Looking at Child Porn

We received an email from an address we didn’t recognize, with a subject line that said “Children Porn.” We considered forwarding it to the FBI, but that would have required opening it, which we didn’t want to do. In today’s political climate, we imagined all sorts of horrible scenarios involving illicit materials found on our hard drive, and newspaper stories quoting neighbors saying “he seemed so normal.”

Even if you believe that the age of consent ought to be lowered to something that more accurately reflects the increasingly adult and sexualized outlook our teenagers seem to have, it’s difficult to imagine anyone but the most principled pedophile arguing for the legalization of child pornography. This kind of material confirms our worst misgivings about the abuse of power and the exploitation of the defenseless. It exemplifies some of our most troubling human impulses. The people who produce child pornography are criminals, both in the letter of the law and the spirit of human decency.

We wonder, though, about our eagerness to prosecute those who look at child pornography. The argument can me made, we suppose, that because there is a demand for such images, the suppliers are encouraged to produce the objectionable matter. In other words, if thousands of people didn’t want to look at little boys being fellated, there would be no point in producing such foul imagery. But should we really be criminalizing the mere act of looking?

In a recent notorious instance of mistaken intentions, the guitar player of The Who, Pete Townshend, was hauled to jail for looking at child porn on his computer. He claimed he was “doing research” and was let go with nothing more than a permanently tarnished reputation.

And what of literature and drawings, or cartoons? What if no actual children are involved? What if the pedophile’s impulses remain in the realm of fantasy, expressed in imaginary pencil sketches and bombastic prose? The zeitgeist requires that those who would author such objectionable stories and pictures be punished. But when we start jailing people for what they think, the great experiment known as America may be officially deemed a failure and we can start conducting ourselves like China.

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” is one of the greatest books of the 20^th century, and its passionate defenders like to stress that it’s an examination of love and obsession, not jack-off material. But stripped of its magnificent prose and acute psychological insights, “Lolita” is a tale about a pedophile. And why would any normal and decent person want to read about such a subject, unless he’s a latent molester himself?

It’s this kind of spurious (and dangerous) logic that makes opening an email entitled “Children Porn” so frightening.