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'A pirate-themed adult movie featuring a sword fight cannot be legally screened.'

SHOULD Fifty Shades of Grey be banned? Australians clearly don't think so. On any typical train carriage, you'll find at least one reader unabashedly engrossed in Ana Steele's romps with Mr Grey and his Red Room of Pain. Yet a film with the same content - that is, a movie combining real sex with bondage - must, by law, be refused classification. How does that make sense?

The disparity seems even more peculiar given the censors' historical obsession with banning novels. Lawrence, Nabokov, Miller, Roth, Orwell: you could run a credible literature course out of books Australians were once banned from buying. In theory, novels can still go to the Classification Board. In practice, they almost never do, probably because the famous literary anti-censorship cases made rating books seem deeply unpalatable.

It's merely one example of the prevailing weird classificatory hotchpotch. In some respects, federal censorship law reflects a New Left libertarianism: the code's proclamation that ''adults should be able to read, hear and see what they want'' comes, almost word for word, from Don Dunstan's Labor policy from 1969. But the classifiers are constrained by specific legislative prohibitions, such as the ban on bondage and other fetishes. Most significantly, films containing actual sex cannot feature violence - which seems reasonable, until you realise the stipulation forbids any violence at all, even if entirely unrelated to sexual activity. In other words, a pirate-themed adult movie featuring a sword fight cannot be legally screened.

Yet the extraordinary disparity between state and federal jurisdictions means few Australians even know the rules. The national code contains an X rating: essentially, for films showing unsimulated sex. But in the states, the sale of X films remains illegal. Insofar as they retail X (which most do), the adult shops in Melbourne and Sydney are breaking the law.

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That's a consequence of activism by social conservatives during the 1980s when the code was being debated. But though the premiers refused to ratify the X category, they're also reluctant, most of the time, to enforce the rules. Given the extraordinary quantity of porn consumed in Australia, a crackdown on adult shops would spur a backlash that no politician wants. Perversely, the very strictness of the laws contributes to a curious laxity: most adult retailers now operate outside the official code.

Or, at least, most of the time they do. Arrests happen, but it's hard to understand their logic. Last year, I spoke to Darrell Cohen, who went to prison for selling, in a Sydney shop, DVDs that could be bought openly throughout the country. Because it's so rare to be jailed for retailing adult content, he suffered enormously in custody, since the other inmates concluded he must be a paedophile and treated him accordingly.

The only places where you can legally sell X-rated DVDs are the ACT and Northern Territory. Or, rather, the Northern Territory so long as you are not indigenous. Few people realise that the Howard government's Northern Territory intervention introduced a draconian censorship regime into indigenous communities, even though the Little Children are Sacred report recommended nothing of the sort.

The irony is glaring. In Canberra, where the politicians live, the adult industry flourishes. But in remote towns in the NT, where there's nothing comparable to Canberra's porn barns, signs warn visitors against the pornography legally available everywhere else in the territory.

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Fifty shades of ambiguity make porn laws a perverse joke