Topic Tuesday #161 2015/08/18 "The Ethics of Kiddie Porn"
I'll be brutally honest here, I'm exhausted. I cam home after working for 12 hours and my creative juices are about tapped out. I scroll though the social media feeds in search of the rare gems for the Friday ORly Radio Show, and find a few here and there but the story that has dominated my feed is the guy from the Subway commercials that lost all the weight, he's pleading guilty for kiddie porn possession. I don't care. Seriously, this is just tabloid news to me and deserves to be next to Loni Anderson's liver spots and Bat Boy's new lady love in the super market checkout. I DON'T CARE. This is what the news cycle is though, light on issues, heavy on sensationalism. Sure, I like sensational news too, so maybe it's the topics they choose?
Kiddie porn. It's not something anyone wants to talk about except to demonize. I for one, and only one if you judge by the news, don't care about it and in fact I think that it falls under the auspices of censorship, which I am wholly against. It's not a nuke. It's not drugs. Possession of it either makes you a fed, a scumbag hustler taking advantage of children for profit, or what would commonly pass for being a sick minded person, or some combination thereof. However... really... It's none of my business... That business is none of my business. What makes people tick is always going to be a weird malaise of possible perversions and ideas. Really, the only thing I can find fault with it is the exploitation of minors. That's it. The line gets fuzzy on the who did the exploitation and who gets off on it. Maybe you are a twisted person that needs that kind of kink to get you going... but maybe you are also the kind of person to never do it yourself, but you will look at what has already been done.
Sure then we have the argument on the supply side economics of it. If there was no one that wanted it, then it wouldn't happen... Sure. And those iPhones are just going to make themselves. There are plenty of things in this world that we take advantage of the product without considering where it came from. Meat. Clothes. Electronics. Whatever is in perfume to make it smell the way it does. And pornography. This has always struck me as a bit of hypocritical cherry picking. This does not sanction the demand for kiddie porn, I find it vile, disgusting and many other words that mean revolting. But, I can only judge for myself and have strong opinions about the subject. That doesn't inherently make it wrong for someone else.
Personal autonomy means a great deal to me. You may have noticed in my posts about abortion and women's right and the right to die. You may have also noticed that these are all hotly contested subjects. So... I'm tired, and I don't want to repeat myself, so I will ask this of you, my esteemed and intelligent reader: Why? Why is it so bad? Am I wrong? Does the history of censorship and prohibition tell us nothing of the real underbelly of supply and demand for things that are taboo? Should I care about the headlines of a pseudo famous guy that got busted for child pornography?
All I know is I don't care about the story, and I need a nap.