Slashdot Mirror
Graphic Artists Condemn UK Ban On Erotic Comics
mdwh2 writes "Graphic artists, publishers and MPs have condemned the UK's Coroners and Justice Bill, which will criminalize possession of sexual depictions that appear to show someone under 18 (the age of consent is 16 in the UK), as well as adults where the 'predominant impression conveyed' is of someone under 18, and even if they are merely drawn as being present whilst sexual activity took place between adults. The definitions could include Lost Girls, Watchmen, and South Park. The Comic Book Alliance has launched a petition against the law."
Just like here in Australia, where we said that Bart and Lisa were real people and if you draw/possess/distribute pictures of them naked, you go to jail. In the UK, that extends to South Park.
Well, that's a'right. I'm listing Bart, Lisa and Maggie as dependants on my tax return this year, as well registering Maggie to get the baby bonus (she's obviously only a year old or so so she counts- every year too!). I recommend UK citizens do the same for Kyle, Stan, Kenny and Cartman.
Of course, the UK government will not see the humour in that. Ridiculous extremes only apply when used against the people, not for them.
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There's "what a law targets", and there's "what a law hits", and they can be two very different things indeed.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Question their motives? So what if their motive is that they want to draw fictional naked children? As long as no real children are portrayed or in any way harmed in the making of those drawings, why should anyone care? The original point of child porn laws was to protect the children in the pornography. In this case, there are none.
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Unfortunately, laws don't really act as they were "intended", they act as they are written(at best, it's all downhill from there). Even if the law is actually written with the more-or-less-pure motive of cracking down on the 4chan babyrapers fan-art fanclub(and that isn't necessarily a safe assumption; pretty much any sex-related law has at least a few theocrats clinging to it somewhere), the original motive won't last for long. If passed, it will most likely be being applied to pretty much any graphic art that happens to make the Daily Mail readership uncomfortable within a few years.
I understand the need to keep an eye on the perverts who pass themselves off as artists
Why?
Cops should deal with perverts who touch kids. Victimless crimes are just tools for fearmongering politicians to get the attention and votes of self-centered parents.
would it not follow that written descriptions be outlawed as well.
furthermore, when drawing stick people, how do you tell a dwarf from a child...
Misters Manet, Degas, and Van Gogh would like to inform you of their fervent objections to your new law...
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
What difference does that make?
Seriously, do you get some sort of moral authority from parenthood? Is there a badge?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
And what's wrong with obscenity?
I understand obscene material bothers some people, but as long as they're not forced to watch it, I don't see why I can't.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
How does some weirdo drawing Lisa Simpson naked harm my kids any more than it does me?
No one is arguing that actual child molesters shouldn't be punished, but passing laws against even depicting such things is not just nonsense; it's dangerous.
So basically, you can get jailed for a drawing that someone else thinks might be of someone under 18.
Talk about B.S.
What next?
Getting arrested for stalking or mugging just because you and some paranoid idiot were walking the same direction on a mostly deserted street?
It's all in there!
Perverts have been forcing it on children for thousands of years!
The sickness must stop!
Hitler studied to be a Catholic Priest.
Stalin studied to be an Orthadox Priest.
Almost everyone convicted of a violent crime in the US is religious. Worldwide, every single major terrorist incident was committed by religious people.
So again, if we are going to ban something for the good of everyone it should be the Bible, not comic books.
People are such twits. They really think they are helping children when doing this, which is the ultimate scape goat. What they are actually doing is preventing them selves from being exposed to something they find objectionable. They are imposing their morality/fear on individuals who aren't committing crimes, of course... not for long. What this all boils down to in a neat way, as it always does, is.... people are stupid.
Eat sleep die
The difference it makes is that if you've never had kids then you can only reliably argue half the facts, meaning your argument is flawed from the get-go.
This is exactly why I only listen to child molesters.
But drawing people being torn apart or burned or tortured (non-sexually) is not obscene? I suppose I must have missed the memo explaining how X+sex is evil and must be banned, when X is tolerated and "free speech" and what not.
Weird. I thought anti-CP laws were about preventing child abuse. But if they are simply about obscenity... well, from now on I'll have to regard CP-producers as free speech activists!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Although drawing a naked baby being raped by guys in rabbit suits might not involve any children who once or ever will exist, it's still obscene.
What's obscene is that you consider it your business to tell people what they can draw.
I wonder if anyone would be so bold as to do the right thing, and suggest a law protecting artistic expression in the UK, equivalent in scope to American Freedom of Speech?
Dude, where's my packet?
I don't think obscenity is the diametric opposite of moral. The concepts don't exclude each other. It's fairly safe to assume that the side claiming to base its choices on moral arguments is the one most likely to describe something as obscene.
I think we all agree that obscene things can be made illegal to produce, but nobody agrees on the definition of obscenity.
I have a kid, and I can say that you are simply wrong. Rational people can make rational conclusions irrelevant of whether they have kids or not. Nut jobs just change their irrational ranting to match their current situation. I have no fear of drawings of Bart plowing Lisa doing any harm to my child. A law that gets you thrown in jail for drawing pictures of underage people naked? That causes me to fear for my child. My son turning thirteen and drawing a picture of that cute girl in his class naked doesn't seem impossible at all.
If it hasn't happened already, I imagine that pretty soon the number of "child" porn (by the legal definition) images on social networking sites and cell phones will out-number all the other child porn images ever created.
There's just no sense in laws that make images of naked people under the age of 18 illegal. Punish the people who actually commit crimes of child abuse.
The original intent of obscenity laws was to prevent the public display of obscene material, not to protect against thoughtcrime. If someone draws something that you would find offensive, should that really be outlawed if it's kept private?
I don't think *anyone* can be the go-to person for what's obscene. There's no point in trying to regulate things that exist solely in the mind of the beholder. They might as well make it illegal to draw anything except fine art, or only allow fine music to be played on radio stations.
If some people are allowed to revel in what they consider the best things that society can produce, why can't other people revel in the worst of society?
Get off it.
The problem with a law like this is that it affects everyone in society, regardless of whether parasites have erupted from their groins. Despite the fact that I do not have children, I am very much a part of society, and I don't want to live in a society where fake things are considered real.
Furthermore, just because I haven't had kids myself doesn't mean I don't know anything about them. It may come as a bit of a surprise to you, but I actually spent quite a few years as a kid myself, and I can report that I can't imagine much lewd material even getting to me in the first place (my parents did their job), and what little did did not seem to scar me irrevocably. What's worse about this particular law is that, as children, my friends and I often drew (admittedly poor) renditions of girls in class whom we liked sans clothes. This is pretty normal for heterosexual boys growing up, and such a law would very definitely have hurt me during those times.
Child molestation is so ridiculously rare, that, like terrorism, all the trouble of trying to stop it is far worse than the problem. Kids aren't molested by dirty pictures; they're molested by their family members and the clergy. Don't come around bothering me over dirty pictures while Father O'Malley sodomizes little Timmy.
Appear to show someone under eighteen? Under such a law, there would be two possible responses:
1. Only depict people who are obviously middle-aged or older having sex.
2. Write stories in which all of the characters are androids. This could include, of course, androids that look like three-year-olds having sex with robots that look like dogs.
While I have no particular interest in seeing either option, I certainly hope someone puts both in the same comic book and sells it in every comic store in the UK.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Nothing about the world changes when you reproduce. Your perception may change, but the facts remain the same.
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When your house gets raided and the material you intended to keep private gets seized and is no longer private, we'll see how you feel about that argument.
The difference it makes is that if you've never had kids then you can only reliably argue half the facts, meaning your argument is flawed from the get-go.
And if you have kids, then you've forgotten what's it like to not have kids. And of course, you can't have a legitimate opinion on child molestation until you've molested a child. Do I have your argument down correctly? I think I do.
Let's consider one of those amateur moral debates. Suppose you had to chose between my life and the life of your child or children. You probably would chose the life of your own. Similarly for me. This is, if you will, a normally minor conflict of interest between us.
My view is that you are confusing your interests with some sort of moral knowledge. I don't have children, but I believe I would maintain my views even if I had children. I have considered those other viewpoints. At a wild and perhaps unfair guess, I'd wager that you had an awakening when you have one or more children and experienced a new way of viewing the world. To continue, you probably now view that former self as ignorant or worse. My take is that you are being too unfair on people like your former self. We never will have a full view of the world or of implications of moral dilemmas. We must decide based on incomplete knowledge and experience, subject to our biases.
My view is that no matter how this law is interpreted or implemented, it will never have a measurable effect on the evils of exploiting children for pornography and sex. In exchange, it burdens society with more pointless restrictions and increases the power of government. Allowing politicians to make laws with negligible moral impact and thereby rewarding those politicians with increased power is one of the worst things a democracy can do.
Opposing laws like this are some of those things that you should do for your children.
HAHA, if you are between 16 and 18, it is already illegal for you to watch yourself having legal sex in most countries!
Wait, what? How would someone in possession of a drawing be a child molester? Don't you need to, I dunno, molest a child in order to become a child molester?
I have children. I believe that people drawing pictures of children IS NOT the same thing as people touching children. Touch my children and risk death. Draw cartoons all you want. Personally, I'd rather the perverts wank to hand-drawn cartoons than to images of REAL children. No one gets harmed by cartoons - published or otherwise.
Define the word. For me, "obscene" means: something that makes the prudes freak out.
Andres Serrano. HR Giger. Larry Flynt. 2 Live Crew. Mortal Kombat. Jyllands-Posten. Getting the idea now?
Circumcision is child abuse.
Correction: The difference it makes is that if you've never had kids then you can only reliably argue with facts, not emotions.
It matters quite a bit how the image is produced. In fact, that's the crux of the issue. A guy who paints a picture of a child having sex isn't hurting anyone, so the law should leave him alone. The reason we have child porn laws is because the children used to make the pictures are considered victims. No victims, no crime.
This is exactly why I only listen to child molesters.
I have candy. Now get in the van!
All of my children are fictional drawings, and until you have fictional drawings of your own you can't understand how important it is to protect them with laws like this one. Parents of real children may consider laws like this repressive to artists and irrelevant to public safety, but that's because they don't know the pain of having your beloved pixels molested.
In the UK, possession is a crime. What's more, copying a file is considered as producing it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Not proven. And even if it were, not anybody else's business.
See above.
Not proven.
Not proven - so vague as to be meaningless, hence unprovable.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I find child pornography as revolting as anyone (aside from the sickos, of course). That said, I staunchly defend anyone's right to artistic expression, regardless of how revolting I might find it. You can't have it both ways; either you have freedom of expression, or you wind up legislating it away.
As long as no actual child is harmed, I cannot argue with fictional representations of sexual acts involving children. Are they repulsive? Yes. I'll still fight hard to defend the right to create such content, on the grounds that no actual person is being hurt.
In short, I find your agreement with legislating morality as it pertains to freedom of expression to be obscene.
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Although drawing a naked baby being raped by guys in rabbit suits might not involve any children who once or ever will exist, it's still obscene.
Yep.
Someone able to imagine so obscene things, with rabbits and so, and put them in a drawing, should be severely punished. 12 months in prision.
Allowing some reduction if the drawings are only drafts and not very detailed.
If they colored them, 6 extra months.
3-6 years for animation attempts.
Ah, and you will no go away free... ./
Expect for at least 3 months for writting the script. 3 extra for making it public in
There are things which considered obscene recently (illegal within the last 30 years) which I probably would have never considered doing if I had never heard of them.
OTH, there are other things that are legal (and lots of web sites for) that I didn't find out about until I was nearly 50 that I didn't have an interest in doing (and found distressing/repulsive).
So, for at least one person (me)
a) Some things I've done I would have never done unless I learned about them but I enjoy them.
b) Some things I would never have thought of/done and now would never even tho I learned about them.
So, I guess your mileage may vary.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Where does prohibition figure in this I wonder. For example, in the USA there seems to be a big thing about seeing breasts (and topless bathing is, as I understand it, illegal), whereas in Europe (where it's mostly legal, especially the Med beaches), breasts are two a penny and not such a big deal!
Stepping over to the Scandinavian countries and there they have a still more open attidute, and full nudity seems to be no big deal.
Is there a frisson of excitement added to the pot for images deemed 'obscene'? Think of TubGirl (OK ... actually, let's not think of it!). How many of you have seen it? Is that obscene? I'd say it was obscene, and yet I've seen it (actually, of course without seeing it you can't really judge!). I've seen it and, strangely, it's not something I suddenly want to try for myself either! So can something be "obscene" and yet not "dangerous"? So it it's not dangerous why talk about making such images illegal?
As with all censorship, it's Mr. Outraged, of Middle England, trying to impose their values on everyone else, because they are right and we all need protecting from ourselves!
Do I think some things should be illegal - HELL YES! Culottes for a start, they're just Devil's Trousers!
In this case, do I think it's right to ban cartoon images of minors in sexual situations. Blimey! That's a tough one. A blanked YES will catch stuff like South Park, and is therefore, IMHO, obviously wrong - but for sure people are going "too far" in other areas and it makes sense to try and formulate a legal response in those cases. I don't know what the answer is, or even if it would be possible to distinguish South Park from South Pron in some useful legal way?
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
Speak for yourself buddy. I'm of the opinion that making the production of "obscene things" illegal is an anathema to free society. And I think you'll be hard pressed to find many allies here.
"Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?"
It's yucky and I don't like it personally so you shouldn't be allowed to do it. Decent people (like me) all agree.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Child pornography
This is not a law on child pornography (which involves the abuse of children), it is a law on fictional depictions of under-18s, as well as adults with a predominant impression of someone under 18. Please RTFS.
Secondly, we already have laws against obscenity - as you say yourself. What is the justification of a new law then, one that covers simple private possession? The justification for obscenity laws is ropey enough in the first place, but the concept of "Obscenity" only has meaning in terms of showing it to other people. In fact one MP (Edward Garnier) did propose limiting this new law to publication - despite his definition being so broad as to include merely showing it to someone, he was criticised by other MPs, and labelled a "libertarian"(!)
Let's not get into that debate though, there's Wikipedia if we need to look up basic definitions.
You should trying looking up the definition of "child pornography" on Wikipedia, and see how it is defined as the abuse of children, and not me doing a quick doodle on a piece of paper.
Under this law, I could take an image of two consenting adults having sex, doodle a fully-clothed 17 year old on it in the background, and suddenly the image is illegal and I need to be put in prison for three years.
But take a pair of scissors and cut the image in two, so the so-called "child" is no longer in the scene, and the image is legal again.
You might draw two perpendicular stick figures and write "guy fucking a baby" underneath it. Then I'd argue that the title would be considered obscene and the drawing is irrelevant.
Do you think that writing "guy fucking a baby" should therefore result in a three year prison sentence?
If so, you'd better report to the local police station, because you've just done it. If you don't, do you agree that it shouldn't for a drawing, either?
Common sense would dictate
Law does not work that way :(
Another law being passed based on the assumption that a certain medium is targeted and consumed exlusively by children.
I'm almost 30 and I own several thousand comic books, probably 30 graphic novels, and actively collect 6 or 7 titles every month. I own the Watchmen and several other titles that would be taboo under this law. None of what's in any of these is more pornographic that he Clan of the Cave Bear series by Jean M. Auel, which my parents gave me to read when I was 13. They'd already read the books a couple of years before and knew about the sex scenes. My wife read Flowers in the Attic around the same age and she tells me that the oldest boy rapes his sister.
Neither of these books come with warnings about the graphic nature of their content or laws to prevent their dissemination to children 2 years above the legal age of consent (WTF, this is akin to the difference between the draft age and legal purchase of alcohol in the US).
My wife is pregnant with our first child and I hope that I never become so irresponsible that I want the government to censor artistic expression because I'm too lazy to investigate the media my children are interested in before I let them consume it. My parents used the Clan of the Cave Bear books as a starting point for the discussion of, not only reproduction, but relationships and human sexuality. I'm sure my parents were embarrased, but that was there job NOT the governments.
For the most part people have little problem with sex or sexuality in visual art. How many nude paintings did you see on your field trips to art museums growing up? For the most part people also have little problem with sex or sexuality in written art. I can't count the number of novels I read in middle school and high school that at least made reference to sex. However, when you combine the visual and written medium everyone looses their Fracking mind if anything taboo comes up (Drugs, sex, etc were the original reason for creating the Comics Code here in the US).
It's all just Nanny State BS.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
I hope to hell you're being ironic/joking, and I just got wooshed.
Otherwise, fuck off. It's irrelevant what 'decent people' think. It doesn't affect them, unless they want it to.
Sharia law is moral to Muslims... but we don't like when it's legislated. So stop being hypocrites and stop trying to legislate morality. How do you know that your morality is right? What if somebody did it to you? A muslim is every bit as convinced of their correctness as you are. Perhaps more relevantly, I am every bit as convinced as you are that my morality (who cares if it doesn't affect me) is correct, nay more correct.
Since we can't know either way, law has no business being involved.
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