Re: Lolitas and Cyber Angels

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 7:16 AM 5/1/96, Will French wrote:

>  I disagree.  If (quite hypothetically) I were one of the
>"models" in such a magazine (I'm 27 now, so I would have been 7
>at the time it was published), I would certainly consider anyone
>posessing a copy, today or 20 years ago, to be exploiting me.

While it may _embarrass_ you, or _mortify_ you, to become aware that these
pictures of you as 7-year-old, I find it hard to understand how my
possession of one of these pictures can (somehow) reach backward in time
and "exploit" that 7-year-old instance of yourself.

Whoever took the pictures may or may not have "exploited" you (an overused
word), but someone viewing that picture today can hardly be said to be
exploiting that 7-year-old.

There is a more abstract argument that is made in connection with child
porn. Namely, that a "market" is created, and that this market is in itself
wrong and improper, and that it abstractly "exploits" an entire abstract
class of people, namely, children. By this logic--and I'm not saying I buy
this logic--even _drawings_ of nude children, for which there were no live
models and hence no possibility of "exploitation" of an actual child, can
be considered to be exploitative of an entire class of persons.

This area is well trod...are morphs of adult models into apparent Lolitas
exploitation? Are drawings exploitation? What about perfectly legal photos
from some foreign country? (Will, what if that photo of you as a 7-year-old
was taken perfectly legally at Sunny Buns Naturist Park? What if it was
taken in Holland or Denmark? Would the fact that you are now embarrassed
(em-bare-assed?) by it, or have discovered that certain people are looking
at it with prurient interest, be enough to make the law "reach back in
time"?


As might be imagined, I am uncomfortable with these abstract extensions of
the law. If this argument is bought, about children being exploited by
drawings or nude photographs, as a _class_ if not as _individuals_, then it
follows by the same kind of logic that _women_ may seek to have "Playboy"
banned because some of them feel "exploited" as a member of a class. (This
is of course being seriously proposed by some women^H^H^H^H^Hwimmin.)

--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
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Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
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