Letters to the Editor

They called me a child pornographer I took some photos of my kids naked on a camping trip. A drugstore employee called the police -- and my family's life became a living hell. By Jody Jenkins [2006-07-18]

• Regarding my pedophile customer...

  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?

  -- Linsel Greene (Portland, OR)
  [Read Linsel Greene (Portland, OR)'s other letters]
  Permalink Flag Tuesday, July 18, 2006 02:23 AM
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