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.

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.

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.

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.

And now thought itself is a crime.

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.

:(

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*!