With Vanessa Williams being a judge at the Miss America pageant and getting that apology, I got to thinking about the September 1984 issue of Penthouse that first published the nude / erotic photos.
In this same issue, there were photos of Traci Lords, the porn actress who was later revealed to have been underage during most of her adult film career. Her XXX movies were pulled from shelves (all but the very last one). Her movies and the Penthouse photos would be illegal child porn.
Yet I see people selling the magazine on eBay allegedly complete.
So the question is whether anyone has ever gotten in trouble for being in possession of this magazine with the Traci Lords images intact?
What does sexually explicit conduct mean? There is not and can’t be a single all-encompassing definition. That doesn’t mean that all nude photographs are or even that all nude photographs in Penthouse are.
AFAIK, no one has ever been prosecuted for owning that Penthouse, so the assumption that the photos are child porn is probably wrong.
I am aware of the definition and as I have not seen the images in question, I think it can be presumed that someone posing for Penthouse would be posed in some suggestive / erotic way. Let us not forget that the Supremes upheld the Knox conviction which, as I recall, involved video of fully clothed little children, not doing anything particularly erotic but the camera was zoomed into their (fully covered) “naughty” areas.
And recent issues where young people were threatened with CP prosecution for “sexting” which I think mostly involves just standing in front of a mirror. In one case a prosecutor threatened a girl who was photographed from the waste up wearing a bra and therefore no more exposed than she would be at the beach.
While those might not have resulted in convictions, I think an underage person posed as they do in Penthouse probably would.
Look at it another way: If young, underage teen girls could pose nude in Penthouse / Playboy type poses with legal impunity, where are such publications? The demand would seem to be huge. No, this would not pass legal muster and neither would the Penthouse images. I think the assessment that they constitute CP under law and case law is correct.
Playboy had a 16-year-old Playmate in its January 1958 issue. Again AFAIK, every retrospective of Playmates feature her centerfold along with the 50s CD-ROM and every other way that Playboy makes money on its past. (Cynthia Myers, the December 1968 Playmate, was 17 when she posed.)
Many Hollywood movies have had under 18 actresses pose nude. Thora Birch in American Beauty is one famous example, easily and legally available.
Yes, most certainly there is a hysteria about sexting. Yes, some attitudes have changed so that seemingly every instance of nudity is a sex crime.
But legally it ain’t so. Your insisting that it’s so without any evidence doesn’t make it so. The backlash against the notion that teenagers must go to jail for taking a picture of themselves is already forming.
The GQ answer to your question is in your OP. Something that has never been prosecuted is probably not illegal.
I don’t believe there was nudity in the film, but in Kubrick’s '62 film Lolita, Sue Lyon, who played “Lolita,” was only 14 years old during shooting. Still, a very controversial movie for its time. Even now, it squicks me out to watch.
She was portraying a 14-year-old, but was actually 16 when the film was made.
There is no nudity in Kubrick’s Lolita. Sex between Humbert and Lolita is only hinted at. The subject matter is possibly even more controversial today than it was when it was made, but the film is actually tame by today’s standards.
In contrast, Brooke Shields appeared fully naked at the age of 12 in “Pretty Baby”. Since she was playing a child prostitute, and one of the nude scenes involved her being “inspected” by a client who she later has sex with, it’s hard to argue that the scenes weren’t sexualised.
Nonetheless the movie remains legal and freely available throughout the western world. So the odds of a nude still of a 13 year old being illegal seems fairly remote.
No, Sue Lyon was only 14 when cast and filmed. She was still only 15 when it premiered. The novel specifies Lolita’s age as 12(!) at the beginning (when she seduces Humbert). The studio wanted to say the film character was supposed to be older (like 16 or 17) but Kubrick got them to settle on simply not specifying. However the fact that Lyon was only 14 was kept quiet (she looked older). And I would say that the sex scene was more than ‘hinted at’. It was (just barely) indirectly implied as strongly as the time would allow (for sex scenes in general, not just between a young girl and an older man). The 1997 remake went further, but only a little (no nudity). It included Dominique Swain undoing the fly on Jeremy Irons’ pajamas.
If you read Lolita, you should quickly realize that the entire point of the novel is not just that Dolores is 12, but that she is pre-pubescent. Humbert actually loses interest when she goes through puberty. A sexy Sue Lyons may bother some people, but her story is not the novel’s story. Yes, I realize Nabakov wrote the screenplay. Just goes to show that movies aren’t books.
Brooke Shields appeared nude in Pretty Baby at the age of 10. She was portraying a 10 year old prostitute, if I recall correctly. AFAIK the movie is not deemed to be child porn.
…all of which should remind us of the old joke: Guy goes to a psychiatrist and the doc puts him through some evaluations. First up, the Rorschach test. He shows him the first inkblot and the guy says, “That’s two donkeys, and they’re mating.” The next inkblot - the guy says, “That’s a pile of four people and they’re screwing.” The next inkblot - the guy says, “That’s two women and they’re making love.” Continues through the whole set the same way. At the end, the doc says, “Obviously, you are obsessed with sex.” And the guy says, “Me?! You’re the one showing me dirty pictures.”
She was only 15 years old when it premiered, 14 when she was cast, and I believe 16 by the time it hit theaters. In the book, Lolita was supposed to be 12, but they changed it to 14 for the film.
There appears to be an important distinction that’s being missed: The Playboy centerfolds from Decades past and Brooke Shields’ appearance in Pretty Baby were, presumably, legal at the time they were made. They are thus probably covered by “grandfather” clauses in the laws.
But the Traci Lords photos in Penthouse were (probably) illegal when they were published. Penthouse ran those photos because they believed them to be of a person named Kristie Elizabeth Nussman who was 22, but they really were of someone named Nora Louise Kuzma who was 15 or 16 at the time.
As to the OP’s request: while I don’t know of anyone being prosecuted for buying , selling, or possessing that magazine in the US, I also don’t have a particular reason why I would have heard about that. But I also know that in many countries in Europe those pictures would not have been illegal, and reportedly the adult films Traci Lords made are still available there, so perhaps the ebay listings you’ve seen are from people outside the US who assume that buyers will check to see what’s legal where they live before bidding.
If this is the case, then why do porn magazines go to such lengths to ensure their models are eighteen? If what you’re saying is correct, a magazine could openly sell pictures of women under eighteen as long as they’re not engaged in actual sex. There’s obviously a market for people that would like to look at nude sixteen and seventeen year olds but nobody is trying to sell to it. This suggests that there are legal restrictions against using under-eighteen nude models.