This brings up issues of the realitivity of the age of consent which varies from 9-20 and attitudes towards nudity. I'm reminded of the Intense Hammer Rage album Avagoyamugs which was outlawed in Australia because of the lyrics (which are indecipherable). It's amazing the amount of illegal things that are allowed on covers and promoted in songs and culture. But other, far more innocuous things are censored.

Personally, I'm far, far more disturbed about the glamorization of sexual violence here than I am about the photo of the girl itself.

I believe you got the story wrong. The album cover was censored as soon as it came out - in the UK. If you go to the album's wikipedia page, you'll see an image of the (lame) cover design used there in lieu of the above image. The ban over the use of this image was never lifted, so recently it was discovered that some British ISPs are simply blocking access to this page to avoid legal issues.
NOW, this discovery reawakened a discussion that already took place before among Wikipedians about the appropriateness of the image and whether or not it should be shown. Nonetheless, all it takes to see that the image was, in fact, NOT pulled off for the reason you cited above or any other, is to visit the page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer - see? all still there.

So, care you rephrase your various misguided accusations?

BTW, it's also worthwhile to take a look at the discussion page for this item:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Virgin_Killer

maybe little girls are already sexual, and we should be talking about all the ways social discourse, especially of late, has constructed them as innocent. foucault anyone?

dubi is correct. See this posting from the Wikimedia foundation's blog: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/12/08/wikimedia-statement-regarding-censorship-in-the-uk/

Jamal - right, and maybe Jews are really money grubbing thieves intent on ruling the world, and we should be talking about all the ways social discourse, especially of late, has constructed them as innocent, regular human beings?

It still was never pulled from the wikipedia page. The page was censored by several British ISPs, but the wikis never touched it.

Dubi, that's a very bad analogy, and, as with any uncalled for invocation of the Jews/Nazis, a real discussion killer. Clearly, like so many PC/feminist sociologist types who cruised through their universities without ever having to think, you are more interested in covering up everything outside your capricious, polemical paradigms than in seeing complications and dual movement. Way to be.

Jamal - there's more to Jews (and antisemitism) than Nazis. I wasn't invoking Nazis, I was simply choosing my own ethnic group (hello, I'm Jewish) to avoid diverting the discussion into racism.
Also, I'm not a sociologist, I'm a political scientist.
And I'm not PC, either, or even much of a feminist, as some have criticized me. I DO think that saying prepubescent girls are somehow naturally sexualized but SOCIETY constructs them as asexual just seems so ridiculously baseless that I had a hard time reacting to it in any serious manner.
Here's why: sexualization of *anyone* is ITSELF a social construct. Cats and monkeys aren't sexualized. Sex isn't done for pleasure's sake "in nature". It is a product of culture. So there simply cannot possibly be something inherently sexualized about girls, just as it cannot be so about adult men or women.

But, frankly, I don't need to go that far. Look at what you wrote: "maybe little girls are already sexual". That's it. You gave me no reason to agree to this suggestion, you just raised it as a possibility. Why on Earth should I waste my time discussing the possible meanings of a possibly interpretation of reality if you never even gave me a glimmer of a reason to think this interpretation might be valid? This is why my analogy is correct: first give me some reason to think there's any merit to your interpretation, then we'll discuss what that might mean. As you said it, you're asking the readers to waste their time on a worthless discussion.

"Sex isn’t done for pleasure’s sake 'in nature'". Bonobos have sex for pleasure and many animals masturbate.

Dubi, I never said any such thing as 'naturally sexualized' pre-pubescent girls. There is a large difference between 'sexualized' and 'sexual'. To say a girl is 'sexualized' is to say that she was free of sexuality (innocent) until an adult intervention (never the girl's own agency) placed it upon her, reconstructing her body and consciousness in a sexual way. The term itself replicates the pastoral knowledge of universal childhood innocence and also the defensive position that sexuality only occurs through a process of sexualization. In their actual living, children are always already transgressive, already breaking outside the boundaries set by parents and society, and encountering aspects of sexuality on their own. This is the 'Masturbating Child' of Foucault's analysis, a lightning rod for pastoral power that brings the child back into the fold by producing a normative discourse of innocence. This discourse doesn't so much strip the child of his sexuality as it shields the child from a body of knowledge about sexuality as such, postponing (or attempting to postpone) the age at which he may begin to understand sexual feelings in sexual terms.

The single greatest problem with modern anthropology is it's failure to adequately reckon with its own normalizing discourse, its own pastoral power. The following paper is a pretty useful overview:

http://www.anthropologymatters.com/journal/2003-2/tremlett2003_theself.htm

Jamal - that may all be very well, but for a child to be able to undergo the process of maturing ("encountering aspects of sexuality"), we still need to agree that at some point, children are non-sexual.
Again, my problem was with your statement not really giving any reason to attribute merit to it.

(plus, let's admit it, as a father I really don't want there to be a discourse from which some people may learn that my daughter *is* a sexual being, and therefore there's nothing wrong with them doing anything sexual with her. But I'm willing to put that personal part aside for the moment).

dubi, we do not need to make any such agreement, simply because we do not need to hold the binary distinction of the sexual and the non-sexual as the decisive fact and principle for our knowledge of sexuality. Nor do I have to provide 'reason', if by this you mean empirical evidence for the phenomenon, as this is merely a backdoor attempt to maintain the binary through recourse to the agencies of power that sustain them - psychiatry and medicine. If you are going to take a genuine anthropological approach to my remark and to the 'sexualization' on the album cover, your initial anger and subsequent skepticism is not the way to go.

I'm afraid I'm with Jamal on this one.

Dubi, invoking your role as a father, obviously you want to protect you daughter and that's comendable by anyone's standards.

I think what Jamal is saying is that girls are socially constructed as innocent, virginal and uninformed about their own sexuality. Someone being sexual would never justify someone violating them but children learn to understand their own sexuality to a certain extent. To deny their sexual autonomy or curiosity completely is very harmful.

I think the point Jamal is trying to make is that sexualising children is not good for them. But denying that children may be interested in knowing where babies come from or telling the masturbating is wrong or completely denying that learning sexuality is a lifelong process isn't helpful either.

There's a big difference between someone sexualising a child and that child being healthily sexual for their own age.

Do you agree Jamal? I'm a bit of a Foucault beginner so I might be way off.

Rach, I don't know about Jamal, but I fully agreed with everything you said. I'm not for keeping young children uninformed by denying them knowledge they seek. I merely claimed that children do not seek this knowledge until a certain point in their life, and that until that time they can be defined as "non-sexual".

I disagree

That's not the point I'm making, Rach.

When we say that something is sexual, what do we mean by that? Where does our definition of sexual come from?
How is the sexual constructed in such a way that it creates the possibility of the non-sexual along with it?

In some South African societies, the genital stimulation that occurs between young males in their same-gender regiments is not considered sexual. Others might not believe that anything other than heterosexual, reproductive intercourse is a sexual act. They would have a hard time with the label 'sexual' being applied to people rather than acts. The concept of sexuality as a 'thing' that a person might or might not 'have' is altogether extraneous to their lives.

In the USA, UK, etc., when we designate something as sexual it means that we are subjecting it to constant scrutiny as to whether it is normal or problematic. This is Foucault's pastoral power.

Think of the priest, the shepherd of his flock, who has his own institution of surveillance. He is not interested in the sexual, but in the transgressive, the sinful. He constructs the soul as the place where sin accumulates, and creates the means by which the soul of each parishioner might be laid bare. He has a unique knowledge of the soul of unique every person in his parish. The soul only exists insofar as it is to be inspected by the priest and monitored constantly by the confessor.

This is exactly how sexuality is constructed in our modern tradition of government and psychiatry. A person's sexuality is that which, by definition, is being scrutinized for sinfulness. To be sexual is to be made available for inspection. The more aspects of body and behavior that are seen as sexual, the more necessary and pervasive is the inspection.

When we say that a child is not-sexual, we have already constituted the child's sexuality as a monitored region. The 'innocent child' is the direct corollary of Foucault's 'masturbating child'. If the child has access to his genitals to touch, he is already sexual.

When I was five years old, I had a particularly deep pining for the company of a classmate, and became quite upset when we were separated during the school-day. Was this sexuality?

"No," our culture responds. It is quite normal for children to feel this way.

"Such relationships are not sexual in nature."

What does that mean? In retrospect, it sure felt like a crush.

If we take our cultural definition, it means that the relationship was not problematized - it did not invite itself to the scrutiny of teachers, parents, psychiatrists and clergymen. It was already innocent, and so was I. To say that the child is not sexual is to close her off from the pastoral power that constructs and monitors sexuality, to put her at a distance and let her live just a little longer without awareness of her own sinfulness. In that way we ARE protecting her, not from predators, but from her own guilt.

Jamal - that seems like a wholly Christian-centred concept. But notions of sexuality exist in cultures, like Judaism, where the accumulation of sinfulness is not scrutinized by any formal aspect of society, and where guilt doesn't play an important part of the way society functions.

Also, can't we define "sexual gratification" fairly clearly? And once we do that, can't we define "sexual" anything as relating to such sexual gratification? Yearning for a person intellectually, then, if it is not for the purpose of sexual gratification, is not sexual. Otherwise we turn every aspect of social life into sexual in some way...

Finally, it sounds to me like being defined as non-sexual is a good thing. I wish I were protected from the scrutinizing gaze of society. It seems like what we should be problematizing, if we accept your view, is not "the ways social discourse, especially of late, has constructed them as innocent", but the exact opposite - the ways social discourse has constructed adults as objects of social scrutiny rather than autonomous, free, private agents.

Dubi, we could define "sexual" to be anything we wanted it to be, but we don't, because that is not what anthropologists do. We examine the artifacts of discourse and try to understand them historically. Your attempt to locate an objective and universal sense of the sexual is all very nice for your own goals, but it isn't a reflection of historical human experience.

Your last remark is interesting. The scrutinizing, objectifying, normalizing agency of human beings in social life is easy to lament, but in seeing it only one way - as a negative oppressive force - you use the exact same agency you are lamenting. You objectify the objectification of social beings. The more you try to try to resist the imperfection of being human, the harder it bites back.

OK, this is where I give up. Maybe it's just a disciplinary language barrier, but I have no idea what you said in your last comment, Jamal. I'll assume it's my fault and resign.

what does 'objectify' mean to you, then?

Is virgin killer referring to a virgin who is a killer or a killer who targets virgins?