We note with interest the decision by the OFLC to clear “five Bill Henson photographs of naked children, used in the past fortnight by mainstream news websites, for general release”.

Particularly we note that:

Classification Board member Claire Bowdler says the use of the images on news websites is legitimate reportage and not sexualised in any way.
^{(our emphasis)}

Pardon us? Not sexualised? What medication are these people on?

The bastardisation is guaranteed to sexualise the images. They emphasise the sexual in a way that was not intended by the artist.

The pictures are – or at least were – poignant images of innocence. That is their point.

The images do not sexualise the girl as Lions’Balls‘ Executive Director, “Hottie” Jenson, and others claim (the “pursed-lipped paragons of public morality“, former Police Superintendent, Alan Leek, called them).

“Hottie”, herself, and the exploitative media perves who have made a juicy, salacious, hot-selling, faux-concerned issue of all this, they are the ones who have “sexualised” the images. What is the conventional use of pixelation? To disguise the faces of wrongdoers. What does the black bar do? It draws particular attention to the girl’s breasts and thereby makes a point of her sexuality.

The so-called “sexual context” of the images, which supposedly makes them so offensive, was absent from the images themselves and has been created and fanned entirely by these self-righteous, self-appointed guardians of our morality.

“Hottie” and the slavering media have done more potentially to psychologically damage the subject of these images than Henson ever could. “Hottie” and her claque, along with the media, seem to me to be the real sexual predators in this farce.

If you would like to add your name to last week’s open letter in support of Bill Henson, or just in support of artistic freedom, you’ll find a link at Alison Croggon’s estimable Theatrenotes blog.

^{[Fuck me but those bloody evil, deeply-sexually-repressed bastards, Augustine and Calvin, the religious forbears of today's "purse-lipped paragons", have a lot to answer for.]}

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