Kiddie Porn Makes Good Picture: Alberto Gonzales Saves Your Youngsters While Bush Kills Your Teenagers

tagged as: 13-year-old butterfly's first photo shoot

Hart Williams of Skiing Uphill Blog wrote an excellent bit about Operation Swarmer in Iraq and Alberto Gonzales' celebrated capture of Kiddie Pornographers here at home. You can find it here. My reply is below:

Hart:

Of course, I'm more interested in the stuff about Kiddie Porn than anything else. What does that say about me ;-)

I have done a bit of informal trolling about the Internet for "kiddie porn" since about 1996, when I first discovered how to decode UUencoded picture from Usenet. It tends to be a dead of night activity "just to see" if there's really anything out there.

I'm more or less certain that kiddie porn *does* exist - but not in the Kiddie Porn "rings" described by the media. Most of what I've seen points to parents who are molesting their children and filming that activity and then sharing it with other sick-minded fucks. (I qualify the activity as "sick" because when you actually see video of kids with grown-ups...well, it's fucking sick, IMHO.)

Much of the illicit video and photo stuff one finds on file-sharing programs is tagged thusly, "pussy bitch little cunt 13-year-old father daughter incest anal sex blowjob" but when you open these things, it's barely legals rather than actual tiny tots. Enter limewire, type in "child" as search string with ADULT subcategory, and you're going to see about 500 films tagged thusly. Any alarmed self-righteous parent or church group isn't going to actually examine this stuff - what they will see are the tags, which, like any text-based erotica, simply implies a fantasy sex world that people WANT to be seeing, rather than based on the actual content therein.

The deeper issue, as you are well-aware, isn't whether or not Kiddie Porn actually exists, but that there are people who want it to exist. Perhaps I qualify in that category, based on my late-night trollings - I am told that I can also find pictures and video of women having sex with bard-yard animals, and while this is less odious, to a degree, than men having sex with pre-teens, it's not something I've ever searched for.

Similar to the scenario of people wanting to stamp out homosexual activity because they might suspect themselves of having desires they don't understand, I think much of the knee-jerk reaction around suspected or alleged Kiddie Porn might rest in a need to be seen as someone who has Absolutely No Interest in Sex with Children. Given the grave consequences meted out for this type of activity (witness the recent case of Debra LeFavre, the 25-year-old teacher who had sex with a 14-year-old male student, and who is trying to plea bargain (on national television) a really draconian seven-years of probation for this tepid "crime") it's hard to blame anyone for being reactionary about what might actually be both a natural and historical desire to have sex with an "innocent" - or to at least fantasize about it with someone else's "success" in the matter as the backdrop entertainment.

Gonzales, after all, is a part of the Bush White House, and no other administration has been as successful at pandering and inflaming the base fears of the population at large than they. Typical, though, of any Bush-inspired "solution" to any problem is the utter lack of attempting to get at the root of the problem, which, being about sex is invariably intractable and messy - so much easier to bust a "ring" of those who might have received or sent such material via the Internet. Given, however, the generally vast difference between how a sex file is tagged and the true ages of the people having sex, what really bears scrutiny in this particular case is whether or not the content of the material actually warrants the charges.

My bet is that they don't and this case will disappear as soon as the press conference is over.

- gregoryp(tm)

Technorati Tags: sex, kiddie porn, Bush, bush, Gonzales, gangbang, clusterfuck, kids, boobs, butterflies, airstrike, invasion