Attached Link: The Heidi Effect

What's "legal," not surprisingly, usually depends on how much money you have. When some DA went after Barnes & Noble for selling aforementioned coffee table books (David Hamilton, Jock Sturges etc.), B&N's lawyers, (supported by the American Library Association and others who filer amicus briefs IIRC) won. Ditto the case against the film 'The Tin Drum.' Joe Blow posting cute pics of his 2 yr. old daughter in the bathtub probably better start getting used to not bending over to pick up the soap in the shower where he may be headed. There was a series of articles just a week or so ago about the child "model" sites and I think Alberto is looking into them as a new target. Some of them are clearly nothing more than softcore erotica and the parents have to know it but they're too greedy to care. The legality of the nudist videos reflects the (IMO rational) view that simply being naked doesn't necessarily equate to sinful or even obscene. If someone is filming the kiddies with a "crotch cam" then that's pretty obvious but ultimately, a lot of it seems to boil down to trying to figure out how the images are going to effect a particular viewer, whether they're going to excite "lewd" feelings. Where does that lead when in reality, someone, somewhere is turned on by everything from car crashes to people dressed up as animals? There's an interesting essay about the sexual symbolism of the Heidi films (link) - rather longwinded and psycho-babbleish, but the part about Heidi milking a goat is an amazing revelation. "In the second scene Heidi is learning to milk a goat. The body and legs of the goat frame Heidi, while the goat's udder hangs down from the upper left corner of the frame. Without an establishing shot of the goat, it is difficult for viewers to know just what they are looking at. Grandfather shows Heidi how to pull on the goat's teat, standing for a brief moment directly behind the teat. In the sequence, Temple handles the semi-flaccid teat without being able to extract any milk. Just when she directs it toward her face, milk squirts out in a sudden rush. The director obviously found the scene so successful that he repeated it toward the end of the film with another sympathetic male actor. For children, this is a comic sequence, of course, but, as Dwan stated, "...they don't catch that significance." So there you are; you've probably been perving out for years and never even knew it. Post your Aiko, fully clothed, milking a goat and you'll have the last laugh - er unless the mods read this find out what it *really* means :-)

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken