Sex Offenders

[handofgod]

Recently, The Economist published an article about the harsh treatment of sex offenders.

After reading the article I figured this would be an interesting topic for discussion. I'm pretty neutral on the subject, and I'm not trying to glorify anything and I'm not sticking up for sex offenders. Oh and I'm not a sex offender.

Thoughts?

Opinions?

[SlappyMcGee]

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

Y'know what, I don't know the cure for perversion. I'm inclined to say that it's death for many egregious cases, but that'd be inhumane. For the cases that can be treated with therapy or something, more power to 'em. All others need to not exist anymore, in the quickest manner that can accomplish that.
I did happen to read that article, actually, and it began with an interesting case: two minors whose age difference was a year, give or take some months, and the older was tried as an adult and convicted as a child molester. That sort of shit is stupid; that case should've lasted five minutes before it was thrown out, and I hope the prosecutor who destroyed that girl's life pays for it in some manner. It's ridiculous that conservative and/or religious movements have managed to lump together premarital sex (or, God forbid, sexually active high schoolers) with middle-aged kiddie-diddlers, and that's the issue that Economist article was about.
When it comes to the sexual activities of the older tier of teenagers, I think more people need to chill the fuck out. The problem we should be focusing on is cases involving participants on opposite sides of that age range, because that's actually where there's any sort of problem.

[SkyPanda]

First thing- there seems to me to be a lot of contradiction involved in the idea of a sex offender registry. If these people are not dangerous, then why do we need a register? If they are dangerous, then why are they moving freely in a community?

Second thing- everybody who has ever said that the registers are too broad is completely on the mark. Who is the bigot, of group of bigots, responsible for registers that cannot distinguish between teenage consensual sex and paedophillic rape?

[scythe]

I posted a relatively-famous &totse essay on this a while back, but totse is gone now so here's a mirror. It's dramatic, but worth reading.

[SkyPanda]

from the link Scythe posted:
"Sally Mann, who did some of the most widely-published nude photos of children. Her frankly erotic photos of her own children were called incestuous, pedophilic and pornographic."
This is because taking erotic nude photographs of your own children is incestuous, pedophillic and pornographic.

"Allen Ginsburg and Joseph Richy published an essay in 1990 against the radical departure from art history in which nude children and adolsecents are out of bounds. In "The Right to Depict Children in the Nude," their main point was that sex and nudity in children, and especially adolescents, had been a primary theme of the visual and literary arts throughout Western culture, as well as in many non-Western societies."
Ginsburg and Richy need a better main point because this does not excuse anything. There have been plenty of murders throughout Western culture too, does that mean that murder is okay? Perhaps the rest of the essay is needed.

I think there's a strong argument for exploring or portraying adolescent sexuality in film and literature, less so for naked pictures of young children. Pictures of young naked children are pictures of young naked children. It's hard to make them into anything else. This kind of opinion doesn't usually go down well with the artistic and the pretentious, I know.

[Atilla]

I'm curious how SkyPanda reacts to nappy ads, since they frequently feature videos of naked babies. I imagine it involves a torch and pitchfork?

[SkyPanda]

I'm curious how SkyPanda reacts to nappy ads, since they frequently feature videos of naked babies. I imagine it involves a torch and pitchfork?

Well Atilla I don't know, why don't you ask him? He's a very approachable guy. :)


Nappy ads don't eroticize babies. They also don't show all of the baby, if you know what I mean.

[unoriginal name]

"Sally Mann, who did some of the most widely-published nude photos of children. Her frankly erotic photos of her own children were called incestuous, pedophilic and pornographic."
This is because taking erotic nude photographs of your own children is incestuous, pedophillic and pornographic.

If you knew anything about Sally Mann's photographs, you would know that every last one of them is art.

[SlappyMcGee]

"Sally Mann, who did some of the most widely-published nude photos of children. Her frankly erotic photos of her own children were called incestuous, pedophilic and pornographic."
This is because taking erotic nude photographs of your own children is incestuous, pedophillic and pornographic.

If you knew anything about Sally Mann's photographs, you would know that every last one of them is art.

Convincing children who don't no better to pose nude for photographs isn't art; it's rape.

[otters~1]

rape

*calls police. police add Slappy to nearest sex offender registry*

[Atilla]

I'm curious how SkyPanda reacts to nappy ads, since they frequently feature videos of naked babies. I imagine it involves a torch and pitchfork?

Nappy ads don't eroticize babies. They also don't show all of the baby, if you know what I mean.

...Didn't you just say "pictures of naked children are pictures of naked children", as if to imply that all such pictures are foul pornography? I've not seen Sally Mann's pictures, so I can't really say how erotic they are - not to mention that viewing them would probably get me branded as a sex offender! - but I think it's bit silly to have a black-and-white worldview where any picture of an unclothed child is automatically pornography. Lots of parents have pictures of their kids in the bath or whatever. It doesn't mean they're evil paedophiles, necessarily. Yeah, if the pictures are eroticizing the kids, that's terrible, but I think it's pretty clear that not all pictures of naked children are the same, and that "contains a naked child" is not sufficient condition for a photo to be established as child porn.

[SlappyMcGee]

I'm curious how SkyPanda reacts to nappy ads, since they frequently feature videos of naked babies. I imagine it involves a torch and pitchfork?

Nappy ads don't eroticize babies. They also don't show all of the baby, if you know what I mean.

...Didn't you just say "pictures of naked children are pictures of naked children", as if to imply that all such pictures are foul pornography? I've not seen Sally Mann's pictures, so I can't really say how erotic they are - not to mention that viewing them would probably get me branded as a sex offender! - but I think it's bit silly to have a black-and-white worldview where any picture of an unclothed child is automatically pornography. Lots of parents have pictures of their kids in the bath or whatever. It doesn't mean they're evil paedophiles, necessarily. Yeah, if the pictures are eroticizing the kids, that's terrible, but I think it's pretty clear that not all pictures of naked children are the same, and that "contains a naked child" is not sufficient condition for a photo to be established as child porn.

If you make a child pose nude for a photo and then display it publicly, how is that not pornography? I don't care about connotations of the photo; children aren't old enough to give actual consent for this sort of thing.

[SkyPanda]

If you knew anything about Sally Mann's photographs, you would know that every last one of them is art.

Since practically anything can be construed as art, including punching somebody in the face (as long as you do it in an artistic and aesthetically pleasing way, perhaps as part of a dance) then whether or not Mann's photographs are art doesn't change or excuse the fact that they are incestuous, pedophillic and pornographic.

but I think it's pretty clear that not all pictures of naked children are the same, and that "contains a naked child" is not sufficient condition for a photo to be established as child porn.

Yeah. I think I was more trying to say that "it's art" does not excuse the fact that it's a picture of a naked child.
It's hard to legislate on issues like this when a snap of your kid in the bath is okay, but a published picture of your kid in the nude isn't; when a movie about a teenage girl having sex and falling pregnant is okay (Juno), but a porn movie featuring underage kiddies isn't . But that's the reality and there isn't any catch-all critera that can separate the okay from the not okay.

[Skyling]

If you make a child pose nude for a photo and then display it publicly, how is that not pornography? I don't care about connotations of the photo; children aren't old enough to give actual consent for this sort of thing.

What if the child is seventeen years old?

[乳头的早餐谷物]

If you make a child pose nude for a photo and then display it publicly, how is that not pornography? I don't care about connotations of the photo; children aren't old enough to give actual consent for this sort of thing.

If you knew anything about Sally Mann's photographs, you would know that every last one of them is art.

Since practically anything can be construed as art, including punching somebody in the face (as long as you do it in an artistic and aesthetically pleasing way, perhaps as part of a dance) then whether or not Mann's photographs are art doesn't change or excuse the fact that they are incestuous, pedophillic and pornographic.

In this situation, those are just empty buzzwords. There's no incest depicted, nor pedophilic behaviour, and it's not presented to be sexually arousing—which is what pornography is. You can't brand something pornographic while explicitly disregarding the connotations of the work. You certainly can say that it's wrong, and you can explain why, but you can't bend an existing word with emotive resonance to suit your purposes and then act as if you have made a convincing argument.

[SlappyMcGee]

Fine, forget porn; it's fucking wrong.

[SkyPanda]

In this situation, those are just empty buzzwords. There's no incest depicted, nor pedophilic behaviour, and it's not presented to be sexually arousing—which is what pornography is. You can't brand something pornographic while explicitly disregarding the connotations of the work. You certainly can say that it's wrong, and you can explain why, but you can't bend an existing word with emotive resonance to suit your purposes and then act as if you have made a convincing argument.

I think the terms apply, otherwise I wouldn't have used them.
'Incestuous', 'pornographic' and 'pedophilic' are all based on the pictures being erotic. The pornographic part comes from the pictures themselves being sexual. The incest and pedophilia comes from the act of taking the pictures- the children were underage and they were related to the photographer.

Now of course, there's the argument that the pictures aren't erotic or sexual because they are Art, with a capital A. Like I said before, you can make anything you want into art, so that needs to be taken into account. Could a person artistically commit murder? How about some nice artistic rape? Can the creepy guy in the park taking photographs children stand up in court and say it was for artistic purposes?

I don't believe that the purpose of these photographs excuses their nature.
Furthermore, if the purpose of the photographs were to celebrate a mother's delight in her child's sexuality or whatever, then that's pedophilic. It's no good going on about the intention of the work not being pornographic if the actual intention was even worse than creating pornography!
But that's the problem- it's difficult to determine the intent of a work. The only reason that the pictures aren't pornographic is that Mann says they're not? Hmmm.

Also, publishing pics of your kids in the nude isn't a nice thing to do, whether or not the pictures are erotic doesn't change the end result of picture+naked, which is what the person is likely to object to when they're older.

I'm gonna make a detailed point of the incest thing, because Greer said some creepy shit that needs to be addressed.
This situation is incestuous because we have a parent taking erotic photographs of her child. Not incestuous by any dictionary definition probably, because it's not actual sex and dictionaries tend to be specific like that, but this IS a sexual interaction between two related people. That's not something that most societies tend to encourage. It's not about a depiction of incest. Taking the erotic photographs was the incest.
Do you really think it's okay for parents to look at their children this way? Do you agree with Greer- "The censoring of a mother's physical delight in her children marks the last stage in the denial of the sensuality of children."?
children+ sensual/sex/erotic = pedophilia
pedophilia = bad
It doesn't need to be made more complicated than that.

Of course, Mann might not have been delighting in the sensuality of children. She was probably just manipulating her underage children to suit an artistic agenda. Which is just as bad.

I apologise for being rather muted and restrained here. Publishing photographs of your naked children is totally fucked up. I can't stress that enough.

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

General note on art:

If you're intending to produce some work of art, but your art somehow involves something perverse or illegal in its making or presentation, then the fact that it's art should not protect you from scorn and possible legal prosecution. In no way should that label excuse any terrible actions you perform in its making. It seems to me that art is one of those very rare areas in society which is immune to criticism (or more accurately, in which one would be shouted down on principle as a closed-minded bigot for criticizing a work of art).
You want to make a horse sculpture out of tires? Fine, whatever. Fill your boots. But if you make a giant golden penis sculpture in a public park, saying that it's artistic because it's so provocative and stands out from its environment, then you have produced an expression of art which you should have kept to your own twisted self.
It comes down primarily to "expression." I often hear it said that it's not wrong because it's "merely expressing oneself." An ounce of critical thinking later, however, would provide countless examples of terrible, terrible ways to express an idea, no matter how novel or interesting the idea may be. (For example, murdering the leader of an oppressive communist country with a hammer and sickle may be awfully symbolic, but it's still murder.)

For example, if I want to criticize the social institution of makeup and other beauty products, I can make a sculpture of a faceless woman deciding on a face to wear, and that'd be fine. It would not be fine if my chosen medium was the corpse of a supermodel I kidnapped. It'd still be art. It'd still be a powerful, provocative expression of some idea, some commentary on society. It'd still give some people pause, or make some people reconsider the way they think about the issue. And arresting me for making it would still be imprisoning me for "merely expressing myself," and I could rant all day long about freedom of speech, the necessity of art, and the freedom of expression. But I'd still have done something vile. The fact remains that this is not a work of art that should have been produced, and I am off my fucking rocker for thinking that this will provide any form of insight to a reasonable person. The fact that it is art does not excuse my actions, nor would it had I done something less illegal.

"It may be illegal, but it's art" does not demonstrate the correct priority.
"It may be art, but it's illegal" does.

In the case of the woman who took "erotic" pictures of her children, the first observation that should be made is that she has done something illegal and is of depraved character. Then one of the jurors in her trial might think to himself, "huh, that's interesting... it's kinda artsy," before following it up with, "albeit one more item to the list of things I want to un-see." And then the photographs should be promptly destroyed, not for the sake of silencing a revolutionary artist, as one might be accused, but because they're plainly fucking evil.



On the other hand, if the pictures were indeed of a 17-year old, then people need to chill significantly more the fuck out. I'd still feel weird seeing it, but it's nowhere near as bad as sexualizing a pre-pubescent child.

[Universezero]

I'd say that the so called "Megan's Law" is highly unjust; people should be held accountable for these kind of criminal cases, but to what extent? To me, it sounds like these people have been given a life sentence. They'll have trouble getting jobs and will never be able to become socially active again. And if you've already served a 15 year jail sentence, but then have to go back into a world that will never accept you, then what was the point of leaving jail?

Some prosecutors are now stretching the definition of “distributing child pornography” to include teens who text half-naked photos of themselves to their friends.

How is that even illegal if a) It's yourself, b) You willing took the photo, and c) You're only have naked? These kind of cases really strech the boundaries.

[blue_tetris]

Fine, forget porn; it's fucking wrong.

I dunno if I can agree that nudity is inherently wrong, somehow. There's a lot of reasons to be naked, legally and non-sexually. Sometimes even in public.

[jean-luc]

Fine, forget porn; it's fucking wrong.

I dunno if I can agree that nudity is inherently wrong, somehow. There's a lot of reasons to be naked, legally and non-sexually. Sometimes even in public.

Says the man with the yaoi sig.

[scythe]

Fine, forget porn; it's fucking wrong.

I dunno if I can agree that nudity is inherently wrong, somehow. There's a lot of reasons to be naked, legally and non-sexually. Sometimes even in public.

Says the man with the yaoi sig.

Says the guy who recognized it.

[blue_tetris]

Misono-san is a chick, experimenting in the novel ways of love with her brother. I think you're looking for "shota", not "yaoi", loser.

[jean-luc]

Misono-san is a chick, experimenting in the novel ways of love with her brother. I think you're looking for "shota", not "yaoi", loser.

Ah, I'm afraid you cropped in such a way that I couldn't tell. Both individuals look like a man/men.