The Australian Sex Party enjoyed a rejuvenation of sorts at the recent Higgins by-election, securing 3.3% of the vote, but nothing could beat the PR bonanza flowing head-honcho Fiona Patten’s way in recent days over two apparently pressing porn issues.

Two weeks ago, Patten issued a curious statement through sex industry lobbyists the Eros Association stating that the good regulators at the Australian Classification Board had banned the practice of “squirting” in porn films because it didn’t believe the practice of female ejaculation was real. Under current guidelines, that takes the film out of the acceptable X category and into the realms of a fetish, potentially drawing the ire of Customs and other heavy-handed government operatives like Stephen Conroy.

The mainstream media, riffing off a related controversy about the banning of small breasts, snapped up the story this morning with the prestigious National Times leaping into to cyberspace on the “Weird politics of small boobs and bodily fluids”.

On Wednesday, the Sex Party, building on the momentum, issued this press release over an apparent Australian Classification Board ruling that a-cup models that looked under-age would automatically refused classification.

The code, and various state laws, include a long-time clause that nude models who “appear to be” under 18 are automatically refused classification.

In clarifying comments to Crikey, Patten said she had attended an information session at ACB headquarters last year in which screenshots from several productions were shown as examples of when the censor would step in. At the meeting, “the underdeveloped nature of the model’s breasts was cited as a reason for the image to be refused classification numerous times.”

Of course, it’s no coincidence that the stoush is occurring against the backdrop of activism Stephen Conroy’s naughty blacklist and the current “Internet Blackout” campaign.

The Sex Party argues that the consequence of the laws in cyberspace would be the banning of not only websites that host the material, but those that link to them — ruling out a large proportion of the sin-obsessed industry’s massive online presence.

The local stoush follows a seven-year controversy over the practice of “squirting” in the United Kingdom. Last September, after years of pressure from “feminist” filmmaker and Daily Sport columnist Anna Span, the British Board of Film Classification relented and allowed the practice to appear in Span’s DVD ‘Women Love Porn’. The fact that male ejaculation is normally allowed lead some local bloggers to accuse the censors of double standards.