Crime & Federalism

I look at pictures of Australian Shepherds, not because they turn me on - but because they are cute.  It is indeed possible to find something to be non-erotically cute.  Is that not the case with babies?  

When Nicole Saupe’s son was about 18 months old, the Cincinnati-based photographer snapped a picture of him sitting in a big, rattan chair shaped like a wok. He was too cute to resist in his jammies, his spread legs revealing his diaper, his belly poking out from under his shirt. And so Saupe uploaded the image onto a new online gallery she had created.

My best friend has about zero paternal instincts.  Yet he sends me pictures of his nephew (fully clothed) doing cute things like eating a cookie.  On Facebook, people share and comment on baby pictures incessantly.  People think babies - like puppies - are cute.

Consider Saupe's sickening reaction to knowing that others found her baby cute:

“Before I knew it, it had been downloaded three times. That had me very unsettled,” Saupe recalled. “It did freak me out so much that somebody downloaded these pictures.” She doesn’t know why somebody downloaded the images – maybe he or she just thought it was a cute picture. But Saupe kept envisioning a pedophile and “it made me so ill.”

This is a very sick woman. Unless she has sexualized her own child, why would she think others are sexualizing him?  What goes through such a person's mind, "My baby is so cute.  Other people must want to have sex with him."  As someone who has no sexual interest in children, I simply cannot comprehend the psychopathology of the modern American parent.  How can you look at your own child sexually?  

Prosecutors, unfortunately, are as sick as Saupe:

This spring, Alma Vasquez, a 22-year-old Utah mom, was charged with two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor after, police said, she took photos of the child’s father, 34-year-old Sergio Diaz-Palomino, sexually abusing their infant son.

But charges were later dropped because police determined Diaz-Palomino did not assault the baby. Instead, the couple was giving the boy a bath and after the bath, while the baby was still wet and laughing and the father happily kissed the infant’s body, Vasquez documented the scene as family memorabilia. She took the film to Walgreens for processing into prints, and a technician alerted the police. Arrests, jail, indictments, the child’s removal from Vasquez’s home by the state, followed. Diaz-Palomino, who was in the country illegally, was deported.

Everyone is a sex offender when everyone gets sick over sex:

We now live in a culture in which any nude photo — and some non-nude images, too — of a child is seen as potentially pornographic. 

That begs the question: What the fuck is wrong with you people?  Do you sit around thinking about having sex with children?  Can you not stare at a nude image without masturbatory thoughts?  If you can, why do you think that no one else can?

Narcissism means thinking, "I'm special.  It's everyone else that is the problem."

Thus, we either live in a nation of child perverts who can't look at a nude image innocently, or we live in a nation of narcissists where it's always the other guy who is the problem.  Either way, we're screwed.