14 February 2007
Written by Rainer
H&M bikini ad = pedophilia? Not
Pedophilia. Hah, got your attention now not to mention loads of google hits. Pedophilia has lately been widely broadcasted in Finnish media. Specially the pedophilistic material one can so easily find in the wild wild internet. I think it has something to do with the fact that the elections are coming to town. According to the police we have only seen the tip of the iceberg on the pedophilia in the internet. The libraries have already installed filters, which surprisingly do not work properly as they filter sites that doesn’t contain any pornographic or “adult” materials.
The pedophilia debate has been actually calming down lately, but now our own “shaft carrier” Helsingin Sanomat brought it up again by raising concern about sites like irc-gallery or kuvake.net where people, mostly youth, send pictures of themselves. This combined with previous debate “conclusions” such as “H&M bikini ads are a port to pedophilism” and ye good olde “men are the reason there is pedophilia in the world” brings out the “we have to protect children from evil material in the web”. According to the researchers the children might othervice find for example S&M or anal porn on the internet which may disturb the child’s growth.
But where can the kids find this. I’ve been surfing internet for over 10 years and occasionally have searched for porn in the dark lonely hours when I just needed to waste precious working time. Unfortunately I’ve never found such material accidentally. Sometimes not even when I’ve deliberately looked for it. Of course if you google /*yes, googling is an official verb now, found f.ex in Oxford English Dictionary*/ with phrases like S&M, anal, pedophilia you’re gonna find “some” pr0n, but in generally one doesn’t accidentally find “adult content” anymore – or maybe I’m just using wrong phrases.
The thing that pisses me off mostly in the debate is that the Finnish government is planning a censorship for content on the internet where they make the ISP responsible for the filtering and the list of banned pages is “classified” and controlled by SuPo; the Finnish equivalent of NSA. The measures they have taken against the problem are purely populistic. This is not gonna stop anyone from acquiring material of naked children. It’s just swiping the issue out of the plain sight. And are they guys who lurk in the teen galleries just looking at the pictures really the cause for the problem (and they are actually called as long as they ). They can and will get pictures of semi-clad wo/men some way or the other. And as long as the stuff is happening on their dirty little minds and not actually I don’t see why this should not happen. The distance between thought and action is fairly long and rocky.
Lets take an example: I might’ve thought of committing a murder, or a kill, when I was in the army and had a fully loaded AK-47 on my hands, but I never did. I’ve even playfully considered an act of terrorism with self-assembled bomb when I get old and time should pass me. Still I haven’t done any such measures nor will do such voluntarily. A thought of an action does not lead to one.
But hey, to hell with it all. As long as we can protect the children from the evil and weak male minds, who only think of sex and are aroused just by seeing a piece of unclad skin on a paper poster, we will do fine and the world will be saved.
The extreme “child protectors” and muslim extremists are actually fairly similar in the end; both blame the “weak” male mind of doing something not appropriate and are willing to limit civil rights to get their will.
I wonder if the “child protectors” would be willing to wear burkha to protect the children from “a flash of skin-sexual thought-rape-child molesting” -domino effect?.