![A physically aroused young man sits on the ground, stripped and bound to a fence behind him. Semen drips down his face, chest, and from his anus as another person takes a photograph of the moment using a cell phone camera.
This drawing turns me on because it contains many elements of my sexual fantasies. However, I seriously reconsidered posting it tonight because it shows an incredibly volatile subject. Interestingly, despite all that’s depicted here, the bondage, the indications of rough, likely homosexual sex, and the intense power imbalance, it’s the inclusion of the cell phone camera that turns this fictional picture into a potential political nightmare. I’m talking, of course, about “sexting.”
Personally, I enjoy rough sex involving consensual use of restraints and, yes, photography. While restraints were simpler for me to enjoy, being photographed makes me a little uncomfortable to this day because, by and large, a man’s value is measured in everything except his sex appeal. To be considered as potentially beautiful, or at least pretty enough to be visually desirable, seemed so impossible for so long that even a hint of such attention felt more likely to be putting me at the butt of a joke than giving me a compliment.
In the hegemonic gender paradigm, what a man cannot be, a woman is, and so when I was sixteen, my then-girlfriend and I set up a few private photo shoots in which I photographed her naked. This is not uncommon, abnormal, or unhealthy. It was, as much of young people’s behavior is, simply a necessary exploration of our own bodies, feelings, and desires. It was partly through experiences such as that one that I developed my sexual personhood, and my girlfriend developed hers.
Increasingly, however, young people’s rights?and particularly their sexual freedoms?are being whittled away by outrageous, paternalistic, and contradictory claims. As I said at KinkForAll Washington DC,
In December of 2006, the Denver Post reported on a Utah court case in which two 13 year old heterosexual adolescents were convicted of sexually molesting each other. They, too, are now both registered sex offenders. This story showcases a horrible double-standard of youth sexuality: at 13, you’re too young to be capable of consenting to sex, but apparently you’re old enough to consciously decide to sexually molest someone else.
Moreover, at such young ages you’re also apparently old enough to be charged with producing and distributing child porn of yourself, even when the pictures you take are not even close to the explicitness shown in the fictional drawing at the top of this post. So, in what is poised to be an extremely important legal case, A federal appeals court in Philadelphia may soon decide whether [teen girls] can be prosecuted under Pennsylvania child pornography laws merely for appearing in a “sexting” cell phone image, the Post-Gazette is reporting:
In 2008, then Wyoming County District Attorney George Skumanick Jr. threatened to prosecute the girls unless they attended what their lawyers called “re-education” classes and wrote an essay about why sexting is wrong.
Yesterday, before the three-judge panel, a lawyer for Mr. Skumanick said that was a legitimate effort to protect the teens from themselves and potential child predators, and compared it to other state laws?like motor vehicle rules?that regulate teen behavior.
That claim outraged ACLU lawyer Witold J. Walczak, who argued the prosecutor cannot accuse the girls of being pornographers under the guise of protecting them from pornographers.
“We’ve been mystified how anyone can look at these photos as pornography,” he said. “These photos are not even close calls.”
(Emphasis mine.)
America is tragically embroiled in more than enough wars right now. Stop putting our kids on the front lines of the war on sex. Stop treating them like the criminals you claim to be protecting them from. Stop destroying their future by forcing them onto sex offender registration lists. And, please, stop shaming American children to their own deaths. Just, stop.
-maymay
(via orz.4chan.org)](https://web.archive.org/web/20160313203000im_/http://40.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwfppnqTxm1qzs83zo1_r2_500.jpg)
A physically aroused young man sits on the ground, stripped and bound to a fence behind him. Semen drips down his face, chest, and from his anus as another person takes a photograph of the moment using a cell phone camera.
This drawing turns me on because it contains many elements of my sexual fantasies. However, I seriously reconsidered posting it tonight because it shows an incredibly volatile subject. Interestingly, despite all that’s depicted here, the bondage, the indications of rough, likely homosexual sex, and the intense power imbalance, it’s the inclusion of the cell phone camera that turns this fictional picture into a potential political nightmare. I’m talking, of course, about “sexting.”
Personally, I enjoy rough sex involving consensual use of restraints and, yes, photography. While restraints were simpler for me to enjoy, being photographed makes me a little uncomfortable to this day because, by and large, a man’s value is measured in everything except his sex appeal. To be considered as potentially beautiful, or at least pretty enough to be visually desirable, seemed so impossible for so long that even a hint of such attention felt more likely to be putting me at the butt of a joke than giving me a compliment.
In the hegemonic gender paradigm, what a man cannot be, a woman is, and so when I was sixteen, my then-girlfriend and I set up a few private photo shoots in which I photographed her naked. This is not uncommon, abnormal, or unhealthy. It was, as much of young people’s behavior is, simply a necessary exploration of our own bodies, feelings, and desires. It was partly through experiences such as that one that I developed my sexual personhood, and my girlfriend developed hers.
Increasingly, however, young people’s rights—and particularly their sexual freedoms—are being whittled away by outrageous, paternalistic, and contradictory claims. As I said at KinkForAll Washington DC,
In December of 2006, the Denver Post reported on a Utah court case in which two 13 year old heterosexual adolescents were convicted of sexually molesting each other. They, too, are now both registered sex offenders. This story showcases a horrible double-standard of youth sexuality: at 13, you’re too young to be capable of consenting to sex, but apparently you’re old enough to consciously decide to sexually molest someone else.
Moreover, at such young ages you’re also apparently old enough to be charged with producing and distributing child porn of yourself, even when the pictures you take are not even close
to the explicitness shown in the fictional drawing at the top of this post. So, in what is poised to be an extremely important legal case, A federal appeals court in Philadelphia may soon decide whether [teen girls] can be prosecuted under Pennsylvania child pornography laws merely for appearing in a “sexting” cell phone image,
the Post-Gazette is reporting:
In 2008, then Wyoming County District Attorney George Skumanick Jr. threatened to prosecute the girls unless they attended what their lawyers called “re-education” classes and wrote an essay about why sexting is wrong.
Yesterday, before the three-judge panel, a lawyer for Mr. Skumanick said that was a legitimate effort to protect the teens from themselves and potential child predators, and compared it to other state laws—like motor vehicle rules—that regulate teen behavior.
That claim outraged ACLU lawyer Witold J. Walczak, who argued the prosecutor cannot accuse the girls of being pornographers under the guise of protecting them from pornographers.
“We’ve been mystified how anyone can look at these photos as pornography,” he said. “These photos are not even close calls.”
(Emphasis mine.)
America is tragically embroiled in more than enough wars right now. Stop putting our kids on the front lines of the war on sex. Stop treating them like the criminals you claim to be protecting them from. Stop destroying their future by forcing them onto sex offender registration lists. And, please, stop shaming American children to their own deaths. Just, stop.
(via orz.4chan.org)