Do we really need to protect ourselves from images? The distinction that says porn is the depiction of “sexual acts” is quite clear, we do not want to see or encourage photographs of children in sexual acts. But sexual contexts? There was no greater moment in my life where I was so absolutely stuck in a sexual context than when I was an adolescent. Sex was on my mind most of the time. By cordoning off adolescents from sexual contexts in art and the media are we not in some way causing a bit of trouble, by putting blinkers on them, they won’t know where they are or what to do and get themselves into all sorts of trouble that no chastity ring could rescue.

But then images can be used to corrupt and control people. Images shown and language used could influence/seduce vulnerable members of our society. One way of preventing this is through education, and focus on ‘visualcy’ because we do live in a world of images and we need to learn to not let ourselves be controlled by that world of images. Here is an interesting study on female and male adolescents’ interpretations of body imagery in schools

What is also interesting about the new laws hinted at in the Sunday Telegraph is the offence “meeting a child after “grooming” them with indecent material for sexual purposes”. What if a father gives his son a Playboy? Is that grooming.

Strange that art inspired the establishment of these laws and not the MP grooming and having sex with school kids doing work experience. ‘I think Milton was grooming me for sex’

Sorry about the ramble and rant just been thinking about the Bill Henson thing a bit since yesterday when I stumbled upon this excellent (but a couple of weeks old) article on the art life blog.