Posts by Emma Hart
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It's like Craig just got 100 random people to put money in a coin slot for Russell's benefit :)
Well, Russell did say his 'looking for porn' hits had dropped off lately. I'd link, but it's somewhere on the Thread That Ate Tokyo.
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having sex with girls their own age, but under the local age of consent (which can be 18)
When we were setting up Erotica, we looked for things we could just blanket ban. The first thing we tried was kiddy porn - which involved defining what a child was. Someone under the age of consent? Okay, is that sixteen, eighteen, thirteen? Even if you only took the US into account, which wasn't something we wanted to do, it varied hugely from state to state and sometimes for what kind of act it was - bless the convoluted engineering of laws so you can continue to discriminate against gay people.
And we have historical boards too. We had a woman object to a Classical Roman man in his twenties considering a fifteen year old male a legitimate sexual partner.
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I didn't know I'd read this book until you started describing the plot and it all came flooding back. Lovely. But, action-packed climax? Ick.
When I was a kid, we used to play in the abandoned quarry across the road from my mum's house. We had a regular wee village of huts and bivvies down there. Then the council put up a proper confidence course, which is always kept locked, and a skate-board half-pipe that nobody uses.
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Sorry, let's see if we can start again on that one. When I said:
there is a harm difference between text porn, and photographic or filmic porn, both in production and in accidental viewing
by 'in production', I meant the process you have to go through to get your end product, your photograph or your piece of writing. I apologise if that wasn't clear.
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I quite agree there is a difference, but it is a difference of degree, rather than one of kind.
Seriously? Wow. You don't see any difference in kind between writing a fictional story that involves child abuse, even if the depiction of it is entirely negative, and actually abusing a child in order to get pictures of that abuse to distribute?
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The Lesbos thing begs the question: what do they call women of the Sapphic persuasion on said island?
Tourist attractions.
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I don't mind if 'we' stop investigating stuff because we consider it's not harmful, OK, not important etc. Maybe the woman you've written about falls into one of those categories.
But 'big in scope'?
So, if we have a big problem and limited resources, would it be acceptable to decide to devote your energies to the higher-harm end of the problem? Genuinely asking here. Because I get the feeling Fletcher was raided on the basis of 'ease of target' rather than 'degree of harm' - which I guess is another way to deal with the problem, to chase after people you think you can nail.
Certainly there are bigger, more active sites out there dealing with material in that squicky things area, and if I know where to find them, surely the FBI do too.
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I'm expecting the Tour de France to look very sexy indeed
Is there something you want to tell us about cycle shorts? We'll be very understanding and almost not prurient at all.
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That's the 'effective' side of the argument, Kyle. The internet is big (really big, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, etc), and in the time it takes to properly investigate that material and find out if it actually is illegal, a whole bunch more stuff has gone up. It's like playing Whack-a-mole with one hammer and a board the size of Scunthorpe.
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And OK, so any given interest-based web community doesn't map onto any single identifiable physical location, and may in fact have entirely different community standards from any other randomly selected geographical community. Almost by definition, it's a subcultural utopia. So... any given interest-based web community should not be subject to the laws of any other community than itself? Or what?
I honestly don't know the answer to that question, Jolisa, but it's one I find really interesting, and not easy to dismiss. I do think the 'physical location of the server' rule is patently ridiculous, when the group may not include anyone who lives in that community. I'm also really impressed by the way net communities regulate themselves - they settle around a line of what's acceptable for that group and hold there remarkably well. I'm not saying 'I passionately believe the internet should be unregulated', I am saying "I can't see how you can do that in a way that's both effective and fair".
except for the bit where she has sold access to these stories and has thus crossed some line from expression to commerce? Is/isn't that what she's being punished for, as much as for the content?
As Russell has pointed out, she was hardly getting rich off it. Age verification on the internet is a massive PITA and pretty much impossible to do reliably. Xanga says if you can access a credit card, that makes you eighteen. Erotica at BW was behind a paywall: one of the several reasons we took it down was that it just wasn't working out for us financially. It's a lousy business model, but it did make us feel safer about the material being restricted.
She is being charged with distribution, but that doesn't mean possession isn't a crime. It is here as well.
If somebody took down some stories about child rape and murder from the very same web that my children are (for better or for worse) beginning to use, forgive me if I don't exactly feel "damaged."
Well, except your children couldn't access it. They can't access the erotica at BW, either. I have kids too, and when they started using the net, it seemed to me far more practical to regulate them than the internet. There are probably books you don't want your kids to read in 'the very same library' that your children are using, too.
I agree wholeheartedly about the idiocy of the facebook/youtube breastfeeding photo ban debacle
Okay. What about lj's removal of incest survivor support groups because they had the word 'incest' in their tags?
Also, I'm trying to understand the nature of the "damage" Emma mentions in her last paragraph. I'm not being thick, I just feel the need for more exposition on this subject.
Okay, I personally feel enormous sympathy for Fletcher, for what she's been through in the five years it's taken this to come to trial. I see people I care about really upset - rather than titilated - by the idea that they're perverts, that because they write sexually explicity stories that fall inside those FBI guidelines, they're somehow morally equivalent with people who actually hurt other people. They've grouped the consensual with the non-consensual. The Fletcher case has become something of a cause celebre, and it is having a knock-on effect, even if it's only in fear and self-regulation.