It is a scene out of every parent’s — and teenager’s — worst nightmare: Two adult-film actors turn up naked at the front door, to tell a stunned mother: “Hiya … your son’s been watching us online.”
The sudden appearance of a smiling, but nude Sue and Derek has become something of a sensation as part on an unusual series of TV ads by the New Zealand government about Internet safety for young people.
In the latest video for the Keep It Real Online series, pornography actors tell a woman played by comedian Justine Smith that her son has been watching their clips “on his laptop, iPad, PlayStation, his phone, your phone, Smart TV projector,” adding that the porn stars do not talk about consent and “just get straight to it.”
“Yeah, and I’d never act like that in real life,” the man, Derek, says, as the woman’s horrified son enters the room holding his laptop.
“We usually perform for adults but your son’s just a kid. He might not know how relationships actually work,” Sue says.
After walking in on the scene, her mortified son drops his bowl, while still keeping hold of his laptop, and his mother tells herself it is time to have a chat.
It follows a report in December last year that revealed young New Zealanders use the Internet as their first and primary tool to learn about sex — and one-third of the most popular pornography clips viewed in the country depicted non-consensual activities.
The series — which also includes videos addressing cyberbullying, grooming by pedophiles and the ease of children’s access to violent content — encourages parents to “stay cool, calm and collected” when starting difficult conversations with their children about online issues, said Motion Sickness, the advertising agency responsibe.
“Parents should feel confident when dealing with these issues … at the end of the day, they’re the best person to keep their child safe,” Motion Sickness spokesperson Hilary Ngan Kee said in a statement. “You don’t need to have all the answers, but supporting your child and giving that ‘adult’ guidance as they navigate the choppy waters of the online world will really make a difference.”
It is not the first time New Zealand’s government has commissioned advertising using humor to send a serious message: Among the most popular are drunk-driving advertisements in which a young man imagines a conversation with a “ghost” friend after a car accident.
The public service announcement spawned the widely quoted meme: “You know I can’t grab your ghost chips.”
Another saw the film director Taika Waititi satirically urging New Zealanders to support a new charitable cause: racism.
“Kiwi humor sort of comes from late-night chats round a table, either in the kitchen, pub or garage,” comedian James Nokise said. “It’s why we can come across to foreigners as either dry, too casual or occasionally harsh ... we’re small enough that we’ve managed to take the kind of intimate family humor and apply it to the whole country.”
New Zealanders “love downplaying something to make it irreverent,” he added.
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
RSS