Robert Kirby : Loose Cannon
I never thought the day would arrive when I would want to see some no-nonsense killer censorship deployed. But it did arrive, quite recently, with the exhibition in Grahamstown of what a lot of people believe is little more than child pornography going as art. Alas, the head of the new censorship board, Nana Makaula, missed out. Instead of using the occasion to show, once and for all, that anything that even hints at child pornography should never be allowed, Makaula has done no more than put an age restriction on the exhibition.
Not only was this a cop-out, but Makaula leapt at the chance to flaunt. Her excuse for allowing the exhibition to continue was to show how liberal and mature the new censorship administration will be. What she clearly overlooked was that, in the first place, by imposing an age restriction on the exhibition, she effectively preserved its delights for those who wanted them in the first place.
It is mentally diseased adults who take their pleasures from child pornography. In her quest to be seen as broad-minded, tolerant and progressive, Makaula has now guaranteed the degenerate’s keyhole.
Broadly speaking, children have far merrier things to do than go to sleazy exhibitions by third-rate artists.
The second misconception by Makaula is even more perilous. The new films and publications Act is an extraordinarily mature piece of legislation. It bans only those things that, by accepted human standards, are deemed conduct beyond exculpation. the Act is as specific on bestiality and gratuitous violence as it is on child pornography. It is simply not allowed, in any form.
Which also means in any camouflage. So it is not good enough to ignore, say, an explicit painting of a young girl’s perineum, and say that it’s not child pornography – apparently on little more than the reassurance of the artist. Such a painting is well along the way to being child pornography and should be identified as such.
You can’t shilly-shally and go all glossy- eyed about artistic merit when the ultimate sacrifice might suggest, in even the most oblique terms, that public exhibitions largely dedicated to the intimate examinations of children’s genitalia are acceptable.
Censorship is never a completely impenetrable barricade. The moment something gets banned – a book, a film – it immediately takes on a sort of heretic glamour. Forbidden fruits and all that.
The subversive and real danger in censorship is that it not only controls what may not be seen, it defines what may.
In other words, it sets some sort of example – good or bad. If Makaula had banned the Mark Hipper exhibition outright, she would have sounded a strident warning bell. Nothing that so much as hints at child pornography will be tolerated. Instead she said that, had she banned the exhibition, the “image of the board would have suffered terribly”.
You’ll find Nana Makaula’s cart just in front of her horse. The board’s image is clearly far more important than its responsibilities. One-nil to the pornographers. And on the question of suffering, we can only hope a certain one- year-old baby suffered a little less when being filmed for child pornography’s clients.
One of the many grotesque discoveries of the recent police raids on paedophile rings in Europe and the United States, was film of this baby being gang-raped by three men. How’s that for “image”.
I have to wonder, was the same mischievous incubus fluting in his own ear when Hipper painted his graphic depiction of a little girl’s vagina and anus? A muse unheard to the rest of we dullards?
Or was he merely doing what his apologists claim: “investigating the `fascinating world’ of child sexuality”? The children, themselves, of course had not been consulted on the need for any such investigation.
The saddest part of the whole exercise is the way that these decisions are being taken on behalf of children, by their adults. Which is exactly what I am proposing, but with an important difference. Keeping child pornography as much at bay as possible, we will only run the risk of letting our own young revel in that precious domain called childhood.
Those magical awakening years, before the world’s realities erode the child-dreams, are already under continual and savage attack by commercial interests. Take a look at the Cartoon Network if you want to see how tomorrow’s consumers are being trained by marketing experts. Do we also want the Hippers of this world peering into our nurseries, hungry “artist’s” brush in hand? Call me an old hypocrite, but I think not.