Australian Author Arrested for Writing a Book

Australia has weird fucking laws. So does Canada for that matter, but this time we’re going to take a look at Australia. Today, March 24th, 2025, People ran an article about Lauren Tesolin-Mastrosa, a Sydney author writing under the pseudonym Tori Woods. As Tori, Lauren wrote a book that most Archive of Our Own readers would look at as a nothing-burger, but as we all know: Australia is straight up Bizarroland when it comes to obscenity. Granted: Lauren’s book is definitely not everyone’s cuppa and it certainly wouldn’t be mine, but arresting someone for writing something kinda disgusting is pretty crazy, right?

The book, entitled Daddy’s Little Toy was an erotic novel under the kink umbrella for “Daddy Dom/Little Girl” [DD/lg] which is essentially one way of saying “I call this man Daddy in bed and he calls me his Little Girl and I pretend I’m far younger than I am because [insert whatever fucking reason you gotta come up with for it to sound like it isn’t just about power play fantasy and that’s perfectly okay].” DD/lg is often considered a “Third Rail” kink. Along with Nazisploitation (of which we have plenty of experience here), teratophilia, furry content (by the way, a prominent artist was recently banned from BlueSky for werewolf porn, and I will talk about that later but what the fuck???), etc, DD/lg is sometimes banned in certain kink spaces especially online and gets an extremely bad rep due to some “Daddies’” bad behavior both online and in meatspace. Much of the time, it’s difficult for women who are interested in this fetish to find an outlet for it merely due to…well -gestures at men- Sorry, guys, but it’s tough to beat those allegations when you’re getting out-classed by a bear in the court of feminine opinion.

So if a woman is really into this, what’s her recourse? It’s obviously not going to hurt anyone for her to indulge in a little fantasy, is it? She’s a grown ass woman, if she wants to have dirty thoughts, she should probably be allowed to do that in peace. Not in Australia. In fact, Australia has some of the most overly-broad and unduly vague obscenity laws we’ve ever seen in a supposedly “developed” part of the world, their classification system for what “promotes” pedophilia in pornography going so far as to lend itself toward arbitrarily banning small-breasted women from making porn videos despite their age being well over the legal limit. Talk about minor-coded, you can’t even own a sex tape of yourself if your boobs are A Cups? A man in Australia was once charged with possession of child pornography for Simpsons porn featuring Bart Simpson, as the government classifies even fictional characters who appear to be children to be protected under the law. When Lauren wrote a scene in her DD/lg book in which the Main Male Character (MMC) has dirty thoughts about bald minge (comparing a shaven pussy with a child’s genitals and allegedly desiring the FMC since age 3), the Australia government was obviously going to have something to say about that.

In fact, they’ve got more than just something to say, they’ve got charges to file. In the point of view of an American, burning books and charging people for thought crimes for writing something gross is far and away one of most unthinkable things that crosses into my sphere. As someone whose pornography often prominently displays a swastika as part of kink, the concept of words on a page being the sole basis for the arrest of a human being is far beyond the scope of what I consider acceptable governmental power. Lauren, having written something relatively tame in terms of kink material for many in certain spaces, faces the most dubious of crimes: writing words her government thinks is gross. No children were harmed in the creation of the story, in fact the creation of the story was likely “committed” by herself maybe with a glass of wine at night, a little dalliance into a cherished fantasy she probably doesn’t get to indulge in at home. Victimless. So how in the ever-loving fuck can something you do alone in your study without pictures, without input, without anything but your own thoughts and a keyboard be considered child sexual exploitation material? The A.I. argument doesn’t fit here. A.I. has trained on images of CSEM—it can’t help that it has because it trawls the internet and guess what’s all over the clear web if you know where to look? A.I. involves real kids. But your imagination? Alone? Words by themselves?

Is Nazisploitation a hate crime? If I type the words “I got my pussy pounded by that delectable and dangerous Aryan Oberführer, his sanguine brassard hugging his bicep with the deep black slashing lines of the tilted swastika,” will there be someone at the Sydney airport waiting to pick me up when I land for hate speech? (Weirdly the answer to that is likely “No” just based on the hate speech laws in Australia which shows you just how fucking weird it is that their obscenity laws are Like That but their hate speech laws…aren’t.) They probably would ban it under their basic run-of-the-mill obscenity laws but it would never have landed me in for a crime that wasn’t actually committed and was only written about as part of a morally dubious fantasy. So why pick up Lauren on CSEM charges when there was no actual real life crime committed?

Sure, check her hard drive. I’m a huge proponent of that. If you find something actually sus, get back to us, and god knows you might considering her background as a marketing exec for Christian Org Baptist Care, a nonprofit which focuses on helping to provide for the homeless, elderly, and other marginalized communities within Australia. It’s not exactly shocking when it’s discovered that a lot of these religious folks are absolute nutballs, but if there’s nothing actually damning on her hard drive (or in a shoebox under the bed), then by god can we please just let her have her gross little fantasies? You’d think she personally came out and put her finger in your puppy’s butthole the way some TikTokkers and Redditors have been caterwauling about her.

Since folks seem to really be clutching their pearls over a fake man lusting over a fake kid in a fake story, let me remind you all that there are several states in the U.S. in which you can still marry a child. There are horrible things happening to real children all over the world right now. Exploitation comes in hundreds of forms, including forms that you haven’t even considered—the ability for parents to take monetary advantage of their children through vlogging, for instance, which can lead to some insane consequences (see: Eight Passengers), or trashy television shows such as Dance Moms which centered upon sometimes extreme emotional abuse of the children featured. We don’t need to go searching through some woman’s fictional stories to find children to protect, if we open our eyes and prioritize reality, there are plenty of kids to help.