Mailbag: Hello, What Is Kiddie Porn?
As you can well imagine, PervScan receives a fair amount of email from both regular and irregular visitors. Sometimes it’s just spam, sometimes it’s a plea for attention from somebody who thinks PervScan will like him or his online doodlings, sometimes it’s a long crazy rant from some patently demented freak, sometimes it’s a hostile letter from somebody who thinks it’s his proper duty to cleanse the internet of everything ungodly and perverted. A lot of this email is amusing, a lot of it goes straight into the trash, and then what’s left is usually rewarding and even stimulating to read.
The PervScan Mailbag is a new feature that is going to draw from this well of weirdness. Whenever PervScan happens to receive an email that it thinks is worth sharing or discussing, it will feature that email here. Accordingly, if you have any particular thoughts or questions that you would like to send to PervScan, you are of course invited to do it — provided you can take the heat of a public response.
The first installment of the PervScan Mailbag features a note sent by frequent link contributor hludens, who wrote:
I’m in a sweat, I checked out the movie 800 Bullets from Blockbuster, and it’s in my DVD player as we speak, frozen on a scene where a young (preteen) boy is lying in bed with a beautiful young whore, and he’s groping, tweaking, squeezing her left breast, following her instructions on how to properly treat a teat. There’s also a next morning scene where he wakes in bed with the whore — who’s naked. The kid’s fully clothed . . . but still…
I’m in a sweat because by any definition in the US I’m in possession of child porn — and It’s not my fault! This movie had no x-rated warnings — nothing to suggest that it contains child porn (I could have gotten a hint from a viewer’s comment on IMDB.com) — but my culpability is clear.
Tomorrow I’m taking the offensive DVD to the DA and making my confession. I suspect I’ll be indicted by a grand jury — it’s a felony charge— and the next time you see old hludens14, it’ll be on the internet sex offender registry.
I’m also going to implicate the Blockbuster chain, as well as the store manager who recommended the DVD. Why should I go down alone?
That’s what I get for going off the reservation and watching a foreign flick.
In a followup email, hludens clarified the underlying issue:
The real question of 800 Bullets is for me — When is child porn porn? Is it okay if it’s on a foreign DVD, distributed through Blockbuster? Is it okay if the kid isn’t nude but groping a nude adult?
Is it porn only if it gets on the internet? If I send you a screen shot of the DVD scene, will you and I be trafficking in kiddie porn? But it’s okay if you rent the DVD from Netflix?
People got in a fucking frenzy over Janet Jackson’s nipple —
Obviously these are excellent questions. The recent film by Nicole Kidman, Birth, raises similar issues. PervScan also remembers seeing a 1970s film by Jean-Luc Godard (title?) in which two parents, radical Marxists, have sex in front of their children in the belief that it’s proper to teach the kids that sex is natural. Are these films porn — kiddie porn? Or are they somehow elevated above the sleaze by the presence of the divine Ms. Kidman in the one case and the cranky M. Godard in the other? Is a film ever porn if it’s got a star or an auteur? Well, then, what do you make of the recent film “The Brown Bunny,” in which Chloe Sevigny gives a (real) blowjob to writer / director / actor Vincent Gallo? What’s the verdict: porn or not-porn?
It would be tempting to say that there is a double standard involved when determining what is or isn’t pornography. But then again, perhaps the truth is that there are no real standards at all. When the judge said that he didn’t know what porn is “but I know it when I see it,” he said it all: what’s x-rated to one man is g-rated to another. And yet, if that’s the case, can any sexually explicit work featuring children ever really be g-rated? Or do the presence of children introduce a sort of moral absolute into the rating of a film?
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