Bydio

Again, my comment won’t pass the Snapped Shot spam filters, so I post my comments to the Child Pornography Called Art post here. Hell, if I write this much I might as well post it on my blog, too. Carpel tunnel, here I come!

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First off, the Cisco router is dead. Long live the Cisco router! :>

Rooster… well, you know.

Now back to the fun. Cap’n, our points of view are pretty close to polar opposites, but I’ll keep writing just to clarify my view. This kind of controversial talk is my kind of fun.

If I recall correctly, the girl was 8 when the pictures were taken, and as this furor erupts, she’s now 11 years old.

Phrases like “They don’t know no better” and “She has seen the seedier side of life” are ones that I have trouble with because it conflates nudity with shame and perversity. Nudity is probably the most natural we can be, as we are brought into this world bare. Clothing has evolved in style and meaning, but it’s mostly to keep us protected from the elements, not to keep us protected from each other. If clothing is mostly to keep us protected from each other, then we should welcome Shari’a law.

Lack of nudity — meaning keeping certain bits covered — is what causes titillation. When your biology says you want something but it’s hidden away from you in plain sight, this creates frustration. This is something being noticed in the Muslim world where sexual frustration is being channeled into the Jihad. When seeing the object of your desire in plain sight, that object becomes less frustratingly desirable over time to the point of it becoming commonplace. This is what happens with nudists. New nudists are shameful and gawky, but as they get used to seeing nude women and men around them all the time, the shame and frustration is sapped from them. Seeing this phenomena, one can conclude that nudity itself isn’t wrong or perverse, and can in fact be good.

I, personally, would never want to allow full nudity in public, but not because it’s dirty or prurient, but because it’s unsanitary. I wouldn’t be keen on sitting where bare-assed people have been hanging out because they would probably leave behind smegma and e. coli. Can’t have that.

As to Brian’s comment, he did say the image of a naked child was child pornography, and essentially agreed with your interpretation, so if nudity is child pornography, then by that definition one could say breast feeding is child molestation, etc. Now Brian won’t post my Photoshops anymore! See what you made me do, Cap’n?! lol

Standards. We all know media makes money by fascinating and titillating us, otherwise we don’t watch, so media standards are a poor measuring stick. Media is a reactionary force only. The law, too, is a reactionary force. Laws are enacted only after something occurs that creates fear. Unfortunately, the law punishes the victim in many cases, whether it’s drug use or nudity. To put someone in jail and force them to face the dregs of society because they didn’t have something covering their nipples is outrageous and wholly unacceptable in my not-so-humble opinion. These laws are called “protection”, but they don’t punish perpetrators of crimes, they punish those who might be attacked by criminal elements, all on the assumption that to put yourself into a potentially compromising situation is equivalent to assault and rape. Cat meat imam from Australia, no?

Again, as you said, it comes down to standards. Shall we punish nudity, or those who would take advantage of the nude? Should we jail the parents of a naked child, or those who would gleefully subject them to shame and humiliation — and rape in jail — because they painted or photographed something eminently natural? We can prove that the image of a naked person, at any age, is not harmful to anyone, so why should they be punished because such an image might make someone else think it’s okay to assault and rape that naked person? Our standard should be to punish those who would cause physical harm to a nude person, not to harm the nude person in the hope of preventing an assault and/or rape.

So sayeth the Donkeyrock. :>

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