Neil Gaiman's Journal  -
1 days and 7 hours ago
div style="margin-bottom: 10px; font-size: 10px;"posted by Neil/div spanThis is a bit
long./spanspan style="font-weight: bold;" /spanspanApologies./spanspan style="font-weight: bold;"
/spanspanI'd meant to talk about other things, but I started writing this morning and got a bit
carried away./spanspan style="font-weight: bold;"br /br /I have questions about the Handley case.
What makes lolicon something worth defending? Yaoi, as I understand it, isn't necessarily child
porn, but the lolicon stuff is all about sexualizing prepubescent girls, yes? And haven't there
been lots of credible psych studies saying that if you find a support community for a fetish,
belief or behavior, you're more likely to indulge in it? That's why social movements are so
important for oppressed or non-mainstream groups (meaning everything from the fetish community to
free-market libertarianism) -and why NAMBLA is so very, very scary (they are, essentially, a
support group for baby-rapists.)br /br /The question, for me, is even if we only save ONE child
from rape or attempted rape, or even just lots of uncomfortable hugs from Creepy Uncle Dave, is
that not worth leaving a couple naked bodies out of a comic? It is, after all, more than possible
to imply and discuss these issues (ex. if someone loses their virginity at 14, and chooses to write
a comic about it) without having a big ol' pic of 14 yr. old poon being penetrated as the graphic.
I also think there's a world of difference between the Sandman story-which depicts child rape as
the horrific thing it is (and, I believe, also ends with a horrific death for the pervert, doesn't
it?) and depicting child rape as a sexy and titillating thing. I think there is also a difference
between acknowledging children's sexuality, and pornography about children that is created for
adults. Where on this spectrum does something like lolicon fall? And, again, why do you,
personally, think that it should be defended?br /br /Thanks for reading my ramble, and for being
accessible to us, and engaged in things like CBLDF. Mostly, they are a fantastic org., but I'm
really on the fence with this case...br /br /Jess/spanbr /br /Let me see if I can push you off the
fence, a little. I'm afraid it's going to a long, and probably a bit rambly answer -- a span
style="font-style: italic;"credo/span, and how I arrived at that.br /br /If you accept -- and I do
-- that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That
means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you
don't say or like or want said.br /br /The Law is a huge blunt weapon that does not and will not
make distinctions between what you find acceptable and what you don't. This is how the Law is
made.br /br /People making art find out where the limits of free expression are by going beyond
them and getting into trouble.br /br /LOST GIRLS, by Melinda Gebbie and Alan Moore is several
hundred pages long. (a href="http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2006/06/lost-girls-redux.html"I posted
the full-length review I did for span style="font-style: italic;"Publishers Weekly /spanhere/a.
Describing it, I said,br /br /blockquote style="font-style: italic;"The boundary between
pornography and erotica is an ambiguous one, and it changes depending on where you're standing. For
some, perhaps, it's a matter of whatever turns you on (my erotica, your pornography), for some the
distinction occurs in class (i.e. erotica is pornography for rich people). Perhaps it's also
something to do with the means of distribution – internet pornography is
unquestionably porn, while an Edwardian publication, on creamy paper, bought by connoisseurs, part
works bound into expensive volumes, must be erotica./blockquotebr /br /and I went on to say,br /br
/blockquote style="font-style: italic;"It's the kind of smut that would have no difficulty in
demonstrating to an overzealous prosecutor that it has unquestionable artistic validity beyond its
simple first amendment right to exist./blockquoteWhich was the kind of thing you put in a review
suspecting that its real purpose may be to persuade a prosecutor that the case is already lost, and
not to bother.br /br /In with span style="font-style: italic;"Lost Girls/span' many permutations of
sexuality, we find some content featuring fictional characters under the current age of consent.
It's a story about sexual awakenings, after all, and few of us wake exactly on our eighteenth
birthdays (or whatever your local age of consent or representation happens to be). At one point we
find ourselves reading a book within a book, a Beardsleyesque fantasia in which fictional
characters discuss the fact that they are lines on paper, metafictional fantasies, while having
underage, incestuous, sex. It's art, and it's brilliant, and it makes you think about what porn is
and what art is, and where the boundaries are.br /br /The Law is a blunt instrument. It's not a
scalpel. It's a club. If there is something you consider indefensible, and there is something you
consider defensible, and the same laws can take them both out, you are going to find yourself
defending the indefensible.br /br /I was born the day of the conclusion of the span
style="font-style: italic;"Lady Chatterley/span trial in England, the day it was decided that span
style="font-style: italic;"Lady Chatterley's Lover/span, with its swearing, buggery and raw sex
between the classes, was fit to be published and read in a cheap edition that poor people and
servants could read. This was the same England in which, some years earlier, the director of public
prosecutions had threatened to prosecute Professor F R Leavis if he so much as referred to James
Joyce's span style="font-style: italic;"Ulysses /spanin a lecture (the DPP was a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Bodkin"Archibald Bodkin/a, who also bannedspan
style="font-style: italic;" The Well of Loneliness/span) , in which, when I was sixteen and
listening to the Sex Pistols, the publisher of span style="font-style: italic;"Gay News/span was
sentenced to prison for the crime of Criminal Blasphemy, for publishing an erotic poem featuring a
fantasy about Jesus.br /br /When I was writing span style="font-style: italic;"Sandman/span, about
eighteen years ago, I had thought that the Marquis de Sade would make a fine character for my
French Revolution story (I loved the fact that at the time he was a tubby, asthmatic imprisoned for
his refusal to sentence people to death) and thought I really ought to read his books, rather than
commntaries on them, if I was going to put him in my story, and I discovered that the works of
DeSade were, at that time, not available in the UK, and that UK Customs had declared them
un-importable. I bought them in a Borders the next time I was in the US, and brought them through
customs looking guilty. (You can now get De Sade in the UK. The arrival of internet porn in the UK
meant that the police stopped chasing things like that.)br /br /The first time I got involved in
fund-raising for comics freedom of speech was in late 1983 or early 1984 -- Knockabout Comics were
having one of their frequent battles with UK Customs over what could and could not be imported into
the UK. Some comics contained rude words, sex, or the use of marijuana in them, and Customs would
seize any comics they objected to, forcing Knockabout to fight long, expensive, court cases to get
them back. (I remember their outrage when, in 1996, Knockabout imported some Robert Crumb books to
accompany a BBC TV documentary on Crumb, and UK Customs confiscated the books, forcing yet another
court case. I'm pretty sure that it was over some autobiographical Crumb work which contained
drawings of sexual fantasies including characters who were under 18. As a
href="http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/?p=1515"Tony Bennett, from Knockabout said in a recent
interview,/a span style="font-style: italic;""The other case was with HM Customs in 1996 over
Robert Crumb’s comics and explicit sexual imagery. We won this overwhelmingly as well and
Customs were kind enough to write to me after the case setting out a list of what sex acts might be
shown in comics. I haven’t actually framed it but it is a precious document."/span)br /br
/The first time I ever came close to sending a publisher to prison was about 1986 or 1987, for
Knockabout's span style="font-style: italic;"Outrageous Tales From The Old Testament/span: I'd
retold a story from thespan style="font-style: italic;" Book of Judges/span that contained a rape
and murder, and this was held to have contravened a Swedish law depicting images of violence
against women. The case was only won when the defense pointed out that the words were from the King
James version of the bible, and that the images were a fair representation thereof...br /br /(For
those of you who are a bit shaky on your Book of Judges, here's a
href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=judges%2019;amp;version=31;"an online Bible
version of the scene that caused the prosecution/a.)br /blockquotebr /span style="font-style:
italic;"While they were enjoying themselves, some of the wicked men of the city surrounded the
house. Pounding on the door, they shouted to the old man who owned the house, "Bring out the man
who came to your house so we can have sex with him."/spanbr /br /span style="font-style:
italic;"The owner of the house went outside and said to them, "No, my friends, don't be so vile.
Since this man is my guest, don't do this disgraceful thing. Look, here is my virgin daughter, and
his concubine. I will bring them out to you now, and you can use them and do to them whatever you
wish. But to this man, don't do such a disgraceful thing."/spanbr /br /span style="font-style:
italic;"But the men would not listen to him. So the man took his concubine and sent her outside to
them, and they raped her and abused her throughout the night, and at dawn they let her go. At
daybreak the woman went back to the house where her master was staying, fell down at the door and
lay there until daylight./spanbr /br /span style="font-style: italic;"When her master got up in the
morning and opened the door of the house and stepped out to continue on his way, there lay his
concubine, fallen in the doorway of the house, with her hands on the threshold. He said to her,
"Get up; let's go." But there was no answer. Then the man put her on his donkey and set out for
home./spanbr /br /span style="font-style: italic;"When he reached home, he took a knife and cut up
his concubine, limb by limb, into twelve parts and sent them into all the areas of
Israel./span/blockquotebr /And in each case, you could rewrite Jess's letter above, explaining that
only perverts would want to read span style="font-style: italic;"Lady Chatterley/span, or see
images of women being abused, or read span style="font-style: italic;"Lost Girls/span or the works
of Robert Crumb, and mentioning that if only one person was saved from a hug from a creepy uncle,
or indeed, being raped in the streets, that banning them or prosecuting those who write, draw,
publish, sell or -- now -- own them, is worth it. Because that was the point of view of the people
who were banning these works or stopping people reading them. They thought they were doing a good
thing. They thought they were defending other people.br /br /I loved coming to the US in 1992,
mostly because I loved the idea that freedom of speech was paramount. I still do. With all its
faults, the US has Freedom of Speech. You can't be arrested for saying things the government
doesn't like. You can say what you like, write what you like, and that the remedy to someone saying
or writing or showing something that offends you is not to read it, or to speak out against it. I
loved that I could read and make my own mind up about something.br /br /(It's worth noting that the
UK, for example, has no such law, and that even the European Court of Human Rights has ruled thata
href="http://www.secularism.org.uk/uploads/3543216b2ccd2e5738717582.pdf"span style="font-style:
italic;" interference with free speech was "necessary in a democratic society" in order to
guarantee the rights of others" to protection from gratuitous insults to their religious
feelings./span/a)br /br /So when a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_diana"Mike Diana/a was
prosecuted -- and found guilty -- of obscenity for the comics in his Zine "Boiled Angel", and
sentenced to a host of things, including (if memory serves) a three year suspended prison sentence,
a three thousand dollar fine, not being allowed to be in the same room as anyone under eighteen,
over a thousand hours of community service, and was forbidden to draw anything else obscene, with
the local police ordered to make 24 hour unannounced spot checks to make sure Mike wasn't secretly
committing Art in the small hours of the morning... that was the point I decided that I knew what
was obscene, and it was prosecuting artists for having ideas and making lines on paper, and that I
was going to do everything I could to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Whether I liked or
approved of what Mike Diana did was utterly irrelevant. (For the record, I didn't like the text
parts of span style="font-style: italic;"Boiled Angel/span, but did like the comics, which were
personal and had a raw power to them. And somewhere in the sprawling basement magazine collection I
have span style="font-style: italic;"Boiled Angel/span 7 and 8, which I read back then to find out
what was being prosecuted, and for owning which I could, I assume, now be arrested...)br /br /The
first time the CBLDF did anything to defend one of my comics, it was the span style="font-style:
italic;"Death Talks About Life/span comic at the back of DEATH: THE HIGH COST OF LIVING, in which
we see Death putting a condom on a banana and talking about how not to get pregnant, diseased or
dead. The Chief of Police in (if memory serves) Jacksonville Florida ordered a comic shop not to
sell it, because she thought it was obscene and encouraged teen sex. In this case, it only took a
letter from the CBLDF legal counsel, Burton Joseph, to the Jacksonville Police Department,
explaining the concept of the First Amendment (and, by implication, that there was an organisation
prepared to defend this stuff) and they shut up and went away. (That's what most of the CBLDF
activity consists of -- small, quiet things that stop it ever getting to a court of law.) From the
police chief's point of view, span style="font-style: italic;"Death Talks About Life/span was
obscene. She wanted it off the shelves.br /br /In this case you obviously have read lolicon, and I
haven't. I don't know whether you're writing from personal experience here, and whether you have
personally been incited to rape children or give inappropriate hugs by reading it. (I assume you
haven't. I assume that Chris Handley, with his huge manga collection, wasn't either. I've read
books that claimed that exposure to porn causes rape, but have seen no statistical evidence that
porn causes rape -- and indeed have seen a
href="http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2006/06/rape-porn-and-criminality-political.php"claims that
the declining number of US rapes may be due to the wider availability of porn/a. Honestly, it's a
red herring. I'll leave that for other people to argue about.) Still, you seem to want lolicon
banned, and people prosecuted for owning it, and I don't. You ask, span style="font-style:
italic;"What makes it worth defending?/span and the only answer I can give is this: Freedom to
write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you're
going to have to stand up for stuff you span style="font-style: italic;"don't /spanbelieve is worth
defending, stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not
differentiate between what you like and what you don't, because prosecutors are humans and bear
grudges and fight for re-election, because one person's obscenity is another person's art.br /br
/The CBLDF will defend your First Amendment right as an adult to make lines on paper, to draw, to
write, to sell, to publish, and now, span style="font-style: italic;"to own/span comics. And that's
what makes work you don't like, or don't read, or work that you do not feel has artistic worth or
redeeming features worth defending. It's the stuff you like and the stuff you find icky, wherever
your icky line happens to be. Because the law is a big blunt instrument that makes no fine
distinctions, and because you only realise how wonderful absolute freedom of speech is the day you
lose it.br /br /(And let it be understood that I think that child pornography, and the exploitation
of actual children for porn or for sex is utterly wrong and bad, because actual children are being
directly harmed. And also that I think that a
href="http://news.cnet.com/Police-blotter-Teens-prosecuted-for-racy-photos/2100-1030_3-6157857.html"prosecuting
as child pornographers a 16 and 17 year old who are legally able to have sex, because they took a
sexual photograph and emailed it to themselves is utterly, insanely wrong/a, and a nice example of
the law as blunt instrument.) div class="label_list" style="margin-top: 20px; padding-left: 15px;
text-indent: -15px; font-size: 78%/1.4em; font-family: 'Trebuchet
MS',Trebuchet,Arial,Verdana,sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing:
.1em;"strongLabels:/strongnbsp; a
href="http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/wittering%20on%20a%20bit" style="color: #999;
text-transform: uppercase;"wittering on a bit/a, a
href="http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/The%20First%20Amendment" style="color: #999;
text-transform: uppercase;"The First Amendment/a, a
href="http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/Bible%20stories%20that%20nearly%20sent%20publishers%20to%20prison"
style="color: #999; text-transform: uppercase;"Bible stories that nearly sent publishers to
prison/a, a href="http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/Lost%20Girls" style="color: #999;
text-transform: uppercase;"Lost Girls/a, a href="http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/CBLDF"
style="color: #999; text-transform: uppercase;"CBLDF/a, a
href="http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/Why%20I%20Support%20the%20CBLDF" style="color:
#999; text-transform: uppercase;"Why I Support the CBLDF/a/div
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Recommandations
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and reject those that you are not interested in
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