While he is often mentioned, George Orwell gets little acknowledgement for his anticipation of the late 20th and early 21st century developments. While by 1984, his predictions appeared not to have happened, all had become fact by 2004. Consider a few. The person to be most feared by a young man is a beautiful, sexually attractive young woman. Children are also to be feared as organizations representing 'child rights' and the government urge them to confide in the state and not to trust their parents whom they now should spy and inform on. There is a constant war against a vague enemy
The crimen exceptum is central to every inquisition, whether it be heresy, witchcraft, being a Jew, a Red under the bed or today one accused of child sex abuse or accessing child pornography. The crimen exceptum requires the suspension of due process and all real processes of justice. You do not need to be tried and convicted, merely accused.Today’s crimen exceptum of either child sex abuse or accessing child pornography are the most potent of any ever possessed by a phase of the inquisition, which is why the current inquisition is so deadly. The crimen exceptum is already expanding into more general pornography, but here we deal with sex abuse and child pornography, the second the most powerful of the two. As the population comes under more control in the totalitarian state, as in America, the crimen exceptum of inappropriate sex may change to dissent/enemy of the state (heresy). Around the time that this was written, a judge in Arizona sent a 56 year old man with no criminal record at all, father, husband, award winning high school teacher ....to 200 years in prison with no possibility of parole or executive clemency or pardon...what did he do ?? They found 20 images believed to be child porn on his computer. The abhorrence with which child porn is regarded can be measured by this sentence, which is cruel and inhuman by most standards as to put an 56 year old man in prison for 200 years is tantamount to condemning him to a miserable and humiliating death in prison Never to step foot in his house again or to make love tom his wife ever again or to watch his own kids grow old and have kids of their own...no more xmas's no more vacations just the 365 days a year of being constantly vigilant for your life in prison. The sentence passes judgement both on the accused and on the society which sentences him thus.This kind of cruelty in a Western society that has also recently accepted the use of torture for the other crimen exceptum of suspected terrorism demonstrates how close we are to the earlier centuries of the Inquisition that both cruelly tortured its innocent suspects and its non-conformists and burnt them at the stake.
The moral panic to protect children while today’s crimen exceptum of either child sex abuse or accessing child pornography is the most potent of any ever possessed by a phase of the inquisition, that the protection of children should form the basis of a moral panic is far from new. Much thanks is due to the Swedish writer and historian Dick Wase for this section. For the information about the history of the crimen exceptum, thanks was already due to award-winning NZ author Lynley Hood. See her A City Possessed in the Bookstore (menu on left). Also what follows was influenced by the excellent books of American writer, Debbie Nathan, and others.Protecting children from sexual activity is relatively new, but protecting them from child snatchers and witches is not. Dick Wase points out that when they started to hunt Jews in 1173 the claim was that Jews ritually killed Christian children (St William of Norwich), and witches were particularly dangerous because they lured children and then brought them to the Devil. One thinks of the recent moral panic about satanic ritual abuse, which did not exist.Wase also points to a 'child masturbation-panic' that together with other sexually motivated ideas resulted in the burning of girls clitorises and encouraged the circumcision of boys.The first big recent child protection from sex moral panic was the infamous nineteenth century 'White slavery panic’ that feared the seduction of working girls into sex slavery. Interestingly and resonating with the medieval tale above it was the protection of middle class white girls between ten and fourteen, not simply working class or black girls, that became of paramount importance. The feared predators before this age of the paedophile, indeed long before the invention of the label, were the slave-hunters, who were Jews, Arabs and Chinese).The great moral panic of fear of homosexuals in the American administration started in 1947 (right after the war) with an article by Hoover stating that "The women and children of the nation can never be safe as long as the degenerated is running free".Dick Wase also points out that as the homosexuality moral panic faded, child-pornography and child-trafficking arose as enormous phenomena, helped greatly through such books as Robin Lloyd's For Money or Love, in which he claimed that 300,000 boys between the ages of eight and sixteen were prostitutes in America (later he admitted those figures were fabricated, 'to see how society would react'). With help by Judianne Densen-Gerber and Vice-sheriff Lloyd Martin the figures quickly arise to 2.1 million prostituted kids, so that now the panic was a fact through help from newspapers and television. It was also fuelled by psychiatrists, therapists and psychologists who during the sexual liberation in the 1960s and early 1970s had to face falling numbers of patients.Dick Wase makes comparisons here with the 1486 first edition of the Malleus Malleficarum, suggesting that the reason it was written was that Pope Innocentius VIII found himself impotent, and blamed it on the witches, so he gave orders for a hunt for witches. It suited the Inquisition perfectly, because they were having problems finding 'heretics' to burn, but now they could use all their resources to hunt witches instead. Note that the Malleus Malleficarum also blames innocent women for men's impotency.Wase also points out that when the latest moral-panic arose in 1976, around children and sex, the 'psycho-workers', as he calls them, and the social-workers could benefit greatly from it, and suddenly intergenerational sex was seen as the most terrible thing that could hit a child. And, he goes on to say, it still is seen as terrible, despite that for example Ney & Co 1994 showed that children themselves range sexual abuse as the least problem among abuses they have to face (for example neglect and physical abuse they find much worse, but those kind of abuses are often used among evangelical Christians to punish their sinful kids, so naturally you cant create a panic around it, and everyone knows how terrible the sin sex is anyway)".In addition, any age that sees large numbers of stepfathers or boyfriends moving in with women and their existing children also produces an increase in sexual activity of one kind or another with children within their own homes.There are actually some studies that found a correlation between early sexual activity, including sex abuse, and positive later sexual experiences, one being 'The relation between early abuse and adult sexuality” by Meston & co 1999 (1032 students).Such findings are so controversial that one risks censorship and worse by publishing them in any detail. Where a woman finds the courage to admit to such a possibility, she is accused of being the victim of 'sexualisation'.
Thus, it is impossible in today's environment to discuss whether early sexual experiences would be positive to a woman's sexual development,
A good place on this web site to study the current moral panic concerning child pornography is the story about Masha. This is by no means the only source of the information that virtually all of the so-called 'images of child porn' available over the Internet via web sites in the West are placed there by US law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI for entrapment purposes or used in state sex offender assessment and 'rehabilitation' programmes. As no-one, including serious investigating journalists or researchers, is allowed to inspect any of this material, many do not know that most of what is proclaimed to be child porn by the authorities and child protection agencies is old material from pre-1970 erotic and nudist magazines and erotic imagery of over 16 year olds which became illegal only after the threshold age for the legality of such images was raised to 18. Nor are we told that much if not most of the so-called porn images of children consists of nude or glamorous or erotic posing, formerly considered 'cute'. A minority portion of the images depicts children involved in sexual acts.A good question to ask at the very beginning of an investigation into child pornography is why it is considered to be almost criminal, if not so, to question either its extent or the actual extent of any harm it might be causing to children. That such a conversation is taboo should speak volumes. Anyone affected by the issue of child pornography, especially one accused of accessing it, should be aware that the recent major police campaigns of Landslide, Ore, Amethyst and others are collapsing due to police corruption. There are a number of stories HERE.One also needs to be aware that the police control virtually all of the child porn images available over the Internet and use them either in legal entrapment or illegal activities, so if you see an advertisement for child porn it is almost certain to be a police trap or corrupt scam.Beware the bogglywoggly! Every year tens of thousands of articles are published in mainstream media about the great evil of child pornography, and how you will go to jail if you even so much as look at a single picture of child pornography.
BEWARE THE BOOGLY WOOGLY!!
Without even going into how insane that law is in itself, I just want to point to the fact that I have never ever, in all these years, seen a single article that defined what they are talking about! Imagine you said to a child: If you ever touch a bogglywoggly, you will die instantly. And you said this every day, and you never once told him what a bogglywoggly is. Do you think you would have a scared and nervous child? This sounds insane, but nevertheless this is being done all the time, not only to children, but to all of us, in many areas.Courtesy Eolake Stobblehouse.The Emperor has no clothesConsider this statement – ‘Taylor and Quayle (2003: 80-83) found that child pornography on the internet was extensively used as a means of achieving sexual arousal and as an aid to masturbation: it was therefore actively used in the paedophile's fulfilment of their sexual attraction to children and in their sexual fantasies.’ Source: Child Pornography Law: Does it Protect Children? Katherine S. Williams, Department of Law, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law 26(3) 2004: 245-261. Let us consider this astounding statement, and the epistemic positions of the people involved with it. They are academics. The first, Max Taylor, a professor in charge of the Copine project at Cork University in Ireland, who is responsible for research into the motivations of individuals who obtain pleasure from child pornography, and who has contributed to the creation of a scale of offences (Copine) used in sentencing offenders.Taylor also presents himself, with good reason, as an expert on child pornography and, through his work, he has managed to access and study images that would land the rest of us, including writers and other scholars, in prison.Katherine S. Williams is also an academic who has written what is arguably one of the best and most objective analysis of the child pornography laws, raising serious questions about their effectiveness in protecting children, and going on to argue that the laws are more to do with implementing a perceived morality than with protecting children.Now let’s return to Taylor and his research partner. They found that child pornography on the Internet was extensively used as a means of achieving sexual arousal and as an aid to masturbation. Can we repeat this? They found that child pornography on the internet was extensively used as a means of achieving sexual arousal and as an aid to masturbation.We may need creatures from outer space to land on this planet and to see how we currently fear the bodies of children and legislate to attempt to control that fear. When those aliens go home they may send us copies of a report that records the remarkable fact of a race of beings, which, under pain of imprisonment, insists that the genitals of their young must be covered and that those young cannot even play at or copy the sexual acts that they commonly observe their elders engaging in.If aliens do not land, we will have to imagine the writings of future historians on the matter. But here and now we do have one device for assessing this extraordinary moral panic. It is called epistemics but we don’t have to study it deeply to appreciate this apparent ‘oxymoronic conundrum’. Epistemics teaches us that we all make meanings at different levels of awareness or within different domains of meaning-making. Ancient man and many uneducated people make them at the level of sense perception and do little abstracting, and this is known as making meanings at Stage 1. The absolutists and dogmatists and many scientists who actually believe that they are ‘objective’ operate at Stage 2 and make the doctrines and laws that control all of us. At higher levels one of the significant achievements in advanced awareness is that we become aware that we are part of the problem we are trying to study and address. The dogmatist and the arrogant scientist at the lower level actually believe that they are objective and separate from the thing that they are observing and judging.Academic Katherine S. Williams is admiring the work of Taylor and Quayle as she reports their astounding statement. But it is not astounding to her as she does not see herself and the other two academics as part of the problem they are assessing, but separate from it, observing and measuring it. In this respect at least, and this may be an exceptional case for her as it does not appear elsewhere in her excellent analysis of the child pornography moral panic, she appears to be making meaning at the level of the doctrine that there can be a disinterested scientist, and not at a higher level where she would question the very method of the other two academics in their making the meaning itself, and where she would look for and accept ambiguity, and reject all labels, especially those with a priori bias, and where she would be aware that she and they were part of the very territory being studied (Korzybski).Consider the judge who excuses himself so that he may study child porn images in his private chambers. Consider the police and prosecutors who collect child porn images and complain over the media about their distress and ‘burn out’, and then we read (April 2005) that several hundred men and women police officers have been caught exchanging pornographic emails to ribald laughter – enjoying it hugely. Consider the parliamentary committee of MPs in Ireland that wishes to sit in judgement on a file of images that may or may not be legally defined child pornography.Truly, the Emperor has no clothes.The criminalizing of beautyWhat better place to begin an examination of the moral panic of child pornography than with works that are patently not pornographic, and are in fact at the other end of a scale where we describe some images as beautiful. We cannot begin, however, without first acknowledging that there are some in positions of influence who declare that what is appropriate for one individual to look at may not be appropriate for others, thus presenting us with a new kind of tiered human morality, aimed at the control of human thought and imagination.This is a practical approach here, beginning with books of images, many of which, while being beautiful, emphasize eroticism. This is the genre often called ‘child nudity’ or ‘child eroticism’ but one should bear in mind that the Western ‘child’ for purposes of defining under agedness can be up to 17 or 18. The books we shall now consider use, mostly female, models below the legal ages, for one good reason that the artist considers their bodies to be the epitome of a special class of human beauty. The advice to anyone seriously studying this question of what should and should not be criminalized as child pornography is to purchase and study these books, all sold through major bookstores and Amazon. Some examples are in the section Beauty is immanent. The only author who does not fully acknowledge the sexuality and eroticism of either children or her own children in her work is Sally Mann, a position which has earned her some criticism. All the others both acknowledge and exploit sexuality and eroticism, and indeed treat them as elements to be celebrated.The chosen authors are David Hamilton, Jock Sturges, Sally Mann and perhaps the most important, as her new book appeared in October 2004, Irina Ionesco with her Eva: Eloge De Ma Fille, which challenges the current absolutism that forbids the depiction of child sexuality by openly publishing a pictorial record of her own daughter’s sexual flowering, with many of the images staged in daring poses and theatrical surroundings.All of these books caused outrage at one time or another, and censors and would-be censors still want them suppressed. There is an irony that while one can purchase them legally in most Western countries, were the same images found on one’s PC, the police and possibly the courts would treat them as criminal child pornography. David Hamilton went from having the status of a great artistic photographer of young female beauty to being reviled. US activists raised raiding parties to attack the bookstores with the works of Jock Sturges and tear them up. Some States even managed to put him on trial, but he was acquitted and his book sales increased. He is sad that the events ‘defined his life’. Once accused, one is always accused. Sally Mann’s pictures of her children were also put on public display and caused storms of protest. Despite this, her work can be found in the most prestigious galleries. As this is being written a new storm over the publication of Irina Ionesco’s Eva: Eloge De Ma Fille is sure to break.All of these books are available now from Amazon at Beauty is immanent. The label of child pornMost newcomers who find this web site do so by searching under the keywords of ‘child pornography’, making it the largest subject category being researched by far.As with sex abuse, the expression ‘child porn’, as widely used in our society, is a label, which signals that its user is employing Stage 2 thinking (see Sex abuse in the main menu for Stage 2). Here also, we are facing a doctrinaire mindset that is difficult to respond to. As with the sex abuse label, this one is used to cover a huge range of images from child nudity, through erotic posing and acting, to simulated and real sexual activity. The oversimplification of the labelling is particularly devastating by its lumping of certain images of all young women under 18, including those sexually mature from 13 on, in with younger children.As with sex abuse, the label trivializes and normalizes as it over-simplifies. If images of beautiful nude children are as much pornographic as those of children being raped, then while the beautiful are criminalized the pornographic are made less criminal.In his The Art of Awareness (p98), J. Samuel Bois says, “A time comes when we see not what is actually there but what we believe is there, because our cultural unconsciousness causes us to believe that it is there. In such cases believing is tantamount to seeing (as distinct from ‘seeing is believing’). In 1964, New York barrister, James Marshall, wrote an article titled The Unreality of Accident Litigation: a plea for a new approach, in which he said, “What an individual perceives is the result of his personality, his environment, and his history, filtered through his experiences." (American Bar Association Journal– August 1964. p. 714.) His plea for a new approach appears not to have been heard.There is a salutary example of the perils of labelling to be found in an attempt of an academic, who sees himself under the label of a ‘child porn watchdog’ to write a comprehensive article about child pornography. Professor Max Taylor, from the organization Copine, based at University College Cork, Ireland, did indeed succeed in writing a very comprehensive article, perhaps one of the best of its kind, using his considerable experience and huge collection of child pornography images, housed at the university. It was considered to be so comprehensive, and so sensitive to the wide range of images available, and so instructive in the ways one could access images and even avoid detection in doing so, that it was adopted and published by the International Pedophile and Child Emancipation group and is on their web site. (http://www.ipce.info/library_3/index.htm/)The thinking process involvedUsing the theories of Alfred Korzybski, made clearer and more practical by Bois, let us examine the process of abstraction used in identifying and judging what is called ‘child pornography’.
The first kind is known as evaluative, using our sense of ‘feeling’, in the way we sense that mother and home are good. This form of abstraction comes not from the image of a child in a sexual or related situation, but from our previous experiences and our cultural assumptions. This emerges strongly in the ideas of the Internet censors who declare that what may be a legitimate image for one to view (picture of a baby in a bath viewed by its parents) may not be legitimate for another (a suspicious stranger without a ‘legitimate reason’ to view the image). This is actually a very interesting abstraction as it is two steps removed from the object viewed. It is an abstraction based on our judgement of another’s abstraction, and as such it has an extremely doubtful basis.The evaluative statement says that something is beautiful or ugly, good or bad, threatening or attractive, but that judgement comes not from the image but from within ourselves. I may see an image of a naked twelve year old girl as beautiful, while my colleagues working on the Internet hotline may see it as an object fanning their hatred of paedophiles, capable of exciting abhorrent passions. Bois says that we make idols of our evaluative generalities.The second level or kind of abstracting is classifying. This unfortunately is labelling, where we say that this is a rich man or a poor man, a bad man or ‘child porn’, with little regard for the potentially wide range of differences within it.The third kind of abstracting is relational. Here we relate what we are seeing, or considering, to other things and to some overall or emerging idea. Here for example, we may examine the possibility that the availability of images of naked children at play or in naturist settings with their families may be good for all of society, and even reduce the likelihood of covert interest in them.The fourth type of abstracting is self-reflexive. Here we are aware of our own role in our relationship with the image. We may find that, instead of it being in all cases the evidence of a crime, it could be natural, funny, a burlesque, or simply beautiful or erotic. Where it is an image of a real crime, we may decide that it could have a value in tracking down the criminal and reducing further crimes of this nature and thus see it through ‘forensic’ lens. If it is a record of incest, we may find it instructive in studying the causes and workings of this unusual expression of human sexuality. If we are poet or playwright, we may want to get a child to act out a part in the interests of a greater good, or if we are a novelist we may want to write about it to produce great comedy or tragedy.Indeed, it is this very self-reflexive ness that may be contributing to our great difficulty with child sexuality, and the reaction of loathing to even the thought of it. At this level of abstraction, we are not a separate entity observing the image; we are participants also in that act of viewing the image. From this it is not hard to understand how what one may see as beautiful may be seen as loathsome by another. The beauty and the loathing are indeed in the eye of the beholder.
The crimen exceptum is central to every inquisition, whether it be heresy, witchcraft, being a Jew, a Red under the bed or today one accused of child sex abuse or accessing child pornography. The crimen exceptum requires the suspension of due process and all real processes of justice. You do not need to be tried and convicted, merely accused.Today’s crimen exceptum of either child sex abuse or accessing child pornography are the most potent of any ever possessed by a phase of the inquisition, which is why the current inquisition is so deadly. The crimen exceptum is already expanding into more general pornography, but here we deal with sex abuse and child pornography, the second the most powerful of the two. As the population comes under more control in the totalitarian state, as in America, the crimen exceptum of inappropriate sex may change to dissent/enemy of the state (heresy). Around the time that this was written, a judge in Arizona sent a 56 year old man with no criminal record at all, father, husband, award winning high school teacher ....to 200 years in prison with no possibility of parole or executive clemency or pardon...what did he do ?? They found 20 images believed to be child porn on his computer. The abhorrence with which child porn is regarded can be measured by this sentence, which is cruel and inhuman by most standards as to put an 56 year old man in prison for 200 years is tantamount to condemning him to a miserable and humiliating death in prison Never to step foot in his house again or to make love tom his wife ever again or to watch his own kids grow old and have kids of their own...no more xmas's no more vacations just the 365 days a year of being constantly vigilant for your life in prison. The sentence passes judgement both on the accused and on the society which sentences him thus.This kind of cruelty in a Western society that has also recently accepted the use of torture for the other crimen exceptum of suspected terrorism demonstrates how close we are to the earlier centuries of the Inquisition that both cruelly tortured its innocent suspects and its non-conformists and burnt them at the stake.
The moral panic to protect children while today’s crimen exceptum of either child sex abuse or accessing child pornography is the most potent of any ever possessed by a phase of the inquisition, that the protection of children should form the basis of a moral panic is far from new. Much thanks is due to the Swedish writer and historian Dick Wase for this section. For the information about the history of the crimen exceptum, thanks was already due to award-winning NZ author Lynley Hood. See her A City Possessed in the Bookstore (menu on left). Also what follows was influenced by the excellent books of American writer, Debbie Nathan, and others.Protecting children from sexual activity is relatively new, but protecting them from child snatchers and witches is not. Dick Wase points out that when they started to hunt Jews in 1173 the claim was that Jews ritually killed Christian children (St William of Norwich), and witches were particularly dangerous because they lured children and then brought them to the Devil. One thinks of the recent moral panic about satanic ritual abuse, which did not exist.Wase also points to a 'child masturbation-panic' that together with other sexually motivated ideas resulted in the burning of girls clitorises and encouraged the circumcision of boys.The first big recent child protection from sex moral panic was the infamous nineteenth century 'White slavery panic’ that feared the seduction of working girls into sex slavery. Interestingly and resonating with the medieval tale above it was the protection of middle class white girls between ten and fourteen, not simply working class or black girls, that became of paramount importance. The feared predators before this age of the paedophile, indeed long before the invention of the label, were the slave-hunters, who were Jews, Arabs and Chinese).The great moral panic of fear of homosexuals in the American administration started in 1947 (right after the war) with an article by Hoover stating that "The women and children of the nation can never be safe as long as the degenerated is running free".Dick Wase also points out that as the homosexuality moral panic faded, child-pornography and child-trafficking arose as enormous phenomena, helped greatly through such books as Robin Lloyd's For Money or Love, in which he claimed that 300,000 boys between the ages of eight and sixteen were prostitutes in America (later he admitted those figures were fabricated, 'to see how society would react'). With help by Judianne Densen-Gerber and Vice-sheriff Lloyd Martin the figures quickly arise to 2.1 million prostituted kids, so that now the panic was a fact through help from newspapers and television. It was also fuelled by psychiatrists, therapists and psychologists who during the sexual liberation in the 1960s and early 1970s had to face falling numbers of patients.Dick Wase makes comparisons here with the 1486 first edition of the Malleus Malleficarum, suggesting that the reason it was written was that Pope Innocentius VIII found himself impotent, and blamed it on the witches, so he gave orders for a hunt for witches. It suited the Inquisition perfectly, because they were having problems finding 'heretics' to burn, but now they could use all their resources to hunt witches instead. Note that the Malleus Malleficarum also blames innocent women for men's impotency.Wase also points out that when the latest moral-panic arose in 1976, around children and sex, the 'psycho-workers', as he calls them, and the social-workers could benefit greatly from it, and suddenly intergenerational sex was seen as the most terrible thing that could hit a child. And, he goes on to say, it still is seen as terrible, despite that for example Ney & Co 1994 showed that children themselves range sexual abuse as the least problem among abuses they have to face (for example neglect and physical abuse they find much worse, but those kind of abuses are often used among evangelical Christians to punish their sinful kids, so naturally you cant create a panic around it, and everyone knows how terrible the sin sex is anyway)".In addition, any age that sees large numbers of stepfathers or boyfriends moving in with women and their existing children also produces an increase in sexual activity of one kind or another with children within their own homes.There are actually some studies that found a correlation between early sexual activity, including sex abuse, and positive later sexual experiences, one being 'The relation between early abuse and adult sexuality” by Meston & co 1999 (1032 students).Such findings are so controversial that one risks censorship and worse by publishing them in any detail. Where a woman finds the courage to admit to such a possibility, she is accused of being the victim of 'sexualisation'.
Thus, it is impossible in today's environment to discuss whether early sexual experiences would be positive to a woman's sexual development,
A good place on this web site to study the current moral panic concerning child pornography is the story about Masha. This is by no means the only source of the information that virtually all of the so-called 'images of child porn' available over the Internet via web sites in the West are placed there by US law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI for entrapment purposes or used in state sex offender assessment and 'rehabilitation' programmes. As no-one, including serious investigating journalists or researchers, is allowed to inspect any of this material, many do not know that most of what is proclaimed to be child porn by the authorities and child protection agencies is old material from pre-1970 erotic and nudist magazines and erotic imagery of over 16 year olds which became illegal only after the threshold age for the legality of such images was raised to 18. Nor are we told that much if not most of the so-called porn images of children consists of nude or glamorous or erotic posing, formerly considered 'cute'. A minority portion of the images depicts children involved in sexual acts.A good question to ask at the very beginning of an investigation into child pornography is why it is considered to be almost criminal, if not so, to question either its extent or the actual extent of any harm it might be causing to children. That such a conversation is taboo should speak volumes. Anyone affected by the issue of child pornography, especially one accused of accessing it, should be aware that the recent major police campaigns of Landslide, Ore, Amethyst and others are collapsing due to police corruption. There are a number of stories HERE.One also needs to be aware that the police control virtually all of the child porn images available over the Internet and use them either in legal entrapment or illegal activities, so if you see an advertisement for child porn it is almost certain to be a police trap or corrupt scam.Beware the bogglywoggly! Every year tens of thousands of articles are published in mainstream media about the great evil of child pornography, and how you will go to jail if you even so much as look at a single picture of child pornography.
BEWARE THE BOOGLY WOOGLY!!
Without even going into how insane that law is in itself, I just want to point to the fact that I have never ever, in all these years, seen a single article that defined what they are talking about! Imagine you said to a child: If you ever touch a bogglywoggly, you will die instantly. And you said this every day, and you never once told him what a bogglywoggly is. Do you think you would have a scared and nervous child? This sounds insane, but nevertheless this is being done all the time, not only to children, but to all of us, in many areas.Courtesy Eolake Stobblehouse.The Emperor has no clothesConsider this statement – ‘Taylor and Quayle (2003: 80-83) found that child pornography on the internet was extensively used as a means of achieving sexual arousal and as an aid to masturbation: it was therefore actively used in the paedophile's fulfilment of their sexual attraction to children and in their sexual fantasies.’ Source: Child Pornography Law: Does it Protect Children? Katherine S. Williams, Department of Law, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law 26(3) 2004: 245-261. Let us consider this astounding statement, and the epistemic positions of the people involved with it. They are academics. The first, Max Taylor, a professor in charge of the Copine project at Cork University in Ireland, who is responsible for research into the motivations of individuals who obtain pleasure from child pornography, and who has contributed to the creation of a scale of offences (Copine) used in sentencing offenders.Taylor also presents himself, with good reason, as an expert on child pornography and, through his work, he has managed to access and study images that would land the rest of us, including writers and other scholars, in prison.Katherine S. Williams is also an academic who has written what is arguably one of the best and most objective analysis of the child pornography laws, raising serious questions about their effectiveness in protecting children, and going on to argue that the laws are more to do with implementing a perceived morality than with protecting children.Now let’s return to Taylor and his research partner. They found that child pornography on the Internet was extensively used as a means of achieving sexual arousal and as an aid to masturbation. Can we repeat this? They found that child pornography on the internet was extensively used as a means of achieving sexual arousal and as an aid to masturbation.We may need creatures from outer space to land on this planet and to see how we currently fear the bodies of children and legislate to attempt to control that fear. When those aliens go home they may send us copies of a report that records the remarkable fact of a race of beings, which, under pain of imprisonment, insists that the genitals of their young must be covered and that those young cannot even play at or copy the sexual acts that they commonly observe their elders engaging in.If aliens do not land, we will have to imagine the writings of future historians on the matter. But here and now we do have one device for assessing this extraordinary moral panic. It is called epistemics but we don’t have to study it deeply to appreciate this apparent ‘oxymoronic conundrum’. Epistemics teaches us that we all make meanings at different levels of awareness or within different domains of meaning-making. Ancient man and many uneducated people make them at the level of sense perception and do little abstracting, and this is known as making meanings at Stage 1. The absolutists and dogmatists and many scientists who actually believe that they are ‘objective’ operate at Stage 2 and make the doctrines and laws that control all of us. At higher levels one of the significant achievements in advanced awareness is that we become aware that we are part of the problem we are trying to study and address. The dogmatist and the arrogant scientist at the lower level actually believe that they are objective and separate from the thing that they are observing and judging.Academic Katherine S. Williams is admiring the work of Taylor and Quayle as she reports their astounding statement. But it is not astounding to her as she does not see herself and the other two academics as part of the problem they are assessing, but separate from it, observing and measuring it. In this respect at least, and this may be an exceptional case for her as it does not appear elsewhere in her excellent analysis of the child pornography moral panic, she appears to be making meaning at the level of the doctrine that there can be a disinterested scientist, and not at a higher level where she would question the very method of the other two academics in their making the meaning itself, and where she would look for and accept ambiguity, and reject all labels, especially those with a priori bias, and where she would be aware that she and they were part of the very territory being studied (Korzybski).Consider the judge who excuses himself so that he may study child porn images in his private chambers. Consider the police and prosecutors who collect child porn images and complain over the media about their distress and ‘burn out’, and then we read (April 2005) that several hundred men and women police officers have been caught exchanging pornographic emails to ribald laughter – enjoying it hugely. Consider the parliamentary committee of MPs in Ireland that wishes to sit in judgement on a file of images that may or may not be legally defined child pornography.Truly, the Emperor has no clothes.The criminalizing of beautyWhat better place to begin an examination of the moral panic of child pornography than with works that are patently not pornographic, and are in fact at the other end of a scale where we describe some images as beautiful. We cannot begin, however, without first acknowledging that there are some in positions of influence who declare that what is appropriate for one individual to look at may not be appropriate for others, thus presenting us with a new kind of tiered human morality, aimed at the control of human thought and imagination.This is a practical approach here, beginning with books of images, many of which, while being beautiful, emphasize eroticism. This is the genre often called ‘child nudity’ or ‘child eroticism’ but one should bear in mind that the Western ‘child’ for purposes of defining under agedness can be up to 17 or 18. The books we shall now consider use, mostly female, models below the legal ages, for one good reason that the artist considers their bodies to be the epitome of a special class of human beauty. The advice to anyone seriously studying this question of what should and should not be criminalized as child pornography is to purchase and study these books, all sold through major bookstores and Amazon. Some examples are in the section Beauty is immanent. The only author who does not fully acknowledge the sexuality and eroticism of either children or her own children in her work is Sally Mann, a position which has earned her some criticism. All the others both acknowledge and exploit sexuality and eroticism, and indeed treat them as elements to be celebrated.The chosen authors are David Hamilton, Jock Sturges, Sally Mann and perhaps the most important, as her new book appeared in October 2004, Irina Ionesco with her Eva: Eloge De Ma Fille, which challenges the current absolutism that forbids the depiction of child sexuality by openly publishing a pictorial record of her own daughter’s sexual flowering, with many of the images staged in daring poses and theatrical surroundings.All of these books caused outrage at one time or another, and censors and would-be censors still want them suppressed. There is an irony that while one can purchase them legally in most Western countries, were the same images found on one’s PC, the police and possibly the courts would treat them as criminal child pornography. David Hamilton went from having the status of a great artistic photographer of young female beauty to being reviled. US activists raised raiding parties to attack the bookstores with the works of Jock Sturges and tear them up. Some States even managed to put him on trial, but he was acquitted and his book sales increased. He is sad that the events ‘defined his life’. Once accused, one is always accused. Sally Mann’s pictures of her children were also put on public display and caused storms of protest. Despite this, her work can be found in the most prestigious galleries. As this is being written a new storm over the publication of Irina Ionesco’s Eva: Eloge De Ma Fille is sure to break.All of these books are available now from Amazon at Beauty is immanent. The label of child pornMost newcomers who find this web site do so by searching under the keywords of ‘child pornography’, making it the largest subject category being researched by far.As with sex abuse, the expression ‘child porn’, as widely used in our society, is a label, which signals that its user is employing Stage 2 thinking (see Sex abuse in the main menu for Stage 2). Here also, we are facing a doctrinaire mindset that is difficult to respond to. As with the sex abuse label, this one is used to cover a huge range of images from child nudity, through erotic posing and acting, to simulated and real sexual activity. The oversimplification of the labelling is particularly devastating by its lumping of certain images of all young women under 18, including those sexually mature from 13 on, in with younger children.As with sex abuse, the label trivializes and normalizes as it over-simplifies. If images of beautiful nude children are as much pornographic as those of children being raped, then while the beautiful are criminalized the pornographic are made less criminal.In his The Art of Awareness (p98), J. Samuel Bois says, “A time comes when we see not what is actually there but what we believe is there, because our cultural unconsciousness causes us to believe that it is there. In such cases believing is tantamount to seeing (as distinct from ‘seeing is believing’). In 1964, New York barrister, James Marshall, wrote an article titled The Unreality of Accident Litigation: a plea for a new approach, in which he said, “What an individual perceives is the result of his personality, his environment, and his history, filtered through his experiences." (American Bar Association Journal– August 1964. p. 714.) His plea for a new approach appears not to have been heard.There is a salutary example of the perils of labelling to be found in an attempt of an academic, who sees himself under the label of a ‘child porn watchdog’ to write a comprehensive article about child pornography. Professor Max Taylor, from the organization Copine, based at University College Cork, Ireland, did indeed succeed in writing a very comprehensive article, perhaps one of the best of its kind, using his considerable experience and huge collection of child pornography images, housed at the university. It was considered to be so comprehensive, and so sensitive to the wide range of images available, and so instructive in the ways one could access images and even avoid detection in doing so, that it was adopted and published by the International Pedophile and Child Emancipation group and is on their web site. (http://www.ipce.info/library_3/index.htm/)The thinking process involvedUsing the theories of Alfred Korzybski, made clearer and more practical by Bois, let us examine the process of abstraction used in identifying and judging what is called ‘child pornography’.
The first kind is known as evaluative, using our sense of ‘feeling’, in the way we sense that mother and home are good. This form of abstraction comes not from the image of a child in a sexual or related situation, but from our previous experiences and our cultural assumptions. This emerges strongly in the ideas of the Internet censors who declare that what may be a legitimate image for one to view (picture of a baby in a bath viewed by its parents) may not be legitimate for another (a suspicious stranger without a ‘legitimate reason’ to view the image). This is actually a very interesting abstraction as it is two steps removed from the object viewed. It is an abstraction based on our judgement of another’s abstraction, and as such it has an extremely doubtful basis.The evaluative statement says that something is beautiful or ugly, good or bad, threatening or attractive, but that judgement comes not from the image but from within ourselves. I may see an image of a naked twelve year old girl as beautiful, while my colleagues working on the Internet hotline may see it as an object fanning their hatred of paedophiles, capable of exciting abhorrent passions. Bois says that we make idols of our evaluative generalities.The second level or kind of abstracting is classifying. This unfortunately is labelling, where we say that this is a rich man or a poor man, a bad man or ‘child porn’, with little regard for the potentially wide range of differences within it.The third kind of abstracting is relational. Here we relate what we are seeing, or considering, to other things and to some overall or emerging idea. Here for example, we may examine the possibility that the availability of images of naked children at play or in naturist settings with their families may be good for all of society, and even reduce the likelihood of covert interest in them.The fourth type of abstracting is self-reflexive. Here we are aware of our own role in our relationship with the image. We may find that, instead of it being in all cases the evidence of a crime, it could be natural, funny, a burlesque, or simply beautiful or erotic. Where it is an image of a real crime, we may decide that it could have a value in tracking down the criminal and reducing further crimes of this nature and thus see it through ‘forensic’ lens. If it is a record of incest, we may find it instructive in studying the causes and workings of this unusual expression of human sexuality. If we are poet or playwright, we may want to get a child to act out a part in the interests of a greater good, or if we are a novelist we may want to write about it to produce great comedy or tragedy.Indeed, it is this very self-reflexive ness that may be contributing to our great difficulty with child sexuality, and the reaction of loathing to even the thought of it. At this level of abstraction, we are not a separate entity observing the image; we are participants also in that act of viewing the image. From this it is not hard to understand how what one may see as beautiful may be seen as loathsome by another. The beauty and the loathing are indeed in the eye of the beholder.
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