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October 2, 2004
Porn has been a contentious issue in the arts and in popular culture for decades. What now comes through the mass media is child porn not porn per se.
Pornography is one of the financial successes of the Internet - and it has been in large part responsible for its enormous rate of growth over recent years. Porn is increasingly being accepted, both as an industry and within high fashion. It is becoming mainstream.
Child porn is another matter entirely. It is children being exploited by pedophiles? Clearly so. Child pornography is sickening images of adults having sex with young children. Or more accurately, child pornography is the sexual and physical abuse of the body of children under 16. Hence the police shift away from porn to child porn.
If it is indecently assaulting children, then is child pornography also purchasing images of child abuse. Or is it possessing indecent photos? Does 'indecent' piggy back on the pornographic as sexual and physical abuse? I suspect that it does in a lot of commentary.
So what is 'indecent'? Is 'indecent' sexual photos of young girls designed for the pleasure of men or women?
Wynn
Is that pornography? Is it an indecent image?
Is a photo of a child taken by her mother indecent?:
Sally Mann, "Gum", "Shiva at Whistle creek", 1992
Is the Mann image indecent? Is it pornographic?
If I downloaded that image onto a computer, is that an act of making an indecent image? Is my reposting the image on the internet an act of distributing an indecent image?
What makes an image indecent? Is it the sexualness?
There is a lot of downloading of sexual imagery going on. So how does the relationship between free speech and child protection on the net actually work ? What comes through the media reports is a 'watch out as we know what you're up to' message.
There does seem to be a slide from the indecently assaulting children to possessing indecent photos in the various media reports. That slide is what is problematic.
What does not come through these kind of headlines is the very complicated debate about bodies, representation, feminism, political correctness, desire, perversion and pleasure that has being going on for a couple of decades. It is a debate that has arisen with the visualization of female eroticism in its sensual, emotional and disquieting expressions.
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Damage. Harm. But then it's wrong to harm anyone isn't it?
What makes it worse in the case of children is the lost potential. That's what we are, it's what we're doing, moving forward through time. Children are how we do that.
The hypocrisy of protection in a commercial society devoted to the exploitation of anything and everything, including human beings, including children, makes it easier for the damage to get done, even as the "protectors" strut around rewarding themselves for the little bit of protection they offer.
It wasn't until the martyrdom of the early gay-rights activists that it was even possible to discuss child molestation in public. People have forgotten that. The taboo made it possible for the molestors to function virtually invisibly, because it was forbidden to talk about it.
Anne Frank shows up in what are at the least some very odd photographs taken by her father. So what is that?
Is it sexual abuse to surgically alter the genitals of a child born intrasexual, what used to be called hermaphroditic? Yes, it is, it is damage and harm. Intentions are a trivial aspect, and sexual pleasure even more trivial. It is the damage, the harm to the victim that matters, that makes it wrong.
Is it harmful to a child to raise her to believe the earth is only 5,000 years old?
That the end of the world is near?
That God hates communists? Yes. Is that abuse? Yes.
There are people who would rather see a child killed than sexually molested.
Who care less about whether children live or die, than whether they die virgins.
That same hypocrisy, like the hypocrisy of drugs use and abuse, supports and maintains two very damaging things.
1. An international trade in the forbidden, including living boys and girls, and images produced in what amounts to slavery.
2. The justification of the all-seeing surveillance technology that is sterilizing the human spirit and reducing the chaotic fertility of the human imagination to an insect droning of utility and dull-witted "safe" amusements.
Is it wrong to make child pornography? It's wrong to damage another person for your own pleasure or gain, especially to damage children for your own pleasure or gain.
To use another human life as if it were a disposable commodity is the sin.
Sex is no more or less a factor than organ harvesting or the trained-animal acts of artificially cute speech and behavior. Jon-Benet Ramsey was already living a damaged life when she was killed, whatever the sordid circumstances that remain hidden there. Children can be used in non-sexual ways that are just as horrific and just as evil sexual molestation.
Encouraging young boys to kill electronic images of other human beings is just as evil as encouraging them to drool over artificial breasts and lips.
Damage is the crime, harm is the sin, whatever the means are.