are not allowed to hold a conference here? Have we apologised for denying Jews to come here and seek refuge, or apologised for trying to ban African American GIs from coming onshore or leaving the base?

Certain phrases and comments written by these people on the net strike me as amazingly simplistic and childish, including statements that Hotel Radisson?s decision was ?a black day in the history of Iceland,? thus putting it in the same category as dates such as 1918, 1783 and 1262. The history books in the next decades will be an interesting read if we ascribe to their logic. Our grandchildren will read about when we lost our independence, ?Móðuharðindin? or when volcanic ash suffocated livestock and humans, The Spanish Flu and the winter when almost everybody froze to death ? and then the day a hotel decided to uphold a moral stance, at least under pressure. A Black Day indeed.

Most of those commenting also concurred that they were ashamed of our government or that the horrible witches of feminism have brought this curse of Puritanism to our country. Some even went so far as to be ashamed of being Icelandic. To them I say, why not exchange nationalities? We could get some people here from Sudan, and you can leave for Sudan. The hypocrisy of these people is appalling.

When Falun Gong practitioners came here to demonstrate against Li Peng, there were nowhere as many voices of dissent protesting about the rights of the Falun Gong being trounced on. Their right to denounce him as a mass murderer was annulled and made void by our government. Or when the police here in Reykjavík took pictures of Icelandic protesters and actually manhandled some of us to the ground. That is just fine and dandy, but God forbid there be a porn conference cancelled. The horror! It?s as though the Internet itself were being closed by the reactions.

From what I can gather, the individuals of snowgathering.com seem to have taken offence to our allegedly puritan society ? a society that seems to be too pure to handle porn. And somehow in their minds, with twisted logic, we have become sexually repressed whale killers. Imagine the headlines around the world: ?Keiko haters kill off innocent porn conference.? I highly doubt that I speak only for myself when I say that ?I love sex and prefer that to whale meat any day?. Hell, I don?t even consume any flesh. So, how I can support Radisson?s decision despite their obvious hypocrisy? Simple. You can agree with freedom of speech, as an undeniable right, it just does not mean you have to be the one that is helping them out. Porn is a fact of life, you cannot tell people what to do; and Radisson does provide porn at an affordable price in the privacy of the consumer?s room. To decide to cease doing that is purely image control. But they have a right not to host guests they deem inappropriate.

I hate generalizations but it seems like there is a generation of men that have grown up and consider it absurd for women to be opposed to being depicted as money-shot recipients. Imagine growing up with your Barbie doll to aspire to, along with your pretty pink sheets and with a rosy dream of becoming a beauty pageant queen and then when you have the nerve to question these things, being told off for the audacity of being a radical feminist. It sort of reminds one of the sombre tone that was taken in the Civil Rights movement:

?How dare they??

It seems as if a whole bunch of males in our country have forgotten the Icelandic Sagas, and in the process have become snivelling little bureaucrats, chanting in unison chorus of spite against the evil and manipulative feminists, those ?kerlingar? that dare to oppose a decent conference and free speech. Are some men too afraid of having female equals? Because there sure were enough of them in the Sagas, like Auður, back to whom almost everybody can trace their roots.

Unfortunately, this whole discussion has become a farce, reminding one of an absurd theatre with meaningless chatter in the media, for example the chairman of the Left-Green party, Steingrímur Sigfússon, has proposed setting up ?net-police? to surf the Internet, with the emphasis on curbing distribution of porn on the Internet. This kind of careless talk reminds one of a totalitarian state. What next? Are we going to burn the Marquis De Sade?s works, cast the smutty Classics into the sea and say good riddance to literature in general? Goodbye disgustingly rude Catullus.

Is there a difference between visual eroticism and what is considered porn on the net? Defining porn is not as simple as some people seem to think. The line between eroticism, satire, porn, literature and art is pretty thin sometimes, but I am reminded of a great little anecdote: If the Swedish plumber comes over, gets laid and does not fix the sink, well you were probably just watching some porn. All sex, no plot. Although that does not mean I want the government telling me what to watch, eat and do. That is not their role and should never be. It was not only feminists, the Left Green Party, the Mayor (Independence Party) and the Church that opposed this conference, there were many other individuals who thought it had nothing good to bring to our country. Bygones. Let?s get over it. They will host their conference elsewhere and Iceland will still be hip if that is what you people are worried about.

However, enough is enough. Some of us are not huge supporters of porn, that doesn?t mean we can try to get rid of it with censorship and Draconian laws. Knowledge and education are better tools. I think we should give the feminists a little more credit and a lot more respect, but that does not mean we will agree with this newest approach of trying to phase out porn on the net and in shops. I myself prefer a more direct approach in my sex life rather than the passive approach of viewing porn onscreen. Sadly, that does not ring true for all, a fact I was reminded of when reading Silfur Egils on visir.net: ?What about all us men that don?t get love, what are we supposed to do?? How about watching less porn and trying to get out some more?

[Chris]

Difficile en effet de trouver un peu de lisibilité dans toute cette agitation et ces décisions ...

Voilà qu'on apprend que la municipalité de Reykjavík vient de passer un accord avec les organisateurs de la Gay Pride islandaise ("Hinsegin dagar") pour augmenter les subventions à cette manifestation jusqu'à 12 millions d'ISK (135 000 euros) pendant les trois prochaines années.

Chris.

[euphrate]

Difficile en effet de trouver un peu de lisibilité dans toute cette agitation et ces décisions ...

Voilà qu'on apprend que la municipalité de Reykjavík vient de passer un accord avec les organisateurs de la Gay Pride islandaise ("Hinsegin dagar") pour augmenter les subventions à cette manifestation jusqu'à 12 millions d'ISK (135 000 euros) pendant les trois prochaines années.

Chris.

Heuu Chris, j'espère que tu mets pas dans le même panier pornographie et homosexualité...
Pour continuer un peu sur le sujet de départ, je me demandais quelle était la religion principale de l'île...? Protestante, comme tout bon pays nordique qui se respecte ?

[ipsilon]

oui, protestants luthériens, à 96 ou 97% ...

[jujux]

Pour rajouter encore de l'argumentation au sujet... Il y a en ce moment un festival de film avec des films erotiques japonais au Fjalakattarins: http://www.filmfest.is/index.php?id=japan

Et pour ce qu'il est de la Gay pride... le Islandais considerent la Gay Pride comme une sortie en famille. Toute la famille descend au centre-ville pour l'ambiance festive. Je pense que c'est pour cela que la mairie va debourser quelques sous.

[euphrate]

oui, protestants luthériens, à 96 ou 97% ...

Ok, merci ! Et les islandais sont très pratiquants ?

[Chris]

Heuu Chris, j'espère que tu mets pas dans le même panier pornographie et homosexualité...

Non bien sûr, Euphrate, aucun amalgame entre pornographie et homosexualité, bien entendu !

Simplement je trouvais étonnant que la mairie subventionne la Gay pride. Mais puisque Jujux dit que c'est un divertissement familial, tout s'explique.

Chris