Big Ed's Place

Often, erotica is shoved into a ‘taboo’ corner where it’s unacceptable to be openly consumed or created. Magazines and books don’t come in plain brown wrappers any more, but erotica and porn companies still use neutral sounding monikers for billing and shipping. Due to the opprobrium, most erotica writers use pen names. Additionally, both porn and erotica exploded when it became easy to consume them in the privacy of one’s home. VCR’s meant that people didn’t have to get caught going into adult movie theaters, or endure an unpleasant environment while they were there. Similarly, the internet dramatically increased porn consumption, with porn leading the way in many developments.

One unintended side effect of the disdain and marginalization of porn, however, was that it created a world with almost no limits. It has been like the traditional Japanese concept of shame. Once a Samurai brought shame on himself, well, it didn’t matter how much shame. There wasn’t a gradation going from “bad” to “worse” to “awful.” The line had been crossed and that was it.

But if the line has been crossed and it doesn’t matter, why not take it to the limit? What difference does it make, really, to cheat on your wife twenty times instead of five? Or to spend three days on a drug induced binge instead of one? There are obviously some celebrities in the news recently who’ve made that calculation.

Similarly, porn saw the rabid push to the limits. Rule 34 is proof of that. So is the explosion of some of the most tasteless boundary pushing porn imaginable. If being taboo or being shocking is all you have to differentiate yourself, and there’s no social penalty for being shocking because you’re already across the line, why not go for it?

So… cue the problem with where the line gets drawn. There is a movement in many quarters to bring quality erotica out from behind the line. Or to move the line so that “erotica” doesn’t have the disdain in popular culture. Of course, that’s much of the basis for the erotica vs. porn definition fight. Erotica is on the “acceptable” side of the line and porn is on the other.

Now rather than wade into that fight in this particular musing, I want to go back to my original metaphor and ask–is there really only one line? Or is there more than one? Or is there really a gradient?

And I’ve come to believe there are really two lines. The first is when something gets looked down on socially. The second is when it motivates a section of the population to actively go after the producers.

That second line, in porn, is clearly child pornography. I’ve discussed my views on it previously and don’t wish to repeat myself about how it should be treated. Instead, I’d like to steer into the area of fictional child porn.

In written erotica, or cartoon erotica, there are no actual child victims. It all comes from the creator’s imagination. As such, I believe it should be harmless and, in America, protected under the First Amendment.

But what I think doesn’t matter. I know of several erotica authors who have run into legal difficulties as a result of using pre-teen characters. Red Rose accepted a plea deal after facing criminal charges for obscenity. Frank McCoy chose to fight his, even though it meant traveling from Minnesota to Florida to defend himself. Dorsai was contacted by authorities and warned but not charged. I know of a handful of other cases that have other complications as well (like the authorities actually finding child porn on the author’s computer). All it takes is a prosecutor out to make a headline or acting out of personal moral revulsion to make someone’s life hell. It’s not necessarily a consolation to win the legal case if you’ve been dragged through the mud along the way.

This is, surprisingly, not purely academic for me. I recently had an opportunity to do graphic novel scripts for a new website for pay. Anyone who’s followed my Deep Dish discussions here knows that I would love to do more graphic novels, but having to pay an artist is holding me back. However, the website was going to allow comics that had pre-teen characters involved in sexual situations. Even if I was willing to be associated with a site that allowed that from a personal taste and morals standpoint, the legal jeopardy is too much to risk.

That’s what made me aware of this second line. Post-puberty teenagers–okay, that’s a grey area since the age of consent varies so much. Pre-puberty? Line. Big Red and flashing, for those who see it. And for me–I’m not going to cross it, even by second hand association.

Roger Ebert recently posted about “NSFW” in which he largely decried American puritanism. In the comments section, many people pointed out that the issue was less puritanism than keeping adult material out of the workplace. Some of this was for ‘hostile workplace’ reasons and some was for ‘you’re wasting company time and resources’ reasons.

I think the commenters are right–the issue is far more ‘at work’ than puritanism.

To me, “hostile workplace” is essentially a problem I’d call “not being adults,” which is extremely common unfortunately. There are things that just don’t belong in a work environment, there are things you don’t talk about with people you barely know, and there are things you don’t suggest or do to people who cannot say no. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who don’t recognize those things or who lack the respect to not go there.

For example, I once worked on a project where we were teamed with a different company. The project manager for the other company felt that it was perfectly fine to tell vulgar sexist jokes ‘as long as it was just us guys.’ Sorry, no. We’re not friends, we’re not hanging out by choice, and I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to sit there wondering if I should speak up and object, when I depend on you for funding, or if I should let it pass. There’s a level of respect that needs to be present in professional environments.

Strike that–present in all environments. And respect doesn’t mean following a bunch of ‘politically correct’ rules. It means treating people as people and as individuals and treating them as deserving of dignity simply for being human.

The “wasting time and company resources” issue, though, is a doozy of a problem to actually define. Because the root of the problem is the nature of work. It’s hard to define work in much of our modern world.

Some work is easy to define. People who work on commission, or own their own business, get paid by the job. There’s an exchange of money for a defined product or service, usually with a contract and various laws and regulations to back up that contract.

However, this gets difficult for many jobs where the work can’t be cleanly defined. Take a secretarial job. There are probably hundreds of little jobs that the average secretary does in a day. Writing the job description for those hundreds of little jobs and writing a contract for each of them would be prohibitively difficult, so we lump them together in a more general description and then pay secretaries by the hour.

And that’s where the definition problem creeps in. Are we paying the secretary for having his butt in the chair for 8 hours? Or are we paying him for those hundred little jobs? And what if he finishes those hundred little jobs in 4 hours instead of the agreed upon 8? Or what if that day there are only fifty little jobs to do? Or what if the jobs are arriving at his desk sporadically, so that he needs to be there hours 1-4, 6, and 8, but he’s not doing much hours 5 and 7? Is he stealing if he does something else like surf the web during hours 5 and 7?

Finding fair answers to these questions isn’t easy. It’s further complicated by the way the job definition transfers risk.

The best example of this is salaried employees. If an employee is drawing pay that does not depend on the number of hours they work, their employer is betting that they will have enough work to fill the standard work week. They’re taking a risk here, because if there isn’t enough work, they still have to pay the employee. In contrast, if there isn’t enough work to pay a strictly hourly employee, they may be able to send them home (or get scheduled for fewer hours the next week, which is more common). If there’s actually more work to do than what fills a standard work week and the salaried employee does it, then the employer actually comes out ahead on their bet.

So… what if the salaried employee is ahead of schedule? Can she go home early? Fire up her iPad and websurf at her desk? Use the computer in front of her for websurfing? Yes, there’s are argument that the employee should be taking the initiative and finding more work, but that’s not explicitly part of the contract most times. So is an employee really stealing if they’re not living up to implied but not explicit expectations?

This vagary makes it difficult to know when an employee is using company resources inappropriately and when they’re not. There’s no easy way to say, “well, he would be working if he wasn’t surfing porn” and is therefore worth disciplining. And except in rare circumstances, it’s hard to say “she’s worked hard enough that we can ignore whatever she’s doing privately in her office.”

So, between the vagaries of knowing when it would be okay for people to surf, and the potential for creating a hostile work environment, any company above the smallest is better off with a standard policy. Ebert, since he works largely from home, kind of definitionally meets that ‘small company’ standard, even if he’s technically a newspaper employee. Even if he weren’t, I’m sure he’d be cut some slack on the ‘stealing from the company’ standard since he clearly brings in a great deal of money to the paper. So I’m not surprised he saw the issue as puritanism first and workplace second.

So, with the election over, my experiment in “Blissful Ignorance” officially ended. I actually checked the news online Monday night and then let myself browse a couple of news and sports websites on Friday.

It didn’t feel particularly good.

Yes, I got the information I needed, but I ended up feeling sluggish. It was like I’d overeaten simply because the dessert looked good. Except it didn’t look that good, it had just been put on the table in front of me. It felt like lard coagulating in the arteries in my brain.

It also wiped out a half hour of writing during Friday’s lunch. This did not particularly please me once I realized what had happened.

For my writing time has become more precious these days. I want to write more and I want certain stories in my queue finished. There is no way to do so, though, without simply taking the time to write. So a half hour here or a half our there lost to sluggishness now feels like an affront.

Fortunately, I still managed to plug on the Deep Dish script on other days. I finished scripting pages 41-44 and started page 45. I also hopped around a bit when I was stuck on page 43 and did some panels here and there where I knew exactly what I wanted. Sometimes picking the low hanging fruit keeps the motivation going.

I also realized that, while I talk in page counts for Deep Dish, it might be helpful to put it in word count for comparison. The Deep Dish script in Word in now 84 pages long, and 24,708 words. Given that the full script is 2/3 done and the remaining 1/3 is done at a detailed outline level, I probably will top out between 30,000 and 35,000 words. That means the script is equivalent to a novella itself.

So the fact that it’s taking me several months is actually pretty reasonable, given my pace on fiction just prior to this. I’m not going to pull up the exact stats, but my last 30,000 word story (Fireworks) took me many months to write too.

Anyway, if I want to pick up the pace, it looks like a low news diet might be a great thing to continue. We’ll see how it goes.

It’s been harder to maintain my Blissful Ignorance this past week. The end of the week found me sliding into low energy due to the usual stresses and lack of sleep. We’re in a stage where our toddler doesn’t believe he needs to sleep, and that’s making it tough on his parents. There have been more than one time where I just wanted to zone out and flip to my habitual news sites. I have resisted, though.

The writing continues to be faster as well. I finished the edits on TMI and sent it to Nick. I reviewed the publisher’s proof of Irie no Kaubutsu. I also knocked out the final scripts for pages 37-40 of Deep Dish. I think I could grow to like this pace.

The hard part of the experiment, however, is seeing how upset I really do get when I see political ads now. I haven’t been able to entirely avoid them–when I’m driving I can’t always pull my hands from the wheel to change the radio station immediately. And there was the time I was trying to set up the DVR and failed to mute the TV–catching too much filth disguised as campaign commercials before I could track down the TV remote. It feels like being hit in the eyes with a flashlight after having gotten accustomed to living in a warm cocooning cave. It fucking hurts.

Which implies I’m likely to continue it. My mood’s up and I’m happier? The downsides seem pretty minor in comparison. Besides, I really want to finish some of my queue, and the only way to do that is to find more time. This seems to be one of the ways to do so.

This past week, I decided to conduct a “quality of life” experiment I dubbed “Blissful Ignorance.” From last Monday through the election, I would not check any news or sports websites, nor read the newspapers, nor watch TV news. I’d awoken to how I was so very pessimistic and cranky in my daily life and how much of that was due to my sense that the world’s going to hell. Now since this is a sex and writing site, I’ll skip the political rants and also skip whining about why sports was also bringing me down and just talk about how it’s going.

One week in, the biggest surprise for me is how much checking news or political sites was a habit. I’d read them over breakfast, a handful of times a day, and when I was in the process of procrastinating other stuff. Not doing it has created an unexpected void in my time. Admittedly, it’s not a big chunk of time–five minutes here, twenty minutes there–but it added up to more than I thought.

So some of that has been filled with writing. Despite only have two lunch hours to write this past week, I managed to finish the crappy first draft of TMI and do three editing passes. It stands at 2915 words. I need one more editing pass before I send it on to Nick for his review/edit. That will probably take a while since he has to get Ch18 of Summer Camp out first, but that’s okay by me.

I also completed the full scripts for pages 33-36 of Deep Dish. When I’ve been averaging 2-3 pages a week, to do a little more than that as well as the TMI work is quite heartening. This experiment may be worth it.

It may be worth it for other reasons. I’ve certainly been less cranky this past week. I don’t know if there will be a point where I will regret not knowing what’s going on in the world. I’ve certainly been disdainful of people who don’t follow the details enough to intelligently vote or otherwise participate in the political process, so the biggest discomfort so far has been the sense that I might be a hypocrite here. We’ll give it another couple of weeks to see if I can get over that.

I’m often surprised by people who don’t recognize how powerful the feminine is. By ‘feminine’ I mean feminine energy, particularly when embodied in a woman. The apex of it is of course feminine sexual energy.

Now I do mean feminine and not feminist. The latter is a political/cultural attempt to get women to be seen as more than just their sexuality. At least as it tends to engage me. My personal experience is that people who call themselves feminists rarely are interested in talking to me, and even more rarely interested in listening to me. There’s a political price to this disengagement, which is probably a topic for a different post.

For open feminine sexuality is incredibly powerful. Masculine men (hereafter referred to as ‘men’ or ‘guys’ depending on their maturity/awareness) simultaneously crave it and fear it. We adore it. We love being with it. We daydream about. And part of us is absolutely terrified of being overwhelmed by it.

The Koran says, “God made desire in ten parts and gave nine to women.” It’s used as justification for forcing women to cover up, which is little more than a recognition of how powerful their sexuality is. Similarly, prohibitions against women’s displays of sexuality throughout history would be meaningless if men weren’t afraid of it. You cage the tiger and not the housecat, after all.

Now I believe that a real man could resist temptation and carry on with his life, unlike boys in men’s bodies. But there are few real men in the world, making it in many ways a moot point. But I do recognize and have felt the fear of being drawn and consumed.

But that doesn’t prevent us men from craving women’s open sexuality at the same time. We create and visit strip clubs, which give us a simulacrum of open sexuality. We fall all over ourselves chasing the Mae Wests of the world. We write porn that is full of hot assertive women who crave sex with us, and often with more than us. Just spend some time on storiesonline or other free sites. The female characters usually have that open sexual energy–loving sex for sex and not being afraid to go after it. Also consider, why else would lesbian porn and bestiality porn be exciting to guys? There aren’t any guys in the picture for us to imagine ourselves as. But the thought that a woman likes sex so much that she’d be willing to get it wherever–that’s the draw.

I often think the whole madonna/whore or virgin/slut dichotomy can simply be traced to men’s push/pull fear/attraction of honest open female sexuality. Hookers and sluts let us get a taste of it for an hour or a night without having to live with it day in and day out where it might overwhelm us.

Now of course, I could be way off. I can only speak for myself and my observations, plus some of the men I’ve had honest conversations with about sexuality.

But one observation by Michael Korda made sense to me. He said that most guys can remember that point in their life when puberty played a nasty trick on them. They woke up and discovered girls and their desire for girls. Unfortunately, the girls their age had long hit puberty and were chasing or involved with older guys. Older girls wouldn’t look at them, and the younger girls were too young. As a result, they felt a strong sense of powerlessness.

I know I did. And it was awful, both then and later. To want, and to not know how to get. Why are time travel stories also popular on Storiesonline? I think largely because they provide a way of revisiting that time with the knowledge and therefore obliterating the residual memories of powerlessness. I also consider much of the ‘sour grapes’ behavior I’ve seen in guys in their 20′s as part of this. Some still don’t quite know how to get that energy, so they denigrate it.

But I also learned, in my transition from guy to man, to live with and surpass that fear and sense of powerlessness. After all, it wasn’t the women/girls doing it to me anymore–it was myself.

And as a result, I discovered a richness of living that was previously unimaginable. Being with a woman in the full throes of her sexuality can be like being in a boat in a storm. Yeah, ya gotta hang on, but what a ride! At the same time, just being with women can help me open my heart and feel deeper. A woman embodying her feminine energy can pull me out of my head faster and more effectively than any other trick I know.

It’s amazing, and I’ve come to adore women as a result. Because power is just that–energetic power, neither bad nor good. When we stop fearing it, we can find amazing uses for it. We just have to see what’s there.

Recently, an Italian documentary attacked Italian TV for dumbing down the women it displayed, turning them all into near-parodies of womanhood. Remittance Girl had a very nice post discussing how statistics, marketing, and aiming for the low common mean is likely the cause of this, more than any conspiracies. There’s also a great discussion in the comments section of that post.

But I want to extend RG’s thesis that statistical marketing is driving the homogenization of desire by addressing one key question–why go along with it?

This is not an ‘other’ question in which we discuss how ‘other’ people behave. I’m going to make it personal and say, “why do I go along with such marketing–be it watching the TV shows that dumb down social interactions, buying Playboy and other airbrushed porn, and reading books so full of tropes as to be ridiculous? I do this because I think it’s unfair to talk about how ‘other people’ are stupid, or sheep, or whatever. Aren’t we all guilty of going along from time to time? Foisting it on ‘others’ not only creates a distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’ with the associated snobbish air of superiority, but it also eliminates the ability to change things. I have damn little influence on how ‘other’ people live. I can influence the world through what I do, and perhaps therein make a difference.

So why do I go along with the dumbing down? Sometimes it’s simply laziness. It’s much easier to turn the TV on and accept what’s there than to spend the time looking for something good. Particularly when I’m tired or feeling low. Sometimes I want lowbrow. This is true, for better or worse, in my own porn consumption. Yeah, I like great production values, but sometimes all I want is Penthouse Letters. I’m not sure there’s any way to explain it, other than, even though I’m a foodie, sometimes I want McDonald’s. Maybe it’s the Thanatos impulse at play.

But… if I’m honest with myself, there’s another emotion at play besides laziness, and that is fear. It’s hard to buck the trends when ‘they’ are telling you what’s good and what you want. Popular culture peer pressure is in many ways just two steps away from junior high. I say two steps, because one’s adult peer group (however that is self-defined) is more influential than ‘they’ (one step) and it’s easier to deal with peer pressure as an adult than as a teen (second step).

Am I ‘as good’ or ‘as worthy’ as my peers if I don’t have a hot woman hanging off my arm? Am I a ‘real man’ if I don’t get all hot and bothered when looking at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue? Am I ‘weird’ or ‘queer’ if I think big breasts are overrated? There’s all sorts of self-esteem issues that swirl around and can be abated by conforming to the peer-pressured norm.

Now of course it is possible to resist that peer pressure. One could disengage and try to escape pop culture. One’s personal peers could provide a countervailing pressure to the dumbing down of ‘they.’ Or one could be extremely secure in one’s person.

I’m not. Or at least, I’m not all the time. Sometimes, I’m quite capable of stepping away from the pressure to have my desires conform and sometimes… it’s hard.

But what helps, for me, is to reframe the personal question not in terms of peer pressure, but in terms of alpha and beta males. When I remember to be an alpha male (or Dom, if you want those terms), the temptation to conform is laughable. I am the one setting the standard.

But I don’t always feel like the alpha male. And… dirty little secret, the beta male in me (and in men I know) is less envious of the alpha male than scared to death of being the omega male. If I conform to the pressure, make the innuendo laced comments about the Hooters girl and laud the airheaded newscaster with the deep cleavage, then I know that I’m just like the other beta males. I’m not the omega.

Buying into the homogenization and the dumbing down provides a secret emotional boost that I, beta male, am just a member of the great average crowd. Not the best, but thankfully not the worst.

There’s emotional security in being just a part of the herd.

Getting men to step up into healthy alpha male energy is hard. It’s hard for me, and I’m more conscious of it than most, and even know some tricks to help (it’s amazing how putting on a suit helps me slide into that headspace).

But honestly, I think that’s what it takes, on an individual level. A greater sense that the mean is just that–the mean. And believing that being part of the mean carries no judgment on whether I’m (or any man) an alpha or an omega.

I’d like to think there’s hope in that, for both myself and us as a society. Because the only way I know how to shift the mean is for all of us individual data points to start heading our own direction instead of trying to squeeze toward the security of the middle. We’ll just have to see.

In 1992, Patrick Buchanan gave a speech at the Republican National Convention, in which he said:

There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.

Now I consider this a Kinsley gaffe, which is a politician telling the truth when it’s not in their interest to do so. For I think Buchanan was right–we are in a war. And by declaring it the way he did, he put me on the other side. Up until 1992, I had been a moderate Republican. From the 1992 election on, I have not voted for Republicans. He declared war on me and the party followed suit, which forced me into the opposition. For as I’ve previously blogged, I believe that freedom begins in the bedroom and if you’re going to attack my right to have my own sexuality–well, welcome to the battle.

So why is this today’s topic? Thank Steve Jobs. He recently committed a similar gaffe and said that he wants us all to have “freedom from porn.” It’s been obvious that he didn’t want adult apps in the iPhone store, but now he’s told us why–it’s not a business decision for him, but a moral one.

Okay. One of the dominant technology makers wants to tell me what I can and cannot see, read, or listen to. Jobs is admitting what many of us suspected–he’s a moralistic technology totalitarian. His way, his morality, or you don’t get to play with his devices.

I appreciate the clarity. A friend almost talked me into an Apple laptop the last time my windows based machine crashed. I also admit to being intrigued by the iPhone and iPad. But having declared war on me, saying he wants to give me freedom from what I myself write, he’s made it clear that he doesn’t want me in his world.

I can live with that. In just about all areas, there are Apple competitors that are more willing to take my business and my labor if/when I start doing apps. Admittedly, iTunes will be a bit of a personal loss, but that’s because I’m also not happy with Amazon and I haven’t found a third mp3 source I like. But that’s okay–I’m sure they’re out there and, worst case, a bully is better than a dictator.

Thanks, Steve, for making it clear which side of the technology wars I’m on.

In The Ugly One, John had to teach Billy how to stand up to bullies. It’s a hard lesson–one that I struggled with, and one I hope my kid does not have to struggle with.

For the fundamental problem with bullies is that they don’t respect others. They push others around because they can. Not because the others deserve it (though there are studies that show that they will go out of their way to justify why their victims do deserve it) or because it’ll make the world a better place, but because they can.

This is particularly problematic in intimate relationships. In my uneducated opinion, much of spousal abuse, child abuse, and other dysfunctions are the result of one party sliding into the role of a bully. They push their partners around to get what they want because they can and don’t see the others as true people or loved ones.

Well, frequently bullying shows up in business. Why treat your workers right if you can push them around? That was the attitude in the late 19th century that drove unions into existence and is much of the anti-union backlash today. Walmart has crammed down their suppliers, forcing them to reduce their own profits and give them to Walmart or go under. Microsoft did it to many of their early competitors–shoving them out of business by sometimes shady means. There are many many other examples.

And now Amazon is doing it to me.

The issue is simple. I live in Colorado, if you hadn’t figured that out from where I’ve set most of my stories. Last week, the Colorado legislature passed a law requiring online retailers to collect sales taxes. Amazon retaliated by closing all affiliate accounts for everyone living in Colorado. You can read more about it here and here.

Now, there are arguments that it’s a dumb law or a bad move by the Colorado legislature. I’m not so sure about that. You see, sales taxes are really paid by the purchaser. It’s just been convenient in the past to have the businesses collect them for the government. This was admittedly burdensome in the catalog sales era of even two decades ago.

But these days, it’s trivial. In fact, Amazon itself collects VAT taxes in Europe for the Governments there. They calculate and include sales taxes in the bills for some of their business partners in the states. Target.com and other sites manage to do it. Furthermore, the CO law gives Amazon an out–they can notify the buyers of what their purchases are and tell them to pay the tax. So, Amazon just has to keep track of your purchases over a year (they already do that) and send you a summary at the end of the year (they already send you ads several times a year).

However, by not collecting sales tax, Amazon gets a small price advantage over the bricks and mortar stores that have no choice.

Now, there are some who will still disagree with this law. I myself think it’s a bit shaky to define Amazon as a Colorado business. But the important point is–it has nothing to do with affiliates. Firing their affiliates did not affect the state’s ability to collect the sales tax one bit, unlike similar laws in North Carolina and other states.

It was purely to send a powerful political message to the CO legislature. “Mess with us and we’ll cost your citizens $37million.” In other words, it was the work of a bully.

Furthermore, it was done without any respect for their affiliates. Instead of enlisting them to lobby against the law, or providing advanced notice that they were going to shut down accounts, they just did it. The letter they sent out attempted to blame it on the legislature, but that’s clearly bullshit to me. If you’re being fair to your business partners, you give them warning. You don’t just screw them. That’s the work of a bully–yanking accounts without warning without regard for the disruption (or possibly to intentionally create it?).

Now I had a small stake in this. I was an Amazon Affiliate because I thought folks might be interested in learning more or possibly even purchasing some of the items I review. This certainly wasn’t for the money–I earned a whopping $2.80 from it (though anything that helps defray expenses is good). I saw it more as a service to you, the readers.

For I see this site as being more than the stories. I’ve had a long strong interest in human sexuality and as a result have accumulated a substantial personal library. I also have found films and music that just seem to fit the mood and sense I’ve tried to create here. There’s plenty of porn in the world. There are a lot fewer thoughtful, evocative, sexually themed works that are any good. Reviews are one way I can provide a service in helping sort the good from the bad.

But since this is not a service that my livelihood depends upon, I do not need to put up with bullying. Even if Amazon decides to reinstate their affiliates, I have no desire to do business with them. I will be reassigning my affiliate links as soon as I find appropriate homes. These will first and foremost be businesses that do not have qualms about working with adult sites (unlike iTunes who believes that all adult content must be banned from their store and from the iPhone). Second, they will preferentially be Colorado-based companies. We locals gotta stick together when we can.

Anyway, I realize that nothing in this post is particularly sexy or illuminating. It’s much less of a ‘musing’ as a polemic. But thanks for understanding.

So it’s time to talk about Child Pornography, or Kiddie Porn. It’s one of the few remaining enforced taboos in America, both legally (since possession of kiddie porn is a crime) and in popular culture. Want to have a kick the dog moment in a crime drama? Have the cops discover kiddie porn in the bad guy’s apartment. On the flip side–want to have the ultimate lure of the taboo? Include some underage sex, particularly incestuous underage sex. Kiddie porn is an easy gut wrench.

But is it reasonable to be such a taboo? I think yes, but not in the way it’s too often applied. The problem is that it’s seen as an evil in and of itself. There are arguments that it’s a slippery slope to child abuse, but solid reputable research backing this up is difficult to find. After all, people aren’t automatons where viewing something immediately leads to trying to duplicate it.

But what is reasonable for its opprobrium is that the act of making child porn is an act of rape. The child cannot consent to posing for nudes, sexually suggestive pictures, or, at the extreme, pictures of them engaged in sex (which they also can not consent to). I believe that consent is paramount and fundamental to sexuality and my political world view stems in a great part from that (see here).

So why not treat it that way?

Pictures of a rape are, legally and morally, not distinguishable of pictures of other crimes. Consider snuff films, depicting a murder, or crime scene videos, depicting a robbery. If these come into someone’s possession, they have a moral and legal responsibility to turn them into the authorities so that they may attempt to catch the criminals. Failure to do so is withholding evidence; i.e. aiding and abetting the crime. So how about prosecuting the person who possesses kiddie porn as an accessory to the crime, rather than with possession?

Doing so would have some substantial benefits. For one, it would focus the attention on the actual crime. As long as ‘possession’ is the crime, it’s too easy to conflate having kiddie porn with ‘possession’ of pot, or ‘possession’ of an unregistered firearm. Possession crimes are frequently not seen as morally problematic so much as a disagreement with the government. Prosecuting for ‘accessory to rape’ moves the focus back to the victim–it’s not the state vs. Joe Porn Addict. It’s the state going after John Rapist and prosecuting Joe Porn Addict for not helping.

Which of course is the second benefit. If someone happens to find or come across some Kiddie Porn, they’d have a lot more incentive to turn it in. There’s no crime if they make a good faith effort to help catch the rapist. The potential plea bargaining options are also obvious.

Now that said, note that ‘accessory’ can still carry serious prison time, if it’s warranted. There’s even a case in Colorado where a woman got life without parole for failing to tell the police where her boyfriend was (just before he killed a cop). There’s also a current case in Wyoming where a guy duped another man into raping the first guy’s ex-girlfriend. Even though the first guy didn’t do the rape, he’s looking at serious hard time.

The point is, we already have experience in the legal system using accessory charges to separate the bad guys from those just caught up in something they shouldn’t be.

The third benefit is that it stops the criminalization of porn where there is no victim. This post in part is inspired by the Chistopher Handley case where a guy got six months in jail for buying ‘obscene’ cartoons.

Cartoons.

Where is the victim in a cartoon? Where is the child that could not give consent? And how much money and effort are we spending going after someone when there is no victim (to the expense of going after others)?

Furthermore, it’s clear that kiddie porn gets used as a ‘camel in the nose of the tent’ argument by those who wish to control the sexuality of others. As long as we concede that there exist materials–cartoons, writing, etc–that are ‘obscene,’ then all we’re arguing over is the definition of obscene. That argument, of course, cannot be won, as it ultimately comes down to Justice Potter’s line, “I know it when I see it.”

But prosecuting kiddie porn possession as accessory to rape eliminates the entire obscenity argument. Now obviously as a writer of erotica, I kind of like that because I’m less likely to be on the wrong end of a prosecution. But the obscenity argument can go the other way too. Imagine a photographer who takes Mapplethorpe style pictures of a 14 year old, but gets a judge or a jury to agree that they’re beautiful and therefore have artistic merit? That means they’re not obscene and this fictitious photographer, plus all the people who own copies of the picture, go free.

But if we bring Child Porn prosecutions back to what they really are–accessories to rape–this does not happen. Instead, it all becomes simple. It’s simply about the crime of doing something to someone who could not give consent.

Now I’ve gone through this entire post focusing on the legal prosecution, but I want to also point to another novel way to deal with child porn and the real crime involved: suing possessors. A woman is suing individuals who download pictures of her abuse (here). I agree with the article that the legal grounds for collecting from someone for additional victimization are new terrain. As a result, I am troubled by the possibilities of where it could go. However, I like the idea for two other reasons. First, there really is a victim here, so we’re not talking about a hypothetical case or obscenity issue. The very nature of the suit forces the case to focus on that fact–that a crime was committed. Second, I like the implied ownership of the images aspect. Since she didn’t (and couldn’t legally) sign a model’s release, she’s implicitly asserting claim to ownership of the photos of her. This makes it an ownership case as much as a criminal damages case.

But civil or criminal, we’re doing ourselves a disfavor as a society to get all worked up about ‘child porn’ as something nasty and evil and obscene. We’d be far better served going after the real crime–the rape involved in creating it–and leave the rest to the side.