This question came up because of a rather famous gay actor known by his stage name of Brent Corrigan. He lied and provided false documentation to some porn producers and shot a film or two when he was 16 or 17, before his legal age of consent. Since then he has done tons and tons of movies and doesn’t care at all about his first movie he made when he was underage. Understandably, those films are illegal to own or distribute, because the model depicted in the film is now known to be underage at the time of filming.
But, should this be the case? If a person comes out as an adult with films of themselves before they were of age, and they give consent to distribute that material, should it be allowed?
I think that it’s a perfectly cogent argument to say that underage actors and models simply cannot legally consent to sexual exploitation, filming, etc, and so underage pornography being illegal from that stand point alone makes a lot of sense. But once an actor or model or whatever comes of age, if they say something like, “I am perfectly fine with any films of me from whatever age being distributed, sold and owned by the general public,” should that be allowed? Should there be exceptions in the law to people who actually want their underage footage to be exposed?
If not, is this impinging on their freedom of speech in some way?
I think for pornography it’s always 18. But for sex it varies from state to state between 16 and 18. And yeah I was thinking of the US. Is age of consent for legal contracts regarding pornographic films 16 in the areas that you’re talking about?
No. The point of the law is to criminalize, and remove the profit incentive from, creating child pornography in the first place. It doesn’t matter what the participants later think of it.
I suppose an argument can be made that an actor who has reached the age of majority should have control of their body of work, but such a legal precedent would provide clear motivation for scum to persuade underage “actors” to engage in criminal activity.
I can’t see how you can retroactively give consent to something that is justifiably a crime. When you’re committing the crime, you have no way of knowing if the consent will actually be given in the future.
And I think you can make an argument that while “Brent Corrigan” may have given his retroactive consent to the porn he made while he was a minor, Sean Lockhart might not have consented. In other words, the act of performing in a porn film had a substantial impact on Sean Lockhart’s life and changed who he was. He should have been allowed to decide whether or not he wanted to become Brent Corrigan not be turned into Brent Corrigan and then having to decide if he could go back to being Sean Lockhart.
Clearly this is a no brainer and the answer is no. You got to draw a line somewhere and I’m perfectly content with it being 18. I imagine most people feel the same way.
“Okay, you make the film now while you’re 16, we keep it on file because it’s legal for you to fuck, but illegal for us to distribute, then when you turn 18 you retroactively okay it, and I give you this wad of cash.”
I don’t normally like slippery slope arguments but sooner or later some twisted individual would come along with a video of them being raped at 7 and there would be real legal kiddie porn.
I understand there’s really no difference between a 17 year old and an 18 year old, but is there so little porn out there that we need to adjust the law so we can get some nearly 18 year old videos? Judging from the amount of fucking I see just when trying to innocently navigate the web, I think we can afford to keep that line.
It’s not even a slope, Fubaya. I guarantee that if you permitted this sort of retroactive consent, you’d have a ton of actual teen porn, either created by porn producers and held until the actors can give consent, or there’d simply be open solicitation of amateur videos of teens who are now able to consent. To allow this is to effectively disable a separate age of consent for pornography. Maybe that’s a debate to have, but this sort of retroactive consent is just a backdoor way of achieving that.
Yup. The proposed legal change would give all underage porn a contingent value, thereby creating (or increasing) the incentive to produce underage porn. Why in the name of all that’s rational would anything think for split second that this was anything but a really, really bad idea?
I think there’s an important difference between “I am now 18, and I now think it’s OK for this to be shown” and “I am now 18, and thus can retroactively un-criminalize the actions of whoever created this in the first place”.
So if someone makes a porn with a teenage star, they committed a crime by making that porn, and even if the teenage star later on says that he doesn’t mind it being seen now, making it was still clearly a crime.
A more ambiguous example is something like this… a precocious and artistic 16-year-old, in the privacy of his/her own home, takes some photos that are in some way sexual or explicit, and then several years later wants to publish them. I can certainly envision a non-exploitative hypothetical here, but I agree that it’s such a niche, and would open up such a can of worms, that it’s not even worth trying to consider writing a super-narrow law.
(Even if you ignore exploitative producers trolling for teenagers to film and then put the film in a vault for a few years, you can easily imagine a bunch of 16 year old girls camcordering themselves masturbating, hoping to make a bunch of cash 2 years down the line. And it’s hard to see society wanting that to happen.)
While I generally love to run against the grain of the board and argue with people, I have to say that I’m in full agreement with the majority of posters in this thread…it’s a bad idea for myriad reasons. I VERY bad idea.
Wasn’t she arrested herself (I think later the charges were dropped). I’m not sure what ever happened to her boyfriend who got her involved in this stuff when she was 15, but most if not all of her films are illegal in the US (they are still circulating around in other countries from what I understand, but I think that it would be illegal in the US to even download one of her films when she was a minor).