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It's not black and white

Posted by Behind Bars on 2011-April-16 15:30:51, Saturday
In reply to Do you think is bad to see nudist photos? nt posted by freeder on 2011-April-16 02:01:47, Saturday

From my perspective it comes down to a consent issue.

I grew up in a naturist family and was a member of a naturist club as a child and most of my parents friends at that time were from that circle. Attending naturist swims and saunas during the winter and naturist beaches with groups of families and club events throughout the summer was the norm for me from the age of 7 through to about 16 and although this was the pre digital age some photos existed within our family and no doubt many existed of me and other group members that others of our circle took.

Now of course it was not wrong or bad for my parents to own photos of my and my siblings as their intentions were one assumes purely innocent.
Indeed I had no problems with any of the group which became our family's circle of friends owning nude pictures of me, indeed I might have thought it as being flattering that someone would have thought that much of me that they wanted to own a picture of me, but that was me and no assumptions should be made about any other child based on that.

But in that context at that age and at that time I would not have naturally thought that someone would have wanted a naked picture of me for erotic or pornographic reasons.
If I had again it would have very much depended on who it was and what they intended to do with the photo.
Back then I guess it would have just been to jack off whilst looking at it. That might have made me feel slightly weird but nothing to have gotten upset about, indeed it might have appealed to my sense of ego as an awkward and unsure pubescent 10 year old.
If I had not known that someone was fapping over a Polaroid of me then clearly I would have felt nothing, not even a sense of weirdness, but that was in the pre-internet days when that photo would have most likely traveled no further than the guy or woman's own photo album and was likely to have been destroyed in time.

And that's it in a nut shell, it comes down to consent, not use. Ok ok I hear the cries about the whole "consent" and "child" issue and largely the adopted official line is fundamentally floored, mostly because it's had to be enacted into law and thus then becomes a "very broad brush" which causes more damage than it helps to protect children.

We do however have the whole internet issue now and photos become very widely distributed and once they are out there they live forever.
The thought of pictures of me naked as a kid being a part of a large porn collection of 1000's of people world wide and traded changes the whole issue about the right and wrong of the issue. On reflection that comes down to how vulnerable it makes you feel. Suddenly everyone you'll ever meet is a potential viewer of you naked as a child and that's a distinctly unpleasant feeling. Not only that whereas in the pre internet day the circulation of that photo was likely to be very limited, the act of making that photo available to be copied and circulated without confines or condition becomes a real breach of trust.

It seems that "we" choose to assume a couple of facts when we collect or view such images.
"We" assume that the child in the photo will never find out that their photo has been distributed over the internet , thus "no harm" will be done OR/AND "We" assume that if the child did found out that they would have consented or have simply not have minded.
Both of those assumptions may indeed be right or more likely be incorrect.

What makes collecting naked photos (in any context) wrong is the fact you have to make those assumptions in the first place and that is something you have no right to do.

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