Apparently, one of them can get away with having admission charged to see his pictures of kids having sex with adults… and the other one has to bring a Charter challenge to even have such materials.
Right now at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, there’s an exhibition on called Picasso Érotique, featuring the great painter’s erotic works. Among them are images of bestiality and at least one of Picasso as a twelve-year-old boy having sex with an adult woman. The exhibition is regarded as a triumph for the gallery, has been widely publicised, and has even received support from the Department of Heritage.
What makes this odd is that the other year, a guy had to bring a Charter challenge to the Supreme Court of BC to get a ruling that he could possess child pornography. The way the law is written, to my knowledge, is that even a drawing or story about sex with children counts as child porn. (What makes it even more odd is that child porn involves children under 18, but the legal age in Canada is 14. Meaning that you can have sex with a 16 year old, but you can’t have a picture of you having sex with a 16 year old.) Of course, the guy bringing this charter challenge was reviled and tarred, and the government and judiciary lambasted for its response.
Canadian legal experts: Is there any factual reason that differentiates your run-of-the-mill drawing of a 12-year-old getting a blowjob from your Picasso oil of a 12-year-old getting a blowjob? Is this one of those Justice Potter things (“I know it when I see it”) - i.e. it’s porn if it’s stashed under your mattress but not if it’s hanging in a museum with security guards to stop you jerking off over it? Is it simply that the gummint would be too embarrassed to go against Picasso but they’ll happily go against Joe Raincoat because he’s not a Famous Artist?
I’m not a Canadian lawyer, but a lack of credentials never stopped anyone in Great Debates.
I think Picasso’s day will come. This business about people being jailed for writing private thoughts in private diaries constitutes the thin edge of a pretty scary wedge. I can easily see the day coming when Picasso, Nabakov, and Polanski are all put too the torch in a latter-day book burning.
I’m certainly nobody to object to another’s finding of hypocrisy, but I agree we need more details here. Kiddie porn is certainly A Bad Thing when it involves real kiddies, right? The purpose of these laws is to protect real kiddies from harm or endangerment.
But a fictional story, or a painting that could just as well represent a juvenile erotic fantasy, is simple porn. If there is not a real child being harmed or endangered in creating it, then the offense is, at most, tastelessness. Sure, one can argue the “creating a hostile atmosphere and encouraging actual rape” etc. but that’s true of all porn.
Seems to me that law, or at least its application, is overbroad, and belongs in a victimless-crime thread.
I’m referring to drawings (and fiction) all the way through. I agree that taking photographs is a Bad Thing since it involves harming children (although I’m not sure why a young person of 16 could consent to sex but not to having his/her picture taken.)
It does seem odd, but there is a difference between doing something for recreation and doing the same thing professionally. I don’t know how the labor laws are in Canada, but in the US it is illegal for anyone under the age of 18 to hold many kinds of jobs – including some that don’t require any duties that a person under the age of 18 cannot legally perform in a non-professional setting. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable for there to be different age restrictions for consenting to sex and being a porn model.
Of course, this line of reasoning would not apply to photos or video taken solely for private, non-distributed, non-commercial use.
Ok. Well, though I am no canadian legal expert, and putting aside for a moment the issue of photographs, I personally cannot see any justification for the state banning any kind of drawing or work of fiction not meant to represent or be about a specific real person, no matter how repulsive we might find them.
The fact that “repulsive” works are tolerated if they are by Picasso, but banned if they are by your average Joe Blow (or Joe Canadian, as it were) smells of hypocrisy to me.