UPDATED FROM Feb 9, 2014 TO REFLECT NEWS ABOUT CHILD PROSTITION IN BRAZIL AND A CONTACT WITH SOMEONE CLAIMING TO BE CHLOE BARTRAM
My brother in law accuses me of “using pictures of children who are in beauty contests as illustrations of supposed child prostitutes”
My brother in law (below) seems to think that pictures like this one by Chloe Bartram of Queensland is not pornographic. I disagree.
Bartram’s “Sparkle, baby” shows a very young girl in a highly sexualized pose, one that at least to me has a strong taste of domination. While I do not look at child porn, I suspect it is not unlike this. Don’t get this or child porn confused with legal, Recommended and curated collection of teen porn, teentuber, that feature of age consenting adults that seem to look younger than they actually are.
The photographer says “I seek to understand if participating in these events increases the pressure on young girls to conform to an idealized view of what it means to be female or rather, is it a celebration of girlhood?”
Is that really all Ms. Bartram sees? Is this “pressure” to conform to other children or pressure for little girls to transform themselves into a sex objects? The clinically white surroundings encases the sexualized little girl in a shocking pink dress as much as Mylie Cyrus’s tongue pops out of her lipsticked lips. The look on Sparkle baby’s face shows less of the joy of a child dressing up than it does the constraints imposed by the white clothed authority figures.
On the other hand, maybe I missed Ms. Bartram’s intent. Recently, someone claiming to be Ms. Bartram emailed me on my personal email account and objecting to my use of the image. I was not sure why she contacted me. Does she simply want to protect her work as a photographer from my criticism? Or does she feel that my use infringes on her commercial rights? Does she fail to understand the American fair use doctrine that permits use of all published work as part of a commentary? If she consults an attorney she will find that use of this picture is covered by the fair use doctrine as long as it provokes interest of readers on TA and gets them to consider the problem of sexualization of children.
Despite my belief in fair use, I want to protect Ms. Bartram’s financial interests, and have offered to discuss this with her if she simply calls me on the phone so I can verify her identity. As readers of the blog know well, I have good reason to worry about persons impersonating others in order to alter the contact of this blog. “Bob Raymond” and “Roberta Flack” … or someone uses these names .. have repeatedly hacked THE Ave and may be responsible for major damage done this week end. The person using these identities does have access to my personal email (an address not on this site) .. feeding concerns about Ms. Bertam’s use of that address.
The sad thing is that Ms. Bertram (or the person using her identity) objects to use of this very good image to make the point that some people see transformation of female children into sex objects as a harmless exercise
. While I know little of Ms. Bartram’s Australia, girly beauty pageants are all over America and are especially popular in red states where God, Guns, and college sports seem to replace the moral ideals of my own culture.
It is difficult for me to understand how anyone could look at ‘Sparkle, baby’ and not connect it to the child prostitution at this year’s super bowl or the expected festival of child prostitution at next summer’s World Cup in Brazil.
My guess is that many or most of the people puting on these baby peep shows would agree with my brother in law, a resident of South Carolina. William Quick has previously accused me of being a thief, a liar, and a psychotic. Now he seems to have a need to defend his southern neighbors from my criticism of their girly shows with children. Of course Bill’s defense ends up accusing me of being a pervert.
“Dear Dr. Schwartz:
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Your recent blog posting, “REPOST: Superbowl attracts kid prostitutes” ( <http://handbill.us/?p=28153>h
ttp://handbill.us/?p=28153 ) is utterly unacceptable. The photoshopped graphic of beauty pageant children that you included is totally beneath the dignity of a physician who is on-staff of a major University’s medical school. I will send a copy of this e-mail to the University of Washington, so that they can see what sort of creep that have on-staff. And posting the blogpost once wasn’t enough for you — you had to reemphasize your boorish behavior by adding more comments to your previous posting on this subject and reposting it.
You somehow don’t seem to understand that using pictures of children who are in beauty contests as illustrations of supposed child prostitutes (both before, and in your new photoshopped image — which is available at several locations on line such as http://lancerlines.files.wordp
ress.com/2012/04/the-average- look-at-a-child-pageant.jpg ) is absolutely despicable. You taking the additional time that was needed to blur the faces of the two children isn’t enough to get you off the hook. You are a dirty old man, period. You should have your brain washed out with soap (not just your mouth).”
I ought to have identified the author of the email. He is William Quick, my brother in law and, I suspect, the author of comments presented here under the names Robert Flack and Bob Raymond.
sMS
Mylie Cyrus looks like a dog lapping up food from a dog dish.
I have challenged the author to produce any e-mail or other documentation that I used the words “psychotic” or “psychosis” to describe him. He was unable to produce any such correspondence. I asked him to remove the sentence at this blogpost that falsely states “William Quick has previously accused me of being a thief, a liar, and a psychotic” and he has refused. I totally expect that he either (a) will not allow this comment to be posted, or (b) write another nasty, bullying blogpost accusing me of something vile and evil (G*d only knows what he will do).