Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

You wouldn't think that would be ambiguous.

Well, no.

While I am hardly a disinterested party, all I can say right now is Hooray!

Now maybe we could concentrate on all the other things facing our kids: insane foreign policy, failing schools, chronic hunger, danger in their homes, and some slightly more pressing issues.

It is, apparently, a foreign notion to some people that parents ought to be involved enough in their children's lives to know something about the books they're reading, the TV shows they're watching, and the Internet porn sites they're visiting.*

What laws like the one mentioned do, in effect, is to make the whole of society responsible for enforcing the values of a certain subculture with regard to the moral upbringing of children. Hey, folks, you don't get to dump that on me. If you want to bring your kids up to believe that sex is filthy, that queers and Jews and people who believe in evolution are going to Hell, and that is's okay to ban books from libraries because you don't like magic and flying broomsticks and you don't think anybody should read about them, you'll have to do it without my participation. If you want me to participate in the moral upbringing of your kids, I get a say in what morals I'm going to model.

*Or maybe it's just the idea that other parents or other adults might not have the same issues they do with those media when they so clearly ought to that gets them upset.

Damn! Something needs to be done about Fuzzy Internet Porn! I demand that my porn be in focus, and in high resolution.

Wait...what? Oh.

Teresa, you had me pretty confused. I knew the internet went back a long ways, but I was pretty sure that we didn't actually have "commercial Web publishers" to write laws about in 1988.

Then I clicked the link and read that the Act in question dates from 1998. You'll probably want to change the tens digit in your post accordingly.

OTOH, the typo did get me to click the link....

Bravo, Teresa!

Heather Corinna, the founder of the teen sex-ed site Scarleteen was involved in this court case and has done a write-up of the result on her blog: http://www.femmerotic.com/journal/2007/03/22/music-and-passion-were-always-the-fashion-at-the-copa/

"Know what that is, my friends? That is myself, my fellow plaintiffs — and specifically, myself, Salon and Nerve; stated to have standing and a credible fear of prosecution — and our fantastic ACLU lawyers and support staff soundly kicking government ARSE."

If your kids are watching Internet porn, fuzzy or not, that's your bizness, Mom and Dad. Fix it in your own house first. The folks who passed this law are the same ones who wouldn't pass the Violence Against Women Act.

You know who owns the most profitable adult porn distribution business in the country? A T & T. Just sayin'.

You know, personally I like protect children by not having casual hookup sex with their married fathers and then selling parlaying it into jobs that keep me in the public eye. I don't actually expect anyone to pay me for it.

Is the public going to find out what politicians and lobbyist that madam in the DC area was servicing?

The social conservatives will just counter with their trump card, the "Stop Doing That or You'll Go Blind Act of 2008."

Aconite #4: Or maybe it's just the idea that other parents or other adults might not have the same issues they do with those media when they so clearly ought to that gets them upset.

I suspect that that is a lot of it. I've been waiting for legislation that declares that parents who bring up their children to be atheists are committing child abuse -- it would, after all, be consisent with everything else the American Hizballah has been promoting.

So that's what they mean by "Blind Justice."

Had a thinko for a second there. I read it as:

Furry internet porn law struck down

So if we just make Internet porn unavailable, teenagers will stop thiking about sex? And acting on those thoughts? How dumb do they think we are?

I am so glad that I had no access to naughty stuff in the pre-internet days of the 19th Century.

Having two in-house children, I'm constantly underwhelmed by all the fear-mongering about children accessing porn on the net. Twice my kids' accounts have been sent porn-related spam (which they deleted with cries of "Eew!"). Both times I sent replies noting that the material had been sent to the underage, and to delete the kid's address at once. And two occurrences does not an epidemic make.

Kimiko #15: I read the headline that way too, at first. Not enough coffee yet, I guess.

It's ridiculous to blame parents for their children accessing internet porn. The vast majority of teenagers with internet access will have done so - if yours claim otherwise then they're almost certainly lying! Of course, it probably won't do most of them any real harm, but I can't see it can do them much good, either. The view of women showcased in the vast majority of porn is hardly progressive and, at the very least, call me old-fashioned, but I don't want my daughter growing up thinking it's compulsory to rip out her pubic hair at the roots!

There is a definite connection between the GOP's pornography obsession and the AG firings. Part of the cooked up "performance reasons" for 2 of the fired AGs were that they would not take obscenity prosecutions that Gonzales' DOJ wanted them to.

There's a brief mention here in the L.A. Times and I'm looking for a longer article I saw.

It also mentioned that the DOJ in Utah or Nevada was trying to prosecute a video store for renting some adult videos which were also being rented and sold in a video chain owned and operated by the US DOJ due to receivership. The defendant's lawyers were arguing for estoppel in that case.

You're right, Helen. It's ridiculous to think that the average parent in the United States will take any responsibility for teaching their children what's okay and what's not. I mean, clearly that stopped happening sometime in the '80s.

(</sarcasm>)

There's always one, isn't there? Sure, of course a lot of teens are going to sneak a peek at boobies online, just like a lot of teens steal their dad's Playboy or try to convince the guy at the 7-11 to sell them a Maxim. And if the supporters of such laws only said the word 'teens', that might be somewhat relevant (though still not enough reason for said laws), but laws like this -- while they no doubt include teens in their definition of 'kid' -- are actually supported mainly by the same sort of people who will tell you that every 9-year-old who uses Google is gonna see porn, because it's that gosh-darn pervasive.

But it's still not the providers' responsibility to do anything but clearly label their site as adults-only and maybe try to keep the search engines off the interior content and pointed to a relatively harmless front page, and I'm not even sure the latter is even so much a responsibility as a nice additional touch, though that's really besides my point here.

It is, however, a parent's responsibility to explain to their children what the parents think is acceptable and unacceptable. It is definitely the parents' responsibility to monitor their younger children's use of the internet, and to monitor or restrict older kids if the kid can't be trusted. The government is not responsible for it; I am not responsible for it; the web-porn industry is not responsible for it. Period.

If you -- this is the general 'you', here, not just Helen or anyone else, okay? -- object to your kids seeing adult images, that's fine; I agree there's a limit to what's okay for any given rough age group, though I think my definition of 'okay' is unlikely to be the same as any other given person's. But if you can't be bothered to try to instill those values into your kid, that's not my problem. And if your kid can't be trusted to obey your restrictions, well, that isn't my problem, either. Nor is it anyone else's but yours.

There's a strange and frightening thing that's been happening in the States in the last 20 years or so. Larger and larger numbers of parents seem to have decided that it is not acceptable for them to refuse any demand from their children. If you look at advertising, for instance, you'll see many ads in which purchasing is pushed by telling the parent in effect, "Well, if they ask for it, you have to give it them." So some of this is coming from the indoctrination that advertising does, but I doubt that's the only source.

Of course this results in some monumental discipline and behavior problems, but set that aside for this discussion. What it means is that if the parents want the children protected from something, or not allowed to get to it, then some agency outside the family must take that responsibility, since the parents aren't allowed to refuse the children access themselves.

Crazy, isn't it?

It's ridiculous to blame parents for their children accessing internet porn.

It's equally ridiculous to blame the content providers, or to think that if parents can't keep their kids from finding porn that the Law will somehow be able to do it.

Of course, requiring a credit card as proof of age is pretty ridiculous too.

I have some sympathy for what Helen is saying, though I'm gleeful that this pig-ignorant law has been struck down. I'd even go so far as to say that we have a culture that makes it difficult for parents to cope, much less be as involved in their kids' lives as everyone seems to want and expect.

Of course, about the point that the social conservatives are reaching to welcome me into the fold, I like to cheerily point out that the root of this problem is that we expect people to be at work too much and we shortchange their families for that time, and what we really need to do is cut the full-time work week to between 20 and 30 hours (while ensuring that anyone who works this full-time week is paid a living wage), remove one of the major obstacles to entrepreneurship/strains on the family (take your pick) by expanding Medicare to cover everyone, and overhaul the structure and funding of public education--moving to a schedule that is more accommodating (ooh, thank you for the spelling reference! My brain shut down on that one) of working parents and providing a more uniform base quality of education by removing funding dependence on local property values.

By that point, they usually look a little greenish, like they found half a worm in their apple. I'm not sure why--it all seems perfectly reasonable to me.

asalfi @24
All of those changes you suggest would address the root cause of the problem, not its consequences.

Along with the free market ethos comes, I think, a legislative philosophy that is more reactive than proactive. Think about drugs policies that focus on punishing dealers and users rather than tackling the reasons people end up addicted.

On the one hand, it displays a touching faith in the idea that people will, if given the freedom to act unconstrained, do good and interesting things often enough that it's worth the human cost when they do stupid things.

On the other hand, it seems to ignore the reality that prevention is cheaper, easier, and generally less damaging than cure.

I still recall my first discussion with an NHS doctor in Britain, when I found out that birth control pills are free there. "It's cheaper than doing abortions*," he said, "And much less controversial."

-----
* this is not an invitation to discuss abortion on this thread.

You know, as a parent, it might be nice to have some effing support once in a while rather than be told "it's your problem, you go out and fix it (and heaven forbid your kid ever does anything wrong because it will be because you were such a crappy parent)". I -- and every parent I know -- am trying to raise decent human beings in a society that gives lip service to how wonderful parenthood is but when the rubber hits the road treats it like raising championship springer spaniels.

And as far as accessing internet porn? For most parents it probably is difficult to keep a determined kid from finding it. Two of my three kids are more computer-savvy than I am (the other is ony ten) and there are times they are alone in the house. Any intelligent kid (and mine are no slouches) will wipe his browser history if he's been doing anything at all suspect. And I'm at home, so I am able to keep a close eye on what my kids are involved in; not every family can afford that.

Do I think this law was the answer? No. It's too vague. I think creating shorter work weeks and workplace situations where parents can spend more time at home with their kids is a better answer, but then pigs haven't grown wings yet.

And Bruce? Yeah, "parents are unable to refuse their kids's demands"? Of all the parents I know, only one fits that description. Her friends are really worried about her kids. Most of the parents I see like that I see on television -- MTV is a goldmine of parental stereotypes.

This is great news, but not unexpected.

I have mixed feelings about filtering software. Most of it blocks alternative religion sites as well as porn. The completely porn-free COG website is on the block lists, for example.

I happen to think there are limits even on parents' right to decide what their kids see. How to decide exactly what those limits should be is a conundrum I don't have a good answer for, but I do think kids (however young they are) should have the right to find out about religions other than the one their parents practice.

Kids want to do everything (including cross the street by themselves when they're two). Parents want to protect their kids from everything (including some things the kids are more than capable of handling). I try hard to keep my mouth shut when I think the line is being drawn in the wrong place; I'm not that kid's parent, I don't know if what they want to do is really an excuse to do something more dangerous, and I've heard plausible arguments suggesting that unreasonable limits are essential to kids' healthy maturation.

I think our whole society has an extremely unhealthy attitude toward sex, and that it might be better to pretend to be more matter-of-fact about it than we really are, so the kids can grow up with that attitude for real. I know lots of people who were raised non-racist by internally-racist-but-against-racism parents in that way. But I won't tell any specific parent what they ought to do in that regard, and not just for my personal safety!

Teresa, I think there's a typo in the penultimate paragraph. Isn't it reductio ad absurdum?

I get the willies when I see adult women in the local supermarkets from cultures that have cultural dress codes that cover women from their heads to their toes, leaving only their faces and their hands below the wrists unshrouded by voluminous amounts of cloth going otherwise from the top of their heads down to nearly hiding their feet. Their young daughters aren't similarly shrouded, but adult women.... I do NOT like it. I tell myself that they have the right to coverup, but nonetheless it horrifies me and squicks me. And it's out there in public, spreading memes and showing approval for what rightly or wrongly signals/implies to me status for women of sequestered possession with self-determination outside of the equation.

I see the annual Sports Illustrated softcorn porn issue and blow internal fuses, porn as porn is one thing, the Sports Illustrated gratuitous objectification is about as honest and decent as Libby Scooter's testimony that landed him conviction for lying under oath and obstruction of justice. The Sports Illustrated approach pretends it it not porn and claims privilege and doesn't get treated as porn--it to me in infinitely more objectionable and offensive and dangerous, because socially it has approval and gets treated as socially acceptable and proper--unlike porn which doesn't get relabelled as "sports." What models with no muscle mass have to do with sports as other than certain soft of sex fantasies by people attracted to models, I don't comprehend...

Another example of absurdly reductionist consequencesis the Digital COpywrong Act -- you know, the one where it seems the RIAA and MPAA can trump long established copyright law (nope, you *cannot* make that copy of that DVD so you can have the content after the original is scratched past usability) or simple market forces (Well, we don't *have* to actually protect our trade secrets, because we'll just sue when someone comes up with a way to use *their* independently-manufactured ink cartridges in he printers we sell) (oh, and using the digital copywrong Act we can also do an end-run around those pesky anti-trust laws, too)_

Feh.

But I'm glad this silly "child protection" law is gone.

And the cons should have given this the heave-ho long ago, if they were honest -- because the damn thing *didn't work!*

pat greene @ 26: You know, as a parent, it might be nice to have some effing support once in a while rather than be told "it's your problem, you go out and fix it (and heaven forbid your kid ever does anything wrong because it will be because you were such a crappy parent)".

You know, I didn't say that. What I said was, "You don't get to tell me that I have to back up your values with your kids even if they aren't my values."

Parenthood is hard. It's damned hard. We don't talk nearly enough about the realities of parenting to our young people so they can make intelligent, informed decisions about it before they decide whether or not to become parents, and parents get screwed over in a hundred thousand ways by a society that, as you say, gives lip service to how great parenthood is while not supporting actual family-friendly policies.

None of that changes the fact that your choice to have kids shouldn't mean that my rights are restricted in order for you to raise your kids the way you want to. You don't get to have it both ways: That I have to help you enforce your decisions, but get no say in those decisions. Your children are not my children, and my life does not revolve around what is best for your kids.

I firmly believe that one of the hallmarks of adulthood is that one takes responsibility, to a greater or lesser degree, for the children in one's society. That does not mean giving up things that are entirely appropriate for adults simply because kids might come across them, intentionally or not. Your child's rights do not trump mine simply because your child is a child, and I refuse to live in a world designed according to what you feel is appropriate for your kid.

If your kid is determined to shoplift lipstick, the solution isn't to keep lipstick behind the counter and sell it only to people with age-appropriate ID. If your kid is determined to go behind your back and view porn, you're just going to have to figure out a way to deal with whatever the underlying issue is. I'm not sitting in the corner because your kid won't behave.

Helen, thank you for calling me a liar. Even though I had net access, I did not look at porn on the net until I was well into my twenties.

pat greene @ #26:

I -- and every parent I know -- am trying to raise decent human beings in a society that gives lip service to how wonderful parenthood is but when the rubber hits the road treats it like raising championship springer spaniels.

Actually, there are pretty fierce guidelines for raising champion dogs.

Whereas, it sometimes seems to me, this most important of jobs, ie parenthood, is engaged with wildly conflicting information and less training than a sane employer would give truckdrivers.

True, results of child-raising are not guaranteed, and mistakes will be made, but neither Full-time Custodial Parents Sealing Child Into Bubble Until Age 18 nor Expecting Mass Innocence Maintenance By The World make viable child-rearing strategies. I do grant that the curriculum for Parenthood 101 would be deeply problematic.

I speak as a non-parent who, however, found her father's stash of Playboy just before puberty. (I never asked whether he noticed, and can't now.)

pat greene @ 26

You know, as a parent, it might be nice to have some effing support once in a while

I was definitely not trying to point fingers here. I was talking about a how the societal norms for raising children seem to be changing: that it's considered OK for parents to do this.

As for "some effing support", yeah, I know how that goes. My wife and I had to raise a boy who had ADHD and ODD back in the 70's and 80's when most counselors and psychiatrists did not believe there were such things. Hell, it took almost 12 years to get a diagnosis, and then we were told "that's what he is, and we're not going to help you at all; deal with it." Well, we did, but it was touch and go for a while. One counselor gave him odds of 1 in 6 of staying out of juvie. He stayed out, he went to school, he eventually worked his way through college, got a PhD and is now teaching at LSU. But the only way that happened was that just about everything else in our family got put on hold for 20 years. The fact that we're still happily married constantly amazes me.

Of all the parents I know, only one fits that description. Her friends are really worried about her kids.

I assure you such parents exist. I don't know many such, because they're not generally the kind of people I'd be likely to socialize with (and besides, most people with kids at home are a lot younger than me). I do see such people a lot out in public, especially in stores.

I really don't see that this will make all that much difference. Porn sites aren't going to stop asking for a credit card number because that's what they are there for - to make money.

pat@26:

You know, I'm actually sympathetic to the idea that it's hard to raise a kid. There's a reason why I don't have kids, and it's because I don't have the patience to deal with them 24/7. I babysit periodically or spend time with friends' kids, and that's about my limit.

Kids definitely take a fair amount of time and energy to cope with. And yes, give them rules, and they will test those rules to the breaking point... and yes, we're living in a time where kids frequently know more about computers than their parents, though that's changing. All of this is true.

But none of that changes the fact that, ultimately, it is your responsibility what you teach your kids and how you handle their transgressions.

This isn't about kids who grow up badly and pointing fingers about it, and nowhere will you find me saying that every bad or inappropriate thing a kid does is definitely their parents' fault. It happens. Kids misbehave, and sometimes even the best parenting can't keep them from doing something boneheaded or mean or misguided or illegal or immoral. But it is about where responsibility for certain things lay, and on that point, I'm inflexible: parents are responsible for teaching their kids what they feel is appropriate and what isn't, and parents are responsible for checking up on what their kids are doing with their time.

If a parent feels they cannot trust their child to abide by their computing restrictions, the answer is not to make a law that says everyone else has to be restricted so the kid can't be exposed to whatever it is the parent objects to. The answer is, in fact, nothing involving making completely uninvolved people change their behavior. The answer is to take away the privilege of the computer. It's simple. It's straightforward. And it will work: your kids aren't viewing porn online if they aren't online.

And that is why I'm so annoyed by laws like these and why my reaction is to be annoyed at the parents (and non-parents!) who support them. I understand that you don't, but that's the topic, so it's what I'm discussing.

When I was a kid, that's what happened if I didn't do what I was supposed to or did what I wasn't: I lost privileges. My friends? Yeah, them, too. I bet it's true of a lot of people here, in fact.

A computer is a privilege. Being online is a privilege.

If you want to know why I nodded when I read Bruce's post@22, it's the very fact that I see too few people for whom this is straightforward, and too many people for whom the answer to their problems is to support laws to make other people change how they act so they don't have to put their foot down with their kids.

I think it's good that you and the people you know are sufficiently good parents that you don't believe the behavior is widespread, but unfortunately, it's not just a phenomenon on TV. There are certainly plenty of good parents out there still, thankfully, but I see more and more often examples of overly permissive ones, unfortunately.

I see comments like these, and my hackles rise.

I do see such people [parents who don't say no to their kids as much as Bruce would like them to] a lot out in public, especially in stores.

There are certainly plenty of good parents out there still, thankfully, but I see more and more often examples of overly permissive ones, unfortunately.

Can we cut back on the parenting drive-bys, by any chance?

Among the things this society is intolerant of is the tendency of children to be rowdy (like children so often are) in public. How many parents feel pressured into bribing their children into silence when they throw tin-plated tantrums in shops? I may not give in to the impulse myself, but I certainly feel the glares.

But unless you know the family personally, you don't know how representative of their parenting the slice of behaviour you've seen is. Don't make assumptions, or generalities, without better evidence.

That line about `contemporary community standards' is the killer, isn't it? That's a grey area, depending on who you talk to...

Aconite 30: Hear, hear.

The economics of porn sites aren't as obvious as some might think. There are free sites out there, with no apparent effort to check on ages, and very little obvious advertising.

I saw a recent report that suggests such sites are effectively advertising-funded, but the advertisers are the porn sites that provide the material. The whole porn business is a web of referrals, where if you send somebody to a paysite you get a share of the payment, and the paysites will happily refer viewers to other sites.

What turns you on is not necessarily the same as what turns me on, and better to get a share of a referral than all of nothing.

And the site that are doing this free-access thing don't seem to be paying much attention to the general laws, such as proof-of-age for viewers and for the people in the pictures.

They're probably relying on something similar to the reasoning behind this notice:

"The owners and operators of this website are not the primary or secondary producer (as those terms are defined in 28 C.F.R. 75.1(c)(2)) of any of the visual content contained in this web site. The operators of this web site rely on the plain language of the statute and on the well-reasoned decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Sundance Associates, Inc. v. Reno, 139 F.3d 804, 808 (10th Cir 1998). This case held, inter alia, that entities having no role in the "hiring, contracting for, managing, or otherwise arranging for the participation" of the models or performers, are exempt from the record-keeping requirements of 18 U.S.C. 2257."

(That's on a site where I've posted furry porn.)

abi @ 36

If I put anybody's teeth on edge, I'm sorry. I was specifically not blaming any parents, but saying that it seems to me more and more acceptable in the consensus culture to treat children in this way. When the norms change it becomes very hard for parents to buck the flow. A large part of a child's growing up is entirely outside of the parents' control, and the expectations are something a child is usually eager to hold over the parents' head. Sometimes it's a completely no-win situation for a parent. As I said in my last post I know where that's at.

Therese, Helen said "the vast majority," not "all".

Pat Greene, I'd happy to give you some support, effing or otherwise. This bill wasn't something you wanted, was it?

Kids have moral agency. That means they can screw up. It doesn't mean you're a bad person. I assume from your reaction that you've run into people who've told you that you are.

I hear that happens a lot. What I find weird is how often it's reportedly done by parents who aren't following the guidelines they're implicitly laying down in their criticisms. I've started to wonder whether the meaning of parent-vs.-parent critical drive-bys isn't "These are the principles I follow in rearing my own children," but rather, "This is how I'd like to think of myself."

Somehow this connects for me to a recent datum I heard, which is that the great majority of parents who say they support prayer in schools don't pray with their children in the morning, on school days or otherwise.

abi, I'm sorry if you were offended by my comments. But on the other hand, could you do me the favor of not assuming I'm only talking about random parents I don't know?

My actual friends may mainly make good parents, but I do actually have experience with roommates, acquaintances, neighbors, and yes, even former friends who meet my definition of "overly permissive". Believe me, I came to the decision about not having kids due to experience with lots of kids and their parents.

And, as I said, I do know that no matter how good the parent, the kids don't always behave. That's really not my issue, here.

Xopher, #27: The completely porn-free COG website is on the block lists, for example.

Do you mean http://www.cog.org/ or some other site? I'd like to double-check the filter I helped build and, if necessary, see if I have any strings left to pull to get it fixed.

Dave Bell, #39: The economics of porn sites aren't as obvious as some might think.

Yeah, what he said. Besides the definitely-affiliated portal sites, there are, just off the top of my head:
1. extortion sites: find a domain that's close to a school or church's domain, or that used to be a school or church's, and put up a porn site. Wait for them to offer you money to take it down.
2. hobby sites: amateur photographers, wanna-be models, exhibitionists
3. weblogs by people who like smut
4. personal smut caches never intended to be discovered, but found nevertheless

paula @ 28

Did you read about this year's Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition? The publisher decided, without notifying them, that the 21,000 paid subscribers identified as libraries or classrooms would not receive that issue this year. (More info at Library Journal and NYT.)

At the moment the main reason I want to keep pornography away from my daughter is that I'm afraid she'd run around the house waving it in the air and shouting "book! book!" and then she'd rip out the pages and eat them. But trying to imagine what it'll be like in a decade or so...

A law like this certainly isn't the answer, nor any law along these lines. I'm not sure there is much of an answer, other than accepting the fact that teens who want to find pornography will manage to.

Tina @42
I'm sorry for overly conflating your comments with Bruce's. They both hit me on a sensitive area, though it's not like I don't know about indiscipline first-hand.

When I was a kid, we had some family friends who - as a policy - never said no to their kids. The dad used to follow his toddler son into the street and stop traffic rather than tell him no. The kids were savages, of course, who trashed our toys and wrote on the walls in crayon. The fact that they are both very good human beings now is due to other adults in their lives, and (to a very great part) their own hard work.

This has certainly had an influence on my parenting style.

What's the problem with kids and porn? I think it's the definition of "kid" being switched on us, so that it means "someone seventeen and three quarters" one minute and "a seven year old" the next.

Little kids aren't going to be interested. I remember my son getting porn spam when he was about eight and being squicked by the headers. (He couldn't understand why the spammers thought he was going to be interested. Neither can any of us, actually.) He certainly wasn't going looking for the stuff. I could reliably get him to lose interest in reading something by telling him it had kissy bits.

Once they're teenagers, well, I thought these days the general feeling was that masturbation was healthy and normal -- and so is finding out what you're into?

My reaction, when my sixteen year old son tells me in a half-horrified half-laughing way about the "tub girl" link someone sent him and how icky it is, is not "OMG he's looking at pron!" but for both of us to roll our eyes at how weird some people are. At sixteen it would be legal for him to have sex, or get married with my permission.

The problem is the transition period, the age where they're starting to be interested but likely to be bothered by the fractal weirdness of what's available, and not sufficiently net-savvy to cope with online weirdos and viruses. I dealt with that by having the only net-capable machine be in shared space for that couple of years -- I wasn't watching over his shoulder, but I could have been walking in at any moment. His main problem with this was that he couldn't download big game-demos to his machine. By the time he was old enough to claim that high speed internet access in his bedroom was a civil right, I reckoned he was old enough to cope with it.

The only thing that ever really worried me with this sort of thing was the issue of John Barnes Princess of the Aerie, which was a sequel to a book utterly appropriate for an 11 year old, but which turned out to be full of really icky sex mixed up with even ickier conditioning and control. I ended up saying : "This book is full of gross icky sex and I'd really prefer it if you didn't read it until you're older."

Re #39 & 43 - Both of you are perfectly right. I sometimes forget that because of my work (computer crime) I automatically filter 'porn' as meaning the hardest of hardcore and most far out kink. Those sites tend to charge rather expensive membership fees.

abi @ 46

Again, my apologies. My posts were poorly worded, and my meaning not clear, which tends to happen when I talk about something that bothers me in present time and resonates with bad past experience. I can't think of anything more personal and full of potential emotional turmoil than child-raising, seen from either the child or the parent's perspective; it's an area where it's easy for a clumsy foot to tread on a sensitive spot, and I regret doing that.

Being a parent... This reminds me of the last times I saw my dad alive. I was visiting from California in 1990 or 1991 and he and I talked about personal things. Note that this is someone born in 1925, from a generation where people just didn't talk about that personal stuff. He told me how, when I was born, he was so scared because he had never done this, and he was afraid he wouldn't do a good job of raising me. It's weird to realize that all this was going on in his head.

Todd 43: Yes, that's the site I meant. I've heard that it was being blocked, and that many other Pagan and alternative sites were blocked as well. I don't have any filtering software installed, so I can't check if it's still true.

Jo 47: What's the problem with kids and porn? I think it's the definition of "kid" being switched on us, so that it means "someone seventeen and three quarters" one minute and "a seven year old" the next.

You've put your finger on the problem. Our society has only two categories, "adult," and "child." Adolescents are neither. They tend to be treated as children or as adults, whichever is more to their disadvantage. "Act like an adult!" "Shut up, you're just a kid!"

Among the worst, in my opinion, is that they're expected to go to bed like children but get up as adults, when in fact they switch to adult melatonin timing (unable to sleep before about 11PM) while still needing 10 hours sleep (because they're still growing). This means they're perpetually sleep-deprived (as are we all, as Patrick has pointed out elsewhere, but not nearly as badly).

This false dichotomy is used as a bait-and-switch tactic by people who fundamentally oppose anyone having rights of any kind. "We have to protect the children!" they cry, telling horror stories of 4-year-olds being raped on live webcam, and then drafting legislation that makes it impossible for 17-year-old gay boys to look at any site that doesn't say they're evil and sick and should be killed. (Is tbqungrfsntf.pbz (I don't want to add to its Google rating) on the filtering lists?)

Then, of course, they also want to make the check a credit card, which is the same kind of "OK for me because I'm the ruling class, but not for hoi polloi" oligarchism that Congressman Foley was engaged in. Do they really believe there aren't any adults with internet access but without a credit card? Of course they don't.

I hate these people. They're the very worst our society has to offer. They're exploiting the suffering of real victims of child pornography for abhorrent political aims, and they're examples of why I sometimes wish I believed in Hell.

Jo has definitely hit the Big Lie bait-and-switch of the anti-sex business.

It comes out most with child porn laws. They upped the age limit to 18 in the UK, a few years ago, while any number of 16-year-olds are bonking their brains out, quite lawfully, every day of the year.

This is silly. And the people who perpetrate such stupidities want us to trust them with the sexual health of our children?

#48: Not entirely your fault. Nudity and porn are often deliberately and dishonestly conflated. Besides the obfuscatory equivocation about what kind of "child" we're talking about, there's equally bad equivocation about what kind of "porn" we're talking about.

So if a couple of 17-year-olds go skinny dipping and one of them pulls out a digital camera, they're in the same legal category as people who film the rape of 7-year-olds. (Assuming for the sake of argument that the latter even exist; I strongly suspect that if they do they are far rarer even than terrorists.)

This is why it's difficult to make any sweeping statement about "children" and "porn", unless you are an idiot, or dishonest.

chris @ 53

So if a couple of 17-year-olds go skinny dipping and one of them pulls out a digital camera, they're in the same legal category as people who film the rape of 7-year-olds.

In Florida, yes. A 16- and a 17-year old were convicted of producing and possessing kiddie porn because they took pictures of themselves naked. [Details]

Xopher #51: "We have to protect the children!" they cry, telling horror stories of 4-year-olds being raped on live webcam, and then drafting legislation that makes it impossible for 17-year-old gay boys to look at any site that doesn't say they're evil and sick and should be killed.

I had been going to mention something like that. My parents got internet access when I was fifteen, shortly after a friend of mine had introduced me to internet porn at his house. I, of course, started looking Ignoring the Dire Legal Warnings and clicking on the "Over 18" buttons was a big help in figuring out early on that being gay wasn't bad. If there was this much of it on the internet, surely it couldn't be all bad, right? It wasn't the only thing, but it was a big positive reinforcement. It's different for everyone, of course, but I'm glad I wasn't required to give a credit card.

Not to mention the fact that not all adults have credit cards, while some children do, and still other children aren't too stupid to take their parents'.

Then, of course, there are the two kids who were tried as adults on child pornography charges for e-mailing explicit pictures of themselves to each other.

How one can be a child when posing and adult when mailing the pictures is one of the mysteries of jurisprudence.

Scorpio #56: Isn't it obvious? They mailed the pictures after taking them; clearly, at some point between the two acts, they grew up.

(I don't know if this disclaimer is necessary, but I am not serious.)

Re #53 - People who film the rape of 7yos - or any other age, right down to newborn - being rarer than terrorists? I wish. Oh, how I wish.

Roughly half of my cases involve child porn. I've seen computers with up to 40 Gigs of it, neatly categorized by sex act and participants. Photos, movies... I've read the email of predators swapping tips on how to get parents to trust them with their kids. I've read the careful negotiations to trade a pregnant 'slave' for a used pickup truck. Part of the deal included sex rights to the unborn child. I've seen the logs of a molest-on-demand webcam show.

So no, it's not rare. It's so not-rare it's frightening.

Scorpio 56: Yes, that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. Of course, I object to trying adolescents as adults for any reason—and if it IS allowed, the MRIs showing abnormal adult brain development should be admissible as evidence of diminished responsibility. It would be, if a 30-year-old had that brain development, so by disallowing it our system penalizes adolescents even versus an adult who did the same crime (or "crime" as in the case you cite).

Paula, #28: You're squicked by nuns in traditional habits?

I have Dreadful Skin sitting in my TBR stack, I suppose that's a nun with untraditional habits*.

*It's almost 1 AM, I can't think of any clothing jokes.

Don't wimple out - you're doing fine.

Tania @ 61... At the risk of recycling some of my own old jokes, how about a religious comic-book about The Force of Habit, which fights all kind of supernatural menaces, including the Creatures of Habit?

Speaking of wimples...

From the "Buffy" episode "Triangle".

XANDER: (to Buffy) So, how goes the slaying?

BUFFY: I killed something in a convent last night.

XANDER: In any other room, a frightening declaration. Here, a welcome distraction. (Anya and Willow both look at him) Tell us all about the killing, Buff.

BUFFY: Pretty standard. Vampire staking. Ooh! But I met a nun, and she let me try on her wimple.

XANDER: Okay, now we're back to frightening.

Michael I @ 64... Maybe it was the nun from The Blues Brothers, who seemed to have a talent for telekinesis, besides being quite handy with the rod.

Sylvia@60--I am--I know people who were beaten by nuns. Or think about the Magdalen laundries.

Tania at #61: I just wrote a review of Dreadful Skin (for the May Locus, so you won't see it any time soon), and it *is* worth reading -- a dark, eccentric, interesting book.

I've never raised a child (or reared a hog), but as for myself, early on I resolved not to look at pornography until I'd had some experience actual sex-with-apartner. I knew that Playboy models weren't like women I should expect to meet, and didn't want to be imprinted on them.

So, I'm against the legal attempts that have been made to keep the children "safe", but I still have the strong bias that pornography is a capitalist "plot" (no conspirators, just confluences of interest) to induce a set of predictable, easily-marketable-to, preversions in our young people. They should be left to develop their own, more idiosyncratic, preversions, influenced only by religious art, Hercules movies, MSTied '50s educational films, Chick pamphlets, and the like.

Muriel Spark's The Abbess of Crewe is about a whole bunch of nuns with nontraditional habits. And even more relevant in today's era of wiretapping than it was during the Nixon era when she wrote it.

Michael Turyn #68: I've got a friend who says she can directly trace almost all of her sexual tastes to watching the 1980 Flash Gordon incessantly when she was little.

ethan @ 69... 1980's Flash Gordon? I dare not ask you to elaborate.

I dared not ask her, so I think you're safe.

ethan @ 71... Your comment got me thinking about what your friend might have meant. Let's see. Ming the Merciless turns one of his Rings onto Dale Arden, who starts acting all naughty, which has Klytus comment to Ming that he has never seen anybody react so strongly, not even Aura, his own daughter, who likes to keep a dwarf named Fellini on a leash.

On #69-#72, am I the only one here who has heard of the movie Flesh Gordon? I don't remember much about it, and I doubt I saw it, but it seems related.

I've seen it. It was one of those semi-serious cases of farcial porn; and made the late-night showings at cons for awhile.

It had it moments.

TK

Dan Hoey... Oh, I saw Flesh Gordon. Very silly. So was Flash Gordon, which had better actors although its SFXs weren't much better.

Dan - I've not only heard of Flesh Gordon, I've seen it. Oh, and to really tie it into this thread, I think I was about 15, so I may have been exposing myself* to questionable content. I just remember that it was silly. Penisaurii??

*exposing myself. heh.

Yes, Tania, it had penisaurii. And Flexi Jerkoff who ignited his rocket's engine with a VolksWagen's keys... And John Hoyt... And Star Trek fan Bjo Trimble... And a poster by Ken Barr...

abi: Okay, we're all good then? Good. :) I understand hot buttons, so it's cool from my end, certainly. (After all, this -- the original topic, at least -- is one of mine.)

Dan@73: I've never seen it, but I, too, have heard of it. Scary notion to me, since, ahem, 'pornographic remakes' are generally more poorly acted than the original (what with it being porn and all), and let's face it, rollicking good fun or not, the original was not precisely an example of the world's finest acting. Or writing. Though I still like it.

Those of you who have seen it: I'm sorry. Or possibly not, if it gave you amusement.

And, just as a final thought: I love Making Light threads and where they wander. Especially coming back into one where I was last feeling a bit gripy (it's a word NOW) and finding one of my favorite Buffy quotes. ^_^

My abiding memory of Flesh Gordon (silly, but enjoyable) is the Moronosphere. A concept that could be expanded <pause for predictable reaction>, and probably has been.

Akchewally, I think we discussed Flesh/Flash Gordon last year too. Hmmmm.

How one can be a child when posing and adult when mailing the pictures is one of the mysteries of jurisprudence.

Hardly. It's not a matter of being a child for one purpose and an adult for another. Anti-child-porn laws don't have exceptions saying "Unless you're the child in the picture." Was that demystifying enough for you?

As a parent, I'd prefer that the bluenosed idiots like Donna Rice actually attempt to help the LeslieBs of the world, instead of using child porn as an excuse to write "unless it mentions sex" into the Free Speech Clause.

mythago 80: Some of us think trying adolescents as adults is just plain wrong no matter what. We're not saying they should have been given a pass on the kid-porn; just that they should have been tried as juveniles.

And also, two kids sending naked pictures to each other isn't the same as a kid running a whole website where people pay money for naked pictures of hir. Our legal system is bad at making those distinctions, and I think they're real and important.

ethan #69 wrote: I've got a friend who says she can directly trace almost all of her sexual tastes to watching the 1980 Flash Gordon incessantly when she was little.

Not the Bore Worms!

#77: Surely you mean George Barr.

Patrick @ 83... You're absolutely right. As soon as I posted that earlier comment, I started thinking that I had the wrong Barr.

Some of us think trying adolescents as adults is just plain wrong no matter what.

Some of us don't think "I don't agree with what this law just did" is a synonym for "the jurisprudence doesn't make sense". It does. Our legal system isn't bad at making those distinctions; it's just that people and the lawmakers they elect tend not to sweat the fine details of laws on hot-button issues. "Hang on, let's make sure that we've covered everything adequately and don't have any gaping loopholes" is not a popular response to, say, a bill having to do with child pornography. And, people being people, it's not always easy to anticipate every situation so that the results come out the way we'd like them to.

The more useful question is "why did somebody decide to prosecute a teenager for sending 'child porn' of him/herself, and why would any jury convict?"

It doesn't make sense to treat adolescents both as children and as adults in the same trial. I understand how such things occur, but I think it's a manifestation of the grotesquely hypocritical way our society treats adolescents.

Actually I'll go further. A legal system that allows someone to be tried as an adult for doing something that wouldn't be a crime if s/he were, in fact, an adult, is FUBAR. Not to mention rotten and corrupt.

Or, it could simply be that the laws are awfully complicated, most people don't know or care enough to insist that they be well-crafted, and things fall through the cracks as a result of that and everyday stupidity. Not as fun as outrage, I know, but there you are.

That may be the reason the legal system (which includes all our laws as well as the so-called "justice" system) is fucked up...but it's still fucked up.

#88:Or, it could simply be that the laws are awfully complicated, most people don't know or care enough to insist that they be well-crafted, and things fall through the cracks as a result of that and everyday stupidity. Not as fun as outrage, I know, but there you are.

Surely you're not saying that people ought not be outraged that laws are not well-crafted and as a result we end up with cases where justice is not served by the application of law? I ask because that's what I infer from the last quoted sentence.

We had an Attorney General in Kansas that wanted to prosecute all teen-on-teen sex, so much so that he demanded all health records from clinics performing abortions on anyone under 18. He got his ass voted out of office, then his buddies in Johnson County appointed him the JoCo attorney general. He's trying to continue his vendetta against teen sex.

I don't think a 16 or 17-year-old needs to be turned into a "sex offender' for life because of sex with a 16 or 17-year-old girl. But that's what Phil Kline appeared to want to do.

It's abhorrent.

You infer wrongly, JC. I'm saying that people don't pay much attention to the laws they vote on or what they do, which is why politicians get mad props for supporting things like the 1998 Child Protection Act. Or, you know, the Patriot Act. So we get laws that do things we dislike, or that don't work quite the way we thought when we wrote that impassioned letter to the editor. It's not a matter of an evil and corrupt system; it's one that doesn't work very well because, most of the time, only lawyers give it a second thought.

Paula, my impression of Kline was that he doesn't really give a rip if anyone is raping teenage girls, but it's a useful excuse to shut down abortion clinics.

I wish we'd switch to a single topic law system. That would prevent legislators from attaching local pork corruption amendments and Stop Video Games From Aborting Baby Jebus amendments to Medicare funding bills, for example.

Mythago, it seems from here like your answers are missing Xopher's point. It's as if he were to say "Wow, I'm sick. I messed around with some eggs that had gone bad." and you were to answer, "No, what happened is that you got a case of salmonella poisoning from those eggs." Nothing you're saying about how and why bad laws come into effect - including laws that are easily used for bad ends by bad people - contradicts what he's saying, which is that it's bad to treat juveniles as adults. The mechanics of food poisoning don't wouldn't make him more (or less) sick, either.

It doesn't matter, as I understand Xopher's concern (or at least as I see it with a similar concern), whether a particular law was deliberately crafted for ill intent or simply carelessly drafted under improper pressure, if it leads to the same damn place in the end. The differences matter in trying to craft an effective judicial and legislative response, but don't (I think, and suspect Xopher does too) much change the moral weight of the failing. We tell children adn subordinates that they have a responsibility to stand up to wrong pressures; the same is true of authorities.

leslie b. @34: Places like adultfanfiction.net do not request a credit card number, yet they are sufficiently pancked to have wrapped themselves in layers of legalese that say that if you don't give them your real, true personal data, you'll be sent to Gitmo first time you try to set foot in the US. Or something like that. It's annoying.

This law pretty much targets only amatuers who do not want your credit card number, but find them selves "commercial" due to an advert or a link to a .com site.

#92:You infer wrongly, JC.

I figured that. But I still don't understand, then, why Xopher's (or anyone's) outrage is an issue to you at all? If you think being outraged because the law doesn't work as we want it to work, regardless of why it is that way, is a reasonable reaction, I don't understand the point of saying "Not as fun as outrage, I know, but there you are." I don't see how else I'm supposed to interpret that as anything besides, "Ha, I bet you thought you found something nefarious here, but it's just the way the system works, so there's no point in getting excited about it." It seems to me that if outrage is a reasonable reaction, then there is a point to getting excited about it.

I agree with Bruce @94. As near as I can tell, no one, except you, has said anything about an evil or corrupt system, just a system which sometimes has undesired outcomes, like treating a person simultaneously as a child and an adult. I don't think it matters if it is because of evil, apathy, or the unexpected ramifications of well-meaning acts. It's still something that needs to be fixed.

#92: I think I've worked out what you meant. To take Bruce's analogy, you're basically saying "It doesn't do any good to be angry at salmonella." (Cue Greg London's post about frames here.) This would have made more sense to me if that was why I had thought Xopher was upset. It seemed to me he was reacting to the symptoms regardless of whether the cause was salmonella, or deliberate poisoning.

Mythago, #85, from some reports it looks as though the girl's parents were hunting down the bastard who contaminated their daughter's precious bodily fluids.

The case got mentioned on The Sideshow a few weeks back, and following some of the links leads to news reports that suggest that they started things off, and were shocked to find their daughter being prosecuted and convicted.

BTW, whatever happened to that gay teenager who got bundled off to some sort of reigious "boot camp" for a cure? It was all over the net for a while, along with reports of other little Gitmos for kids who didn't conform, and even

The porn industry will, of course, sell you any number of pictures of teenagers--an 18-year-old is still a "teenager". (Though UK law will get you if the person appears underage.)

One thing which doesn't seem to get much prominence in all this is the age distribution. The images are all "child porn", and while it's possible to make some distinction with pictures from the visible effects of puberty, it's incredibly rare that we get information on the ages that's as clear as in the Florida case.

I don't think this is an American thing, though the endemic religious enthusiasm makes it more obvious there. There seems to be a highly conflicted attitude to teenagers in both out countries, showing up in a lot more than sex laws.

And what the Internet does is give people access to information that isn't available locally. Not censorship, perhaps, but there's a tendency for any community to filter information. Those barriers started to fail with radio and TV, but if the religious enthusiasts own the TV station they can still slow things down.

And lest anyone think I'm against the religious motive, let them consider Chad Varah as an example.

(And "Astronautical Consultant to Dan Dare"--Chad Varah sounds like one of our tribe.)

There was a time in the US when prosecutors and judges had wide authority to interpret law, on the assumption that the legal system couldn't possibly get all the details right ahead of time, and that informed common sense and a desire to be just would correct for the law's inflexibility.

As you might expect, this latitude gave rise to excesses and abuses of power. At some point, enough political groups and voters got upset enough at some subset of these abuses that they passed new laws to limit the flexibilty of officials, judges primarily.

As you might expect, this didn't work so well either. Sure enough, the law isn't consistent or fair in fine detail (or in gross, in the case of insufficiently-considered legislation like the laws we've talked about), and when the people with the responsibility on the spot don't have the authority to correct for the deficiencies, injustice ensues. Kafka would recognize this situation.

Legal systems can't operate on the assumption that the law is perfect in every detail, nor can they operate on the assumption that all of its functionaries are always correct and incorruptible. I'd say this is another classic case of the imbalance of responsibility and authority.

Bruce 94: You're right about what I'm saying.

JC 96: I did actually say it was corrupt. I meant it was rotting from the inside, not that graft and bribery were the cause of such asinine prosecutions. An ill-chosen term in retrospect.

I don't think our legal system is a force of nature. I think it's something our society is responsible for. And if it's wrong, it's our job to fix it. It sounds to me that mythago is saying that there's no point in being outraged about it, that it's like the weather. It's NOT the weather. It's a function of our society that is no longer working in a way that benefits society (at least in these cases) and it needs to be fixed.

I'd like to add a hearty hurray to Heather Corinna and the other folks who got up and testified, despite the certain knowledge that in so doing they made themselves into even bigger targets than they were before.

Favorite line from her post: "Such a pity legal decisions like this one never end with the nice “Neener neener,” you’d really like them to."

Last night, the Ion channel showed 1972 film The Cowboys, which I'd never seen before. (John Wayne was a no-no in Berkeley back then). But this cattle-drive-with-kids-as-hands tale was pretty interesting. It's sort of relevant to this discussion because of one scene where the kids encounter a traveling whorehouse run by Colleen Dewhurst, who eventually decides they really *are* too young and says "Maybe next year."

Mythago #92

Clinics which perform abortions.

There is a huge difference between "an abortion mill" and a clinic where abortion is one of the medical services available....

There is an herd of elephants in the gymnasium involved--"abortion mill" carries baggage of back alley illegal filthy butchering of girls' bodies, by greedy not-even-quacks without competent medical training with unsanitized tools in unsanitary conditions working for a quick buck in something illegal and immoral and unethical and completely sordid and vile. "Abortion clinic" replaces the term "mill" with "clinic" but focuses in on the mindimage of, "this facility exists solely to abort babies and has no decent excuse for existing, it aborts babies and abortion is murder! Getting rid of an "abortion clinic" is a Moral Act!"

Most of the people I've heard of or known who got abortions did not casually get abortions... there are exceptions, they tend to be rare, yes, they do exist, but so do mob killers, Whitey Bulger, sociopaths, psychopaths, criminals who are criminals because their stupidity level is breathtaking, people who kill their kids from incompetence/stupidity/neglect/self-centered behavior, etc.

But the term "abortion clinic" is one of those terms which gives credence and support to those who seek to make it unavailable and condemn any and all involved in not eradicating its availability based on personal choice/creed/ conscience/medical condition.

It's like calling people on disability or other social welfare aid social parasites or social cheats or greedy opportunistic scum or professional beggars....

Paula Lieberman @ 103

And isn't it telling that the backalley sort of abortionist only exists when it's illegal or impossible to get an abortion any other way? In other words, under exactly the conditions those condemning abortion want to impose.

Faren @ 102... TCM showed Harold and Maude this weekend, and this thread got me wondering if 'they' would consider it to be pornography. After all, Harold is a minor.

Xopher at 100: I don't think our legal system is a force of nature. I think it's something our society is responsible for. And if it's wrong, it's our job to fix it. It sounds to me