mamajoan

The cat's outside and I have to finish off my Mudslide before I can go to bed anyway, so here I am blithering on livejournal.

Trouble is, I got nothing deep and profound to blither about. Here's something that's on my mind, though. There was a news story recently about a man who had been arrested for writing child pornography. Apparently, he wrote stories about men (himself?) having sex with children in various forms. I'm not clear on whether there were other kinky elements (e.g. S&M or whatever) to it, but anyway. The judge ruled that, although he (the judge) personally found the stories to be repulsive, they had enough "artistic merit" to be considered literature and therefore free speech and therefore protected. So the guy went free.

Now, I'm not going to go into the pro's and con's or whether the judge made the right decision; not having read the stories or heard the details of the case, I would be misguided to try to second-guess this defendant's actual threat to society. I'm more interested in this concept of "sufficient artistic merit." How does one judge this? Obviously it's subjective, but what do you look for? Have y'all ever read any of the crap posing as stories on alt.sex.stories.* ? Let me be clear: the content of the story is not the issue that I'm concerned with at the moment. Whether it's sex with children, animals, or consenting adults; whether it's vanilla PIV or upside-down underwater with handcuffs and a zucchini, the point is not the content but the expression, the language, the -- for lack of a better word -- quality.

So doesn't this imply, or at least skirt dangerously close to implying, that the defendant's skill or talent with the written word is all that stands between him and a jail cell? That it's only free speech if it's good? Or am I over-simplifying?

Enough for now. Tomorrow, if I get a chance, I'll try to dig up the actual news item to refresh my memory on the details (although, as I recall, they were sketchy).