It’s Sexpo time in Melbourne (November 18-21) and again the state-owned Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre will house this exhibition of the Australian sex industry, which is estimated to be worth $1.2 billion in Australia each year.

The organisers are as ever keen to persuade us that Sexpo is really an exhibition about ‘health, adult entertainment, sexuality, and adult lifestyles’; rather than being ‘only about sex’, ‘the aim of the exhibition is to allow adults to access frank and accurate information on all such matters’. In the past, visitors to Sexpo had access to such ‘frank and accurate information’ as live lap dances and strips by prostituted women, a giant ejaculating penis (the Sexpo mascot, Penisaurus) and videos churning out mainstream pornography.

All of this is given an aura of respectability by the parallel Sexual Health and Relationship Education (SHARE) exhibition run by ‘leading health and relationships commentator Dr Feelgood’. Dr Feelgood talks about Sexpo as ‘a great place to get away from the destructive Hollywood myths about sex, and make your own choices’.

Meanwhile, next door, Sexpo proper carries on oblivious, peddling just such destructive myths; the ‘stars’ of Sexpo are mutilated porn actresses with breast implants and silicone lips and prostituted women with shaved vaginas. Of course, we may ‘choose’ to accept these women as standard-bearers for female sexuality, and the Sexpo exhibitors are on hand to empower us in this choice.

There is a plethora of exhibitors devoted to helping ‘normal’ women achieve the look of porn stars, including ‘pussy waxers’, ‘glamour’ photographers and lingerie merchants. Dr Feelgood’s exhortation to ‘be comfortable about who you are, and start enjoying your own love life… rather than trying to live someone elses’ rings a little hollow. Women are told to ‘stop comparing themselves to movie stereotypes’ by Dr Feelgood and to have their ‘pussies’ waxed and get into some crotchless undies by Sexpo. Far from helping women discard Hollywood myths about sex and our bodies, Sexpo aims to normalise the sexual relations and bodies we see in pornography – and to emulate them.

This is the reason the event organisers go to such lengths to encourage women visitors to Sexpo. Opening day (Thursday) is ‘Ladies Day’, with ‘on-stage performances designed to entertain the Ladies, as though a few buffed men in g-strings could redress the balance in a billion dollar industry devoted almost entirely to commodifying women’s bodies for men. Dr Feelgood provides the faux- feminist analysis to make the ‘ladies’ comfortable at Sexpo. She says: ‘women are definitely more open in discussing their wants and needs’. How can a forum which promotes pornography and the prostitution of women form the basis for a discussion of our ‘wants and needs’?

Under the laughable heading ‘Women in Control’, a Sexpo media release claims: ‘More than 40-percent of the visitors to Sexpo are women and they have no hang-ups about buying products for themselves. In many instances women instigate discussions with their partners and are comfortable discussing what turns them on’. Proof of women’s sexual liberation is apparently feeling comfortable about buying a vibrator. The discussions about what turns us on are taking place with a global sex trade in women’s bodies as a backdrop. And what about the women on the TV screens being fucked by several men at a time and penetrated all over again by the gazes of Sexpo-goers? What control do they have?
Sexpo is little more than a forum for the sex industry where women as commodities are marketed. It’s difficult to see it any other way; the event’s main sponsor is Club X and the event is opened by the Eros Foundation, the sex industry lobby group. They will hold a forum on the need to relax censorship laws to enhance the freedom of ‘speech’ of pornographers (read: market expansion). Then there’ll be a photo opportunity with Sexpo ‘performers’, designed to get television media to attend. And the message sold to those media will be a simple one; the Sexpo slogan this year is ‘Lighten up – Sex is fun’.
Some of the fun being sold at Sexpo this year (‘fun sex’ comes at a price) comes to us courtesy of Hustler magazine, which has published images and text which trivialise rape and incest, (women and girls actually love it according to Hustler cartoonists). It has published the image of a black woman’s buttocks and invited readers to compare them with the hindquarters of a horse. And a picture of a male construction worker pushing a jackhammer into a woman’s vagina, and sported an image of a woman being processed in a giant meat grinder on its front cover.

Sexpo’s throwaway slogan is based on a presumption that anything with a veneer of sexuality about it is politically untouchable. If pornography is about sex and sex is fun, then to oppose the misogyny and racism peddled by pornographers is to be anti-sex and anti-fun! Feminists should just lighten up.

Feminists who don’t believe women’s ‘fun’ and sexual empowerment are compatible with the real aims of Sexpo – the marketing of pornography and prostitution – are protesting against Sexpo on Sunday November 18 between 1 and 3pm at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre near Southbank. They are rightly suspicious when a growing sex industry, (there are 60, 000 visits to legal brothels in Victoria every week) , invokes libertarian feminist rhetoric to dispel concerns about the normalisation of commercial sexual exploitation.