Comment by elif

4 years ago

From my travels, my impression has been that America in particular treats child nudity as completely, unexceptionally obscene, beyond even adult nudity.

Compared to a beach in Europe, where nearly half of children under 2 run naked, there seems to be no grey area or minimum acceptability in the US.

It makes me wonder if our hypersexualized treatment of child nudity /actively contributes/ to the sexualization of children in our culture.

Haha yeah, in Europe there are often naked children running around at the beach. In Germany, there are places (especially lakes) where everyone is walking around, swimming and sunbathing naked - Sometimes the whole family. For me it was quite a shock initially but now I think it's fine.

  • I find that a bit weird tbh. I mean, if we look at human tribes throughout the world/history, and even what is the most common nowadays in african tribes which maintain their dressing habits, they usually cover their genitals. It indicates to me it is human nature to do that. It seems to me, in some countries for several reasons, they are going against the grain, purely out of culture.

    But there's something weird about it. Just like when you look at previous periods in time and now they look weird, often just reactions to previous epochs or other cultures (like the neoclacissim came as an opposition to rococo and baroque).

    This feels like it. It doesn't feel natural. It feels like it is purely out of a contrarian way of thinking, about how forward thinking they are, "look how superior we are that we are completely void of instinct to cover ourselves". and perhaps somewhat of a sexual counter balance to the strictness of the rest of their culture. I'm not sure i'm explaining this in the best way. I think there is a natural middle ground, the one that we have seen throughout hunter gathere human history, and Nordic countries are just being culturally weird by going to one extreme.

    • Europeans don't go around naked all day. It being acceptable to see a person in the nude in certain scenarios is not the same as a complete lack of inhibition towards private parks. You talk about African tribes covering their genitals but I'm pretty sure you're gonna see them being uncovered (and being okay with it) for certain activities for a larger percentage of their day than westerners.

    • You’re confusing people who are naked in public in some special occasions with nudists. The tribes you speak of are not covered 100% of the time in public either.

    • I follow what you're saying and completely agree, especially with the "look how superior we are that we are completely void of instinct.." quote - there are many things this could apply to nowadays in today's instant gratification and influencer (for the likes) driven culture.

  • People naked: ok. Pictures: nok.

    • 50% of my childhood pictures ( all from beaches in the Netherlands) would be lost (actually my aunt already destroyed some living in the UK and felling pressured for some reason) .

      I find it disturbing attributing particularly sexuality to children (actually I find a lot of adult looking clothes more disturbing than a nude child).

      I know that there is people with sexual disorders (I would strongly argue that pedophilic arousal is one), that commit serious crimes. I also do not advocate publishing any nonconsensual pictures on the internet.

      However disallowing something just because it can be abused is rediculous. Banning this guy protects nobody from nothing. Yes they could have blocked the upload of the image to the cloud (I would be happy to locally install any nude detection AI that does not communicate with the cloud. Even something that ask me if I have consent feom all identifiable persons in an image is fine for me. I think the father would actually have been happy about this. No need for manual inspection.)

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    • I often did run around completely naked at beaches. I don't do this anymore because now everyone has a smartphone and much more people take pictures now.

I don't think it's quite as strict as you're making it out to be.

I was in a park in Manhattan last week, which had a bunch of big sprinklers for kids to run through. No one was naked in the sprinkler, but some parents helped their children change in/out of their bathing suits out in the open.

(Then again, I only remember this because I was a tad surprised by it.)

A different article recently prompted me to wonder (I'm American): We know exactly at what age someone becomes 'legal' wrt images - do we know on which day of their life a person first becomes 'illegal'?

  • There is no such day. It's about the context of the images. Nude images of all ages are completely legal in the US.

    You have the logic backwards, it's sexual images that have an age, not nude images.

In the us, there is an unspoken belief that preventing criminals from ""winning"" is more important than protecting citizens.

This is why police fired into a stolen minivan that had a unrelated child and a shoplifting/carjacking suspect in it, killing both. Protecting the child took a back seat to punishing the prep.

Therefore CP laws very quickly stopped being about protecting the children and more about punishing the pedophiles.

Vindictiveness and spite are the unspoken role models of the US justice system.

Nudity in kids is seen as obscene purely because a pedophile could find it arousing. We are preemptively sexualing children in order to prevent their sexualiztion.

A child was once forced to masturbate in front of a camera by COURT ORDER. Police held them down. All because the child was a victim of child pornography and the court wanted a "comparison image" in a similar arousal state to prove it was a image of that child.

Once again, a child was victimized by the justice system, in order to punish a perp.

Never make the mistake of thinking anybody in the justice system gives a rats ass about protecting anyone.

  • > A child was once forced to masturbate in front of a camera by COURT ORDER. Police held them down. All because the child was a victim of child pornography and the court wanted a "comparison image" in a similar arousal state to prove it was a image of that child.

    That summary is misleading and, I feel, wrong. It's not accurate to state that he was "a victim of child pornography," the complaint in this case was against him by the parent of another minor that he was "sexting" with.

    That doesn't excuse the police behavior here, but you're attempting to paint a picture where the victims in these cases are outright ignored in a misguided search for justice. You're twisting this case[1] to fit your narrative, I think.

    Further, he sued the government and won. The courts made it perfectly clear, the lower courts and police were absolutely in violation of this teens rights when it granted and executed this search warrant. So egregiously that "qualified immunity" doesn't even apply to the officers estate.

    I wasn't going to address this, but..

    > Therefore CP laws very quickly stopped being about protecting the children and more about punishing the pedophiles.

    Pedophiles create a market through demand. Often it is also pedophiles that are on the supply side of this market, but not always. Merely participating in the demand side implicates you in these crimes against children as you are suborning their abuse. One could say that our system merely recognizes this fact.

    [1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/forcing-kid-to-m...

    • > Merely participating in the demand side implicates you in these crimes against children as you are suborning their abuse.

      So if someone participates in say P2P sharing of a CP video with some background copyrighted music, she can be simultaneously guilty of:

      1. Suborning the creation of the CP by participating in the demand side.

      2. Undermining the creation of music by distributing it for free.

      Something inside me says there is something wrong here.

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  • > In the us, there is an unspoken belief that preventing criminals from ""winning"" is more important than protecting citizens.

    It's sad you are downvoted for this, because it sums up the American mentality perfectly. Some people really can't handle the truth.