Speaking of Bratz! dolls: Australian Supreme Court judge rules that cartoon parody is "child pornography"
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Artist:
You might want to look back at my original post about the recent case ordering all Bratz! dolls pulled from the market, and my followup to it...
Australian Court Rules Simpsons Cartoon "Child Pornography"
In what today's (Monday) Sydney Morning Herald described as a "landmark finding," an Australian Supreme Court judge has ruled that a cartoon in which child characters looking like Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson engage in sex acts, amounts to child pornography. A lower-court justice had fined Alan John McEwan A$3,000, a verdict that McEwan immediately appealed, maintaining that cartoon characters "plainly and deliberately" depart from the human form.
However Justice Michael Adams ruled that although the cartoons did not realistically represent human beings, they could "fuel demand for material that does involve the abuse of children."
Oh, yeah - show a guy a cartoon of Bart Simpson boffing his mother while Lisa goes down on Comic Store Guy, and he'll immediately want photos and videos of twelve year old girls being sodomised by Rottweilers.
And from that he might turn to real crime - like questioning laws and court verdicts attempting to regulate morality.
This is a little more enlightened than the US system, in which the guy could be sent to the worst prison available for twenty or so years and then required to regiater as a sex offendor for the rest of his life - forbidden by law to live within a quarter mile (or whatever) of schools, or to come within a hundred yards of schools or places where children congregate.
Assuming he survived the prison term.
A 14-year-old girl in Michigan sent a nude photo of herself to some friends - described in press accounts as showing her "face and genitalia" and, the last i heard, might actually be facing (along with possibly 200 other students who circulated the photo) felony child pornography charges that would require her to register as a sex offendor for the rest of her life.
Virginia law, i am told, by someone that's researched the case, defines "child pornography as anything (photographic, painted/drawn, computer-grnerated or whatever) that portrays sexual acts or situations involving characters who appear to be under 18.
And proof that they are over 18 is not accepted as a defense.
To be honest, i'd say that under that definition, i'd think that every Virginia toystore clerk or manager who ever sold a Bratz! doll, and everyone who bought them, should be prosecuted for kiddie porn.
I mean, give a look at this image:
Is this teenie-slut even wearing pants?
Generally, when i've seen an image like that, the next thing i expected to see was fellatio (or, occasionally, from an enlightened director, cunnilingus...)
Locating MOG account...
Comments (6)
Frankly, I'd just love to live in a world where I didn't hear people use expressions like "teenie-slut," friend. I'm sorry, but much of the smut is in the eye of the beholder.
http://traceesioux.blogspot.com/2008/08/empowering-girls-hootchy-clothes.html
I would love to, also. And a world like that probably wouldn't even have Barbie, much less the Bratz!
These dolls are from the same culture that encourages thirteen-year-old girls to have their navels pierced and wear skimpy tops that expose it ... and their parents to allow it.
These dolls are from the same culture that love hip-hop music that never even says the words "girl" or "woman" - but is really really loose with the words "bitch", "whore" and worse.
These dolls are from the same culture that encourages girls to think they need to look and act like Christina Applegate's character on Married - with Children (forgotten the name of the character), who, in the earliest days of the show, was costumd from a teen-catering boutique named - and i'm not making this up - "Retail Slut". (Applegate, incidentally, in the interview where she revealed that - she would have been about sixteen or seventeen at the time - referred to her character as "a little ho-bag"...)
These dolls are for kids not quite old enough to shop from the Abercrombie catalogs that (i'm told; i never saw one) looked more like (more-or-less) softcore child pornography than a catalog.
"Teenie-slut" is not a term i'd normally use i used it with care and precision to describe a trend in society that i find, at the least, disturbing. I did not mean by it a "sexually active teen" (as the parents of at least one sixteen-year-old i knew so described their own daughter when they kicked her out of the house with only the clothes she was wearing when she told them she was pregnant), nor do i disapprove (in the abstract) of teenage sexuality.
I used it to describe the commercialisation of a perverse and misogynistic twisting of what ought to be something joyful and simple.
I used it to describe the huge machinery that tells little girls that they have to look, dress and act a certain way in order to be "popular" or "sophisticated".
I used it because the people who create this "culture" (not necessarily the Bratz! makers, but it wouldn't surprise me) use it (with contempt) to describe the customers they make so much money pushing this junk to.
Can you tell that i am deeply offended and disgusted by the whole thing?
Quoting that post you linked:
I'm sorry - If you say it's all right to sell trashy sexualised clothing to young girls and to not describe it as preciesly what it is when talking about it - in the context of describing the merchandising of it and the sleazy industriy that promotes it, rather than the real kids it's being sold to - then you're missing the point or being altogether too politically correct.
I promise you that that young girl the poster is trying to protect has already heard those terms and worse - unless she's locked up in a convent, or home-school;ed on a desert island with no access to popular culture.
There's derogatory language, and there's calling a spade a spade. The Bratz (and a lot of other junk culture in the same market) portray a culture in which it's good to be a skank or a slut.
Banning language from your own conversation and thinking that by doing so your daughters (and/or sone) won't hear it is like thinking that if you don't teach teenagers about sex, they won't figure out how to do it.
I used the term you objected to specifically in regard to a doll (a whole line of hundreds of dolls) specifically designed to elicit that response in the viewer ... if the viewer is an adult. In young teens and tweens, they're desgned to appear to be role models.
They look like inflatable sex dolls :(
Just sad on all levels...
Yeah - and a lot of little girls were/are taking them as role models, to judge by the sales.