Doug PollardIt's Art not Kiddie Porn (LINK)
July 6th 2008 02:52
A TAXPAYER-funded magazine has put a naked six-year-old girl on the cover in protest at the "hysteria" over similar images by photographer Bill Henson.
The July edition of Art Monthly Australia also includes several provocative photos of children posing naked in adult jewellery as well as naked teenage girls.
News Ltd papers today
Interesting that the Mudrock Press puts inverted commas around ‘hysteria’ but not around ‘provocative’ in this shameless tabloid beat-up. If you Google the original image, you’ll find it couldn’t be more innocent. It could be the lid of a box of chocolates.
But all the usual would-be inquisitors and hysterical publicity-seekers have come screeching out of their chintz-laden castles to howl ‘paedophilia’ yet again.
There’s a complete lack of any sense of proportion nowadays when it comes to anything to do with paedophilia – any semblance of sense goes out the window and hysterical over-reaction worthy of Old Salem town gets under way.
Yes, it’s vile. So are lots of other things. But this isn’t even ‘real’ paedophilia – this is a chocolate box, people. Krudd is of again droning on about the ‘innocence’ of children – meaning, their non-sexual nature.
In fact, children begin to be sexual at quite an early age. They may not know what it is they are feeling, or quite what to do with it, but it’s there. Children experiment sexually among themselves, in my experience, from about the age of 7 or 8 onwards, playing doctors and nurses, displaying their genitals etc. I remember it well – and this was in the 1950’s, before we had any chance to be ‘sexualised’ by advertising and the media. It’s a normal part of childhood.
That doesn’t mean it’s OK for an adult to get sexual with a child, because as we know, that can distort and damage the child beyond repair. And the child can have no idea what he or she might be consenting to.
But it does mean that children would benefit from some very simple sex education at a much earlier age than is now usual. However, the ridiculously overdone hysteria over paedophilia puts it beyond the pale.
And what does all the hysteria and mob violence achieve? The tabloid press have just made it impossible for an alleged paedophile to have a trial, and he was therefore released into the community. The community in question ganged up and hounded him out of town. Together they have made it impossible to jail him, because he can’t get an unbiased jury anywhere. How does this protect children? It does the reverse – it leaves an alleged predator free. Congratulations, you stupid idiots.
Getting back to the pictures of kids, Bill Henson et al, yes, some sad blokes will probably have a wank over some of the photos. Some will do likewise with photos of gloves, shoes, dogs, ponies, sheep or hat-racks. Do we want to ban photos of them, too.
We can’t go censoring stuff which is non-sexual in intent and non-exploitative just because it gives some poor bugger a hard-on. And if you think all photos of naked children are pornographic, i.e., sexually arousing, then you’re the one with the problem, mate, not the artist.
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Comment by RubySoho
Music Zone
Thought Zone
She is wearing the haughty expression of a fashion model and cleverly concealing her privates, as though acknowledging that they should be hidden from view. Sorry but she looks like she is inviting sexual attention, she does not look like an innocent child. I'ive seen everyone from Winona Ryder to Cameron Diaz to Kate Moss strike that very pose and that pose means sex.
I'm not for a moment suggesting the girl is doing this consciously but I do think the photo is a shameless grab for attention and that the child was exploited to make a very adult point.
Comment by RubySoho
Music Zone
Thought Zone
Comment by Doug Pollard
Rainbow Reporter
Rather like that famous picture of a pipe labeled “this in not a pipe”, this seems to me to be saying “this image is not nature, it’s art.” Which makes it ideal for the purpose to which it has been put. To me it reads completely cold and neutral in sexual terms, which, paradoxically, makes it too intellectual to be wholly successful as a piece of art. It’s too contrived.
This is where Bill Hensons work is superior, because it does have that undercurrent, and hence gets under the skin, so to speak.
And the pose is one of those damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t things – if you hide the genitalia, you draw attention to the fact that you’re doing so and invite the viewer to imagine what is hidden, if you display the genitalia, you get accused of creating a sexual image.
I was at Chadstone shopping centre recently, and taking in the way a lot of children are dressed nowadays. There were lots of very young girls (with their parents) -10, 11, 12 - wearing makeup and what I might call pop-tart clothes, which must have been bought by those parents. There were small boys in cut-down versions of the underwear-flashing ripped-T rent boy style, too. If parents don’t want their children sexualized, why do they dress them up like this? Why do they pimp up their children in this fashion? Do they think it’s cute or something?
I reckon a lot of the hysteria over these pictures is actually born of parents guilt at their complicity in this. The photos confront them with what they have done, or allowed to be done, to their own children, and they quite rightly get angry. And then turn round and shoot the messenger who is showing them what they are doing.
Comment by RubySoho
Music Zone
Thought Zone
But having said that, the lynch mob who is now out to get the artist and magazine is making me sick.
Far be it from them to actually learn something from all this.