[quote]EmilyQ wrote:
So let me be sure I understand you (as we’ve established that I’m a careless reader at best and may possibly even be a filthy skimmer). Where exactly do you draw the line? An adult man watching Barney for sexual gratification is distasteful but unconcerning to you in the legal sense? What about provocatively posed pictures of children alone (not photographed in the act of being molested)?
Where does it cross into “he is hurting somebody” territory?
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If you’ve ever watched a movie’s credits roll until the end, you’ve undoubtedly noticed the notation in some films that “no animals were harmed in the production of this motion picture.”
This assurance undoubtedly provides some comfort for the animal lovers in the audience, whose enjoyment of the film would have tarnished had they felt a party to animal abuse in the name of cinematic entertainment.
Similarly (although I anticipate Push bellowing “you comparin’ children to animals?!?!?!”), if no children are actually abused or sexually exploited in the production of the pictures or films that the pedophile is sexually excited by, and so long as the pedophile confines his fantasies to those images, then no, he is none of my business.
But your question spawns a bigger one: what constitutes an exploitative image? One could argue that practically every movie that Brooke Shields ever appeared in as a minor was exploitative, from Pretty Baby (where she appeared nude in a bathtub at 12), to Blue Lagoon, where she appeared nude on a beach at 15. Surely these films enabled countless pedophiles… or hebephiles, to be precise, because at that point she was no longer a prepubescent child.
Is every image of a pre-adult girl or a boy in a so-called “provocative pose” worthy of censure as an exploitative image? If so, then the modeling industry produces millions of tons of arguably exploitative and probably pedophile-enabling photographs every year.
Unless you want to return to the good old days of the Elizabethan theater (whereby only effeminate men and boys in drag were allowed to portray women on the stage for fear that a woman on the stage would incite public lewdness), and have all child characters in cinema, television, theater, and magazines be portrayed by midgets and dwarves, the fact is that children are going to be “exploited” in the capturing of some images, by some people’s definitions. And that pedophiles will be “enabled” by completely innocuous images that the rest of us might simply consider cute.
As an aside, the exploitation of children in these media need not be captured on film to exist. Many’s the child actor or actress who was molested off-camera. Think it doesn’t happen? Think again. It happens all the time. If you want to shoot somebody in the back of the head, shoot the slimy producers who pressure 11-year olds girls to perform fellatio in exchange for a bit part in a B movie.
So yeah, the oldish guy watching jerking off to Rub-a-dub Dolly commercials and Sesame street earns nothing more than my disgust and pity. The guy who gets turned on by watching 12-year-old Brooke Shields, Natalie Portman and Kirstin Dunst filmed provocatively in Pretty Baby, Leon and Interview with a Vampire has probably got some real problems, particularly if he no longer found these women attractive once they turned 18. But he doesn’t deserve a bullet.
Not when there are so many real monsters out there who do.