Sex shops cover up naughty bits

Press, 29 October 1981, Page 9

Sex shops cover up naughty bits

NZPA London Sex-shop owners in the Soho district — London’s equivalent of Sydney’s King’s Cross — ’ were covering up their window displays yesterday as a new anti-porn law came into force.

Black tape and underwear hid the “naughty bits” on advertisements and magazine covers where before there was unadorned flesh.

The Indecent Displays (Controls) Act means that sex shops must keep “indecent” material out of their windows.

The law also clamps down on newsagents, who will have to cover up sex magazines or display them away from their main shop-floor areas.

Soho is the haunt of many men who wind through the district’s narrow streets stopping every few metres to inspect the pornographic material in the windows.

The manager of one club offering “the best films from Sweden, Denmark, and America” said he had stayed Up all night taping over nipples on the pictures in, his front window display.

The doorman at the cinema selling “Continental hardcore" said he thought it was a good idea that some of the most explicit bookshops with indecent displays had been forced to cover up. “We have never had anything like that on the front of this place,” he said. Those convicted by a mag-istrafe-under the act face a maximum fine of £lOOO ($2220). For those convicted by a jury in the Crown courts, the maximum penalty is two years’ imprisonment and an unlimited fine. The vice-chairman of the Soho Society, Bryan Burrough, said there were still many operators who seemed to leave blatant displays open to public gaze. What is decent or indecent, however, is a “grey area” that different magistrates will have to decide. As one newspaper correspondent pointed out, what a refined lady from the outer suburbs spa may view \as “indecent,” a swinging teenager from swinging Chelsea may not.