Posted on 09/19/2020 6:52:03 AM PDT by Parody
Kiddie sex is possibly the most controversial topic any movie can examine. Slip anything into your movie about sex involving a child (whether the child is being molested by someone older, or is doing it with another child) and you guarantee plenty of censorship and angry chatter about censorship, not to mention pretentious eggheads trying to make the case that people are taking this way too seriously and kiddie sex totally isn't what the movie's about.
Sometimes those pretentious eggheads are right, and the detractors really are focusing too much on one little scene or insinuation to the exclusion of all the rest of the movie's story. A little child nudity, a child's having a precocious crush on an adult, or even a crime story involving child rape and/or prostitution do not make the movie all about kiddie sex. Fritz Lang's M, Michael Bay's The Island, Randal Kleiser's Blue Lagoon, Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver, even Luc Besson's Leon: The Professional... none of these are really about kiddie sex, despite whatever prurient interest a few pathetic perverts might be able to take in them.
On a few rare occasions, however, the detractors are dead right and all the pretentious eggheads' film jargon and psycho-babble about metaphorical-subtextual-yackety-yack can't gloss over the reality that a given movie is all about the severely underage rumpety-pumpety, on-screen or off, with everything else mostly there just to provide a contextual excuse. We're not talking about trashy movies in which teens played by twenty-somethings or even by actual teens get all wildly promiscuous on-screen, we're talking about tweens and kids in the single digits doing the four-legged frolic. The following are genuine examples of these I-can't-believe-it's-not-kiddie-porn flicks.
(Excerpt) Read more at web.archive.org ...
Worse x a million. .onion sites from hell.
every teenager focus movie for the last 50 years is kiddie porn basically at a fundamental level.
No mention of Lolita. Sue Lyon was 14 when she played the role.
Taxi Driver
Or Pretty Baby. How Brooke turned out as normal as she is defies logic. I knew her dad - played a lot of golf w/ him and taught him. I think her Mom was the problem there.
I must still be sleeping. Because no one would write that :-) you do know that teenagers go all the way up to 19 right? The good old days weren’t always good and tomorrow isn’t as bad as it seems :-)
Cuties is outrageous. That outrage can get diluted by silly comments.
Also, no mention of the movie “Kids”, which was a theatre release that caused an uproar in 1995.
Kids is one of the more revolting things to ever hit the big screen. Good example! It’s so depressing that you end up almost glossing over the sexualizing of teens in it.
Ah, those morally superior Europeans
There was a movie back in the early 80s called “Private Lessons”. Ostensibly a comedy about a French maid/con artist seducing a teenage boy. Features a simulated sex scene with an underage kid and Rod Stewart crooning on the soundtrack in the background. How did THAT fly back then?
American Beauty featured a sexually suggestive scene involving a girl who was clearly under age. Had i not been watching the film as a guest of family members, I would have walked out after the first two minutes. I was astonished that such a depraved and decadent film won Best Picture for 1999, but long ago, I came to realize that this is par for the course in today’s Hollywood.
And then there was Salo’ . I understand the producer was murdered after releasing it.
That’s because:
A) Sue Lyon was actually 16, though she was playing a 14-year-old (which is an adaptive age-up from the book).
B) “A little child nudity, a child’s having a precocious crush on an adult, or even a crime story involving child rape and/or prostitution do not make the movie all about kiddie sex.” (Arguably, it’s a crime story about statutory child rape.)
C) “We’re not talking about trashy movies in which teens played by twenty-somethings or even by actual teens get all wildly promiscuous on-screen, we’re talking about tweens and kids in the single digits doing the four-legged frolic.” (i.e. The child characters in question had to be under 13 for the movie to end up on the list.)
“Ah, those morally superior Europeans”
He rips them pretty thoroughly in the final entry: “By the way, a court in what was not previously widely understood to be the prudish and puritanical country of Germany effectively banned this movie in 2006 by declaring it kiddie porn and ordering the German “cult classic” company that released it uncut on a DVD to recall and destroy every copy it could. A court in the Netherlands followed suit in 2010, and the uncut version of this movie is no longer legally circulated anywhere in the allegedly sexually sophisticated countries of Europe that are always making fun of Americans for supposedly being so prudish and puritanical.”
“Pretty baby” and “Blue Lagoon” where undoubtedly prurient and should not have been made.
The issue isn’t about a theme revolving around child abuse, it is about sexualising the child actors in the film. “Pretty Baby” featured an underaged Brooke Shields fully nude in many scenes. That was totally unneccessary and prurient as well as exploitative and wrong. I’m not even sure how it got made and everyone involved didn’t get arrested to be honest.
As for ‘cuties’ for a film that ostensibly is a critique on the hypersexualisation, it does a lot of hypersexualisation of the child actors involved in making it. Its a bit like making a film criticising racism and then paying all the actors involved different rates according to their race.
What I was referring to is all the teenage movies where they are having sex. Which is nearly every teenage movie made in the last 50 years.
Really, think about it. Even old teen movies from the 80’s like Sixteen Candles are filled with child sex and drinking.
The 70s was far worse. "Pretty Baby", "Taxi Driver", the multitude of European films that are even more explicit than the two I mentioned. British photographer David Hamilton sold coffee table books of his photos of naked 13-year olds. Jimmy Page and David Bowie were sharing the same 14-year old girlfriend, parading her around the clubs shamelessly. Roman Polanski pleading to essentially a slap on the wrist for raping a child. In many European countries, child porn wasn't even illegal. The internationally-observed 18-year age minimum to make porn is largely a product of the internet. Prior to that, girls far younger than 18 were legally working in the porn business, particularly in Scandinavia which then had infamous reputation as an producer and exporter of child pornography.
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