Col Rouge

You conveniently ignore that our own liberal Prime Minister called this child porn 'revolting'. Your self righteous rants about my ignorance does not justify taking photos of nude boys and girls despite your ranting and raving. This debate was never about 16th and 17th century paintings. You have turned it into this. This debate is about taking nude photographs of 12 and 13 year old children and calling it art today. I take it you along with CJ would be happy for your 12 year old to be photographed nude and displayed in bedrooms throughout our land.

Col, So you travelled the world searching out artworks of genitalia?

How peculiar and what a waste of good money!

Perhaps you should stayed home and just looked in the mirror instead?

I have a question for the naysayers about where the harm is in the following situation.

Weirdo Paedophile takes pictures of swimsuit clad kids at the beach. Parent doesn't know, child doesn't know, weirdo's get off on it in private and swap pics. I don't see any victim.

Same with advertising of children's underwear in store catalogs.

Same if people view Henson's photos.

Convince me of the harm. I want to believe:-)

And if it was your child ?

This is a truly bizarre discussion.

I'm in almost complete agreement with Col Rouge, while I disagree completely with Rainier. Anybody who has read our various comments at OLO over a period of time will know that the reverse situation is almost invariably the case.

Look, it doesn't matter whose kids they are. If any kind of child abuse is being committed, it has to be apprehended and prevented in the future. The debate for me turns entirely upon the question of whether the adolescent models in Bill Henson's images have been abused. I am of the very clear opinion that, while the models were in no way abused in the production of Bill Henson's artworks, some of them most certainly have been by their mass exposure pursuant to the spurious claims made by Hetty Johnston et al.

I also agree with Usual Suspect. Despite the projections of angst by some, nobody is actually harmed in any way in the scenario he describes. To ascribe harm being inflicted on anybody by thoughts that malevolent people have about them is a regression into primitive thought, I would suggest.

I'm quite certain that many people have nasty, malicious, violent and perverse thoughts about each other. However, I'm not aware that such thoughts in themselves constitute harming people. If they did, then we're into hocus pocus, curses and spells territory.

While I am aware of some among us who do think in that essentially primitive way, I hope that most of us are past that, generally speaking.

Oops.

I meant to say "I'm quite certain that many people have nasty, malicious, violent and perverse thoughts about others."