Two news items have me slackjawed this week:
* Christopher Handley, an Iowa manga and comic book collector is facing obscenity charges based on manga that he ordered from Japan. I doubt the people prosecuting him even understand manga‘s rich cultural history or the cultural context in which it is created and consumed. Snip:
(…) Handley is being prosecuted under the PROTECT Act (18 U.S.C. Section 1466A) for allegedly possessing manga that the government claims to be obscene. The government alleges that the material includes drawings that they claim appear to be depictions of minors engaging in sexual conduct. No photographic content is at issue in Handley’s case.
According to the articles, Handley faces up to 20 years in jail for possessing manga containing “objectionable content” that caught the attention of a postal inspector. While the “objectionable” manga is but a small portion of Handley’s collection of over 1,200 volumes of manga that cover a broad spectrum of topics, the authorities confiscated his entire collection, in addition to his personal library of comics, magazines and DVD and his computers.
Why should manga fans be concerned? As CBLDF legal counsel Burton Joseph explains it,
“In the lengthy time in which I have represented CBLDF and its clients, I have never encountered a situation where criminal prosecution was brought against a private consumer for possession of material for personal use in his own home. This prosecution has profound implications in limiting the First Amendment for art and artists, and comics in particular, that are on the cutting edge of creativity. It misunderstands the nature of avant-garde art in its historical perspective and is a perversion of anti-obscenity laws.” (…read more.)
* A 15-year-old Ohio girl is being charged with felony child pornography for taking naked pictures of herself and sending them to a classmate — and the 13-year-old boy she sent them to has also been arrested. Can you imagine how scared and confused these kids must be right now? Yes, in the US you can be arrested for exploiting yourself even if you consented (to yourself). “The girl may receive a punishment of several years in a juvenile detention center and forced registration as a sex offender. This new status could prevent her from living within a specified radius of any school, church, or park for the rest of her life. It may also force her to inform all of her neighbors that she is a sex offender when she moves.” And no, this isn’t the first time.
Child pornography is bad because it’s actual CHILDREN being exploited. I believe that is what **all** folks can get behind.
Artwork where children are being presented as sexual beings is completely different. (Or, in the Handley case, part of it is the prosecutors cultural ignorance of yaoi artwork where the assumption is that the work is depicting children.) There are a number of artists that have spoken about this issue in very articulate ways already (http://ursulav.livejournal.com/833981.html), so I won’t get into it here… but it is shocking to me that someone is being prosecuted for owning comic art **as if it was child pornography**.
This isn’t knee-jerk “censorship is bad!”. This is a case where people are looking at an apple and saying it’s an orange.
@Ken:
If you can say “When I look at manga, I generally see what appears to be a pre-pubescent girl” being screwed in various orifices, you are only looking at a specialized fraction of manga. You should try looking at manga that aren’t about sex. Or if you must look at manga about sex, you are still looking at the wrong ones.
i agree with francisco on that one, what doesnt harm others without their consent is ok. if i had of sent someone a pic of myself, thats my choice, and why punnish the recipient? he didnt make her take the pic?i was emotionally/mentally mature enough to know what i was doing well before i was allowed to. but when it involves actual kids, being molested, thats another story all together. even if i dont like it, manga that depicts stuff like that is ok by me, cause it doesnt actually hurt anyone.
and if you dont have enough self control to know not to actually act on illegal fantasies, hell, get on some meds for that before you hurt someone and get sent to gaol!
@Ken
I think child porn is only bad because of the first reason.
I really doubt that it could fuck people’s heads, or turn someone into a child abuser of some sort. Drawings are only drawings, you can do it yourself, and if you cannot, you can still fantasize about it. You can’t ban some sort of culture production as long as it only involves imagination.
child porn is bad because it messes with children, body and mind, when it’s being done. art is not art when hurting people is required to do it.
You know… I realize this is going to be a highly unpopular opinion on this particular blog, but I just don’t think this manga stuff is as cut-and-dried as everyone makes it sound. There are, in my opinion, deep waters here.
Now, I’ll freely admit that I don’t understand (nor am I interested in) manga’s “rich cultural history” and “cultural context”. I don’t honestly think all of that is relevant. When I look at manga, I generally see what appears to be a pre-pubescent girl getting drilled in various and assorted orifices (orifi?) by men, demons, aliens, vampires, tentacles-of-unknown-origin, their sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, their strange aunt from the boondocks, and common household pets. It’s entirely possible that this pre-pubescent girl represents some virtue or concept in what I’m sure is the rich cultural iconography of the greater historical arc of manga or something, but I don’t see where that matters. To my uber-ignorant gaijin eyes, it’s still a picture of a little girl getting raped by a robot.
See, I think we’d all pretty much agree that child porn is bad, right? I think we can all get onboard with that. The real question is, *why* is it bad? Is it bad because the children getting their photos taken are victims and can’t possibly give consent to either the situation or the photos? Or is it bad because of the effect it has on the people who look at those photos? Or is it both? I don’t claim to know, but I can see arguments for both sides.
The point is, that if child porn is bad for the second reason I mentioned – because it fucks up people’s heads when they look at it, and makes them potentially more inclined to engage in legal and extremely harmful acts themselves, then does it *really* make any difference if that child porn consists of photographs/movies or drawn/animated images? Porn is porn, and a picture is a picture, and a photo or an image somebody drew aren’t all that different as far as I’m concerned.
Now, I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind – especially when I’m not even settled on how I feel about this myself, but I think before we all have the typical knee-jerk “any censorship is bad!” reaction, we should put some thought into this one. I just don’t think it’s that simple, I guess.
Children of the future Age
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.
And now thought itself is a crime.
BTW to continue on with this
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/mccains-sex-off.html
oh good god the worlds gone mad.
Thanks for mentioning my site there. I find the manga story to be completely atrocious. How can you punish someone because the images look like they might be children? What about barely legal porn? The point is that they look like they are underage, or at least close to it. This is ridiculous.
Mandatory new warning label, effective immediately:
Teenagers may include content inappropriate for teenagers.
I was charged with sexual harassment for saying a girl in high school had nice boobs. not tits, not bongos, or anything more vulgar. Boobs. And she was not even the one who brought them against me! A guy who didnt like me because i was a scholastic rival GPA wise, (and whom the girl liked and I was warning her about to begin with, my statement to her being, “he would only like you because you have nice boobs and thats it you want someone who likes you for you.”) overheard it and forced the girl to tell the vise-principle .
I ended up suspended for a week, my name on the sex offender registration which thankfully was purged when I hit 18 3 months later, and ejected from the national honor society despite protests from just about all the people who where members except him. In the end the rules where changed because of me, but it basically ruined my entire senior year of high school. The girl was mortified at all that happened to me, because she had happened to have been a friend, but that didnt matter.
And the guy? Ended up Salutatorian despite being caught cheating by a teacher later on in the year. The teacher who caught him? Fired next year.
And do you KNOW how many girls I went to school with in high school flashed guys or took dirty pictured for guys, or worse.
I have absolutely no respect for these laws. They are made in the idea of protecting people, but in the end they more often than not hurt the very people they are meant to protect. If I had been 3 months older saying a girl had nice boobs would have ruined my life. a 4 letter word would have branded me a sex offender.
It’s sad that I am not surprised by the incredible ignorance that is behind these two cases. That’s American prudery!
that’s unbelievable. ugh.
:(
This reminds me of the case of Mike C Diana.
In March 1994 a comic book artist Mike was found guilty of obscenity by a Florida court for artwork published by Mike Hunt Comix.
His terms of probation included three years’-worth of monthly psyche evaluations, no contact with anyone under the age of 18, maintenance of a full-time job, and *not to draw, even for his personal use*!