(SF)

"Primal Painting" by Martin Guderna, which appears on the Sex Party's rejected flyer, was made publicly in 2003 with paint and a live couple.

By Catherine Quayle
Court TV

Anyone receiving a campaign flyer from Canada's Sex Party would have noticed, alongside details of the party's platform, an illustration of two naked torsos intimately entwined, a painting of a couple enjoying mutual oral sex and a rendering of a penis with wings.

Had anyone received it, that is.

The group intended to mass-mail the pamphlet in time for national elections in early 2006 as its way of pushing the envelope on sexual discourse. But the party refused to enclose the mailing in an actual envelope, as required, and the Canadian postal service rejected it.

Citing its policies against "sexually explicit" matter in mass unaddressed mailings, Canada Post flat-out refused to deliver the pamphlets, and the Sex Party sued.

Last week, the two organizations argued their cases in federal court in Vancouver — the Sex Party raising freedom-of-speech concerns and Canada Post citing its responsibility to children who might have access to such mail — and a judge is expected to rule in a couple of weeks.

If successful, the suit could mean that not only will the Sex Party get to mail its "sex-positive" message to the masses, but the role the postal service plays in protecting citizens from mail it deems inappropriate could change.

The suit asks that Canada Post be required to deliver the pamphlet, but also that the court declare the administration's ban on sexually explicit mail illegal and unconstitutional.

"There's just something really wrong with the government controlling expression of a political nature in the midst of an election," Sex Party president John Ince said. "And so our position is that in a free country, there have to be significant limits on that control. Otherwise, you get a system that looks like China or Russia."

Claiming to be the world's first political party devoted to sex issues, the two-year-old organization aims to liberate a repressed Canadian public and government from what it sees as "sex-negative" attitudes about the human body, erotic art and, well, sex. Among its big issues are sex education in schools, legalizing prostitution and public displays of affection.

Ince complains, for example, that bars are permitted to host violent hockey-type fights, but not live-sex performance art.

"What the heck is this about? You can fight, but you can't make love," he said.

The party ran three candidates (Ince was one of them) in provincial elections in 2005 and plans to run as many as seven during the next elections.

"There's absolutely no chance that we'd get elected," he admits. "We just want to participate in the political process."

Similarly, Ince knew there was little chance the pamphlet was going to be delivered without the modesty of an envelope. In negotiations with Canada Post, the group refused all modifications the administration suggested.

But that was entirely the point: The rejection paved the way for the suit, which created an opportunity for a broader public discussion and, ultimately, dissemination of the party's message through the media (including news Web sites such as this one).

For its part, the postal service has no problem with the Sex Party's message or even its artwork. It just asks that, if they are going to campaign using "unaddressed ad mail" — what we might call bulk mail in the U.S. — they cover up the sex bits.

"Canada Post sees it as a privilege to deliver messages to the homes of all Canadians, and we think it's our responsibility to be careful to ensure that a reasonable community standard is respected," said Janet Toddington, an attorney for Canada Post in Vancouver.

That standard is where things get complicated. According to postal regulations, mail that is broadly distributed without an address, such as ads, catalogues, pizza flyers and political announcements, must be suitable for the general public. In determining where to draw the line, the postal service applies standards similar to those used by Canadian broadcasters.

Just as a "you know it when you see it" standard of pornography can vary depending on who is doing the seeing, so can the milder standard for "sexually explicit."

While Toddington and the Canada Post lawyers deemed the image of the nude couple's embrace "graphically sexual in context," for example, Ince and his party considered it erotic art.

The postal service also objected to the pamphlet's quiz, "Test Your Sexual IQ," in which recipients could discover, for example, the average amount of sperm a man ejaculates (one teaspoon to one tablespoon) or which testicle tends to droop most (the left). The party, no doubt, found it educational and fun.

Ince points to the fact that his story was widely covered on Canadian news during the dinner hour as proof that there is nothing particularly titillating about the message or the images.

"It's simply not pornographic in any way. It's tasteful erotic art. It's nothing that any reasonable person is going to be alarmed by," he said.

Pornography, in fact, isn't the issue at all. Both sides agree that porn is not something they want distributed unwrapped through mass mail.

"We've never questioned the tastefulness of the material. We've never suggested to the party that it is obscene or pornographic," Toddington said.

Ince, who owns a sex shop in Vancouver and has spent more than 15 years as a lawyer advocating freedom of sexual expression, is surprisingly down on traditional pornography, which he describes as "sex-negative" material designed primarily to inspire male lust.

"We're not big fans of most porn," he says.

So the disagreement seems to arise from where the decision about what makes for good mail should be made — at the post office or in the home.

"We see that parents should have a choice of when and how children are introduced to sexual material, and we respect that," Toddington said, noting that Canada Post sees itself as a form of media, like television or magazines, but one without the ability to warn recipients in advance of objectionable content or segregate one type of content from another.

Like TV, the post office accepts responsibility for filtering out inappropriate material. Even so, Toddington said, this problem arises very rarely, perhaps once a year.
An event sponsored by the Sex Party featured erotic body painting and nude photography by Horst Siegler.
An event sponsored by the Sex Party featured erotic body painting and nude photography by Horst Siegler.

If the issue sounds a bit quaint to American ears, that's because U.S. courts weighed in long ago, and have decided that it was fundamentally a matter of free speech. In one 1983 case in which the Supreme Court overturned a ban on mailings about contraceptives, the justices wrote, "The level of discourse reaching a mailbox simply cannot be limited to that which would be suitable for a sandbox."

People receiving things they don't want, they suggested, "can avoid further offensiveness simply by averting their eyes or disposing of the mailings in a trash can."

And American mail-getters worried about their kids rifling through an unsolicited bondage catalogue can opt out of certain types of mailings, including those considered "erotically arousing or sexually provocative."

As in Canada, we have obscenity laws protecting unsuspecting mail recipients from the truly "obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile," but as for the merely sexually explicit, the U.S. Postal Service is pretty easygoing.

"It would simply be a matter of, would public distribution of the photo be considered illegal?" said postal inspector Douglas Bem, who is also the national public information officer for the law enforcement branch of the USPS. Because the notion of "objectionability" could vary widely from one end of the country to another, the standard is a legal one, not a question of taste, he noted.

Nonetheless, the USPS confers with the Department of Justice in cases where bulk mail items appear to reach the level of the seriously "filthy."

"But that hasn't happened in anyone's recent memory," Bem said.

__________________
Put me on wheels and I'll turn tricks.

Clever? Nah, I ran out of that years ago. But if you find this, let me know, k?
"The road goes ever on..." ~ Tolkien

In memory of my friend skip...
Go then, there are other worlds than these

My ADD kicked in, and I lost everything inbetween.

__________________
Though I am different from you,
We were born involved in one another.

For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul.

Complete surrender should not just come at moments in which one faces overwhelming odds, but in the calm when it seems one is personally in complete control of one's life.