I'll bet the real pictures were considerably racier...
But it still should never have gone to trial.
shareHow on Earth can pictures of children playing be "racy"?! I am completely confused by your statement. I'll bet many family albums have pictures of undressed children that are treasured memories. Baby on bearskin or other rug has been a standard for a very long time.
It would take a very warped mind~which the police and the person who reported the pictures obviously have~to see such innocent images as pornographic! No one seems to mind that woman who poses naked children for all of those calendars, greeting cards, etc., do they? Are they going to say that those are art but a person's pictures of his/her own children are perverted?!
"considerably racier..." Minds do not belong in the gutter, but it certainly seems to be increasingly common. *SIGH*
~~MystMoonstruck~~
Well, some people do take erotic pictures of children. Sally Mann, for instance, published legal photo albums of her own children that some people thought were pornographic and it stirred a controversy. The pictures shown in the movie were so innocent that it wasn't plausible to me that there would have been any fuss about them. All I'm saying is that the real pictures may have been more like Sally Mann's pictures, and it's disappointing that the same oversensitivity decried by the movie affected the movie in such a way as to make it implausible (to me). If they really were that innocent, then the reaction was just insane. I don't understand why you've gotten your panties are all in a twist about this.
share[deleted]
That's rather a vulgar way to end your statement.
I'm saying that the name of the thread is questionable. I still say that pictures of children cannot be "racy" or "racier", especially "considerably racier". The movie and the real-life case show that the perversion was in how others looked at innocent pictures. "Erotic"/"eroticism" do not go with the word "child". An adult would have to have problems if s/he saw that.
How sad if people become afraid to have film developed because of pictures such as the one the judge described from his own photo album. A treasured memory becomes soiled by someone with the proverbial dirty mind. It takes a certain frame of mind to interpret those pictures as anything but children having fun. What was wrong with a little girl patting her sister?! They also noted that the pictures were cropped, which has been done in scandal rags to ruin reputations. Now, with what people can do with computers, it's even worse I imagine. Do people have to worry that their photos of playful, happy children or little ones playing dressup or even undressed are viewed by someone with a perverse mind as pornography?
I can't get over this trend of dirtymindedness. I read an IMDb comment about a Forties film in which the character was helping a Scout troop. All of a sudden, this philanthropic person was twisted into someone perverted and called a pedophile! It's a sad statement of the times that purity is mocked and nastiness is seen in everything. Perhaps someday the trend will be reversed.
It is true that children and childhood have been very consciously sexualized through the media. People like Bertrant Russell have written about the need (for the elites) to change the culture in this way, so that the bonds of family would be loosened and the elites would have more power over people at an earlier and more influential age through the media - so in that sense it is basically evil, and I think the "dirtymindedness" you refer to is a result of that. On the other hand, the "good old days" of "Ozzie and Harriet" and '50s purity never really existed, anywhere other than on TV. True, people didn't talk about things like sexual abuse of children in those days, but that doesn't mean they didn't happen with great frequency - they did.
I agree that prepubescent children are fundamentally nonsexual so the word "racy" is inappropriate in that context. Girls first begin to experience sexual feelings at around age 8-9. At that age they are entering pubescence and pictures of them can be and often are "naturally" erotic, imo, because it is natural for girls around that age, to begin experimenting with sexual feelings (not with sex intself) - that is the phenomenon I was referring to in my post, and which is illustrated in Sally Mann's photography. In a way, I think it's healthier that girls feel free to experiment with sexual feelings at that age, rather than in previous generations when adults would have been horrified and girls would supress those natural impulses. So I think there are both positive and negative effects that have come out of the generational changes in sexual expression.
I liked when the judge said he had been looking through his own photo album and wondered what the D.A. would have thought of his pictures of his grandson running naked through the yard sprinklers.
share