My recollection of japanese is limited, but I did hear one of the girls say

"Oishi desne"

Which means "It's delicious, isn't it"

After which Sutherland loudly says, "YES"

Clever ad actually.

I work part time at an adult bookstore. It's a pretty cool place, with a broad scope of literature which could be described as "counter culture". Books on piercings, tatoos, underground comics, and a significant collection of pornography. We cater to all tastes, selling books which feature erotica of all kinds.

We also carry a modest selection of DVDs and videos which covers a broad selection including japanese anime style porn to Bettie Page pin-up stuff. Recently, I had an older man come in and purchase a couple videos we had which I was totally unfamiliar with.

They were nudist colony videos, and I think they they were from Europe. Initially, I thought it an odd quirk.

"This guy is into nudists. OK. Nothing wrong with that."

But then I realized, it's the only way to legally obtain naked pictures of children. In fact, that's the main reason that the store carries it. They're nudist families, on camping excursions, and playing games, and doing things that any normal family does, just doing it without clothes.

When I came to that realization, just as the man was leaving, it made me feel kind of horrible. But then something else occured to me.

Let's assume that this customer was a pedophile, and he was sexually aroused by children. That is not a crime, in an of itself. People are allowed to be aroused by anything. We may not like it. We may not agree with it. We most certainly don't want it for ourselves, but there's no law against thoughts or feelings.

The children in these videos are not being subjected to any harsh treatment. They're with their families, doing fun activities (I think one of them has them river rafting, while another is like baseball or something), and enjoying themselves. They're safe, not being mistreated, and are among their friends and families.

So, what's wrong with a man utilizing that material for his own enjoyment? There's no victim here. Isn't that a far better result than him lingering around playgrounds or the like?

The reason that child obscenity laws are in place isn't because the world thinks children should always be clothed, but rather because we want to protect children from being taken advantage of, and mistreated.

I guess what I'm saying is, why isn't child services looking at these photos and saying, "These children aren't being abused. They aren't being mistreated. That aren't being taken advantage of."

I explained a couple pages down that I sold a Nudist colony video to a customer who I was confident was interested in it because it included images of naked children.

AJCalhoun responded sayinng,

"The reason I say this is that the guy who buys European nudist videos in order to become aroused by the sight of naked children without "victimizing" anyone is, first of all, victimizing those children by proxy..."

I disagree. This is not victimization. The children suffer no ill effects here.

If I was turned on by sex with animals, and I video-taped two Chimps having intercourse, you'd never claim the animals were victimized.

If I was turned on by women with long legs, and videotaped a WNBA game, you wouldn't consider the women involved victims.

So don't give me this proxy business. That's hollow.

Additionally, you say

These guys (and they are 95 per cent guys - men - males) do not get aroused in a vacuum. They are either firing up or they will progress, in time, to approaching and, if successful, to accosting and, if successful, to abusing - or worse - children like the ones in the videos. It's not some paranoid fantasy. This is fact. They are progressive.

You've presented a slippery slope argument. This is like saying that if you're attracted to young boys, you WILL at some point molest young boys. This makes no sense to me. What makes pedophilia different from any other sexual fetishism? If I'm into bondage, and images of women tied up gets me excited, I don't need heroin to get hard.

Come to think of it, I'm happy to admit that I'll masturbate to images of beautiful women. Women who I'm confident that I'll never sleep with. By your logic, at some point I'll have to fullfill that fantasy. I'll rape some beautiful woman I guess.

When you say, "This is fact." it begs the question, fact based on what evidence?

I'm confident that the 55-60 year old man who purchased this video wasn't planning on taking it home, watching it, "firing up", and heading to the school yard. He was doing the same thing that the guy who I sold the Playboy to earlier in the day was planning on doing, just like the goth gay guy who bought that male-on-male anime porn earlier was planning on doing.

They were gonna take it home and have a nice evening alone.

Personally, I've got no problem with that. And, by the way, you misinterpret me. I had no intention of hiding behind the 1st Amendment. It wasn't part of my argument at all.

I just wanted to go to that extra step, and say that not only do I find the act of photographing children perfectly natural and acceptable within a healthy family atmosphere, but I would even say that if those images were later used for the purposes of arousal, I'd have no problem with that.

I'd have a problem if the parents were insisting that they take their clothes off, or making them feel uncomfortable, or posing them, or telling them to do things like kiss one another.

Whatever the children do naturally, how can photographing that be bad?