Boobs on Bike parade in Auckland

Friday August 29, 2008 The Star

Boobs parade brings city to a halt
TALE OF TWO CITIES - AUCKLANDBy CHARLES CHAN
EVER since Swiss billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli’s Alinghi team wrested Ame-rica’s Cup from Team New Zealand in 2003, Auckland has lost much of its lustre as a venue for major events.
In addition to the loss of hosting rights for the prestigious race, the city’s other role as a port of supply and logistics for the around-the-world Whitbread Race is also history.
And bowing to pressure from anti-noise pollution groups, Auckland also surrendered the staging of the V-8 Supercar race to Hamilton, once described by Rolling Stone Keith Richards as “the most boring city in New Zealand.”
Apart from being the largest city in NZ and the venue for the 2011 World Cup Rugby, there aren’t any officially-sanctioned annual event of note going on in Auckland that can draw visitors, like what the Formula 1 Race in Sepang is doing for Kuala Lumpur.
So, there surely must be plenty of red faces in the city hall when the best that Auckland could come up with this year was the annual Boobs on Bike parade in Queen St organised by porn king Steve Crow, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2007.
Big turnout: Part of the crowd at the parade.
The controversial Aug 20 event, in its sixth year in Auckland, featured 30 bare-breasted women parading down Queen St in open-top cars and motorbikes as part of the build-up to Crow’s R-18 Erotica Lifestyles Expo.
Among them was Lisa Lewis, a $7,000 a night escort who also moonlights as a naked news reader on Alt TV which sort of makes her a fellow journalist!
Lewis shot to notoriety when she streaked in a bikini during the 2006 All Blacks-Ireland rugby test match. She later showed her business acumen by auctioning her bikini for over $4,000.
According to media estimates, more than 100,000 people lined the sidewalks of Queen St to ogle the topless women parading down the street in open-top cars and or riding pillion on motorcycles driven by grizzled, tattooed and leather-jacketed bikers.
Crow, who led the parade in a Bentley convertible, had instructed the topless women beforehand to keep the jiggling to a minimum and to not do anything that would be deemed offensive.
One of the more unusual sights was an army tank on Auckland’s main street carrying two bare-breasted women.
The Auckland City Council had tried to stop it with a court injunction but a woman judge said she did not find the parade offensive and ruled in favour of Crow who argued that he was exercising his right to free expression as enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
The parade was a marketing coup for Crow as response to the Erotica Expo had been rather limp and ticket sales needed to be stiffened up.
The Erotica Expo is an annual event which provided visitors an explicit insight to what goes on in the sex industry. Sideshows included visitors paying to wrestle with a near-naked woman on a floor filled with jelly.
Privately, many concerned parents agree that the parade was an exhibition in bad taste but most Aucklanders just shrug it off as a harmless distraction from the daily grind of earning a living, especially during the current economic recession in NZ.
Indeed, the behaviour of spectators left no doubt bad taste was the flavour of the moment when protesters in a counter parade, aimed at highlighting awareness of links between pornography and sexual violence, were booed and pelted with paper cups.
The protest organised by Auckland Women’s Centre and Stop Demand Foundation began about half an hour before the Boobs on Bikes parade and had about 40 protesters.
“It makes objects out of women — it degrades them and we are sick of people like Steve Crow trampling over the values of our country,” said one protester.
Curiously, Stop Demand founder Denise Ritchie credited Crow for “providing us with a wonderful platform” to get their anti-sexual violence message out.
For Crow, the message from the crowd must surely be: stay out of mayoral politics, stick to porn.

August 23, 2008 (YeinJee Asian's News)
A topless parade was held on Wednesday (Aug 20) in Auckland, New Zealand, despite various protests. The Boobs on Bike parade on Queens Street featured some semi-nude porn stars and was part of the Erotica Expo organised by Steve Crow.
The Auckland City Council had sought a court injunction to stop the parade but the judge has ruled in the the parade’s favour. I’ll leave the moral issue for your own interpretation; but some of the folks were obviously enjoying the show…

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