| the blog of human failure
Can I ask a few innocent questions about child pornography? Now before we get started I want to be clear that I am 100% without question or exception indefatigably against the taking or viewing of pornographic images or video of unattractive children. I’ve said this before in print and in speach and I have yet to see the state department or federal government prove I’ve so much as implied otherwise.
Putting that aside for a second, I can understand why child pornography is wrong. There’s the lack of consent from underage people who obviously have no presence of mind or authority to give consent for themselves. There’s the plain and simple further abuse that is perpetuated by the very existence of these photos that act as encouragement to the deranged minds that derive sexual pleasure from the image of a naked child. There’s the horrible selection of candies and confections provided for the victims at the photo shoots themselves. You know a child pornographer is a real asshole when he lures you into his basement with butter cookies. If you’re snapping stills of my prepubescent pecker with two adult sized digits in my ass, I’m expecting chocolate chips.
Putting that aside for a second, I understand intellectually and emotionally why child pornography is abhorrent. But doesn’t anyone feel any sympathy for these people who are, in a way that is beyond there control, attracted to children? I’m thinking, these people didn’t ask to have a sexual proclivity that would result in them being spit on and condemned universally through all of society. Who would ask for such a horrible fate as to have his natural sexual interest be illegal and regarded as the only crime worse than serial murder? You can argue that this is a choice these people are making, but isn’t this the same line of reasoning that lead homosexuality to be considered a psychological disorder until the 1970s? And before you start to yell at me, of course I’m absolutely equating consensual homosexual sex between two adult partners and pedophilia, so stop worrying.
The ancient Greeks are famous for their rampant pedophilia (and their delicious salads – no relation). I wonder what happened in the last two thousand years which transmogrified pedophilia from the perfectly cool, socially acceptable art form that it once was, to the social cancer we consider it today. Ironically, I’m going to have to assume the Catholics were involved.
But whatever, pedophilia is forever taboo, and child pornography is tabooed right along with it. What I think I made clear earlier is that this is great (the fact that it’s taboo). No more perpetuating the cycle of sexual violence against children. I’m completely on board with that. But what are we going to do with all of these pedophiles? Unless I’ve got my cause and effect completely backwards, these guys were taking snapshots of kids because they were sexually interested in children, and not the other way around. So now that we put the kibosh on pictures, don’t these perverts come wandering back up to the surface to assault our kids at the pumpkin patches and jamborees that I worked so hard to organize because of my completely friendly and platonic interest in being surrounded by dozens of youngsters.
Putting that aside for a second, I was pondering this child pornography quandary as I often do in my free time and I thought I had come up with the perfect solution. Animated or cartoon child pornography! It’s so genius. No children are hurt, the sexual proclivities of the pedophile are satiated and society’s fragile sensibilities go on unmolested. Well I thought I had the whole problem solved until a few years back I heard about a guy who got arrested for doing drawings of children in sexually explicit positions. Drawings! That brings me back to the original question that I wanted to ask. How the fuck do you prove that a drawing of a child is under 18? Can’t you just say you drew her short and cherubic for her age? When the cops are beating down your front door with a battering ram, are you supposed to run to your notebook and draw a state-sanctioned driver’s license into her tiny clutching paw? At the very least a non-driver ID? Scuba diver’s license? A Costco Card? Hello, is anyone still with me here…?
Today let’s talk about priorities. Sometimes we can more objectively understand the things we value in life just by stepping back and seeing what attention we devote to each activity and person. The businessman if questioned would say he loves his wife most, but the 18 hours a day he spends at the office indicates a higher priority. A woman might say her favorite author is Dostoevsky, but hour for hour she spends twice the time reading James Paterson.
A man in Darwin, Australia got into some trouble because he had a case of beer and his five year old child in the car at the same time. The man wasn’t drinking and driving, the problem was that he didn’t administer his young son’s seatbelt. He did, however, administer a seatbelt to his case of beer. The five year old sat on the floor in the backseat.
Now if you asked this man which he valued more, his case of beer or his son, I’m certain without ever meeting this man that he would say his son. And I think he’s telling the truth. “But look what he put the seatbelt on,” you might say. “Doesn’t that indicate his true pecking order?” I don’t know. I can point to dozens of examples in my own life where I say I value one thing over the other but if you were to record my time spent or action taken the converse result would be observed. But even knowing that I don’t think I’m lying by proclaiming my proclivities in the prescribed procession.
So where does the truth lie? What do you have to do to cross the line so that just saying you value something over something else is not legitimate or essentially true? We can just resolve ourselves to believing that someone saying something is his priority makes it true because he’s the only one in the position to make proper judgment of his own values.
If we agree with that line of reasoning, then I think we should all be lying about our values in order to be making ourselves as attractive/employable/desirable/seemingly-educated as possible in order to advance our personal causes of having sex, making money, and impressing others with our empathy and intellect. We could always just rationalize it afterwards by saying that what we claim to value are the noblest things anyway and we really do value them the most in our hearts even though our actions for the most part show otherwise. Then when our actions accidentally coincide with the things we claim we value, we can use these points as references for argument of our validity, even though we were spuriously motivated. Aren’t we doing this already?
We’ve been getting some mail here at the Empty Beanie headquarters about what constitutes an empty beanie. Here’s a sample letter.
To Whom It May Concern:
I’m a high school history school teacher in Sichuan, China (Go Bobcats!). Three hundred of my students are trapped under a suffocating pile of conflagrating wreckage with little chance of escape. Through the cracks in decimated concrete and shattered spewing sewerage pipes I can hear the haunting calls of phantom schoolchildren being screamed out of the inescapable abyss. I’ve taken a number of flattering pictures and written witty captions but I am reluctant to post. One unconscious child is literally wearing an American style Flintstones t-shirt featuring the character Barney Rubble. I mean, come on. Is this an empty beanie or what?
-name withheld-
First, let me say hello to our Beanie-philes in China. That our effect is being felt internationally we accept as no small accomplishment and we thank you for your patronage. This does bring me to my larger point about what makes for an empty beanie. While an unconscious Chinese child under a pile of rubble wearing a Barney Rubble t-shirt is an out-of-date drastically insensitive poorly written unimaginative coincidence, it is not, I’m afraid, an empty beanie.
Natural disasters as a rule of thumb are not empty beanies. We’re looking for human failure here people. When an infant gets hit by a stray bullet, it’s just a tragedy. When an infant gets hit by a stray bullet because its father took it hunting, we’re getting close. When a father dresses his infant in brown footy pajamas and straps on a pair of novelty child-sized antlers and then takes it hunting, we’ve got a perfect storm of human error and circumstance that’s empty beanie writ large.
40,000 dead in Myanmar is not an empty beanie. It’s a cyclone. The dictator causing another 60,000 deaths because he refuses to receive international aid is close. Putting the dictator in brown footy pajamas and taking him hunting is a waste of brown footy pajamas but still a pretty good idea. I don’t remember where I was going with this but I think we were trying to distinguish what makes for a good beanie. I think I’m lost so I’ll put it on you to post below. What distinguishes a depressing tragedy or a moronic novelty from an empty beanie? Does anyone have any ideas?
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