Saturday, August 9, 2008

Barely Legal Blogwars

It looks like there's kind of a small blogwar brewing in the sex-poz blogosphere around the issue of "barely legal" porn. This started when Viviane of Viviane's Sex Carnival posted one of the Sugasm feeds from Sugarbank, which was headed by a featured photo of "Mima and Luna", two very young-looking models from the glamour-porn site Errotica Archives. (I wanted to see if Sam Sugar had anything to say about this, but Sugarbank seems to have completely gone down all of a sudden – hopefully its not permanent.)

This was very upsetting to sex-poz blogger Tom Paine (who apparently has other differences with Viviane) of Polymorophously Perverse who's "protective father instinct" kicked in and called Viviane on the carpet for posting "pseudo-kiddie porn", which led to all manner of disagreement from the commentariat there, though Caroline, of Polymorophously Perverse and Un-Cool, offered Tom some support and expressed her discomfort with the image in a couple characteristically thoughtful and reflective posts on the topic.

The interesting thing, though, is that hardly anybody thinks the 2257 disclaimer on the site is inaccurate, and people who have problems with the pictures are upset over the models adolescent appearance, which apparently some people feel is dangerous because it undermines the idea that teenagers can't give meaningful consent or "sexualizes" teenage girls. In other words, you have some sex-pozzes sounding uncharacteristically radfemmish advancing a sort of "social harm" argument, about porn expressing a dangerous idea which might influence viewers in the wrong way; the kind of argument that, in a different context, most of these people would probably argue against.

My own stance on this (which I'm sure I'll be torn a new one for) is that just because somebody who's a legal adult looks a few years shy of an arbitrary age limit doesn't suddenly make the images anything remotely close to kiddie porn. Second, I don't have a whole hell of a lot of sympathy with the idea that porn like this represents such a dangerous idea that it ought not be produced. That's not to say actual under-18 teenagers should be doing porn, of course, but I'm not against porn that expresses the idea of sexy teenagers, either by use of young looking models, or through drawings or animation (such as hentai manga or anime). I can see where images like this might piss people off, especially given the current moral panic over the "sexualization" of teenagers, particularly teenage girls, but I don't think its an idea so heinous that it should be driven out of the marketplace of ideas (though to be fair, I don't think anybody has so far argued that the state should step in an censor such images).

And when people get so upset about a particular model, my first instinct is to try and find out who the models in question actually are. Its the dark-haired model, Mima, in the photoset that people seem to be most upset about. She's somebody I thought I'd recognized, and sure enough, its none other than the (usually-blonde) Miriama K, an already young-looking model who's ungodly-large doe eyes make her look way younger than her actual age. According to her Myspace page (which I'm assuming is genuine), among other sources, Miriama is a 21 year-old professional model from Bratislava, Slovakia. She's been active since late 2006, which would have made her about 19 when she started modeling. She's actually been all over Central European web porn circuit over the last couple years, doing both softcore and hardcore, and from some of the photos on her Myspace page, it looks like she models for non-porn stock photography as well. Could she pass for 14-17? Definitely. Is she anywhere close to that age? No.

I could find less about the other model, Luna, who typically goes by Judita A or Lea T, but I've seen photos like the one in question where she looks young, and others where she looks well into her 20s. (Amazing, what differences in appearance a few differences in lighting and camera angles will bring about.) I'm guessing, if anything, she's around the same age as Miriama or a few years older.

And as an aside, I see a lot of stuff come up in the feminist and sex-poz blogosphere about young-looking girls, but nobody seems to notice there's an entirely parallel genre in gay porn. Do a Google image search for "twinks" and you'll see what I mean. It could have to do with the fact that gay porn is hugely off of a lot of people's radar, to the point where most discussion of porn, even among sex-positives, seems to mention it only as an afterthought. But I also think that young-looking guys being sexual just don't get people quite so upset as sexy images of young-looking girls, and to my mind, that speaks to the fact that a lot of this concern might be coming from an all-too-traditional "lock up your daughters" mentality.

Addendum: Anastasia from "Sex, Life, and Frilly Bits" weighed in with a thoughtful post on "Youthful Erotica & The End of the Civilisation?". Nothing to add except, "what she said".

Further addendum: It appears that Caroline, a blogger who I have a great deal of respect for, is now feeling singled-out, maligned, and mischaracterized by some of the statements I've made above, and is really quite upset about the whole thing. Her arguments about her discomfort with the images acknowledge that a lot of this is gut-level revulsion on her part, and she does acknowledge a certain degree of contradictory feelings on the subject, given her other writing on "extreme porn". For my part, I didn't do the most perfect job of summarizing the argument taking place. (Actually, I challenge anybody to try summing up the nuances of an argument between multiple parties in one or two paragraphs and do a good job of it.) If you're interested in this issue and want to know who's arguing what, I strongly recommend following the links I've given to Caroline, Tom, and Anastasia's posts (and their respective comments) for a clearer picture of what arguments are being made and by whom.

41 comments:

  1. I am glad that you commented on this. In particular, I appreciate you bringing to light the fact that gay porn with the same aims exist. Most anti-porn folks (and I think that *some* of the people posting in that thread are anti-porn or are at least using anti-porn arguments) completely ignore male barely legal content. Why? Because it messes up some of those very neat and tidy arguments about the patriarchy.

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  2. I hate to be so predictable, but I find no merit in this debate at all. The performers are of legal age and whatever is "implied" or "suggested" does not change the reality of the situation. If there were under-age models used, the images are evidence of a crime, if not, they are a photographer's vision.

    Anyone is free to criticize that vision on any grounds, political, artistic or otherwise, just as the photographer is free to produce them within the law.

    I for one think people - and that is a gender-neutral term - should have the freedom to fantasize about whatever they want. I'm opposed to group-think, mind-control and attempts to impose a political or moral template on the human imagination.

    I trust people to know the difference between fantasy and reality, thought and action, and behave responsibly whatever perverse notions may dance through their heads.

    There are no wrong thoughts, only wrong actions. When those who claim to be sex positive - a term I dislike because it describes nothing specific and invites ridicule - say that this kind of sexual fantasy or the depiction thereof is okay but this kind is not, I hear a version of the old standard "What I Like is Cool But What You Like Is Perverted."

    Frankly, I think porn has become physically more extreme than it needs to be but thematically tepid and overcautious as a result of the sexual inexperience and parochialism of those making it and a pervasive fear of unspecified consequences from whatever quarter on the part of those selling it.

    Many of the classics of the so-called "Golden Age" of shot-on-film porn couldn't get made today. Behind the Green Door? A graphic rape fantasy. Forget it. The original Taboo? Incest. No way. It doesn't matter that Marilyn Chambers was not, in fact, raped or that Kay Parker didn't really have sex with her son.

    Of course, when these things happen in Titus Andronicus or Oedipus Rex, they're the stuff of great tragic drama to be studied by university students. But when they're portrayed in the context of sexual fantasy, they're revolting and evil and inciting and we must all be protected from them by either censoring them legally or shaming them back into the closet.

    Where does this line of "examination" lead? Straight to here:

    http://www.avn.com/law/articles/31669.html

    If a picture that is otherwise lawful becomes unlawful, or unacceptable, because of the ideas behind it, words will eventually suffer the same fate, and thoughts thereafter.

    That, not the obvious pretense of adult performers hinting at being younger than they are leading by some elaborate process to the actual molestation of children, is the far more likely slippery slope and much more to be feared.

    One more time. Child molesters molest children because child molesters are compulsively driven to this behavior by internal forces, not because of something they see in a picture. They were here before there were pictures and they would still be here if all pictures disappeared from the world tomorrow.

    Do pictures have some social influence? Of course they do. Is that influence necessarily benign? Of course not. Is that any reason to suspend the notion of individual responsibility for individual action and either silence those ideas we consider irresponsible or denounce those who expose such ideas to the light of day?

    Only those who benefit by mass, hypocritical denial of the existence of anti-social desires, which is to say those most likely to count on the ignorance of their victims to inflict those desires on the unwilling, have an actual dog in this fight, and I want that particular dog to lose.

    Anything that people might think, say or do is a suitable subject for art. It is only by the rigorous determination to explore the hidden things that we come to understand them and the reactions they inspire in us.

    This argument has raged since Socrates' time, through Sade's time and into our own time. I would be on the same side of it in whatever historical context it was conducted.

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  3. "you have some sex-pozzes sounding uncharacteristically radfemmish about porn"
    - you cannot begin to even imagine how angry I am with that statement. I am actually so angry I can't even write clearly. I've got a commenter coming from this post explaining to me why just because someone sees something in the media doesn't mean they go out and do it as though I was a brainless radfem (HOW many times have I written about that??).
    How fucking dare you liken me to a radfem? I have said so clearly that my reasons for disliking barely legal, as outlined in my post, are unfair. I wrote that post so maybe others could see how their own prejudices informed their anti-porn stance and that they might acknowledge, as I have done, that that is no way to judge something.
    Seriously, how fucking dare you liken me to a radfem because of that post? Oh, and thanks for sending readers my way who now think I AM an anti-porn radfem. That's fucking great. The mere sniff that I might not LOVE all porn and you say I'm being "radfemmish".....
    Fuck, I have never ever been more angry about a blog issue than I am right now.

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  4. Caroline, I understand how you feel. This post was totally out of line. This isn't a "debate" and I'm having a hard time understanding why people are reading things into it that aren't there and trying to make it about them. But as I've learned, strange things can happen in the blogosphere w/ people who you *thought* were your friends when you don't fall in lock-step with a certain kind of groupthink.

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  5. Well, its kind of hard to argue against words being put into my mouth, actually. I suggest you go back and read what was actually written – I phrased it "uncharacteristically radfemmish", not "dangerously radfem", and I think there's a difference there. Also, I didn't single you out in particular when I said that. Full statement, in context, "In other words, you have some sex-pozzes sounding uncharacteristically radfemmish about porn expressing a dangerous idea which might influence viewers in the wrong way."

    What I meant by that, and I thought I was clear, but maybe not clear enough. Most bloggers agreed the image in question does not show actual underage girls. (In fact, in the post above, I made a point of clarifying who the actual models were and how old were, so as to get that issue out of the way.) So the argument is not over the models being in a non-consensual situation, but on some people's idea that that image presents a really really dangerous idea, perhaps one that shouldn't see the light of day. And that, to me, is interesting, because that's usually the line of argument advanced by either radfems or social conservatives about pornography.

    Believe me Caroline, I do not think you or Tom are remotely radfems, which is why I used the adjective "uncharacteristic" in my description above. What I am saying is that some of the arguments that you and Tom, and a few others, have advanced concerning these images actually concedes a rather huge amount of ground to the "social harm" argument against pornography.

    I'd be happy to discuss this further, but not if what I'm saying is going to continue to be so severely mischaracterized and things that I did not say put into my mouth.

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  6. Jesus, Caroline and Amber, come off of it. Really. This is a respectful point of disagreement, not an attack, and I really do wish you'd stop reading it in the worst possible light.

    I don't think there was anything "out of line" about this post at all. I described an argument that was taking place in the blogosphere and stated my opinion on what was being said. More or less what Anastasia did in her post on the topic, BTW.

    And who's trying to impose groupthink here? Not me, but those of you who are trying to shout me down for expressing some disagreement with Caroline and Tom sure come across that way.

    Jesus, cool your jets people.

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  7. Caroline –

    I think if I made any error it was conflating you and Tom's argument too much, and for that aspect of it, I apologize.

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  8. My position on this is simple and basic:

    If the models involved in this are of legal age, then it is legal.

    The End. Finito. All Stop. C'est Finis.

    I may have my own personal problem with "barely legal" porn and its eroticization of young adults....but I would never call for its censorship based on such flimsy logic as "it supports kiddie porn".

    Having said that, IACB....I just gotta take grand exception with your statement that anyone who does challenge the type of photo is somehow becoming "radfemish". Whatever Amber and Caroline may be with their issues with that photo, they most assurably aren't radfems...and I believe that that line of argument kinda comes dangerously close to a line sex positive men probably shouldn't approach.

    Also...what Ernest said, +10.


    Anthony

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  9. Anthony said:

    "Having said that, IACB....I just gotta take grand exception with your statement that anyone who does challenge the type of photo is somehow becoming "radfemish". Whatever Amber and Caroline may be with their issues with that photo, they most assurably aren't radfems..."

    As I've stated already.

    And I would have stated it differently in my original post if I'd known in advance that people would latch onto that one word and blow it up into such an issue.

    But I do think some of the arguments made against the above image do cross the line into the "social harm" argument against pornography, a line of argument I usually associate with radfems and social conservatives, which is why I used the rather unfortunate adjective "radfemmish".

    But I do think a lot of the arguments I saw concerning "barely legal" images like the one being debated do concede a rather large amount of ground to the "social harm" argument, and I stand by that contention.

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  10. Anthony - that's exactly my point. There was absolutely nothing uncharacteristic or 'radfemmish' about what I said and I resent that. And yeah, as I said in my post, 'barely legal' is legal and no one has broken any laws. My point was showing how personal prejudices and privilege effects one's judgement. No where did I say my prejudice was justified. And I'm pro-porn and I'm not happy I've got comments on my blog patronising me from this post, people telling me I'm 'intellectually lazy' or whatever elsewhere.... If I was intellectually lazy I wouldn't have touched this. Dealing with inconsistencies in your arguments is far from easy, let alone on subjects like this. I'm just glad most people saw what I was doing with this.

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  11. I'm sorry if this post led to you getting shite comments. You are the very opposite of "intellectually lazy" and I can't believe someone would say that about you.

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  12. IACB- I think you are really misrepresenting what Caroline said. She's not accusing of anyone of non 2257 compliance, she said she thought the models looked young, and she, PERSONALLY, is squicked by that.

    So what? A lot of people are squicked by various things, and her saying SHE, PERSONALLY is squicked is not her saying Viv should be hung and no one is allowed to look at what they like.

    I'm not sure how so many people MISSED that...

    and yeah, I do think likening her to a radfem in anyway was out of line.

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  13. "I think you are really misrepresenting what Caroline said. She's not accusing of anyone of non 2257 compliance,"

    I didn't say that she was, and now you're misrepresenting what I said.

    Some other people who were blogging about the topic (how many times do I have to repeat that I wasn't only responding to Caroline?) actually did raise some concerns about the models ages since the photos were from an "overseas" source. I really wanted to put that issue to rest and I hopefully have.

    "and yeah, I do think likening her to a radfem in anyway was out of line.

    Bad choice of words, but I have apologized for that already and clarified my point.

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  14. "My own stance on this (which I'm sure I'll be torn a new one for) is that just because somebody who's a legal adult looks a few years shy of an arbitrary age limit doesn't suddenly make the images anything remotely close to kiddie porn."

    YES! A thousand times YES. Someone "looking underage," to me, is someone having a childlike BODY. I have a face that gets me consistently deemed far younger than I am. Faces are not good indicators of age -- and therefore, eroticizing a youthful face just strikes me as wildly different from eroticizing a child's body. Just... not the same.

    I do think, though, that your mention of your old girlfriend over on Caroline's blog is shooting yourself in the foot, because it makes it sound like this is about you and your own desires, in a post and comments where similar desires are already being posited as the kind of thing that needs examination, and/or suspicion.

    And I'm sure I'll get called some kind of apologist for this, but that model's face is *stunningly beautiful.* I sure didn't think I'd like to do kids when I saw that.

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  15. Trinity –

    I'm actually working on a followup post on this. I do think the appearance of a couple of my old girlfriends relevant to how I feel about this, actually. I think it gets back to life experience issues, like Caroline is talking about, and I think, in combination with other examples of places where people have gotten really upset about images of people being put down and how that tends to be taken very personally, underscores what a personal minefield the whole issue is. I think when you're talking about porn or appearance issues in general, yup, you're probably going to end up stepping all over other people's toes. (Which does not mean you can't have the discussion, of course.) To reduce this down to "you're just saying we can't critique pornography", as few commentators have, is distorting the issue severely.

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  16. "To reduce this down to "you're just saying we can't critique pornography", as few commentators have, is distorting the issue severely."

    Yep.

    And, well, there's the whole OTHER can of worms that is "but is it REALLY wrong to have the fantasy that someone is of age but rather young?"

    Because if it is, I guess that's just another place where my desires count as Not Right.

    When, y'know, my actual partner is more than ten years older than me. Which some people (and I'm not saying Caroline, to make it TOTALLY clear) have their own problems with, because then *he's* the icky ugly used-up Patriarch who wants arm candy.

    (Butch arm candy? REALLY? I'm the dom.)

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  17. "This argument has raged since Socrates' time, through Sade's time and into our own time. I would be on the same side of it in whatever historical context it was conducted."

    But Ernest, haven't you heard? Sade is *different*, because that's not visual. Because those things are, uh, really different, because, um...

    ...yeah. Right there with you, dude. :)

    And Paine posting about this before he knew the models were of age is just icky. I don't much like his blog, because of things like that. He jumps to conclusions more often than I'd like.

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  18. Well, the whole thing about this Jeffereson guy also had its start on Tom's blog this week, so I think there might be some spillover from that. Since I don't know the first thing about the parties involved, I'm staying well away from that.

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  19. "Well, the whole thing about this Jeffereson guy also had its start on Tom's blog this week"
    - what the fuck? There was a post planned about Jefferson supporting him and his problem at PP but I had to pull that post to deal with the Viviane stuff because of the nice little pile on that went on at mine and his. Tom Paine does support Jefferson, shame that didn't get the chance to be shown this week. Perhaps if I hadn't had to deal with all the shit from people not reading my stuff carefully we could have ran with the Jefferson post. As it is, it's pushed back til Tuesday.

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  20. Eh, I'm getting my cast of characters mixed up here. I know Tom has had differences with him in the past, but I guess he's pretty peripheral to the present blow-up. I thought somehow the "Lolitagate" argument may have been spillover from differences Viviane was having over the Jefferson issue, but sorry for speculating out loud.

    As I said, I'm staying well away from that one, really having little knowledge of it.

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  21. Yes well Tom and I went through Viviane's stuff and Dacia's stuff and discussed it. Other stuff is throught through and often discussed - "jumping to conlusions" my arse. Shit, I remember the shit he went through sticking up for a woman in her 60s wearing a bikini, how there was a charming little pile up there calling him all sorts of shit. Most stuff on his blog is personal, so it's hardly out of character for him to blog about his personal reaction to something - his blog is personal ffs.

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  22. Trinity,

    Thanks for the support. I know there's some heated personal stuff going on with this thread, but I was wondering if my post got lost in the shuffle or nobody cared to address it. I'm glad you did.

    As a BDSM player throughout my adult life, I understand the crucial importance of placing limits around action, but placing them around desire, or the depiction of desire in a manner than involves no harm to the participants, inevitably degenerates into attempts to circumscribe the imagination, and the sequelae to that are all bad.

    Criticism, expression of personal distaste, analysis of the harshest sort, all equally valid and rightly protected.

    But in the privacy of my own head, I'm free to reject all that, and when I make pictures, as long as those pictures are made in a lawful and consensual manner, that reflect what goes on in my head, my freedom to do so is equally protected.

    To choose another example, when Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita first appeared, it was denounced as pornographic and immoral and, because it was told from the point of view of Humbert Humbert, also accused of making an apologist's case for child molestation.

    No one who knew anything about Nabokov's body of work, which is consistently conservative regarding social and political issues, could have thought such a thing, but American critics, unlike their European counterparts, judged this particular work in the light of their own moral horror of the subject matter and projected their need to take a stand against child molestation onto the author.

    Some years later, in an interview for Paris Review, Nabokov clarified this with his usual testy impatience:

    Interviewer: Your sense of the immorality of the relationship between Humbert Humbert is very strong. In Hollywood and New York, however, relationships are frequent between men of forty and girls very little older than Lolita. They marry–to no particular public outrage; rather public cooing.

    (I should note here that the interview was done back in the more relaxed atmosphere of the Seventies and I doubt Woody Allen would agree that such attitudes prevail today.)

    Nabokov: No, it s not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of "little girls"–not simply "young girls." Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and "sex kittens." Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his "aging mistress."

    To hammer the point home a bit harder, the author goes on to state that "Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear "touching." That epithet, in its true, tear-iridized sense, can only apply to my poor little girl."

    No moral ambiguity there,

    Nabokov subversively invites us into the mind of a monster that we may better understand how monsters rationalize their crimes, and daringly allows us to identify with the desires that beget those crimes, thus bringing us face to face with our own capacity for such urges and the alibis we might use to justify their infliction on others.

    True genius that he was, Nabokov made Humbert as human as your or me, and all the more disturbing for it. It is not Humbert's fantasies that are inherently evil, but rather his behavior. Even Humbert himself knows this, hence his tormented attempts to shift the blame onto the victim, who he re-creates in his mind as an irresistible seductress. This, of course, is typical of sexual predators, right up to Ted Bundy, who blamed the influence of pornography for his crimes rather than taking responsibility himself.

    Words and pictures and thoughts and fantasies should never be confused with actions. It is that very confusion that provides cover for real monsters, not the particular images or ideas that animate their imaginations.

    If viewers find ambiguous depictions of youthful sexuality disturbing, let them say so and own that disturbance for themselves, instead of labeling the images "problematic."

    It's important to pick our targets carefully here. A BDSM artist I once interviewed who draws some very harsh images of women under extreme duress laughed off a question about whether he hated women as being the equivalent of asking Anthony Hopkins if he really eats people.

    No children were exploited in the pictures under discussion. No victims were eaten in the Hannibal Lector movies. No actual Lolita had her childhood destroyed by a living Humbert Humbert.

    There are plenty of real evils and evildoers in the world without cooking up new ones from the realm of artistic representation. It is they, not the artists, who are rightly the target of our indignation.

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  23. "As a BDSM player throughout my adult life, I understand the crucial importance of placing limits around action, but placing them around desire, or the depiction of desire in a manner than involves no harm to the participants, inevitably degenerates into attempts to circumscribe the imagination, and the sequelae to that are all bad."

    Yes, definitely.

    "To choose another example, when Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita first appeared, it was denounced as pornographic and immoral and, because it was told from the point of view of Humbert Humbert, also accused of making an apologist's case for child molestation."

    Yeah... and this has happened *all the time* throughout history.

    The thing is, though, that while I agree with you about "barely legal" porn (and mind you there's a lot of it I find viscerally distasteful; a naked woman with a young-looking face and no other context given just happens not to be it for me), I don't really think it's fair to Caroline or even (yuck) Paine to compare their reaction to misinterpreting Lolita.

    Nabokov intended to show how twisted Humbert was. Barely legal porn is not designed to show up desire for the young as bad or immoral; it's just designed to allow those who have it to indulge it. So when people say "I worry when I see people allowed to indulge those desires," they're not making the mistake that they're getting the pornographers' intent backwards.

    What I do think they *are* doing is changing the focus from actions to fantasy, and *that* strikes me as always bad (see most recent post on my LJ for more comments on that.)

    And the thing is... I think few people's *minds* are totally clean. Just about every possible form of creepy immoral sex possible is something I have, at some point in my life, wondered about. I would not DO any of it, and in some cases I'm bloody disgusted it even would cross my mind. In most, I would never even consider finding pornography that fakes involvement with such things.

    But I think when we begin saying that the pornography should not exist, or would not exist in Utopia, or is worrisome for merely existing, we're inherently claiming we never thought or think about it, because we're saying no one should think enough about it to make fake things that wrestle with those desires and thoughts.

    And that worries, and bothers, me. Heck, I'm deeply conflicted about what I think about non-consent as a ****faked**** theme in ****actually consensually made**** porn... everyone I talk to says it's a cosmic bad idea and awful. But I'm not convinced that no one ever creating it makes sense to me.

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  24. It appears that some very heated debate got started here. I wish I had time to throw my two cents in regarding all the different, and very rich, points of view being thrown around but I don't.

    Suffice it to say, I do have one point of view I would like to share.

    I do support porn. I am also a card carrying member of the Nina.com website (or will be again as soon as I get off my ass and renew membership). I also support the CURRENT 2257 statutes provisionally (I have a few disagreements but that can keep for later). I also fully support SPC following those same statutes as our dearest Mr. Greene pointed out that they should in a previous post on this blog.

    However, there are natural limits to everything. 18 is the age of legal adulthood in the United States and many places elsewhere. My natural limit to how far I go in supporting porn is that I would highly prefer that all women AND MEN who perform in pornography look at least 18. I say this for two reasons:

    1. If they look at least 18 then I won't find myself running all over the place to double-check the video's copyright and all that. If the performers look way younger than 18 there's always that doubt in your head that just never seems to go away for some reason.

    2. I am a father of a 2.5 year old little girl. Sorry, everyone. I know you're probably holding your head down in shame, but becoming a father does change a man. Cut me some slack here.

    Thank you all.

    Drar

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  25. "(I should note here that the interview was done back in the more relaxed atmosphere of the Seventies and I doubt Woody Allen would agree that such attitudes prevail today.)"

    The difference in atmosphere is bloody striking – just look at movies about this – in less than 30 years we've gone from Manhattan to Hard Candy, both reflecting fairly mainstream attitudes of the time.

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  26. All points well-taken.

    Trinity,

    I agree that the creators of barely legal porn have any intent remotely similar to Nabokov's and I'm sure he'd rise from his grave to thrash me soundly for any suggestion to the contrary.

    But your second point is really what I'm driving at, and there we're completely in concert. There are no clean minds. Everyone is theoretically capable of everything, good and evil, and removing free will from the equation undercuts all possibility of moral action. When we try to shield others from ideas or depictions of ideas that we consider evil, we don't make evil go away. We just make ourselves feel momentarily more comfortable at the expense of asking the hard questions our least acceptable desires raise about our basic natures.

    Here I'm inclined, as I only occasionally am, so let's not jump to any conclusions over it, with Camille Paglia that if porn is to be useful for anything at all, it should go ahead and show us the worst of our imaginary lives. Not exclusively, and certainly not at the cost of damaging those involved in making it, but porn as a medium allows us a safe way of looking at things about ourselves that it's far more dangerous to ignore.

    As long as I'm sure that no harm was done in creating it, I have no problem with any porn content, including barely legal porn or BDSM porn that plays on the theme of non-consensuality. In fact, I do create some of that very thing in an all-illustrated magazine I do for LFP. It's all art-work and all fiction and therefore no real threat to anyone. If people don't want to look at it or find it disturbing, fine, but when they start talking about it being "problematic" and needing "examination" I know we're in the dangerous territory you describe so well of confusing thought and action. Nothing good comes from that place.

    Drar,

    How nice to hear from you again, my friend. I hope you're doing well. Hard to believe that your daughter is already two and a half.

    Clearly, parents have a different take on this issue than non-parents from what I'm reading here, and I respect that. I also respect their choice not to look at things that upset them. But I would urge them not to project their parental anxieties onto images that do not, in fact, depict sexual behavior involving actual minors, or to assume that everyone who is turned on by fantasies of that nature is dangerous to real children, or that the disappearance of these materials would make real children any safer. We've seen from the terrible deeds revealed in some very puritanical religious communities that predators thrive in an atmosphere of repression.

    The angriest critics of modern porn, who like to think of themselves as progressive, are quick to throw up the straw man of dismissal as mere prudes when in fact I would describe them as morbidly obsessed with the evils of sexuality in a manner much like that of the Victorians, who also considered themselves progressive. They see the basest of instincts at work everywhere and that the containment of those instincts is the only way to bring about an improvement in human nature. But the reality is exactly the opposite. Only a deeply perverse society would go around putting skirts on piano legs to avoid inspiring impure thoughts, and the consequences of that perversity were visited on women and children of that time with a degree of excess that still causes us to shake our heads in bewilderment today.

    It was the Victorians, after all, who largely invented the idea of the innocent, asexual child, and of the necessity for strict governance of privacy and intimacy that had never been existed in human history and still don't exist in most of the world today, where multiple generations of families are born, procreate and die under the same roof. It's hardly surprising the child prostitution thrived in Victorian England at a scale never seen before or since under the cover of social secrecy concealing the motivations that animate human behavior just as it concealed those piano legs.

    Again, it comes down to the question of which is the greater evil, allowing the depiction of sin without actually committing it, or forbidding its depiction while allowing it to thrive in secret. If I thought there were a third path, I would entertain it, but history is not encouraging on this point.

    And IACB rightly points out the dangers of trying to place hygienic limits on artistic expression. Such limits would, once accepted as legitimate, invariably lead to the suppression of art as well as trash. It wouldn't just be Lolita we'd lose, but Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver, Pretty Baby and a host of other important works that couldn't get made at all in the current hysterical atmosphere.

    Such a course carries huge risks in terms of loss of insight for whole societies and offers no real benefits in terms of protecting the innocent.

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  27. "But your second point is really what I'm driving at, and there we're completely in concert. There are no clean minds. Everyone is theoretically capable of everything, good and evil, and removing free will from the equation undercuts all possibility of moral action. When we try to shield others from ideas or depictions of ideas that we consider evil, we don't make evil go away. We just make ourselves feel momentarily more comfortable at the expense of asking the hard questions our least acceptable desires raise about our basic natures."

    Yes.

    I remember the first time I wondered if murder could be fun. I was about thirteen, maybe, and in an aquarium store. I looked at this fish, and suddenly had vivid visions of squeezing the life out of it, for fun.

    I was of course immediately horrified that I could even think such a thing. For weeks, I thought it proved I was the worst of humanity. All sorts of things I'd internalized about myself as bad, deserving of the abuse, etc., were "proven" because I'd thought about hurting that fish.

    I told someone, maybe a therapist, maybe my father, years later, feeling like I just HAD to confess how terrible I was. The adult laughed and said "everyone thinks about that sometimes."

    It amazed me.

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  28. "They see the basest of instincts at work everywhere and that the containment of those instincts is the only way to bring about an improvement in human nature. But the reality is exactly the opposite. Only a deeply perverse society would go around putting skirts on piano legs to avoid inspiring impure thoughts, and the consequences of that perversity were visited on women and children of that time with a degree of excess that still causes us to shake our heads in bewilderment today."

    YES. THIS.

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  29. I may have my own personal problem with "barely legal" porn and its eroticization of young adults....but I would never call for its censorship based on such flimsy logic as "it supports kiddie porn".

    Which is exactly what Caroline said, too. She NEVER called for censorship. She said, "This bothers ME, personally - and I want to figure out why." I still can't understand how people missed that.

    Whatever Amber and Caroline may be with their issues with that photo, they most assurably aren't radfems...

    I actually don't have any issues w/ the photo. I've been defending Caroline bc she put up a personal post, and people jumped all over her about it, reading things into it that were never there. She sent me a link to the photo before she blogged about it, asking my opinion on it. My reaction was basically "meh." I can understand how someone could be bothered by it, which is what I told her. Me, personally, I'm not bothered by it - but that's neither here nor there.

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  30. "I've been defending Caroline bc she put up a personal post, and people jumped all over her about it, reading things into it that were never there. She sent me a link to the photo before she blogged about it, asking my opinion on it. My reaction was basically "meh." I can understand how someone could be bothered by it, which is what I told her. Me, personally, I'm not bothered by it - but that's neither here nor there."

    Personally, the only thing that bothered me about Caroline's post was that I think such squicks, when they're then used to blanket condemn or even blanket "worry about" a genre, could lead to condemnation of the models themselves for having the wrong kind of face or body. Beyond that, hey, I don't care.

    What really bothered me was Tom Paine's post and sloppy conflation between "looking underage" and "being underage." I saw a lot of clarification and explanation from Caroline, but not from Tom. And that bothered, and still bothers, me. When someone posts a post like Tom's, where he doesn't even bother to look for the facts, and then pronounces to the whole Internet what's appropriate sexual material or not, I get snarly.

    And for better or for worse I chose not to comment at Tom's, because he has made posts about me in the past that made me feel attacked and uncomfortable, and I REALLY don't want to start the drama I fear would begin if I showed my face there.

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  32. Unfortunately, I'm offline again due to the usual issues, so I haven't been able to post as often on this as I want to....but it is good to see that everyone here is getting back on the same page.

    I never said or even assumed that Caroline was in any way supporting censorship; I was just stating my own principle that I am simply opposed to censorship of legal images of adults...even "barely legal" ones. Naturally, any person has the absolute right to be personally squicked out at such images for whatever reason. And thanks for the clarification on your position on the photo, too.

    What does bother me a bit, though, is the propensity of some to automatically assume that their personal squicks about what does or doesn't turn them on should be elevated to the level of public dictates. It is often so easy to universalize your own personal tastes as applying to everyone; and to extrapolate your personal likes and dislikes to the broader community as if everyone not totally in agreement with you are somehow dissing them personally.

    This is a problem that I see constantly with some self-identified "sex positive" folks who on occasion have the propensity to treat their own personal favorite sex practices as universals at the expense of others.

    It also kinda bothers me that there is a tendency for some folks to go so quick to the "We're being targeted because the men want us to love ALL porn!!" card....I don't think that IACB was going there at all, even if his use of the term "radfemish" was out of line, IMHO.

    But there is a slight implication about the men here that assumes just because we defend the right to produce and consume mainstream porn, we must explicitly consume the same porn ourselves...and thusly, our positions are tainted by our own personal tastes.

    Rest assured, ladies....no one here is in any way saying that you can't be personally critical of porn or have different personal tastes. Not IACB, not Ernest...and most certainly not me. Hey, I have some very real issues with some subgenres of porn myself.

    The point here is not to allow our personal differences degenerate into needless smackdown wars...I'd rather save that for the real antipornradfems.

    My views, and mine alone, as usual.


    Anthony

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  33. Quoting Trin:

    What really bothered me was Tom Paine's post and sloppy conflation between "looking underage" and "being underage." I saw a lot of clarification and explanation from Caroline, but not from Tom. And that bothered, and still bothers, me. When someone posts a post like Tom's, where he doesn't even bother to look for the facts, and then pronounces to the whole Internet what's appropriate sexual material or not, I get snarly.

    And for better or for worse I chose not to comment at Tom's, because he has made posts about me in the past that made me feel attacked and uncomfortable, and I REALLY don't want to start the drama I fear would begin if I showed my face there.


    Yeah..seems to me that Tom Paine's the one who's being the jackass about all this...probably due to his personal issues with Viviane.

    Funny, though, that he would defend Jefferson during his plight about his custody battle.

    (My only statement on that brohaha is this: When you put yourself out on the Internet, you take your chances; if you put your private life out there for public consumption, you shouldn't be so surprised that others will use it as a weapon against you. I'm not saying that Jefferson shouldn't get support for his battle; just that he probably should have taken his custody battle into consideration while blogging so publically about his private sex life.)


    Anthony

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  34. FTR: I have no idea who "Jefferson" is or what the brouhaha is. In the interest of not getting myself further worked up about Paine -- who is the partner of someone I find awesome -- I'm not going to look, unless it's a deeply serious ethical issue. (If it is, please let me know.)

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  35. I've been avoiding Tom Paine's post, too. I skimmed it initially and thought it was sloppily done, read the first several comments, and decided it was getting ugly and I didn't have the energy to be a part of that crap.

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  36. I think that the interesting thing about the initial post is that it highlights the reality of personal blogs within particular blogging communities or niches. There shouldn't be an issue about an image. It shouldn't be debated any further because it isn't leading to any positive place.
    As for my post IACB, or what I said within it, I've said many things within it, sure enough, and some of those things relate to my own personal view of barely legal porn, that would make me seem a little rigid in my adult tastes, even though I don't really care what others view or what porn exists in society. Ultimately, an adult makes a choice on what to view based on their own personal fantasies, and no blog/blogger/site is going to really change or influence that. Adults corrupt children in so many more damaging ways, before they reach the age when they can view porn. Thus, this image shouldn't be an issue or made into the issue it was.

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  37. My goodness. I've read so many posts in this discussion. So many people seem to be irately calling other people names, but I'm still waiting to see a legitimate justification for keeping young-looking women out of porn.

    I'm also tired of people speaking for me as a parent. I have a 24 year old daughter who could probably pass for 17. No, I don't think I would have any right to claim she needs to be sheltered, and neither do I think anybody else would have that right. But I can just hear the howls if some of you saw her picture, people saying that because she looks young she is too immature to make that decision herself.

    Caroline said that a 21-year-old is too immature. What age then? Any?

    And the lack of concern about males...

    This is just the new objectification of women by the paternal establisment.

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  38. I think it goes a bit far when we call for a policy of not having porn performers LOOK like they're under 18.

    I mean, come on, Nina herself was decked out in pigtails when she was going down on Peter North in "Young Girls in Tight Jeans." Er, notice the title?

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  39. Sheldon said:

    "I think it goes a bit far when we call for a policy of not having porn performers LOOK like they're under 18.

    I mean, come on, Nina herself was decked out in pigtails when she was going down on Peter North in "Young Girls in Tight Jeans." Er, notice the title?"


    I think I remember that one, actually.

    The thing is, there probably is a distinction to be made between movies like the above, where women obviously in their mid-20s on up are dressed as "young girls" versus models like Miriama K, who actually look like teenagers, even when they're not specifically dressed as such. The former is obvious "age play", while the latter, which is more typical of "barely legal" porn, is actually playing on the appeal of youthful features in and of themselves.

    I don't think the censure of either is called for, in any event, though.

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  40. Anastasia said:

    "As for my post IACB, or what I said within it, I've said many things within it, sure enough, and some of those things relate to my own personal view of barely legal porn, that would make me seem a little rigid in my adult tastes, even though I don't really care what others view or what porn exists in society."

    On the contrary, I don't think you came across as rigid at all.

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