Bill’s Content

William D. Wylie, Jr. wrote:
Hi Bill,

Read your article in River City Times about the Girls Gone Wild producer being persecuted.

The PJS said he’d agreed to a half-a-million dollar fine for not keeping some paperwork.

My thoughts/experiences/analysis:

1. There is no censorship requirement for network TV after 10 pm, so those commercials – as well as movies – could be shown uncensored. Of course, “obscenity” – whatever that is this week – is always banned. See fcc.gov.

2. It’s funny that I can watch topless young females on TV, as long as they live in South America or Africa (and have brown or black skin). There most certainly is a double standard at work here.

3. While in Yokosuka, Japan in 1994, I was browsing through a book store when I opened a skin mag, which featured topless 15-year-olds. Turns out I had stumbled
into the Land of the Free.

3. In 1986, I saw a bunch of topless women – and teenagers – on a public beach in Toulon, France. Have you ever been outside the US?

4. The US has become a lot like Iran, where the government heavily censors TV and forces people to wear clothes on the beach, etc.

Yours very truly,
William D. Wylie, Jr., B.S.
Sociologist

My two cents: I’m pretty certain that skin mags with pics of topless 15-year-old girls is a NOT cultural achievement. Still, back in the Victorian Era — for all it’s supposed sexual repression — it was quite common to see images of unclothed children in art and advertisement. Of course, many in polite society had no idea that pedophilia even existed. My own parents have pictures of us kids in the tub. It was supposedly a more innocent era, and the today’s taboo against all such images involving children is just society’s way of protecfting children from exploitation. I kind of doubt the rates of child sexual abuse are lower in more societies where the majority of healty adults consider nudity — both adults and children — no big deal.

Please remember, though, that there is such a thing as context. There’s a big difference between family photos taken at the topless beach and some creep with a camera alone with a child in a bedroom. But the laws protecting children from exploitation are very specific, and don’t allow for innocent intent. In other words, a naked child in a photo is a naked child in a photo, and someone needs to be arrested, just in case. And of course, we have politicians more concerned with promoting themselves as Culture Warriors than with actually protecting children from real abuse.

[tags]child porn,nudity,girls gone wild[/tags]

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