Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Pedophilia Mammalia

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You know how much I love Law & Order: SVU. Like a lot. Like, I'm gonna write an episode one day. The last episode to air entitled, "Possessed", didn't disappoint. I think that show is a great study of human behavior and psychology with a cast that is very easy on the eyes.


But anyway, I sat watching that episode wrapped in my Snuggie with my brow furrowed in anger and disgust at the overweight pedophile salivating over little girls and the old defendant smugly walking out of court again. His defense: his books were fiction and therefore he could not be charged with conspiracy even though a pedophile used his books as "instruction manuals". Interesting. Write about anything you want, as long as it's fiction and you're protected under the First Amendment?





Could Philip Greaves have protected himself by writing a work of fiction? Not so much. He was arrested because his work was considered obscene in Florida. Even if it was a work of fiction, unless it had true artistic merit, the work may still have been censored. A few months ago, I read Diary of an Innocent by Tony Duvert (1976). It is a first-person narrative of a man who has sex with teenage and prepubescent boys and even some animals. I think there's even a scene where he has sex with a chicken and one with a goat, or maybe it's a dog. I don't remember. (But how do you even do a chicken? Bop it up the egg chute?)


Diary is a novel touted as shocking, scandalous, disturbing. Duvert himself refers to it as pornography. By today's (ok, my) standards, the book wasn't as alarming as I was expecting. My eyes bugged out a few times but I read it cover to cover. I'm also aware that some things were probably lost in translation from French to English. Many believe this work of fiction is based on actual events in Duvert's life. Could a pedophile learn skills and techniques from this novel? Could someone's stance be changed from an anti- to a pro- pedophilia platform? Most works of fiction that are censored are ones that have sexual content that offends a segment of the population's morality. Yet having serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value is what protects those same works. Wow, Freedom of speech and Freedom of the press.


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