If I own a JBR video, am I a child pornographer?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

Poll question: If I own a JBR video, am I a child pornographer?

"Ooooo Oooo, dance, little one, dance for me and only me! Where's the rewind?"
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I am not only sick of the mainstream media urinating in breathless excitement over this piece of crap story (WHO CARES what that sob ate or drank?) I am also sick and tired of the repeated JohnBenney videos showing her prancing and dancing.

That is all this world needs - repeated video shots of a child abused girl, dressed up to look like a hooker 5 times her actual age, just so some perv can get his jollies.

So the question is,

does ownership of a johnbennetramsey video make you a pervert?

Poll result (25 votes)
You sicko, you. Hands on the wall and spread 'em	(4 votes, 16%)	Vote
Ain't she cute, and so young and tender and so _________!	(1 votes, 4%)	Vote
today's MSM editors are all child rapists in disguise	(3 votes, 12%)	Vote
Who is johnbenney?	(1 votes, 4%)	Vote
"Come to me, my little one, Dorothy!"	(1 votes, 4%)	Vote
"I like the little ones!" John Belushi	(1 votes, 4%)	Vote
ENOUGH WITH THE JBR THREADS, damn you!	(14 votes, 56%)	Vote

[nam78_two]

1. I don't know about pervert

But obsession about any 10 yo or for that week old crime story, that has nothing to with anything of particular importance does make you a loser imho ...
(you as in person, not you as in the op)

[izzie]

2. She does look a little odd dressed up like a Fr. show girl

She is hardly dressed or dancing around as a child. Usually one thinks of a 6 year old or what ever her age was to be acting like a child. She also had no talent for this type job. A Temple she was not. Usually kids did this in the back yard or attic. What was her mother thinking? She should have been in dancing class with kids her age dressed as bubble bees or some such thing. The film clips are just so out of it.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

3. apparently, these beauty contests are huge in the south.

and they wonder why some people are so screwed up, especially about women's rights, in Baptist-land?

[jmowreader]

4. You'd be shocked to know HOW huge they are

Well, huge to the people who play in them anyway.

I've got a copy of the paper from a couple weeks ago. It contains a picture of "Little Miss Our Lady Of Perpetual Agony Elementary School" or some shit--it was actually a public grade school, but you get the idea.

And you pretty much guessed it: big hair, excessive makeup, $500 dress...for an Elementary School pageant?

These kids have resumes: Little Miss Watermelon Fair, Little Miss Manure Spreader Fest, and so on. Down here, every gathering of fifty people is likely to have a beauty pageant attached to it...and if you can't find a pageant sponsored by a Mule Days or River Fest to stick your kid in this weekend, there are companies that run "Little Miss Sparking Eyes" pageants--they just rent a hotel ballroom and have a pageant. (Which rates right up there with "cheerleaders" who aren't affiliated with a sports team to cheer for, which is another quaint Southern tradition that my Yankee ass will NOT miss the second it gets enough money together to get back north of the Mason-Dixon Line where it belongs!)

Okay, so what's the point? "The children get college scholarships if they win." Uhh...the Little Miss Fayettenam Dogwood Festival pageant gives a $150 scholarship. It costs $300 to get your kid's makeup done for that weekend--which isn't all that outrageous when you figure she'll be in the chair six times in three days. (These kids are brats. I'd charge $50 to spend half an hour with one of them and not feel bad about it for a second.) And then there's three nights in a hotel, $800 for clothes, whatever dance and voice lessons cost, amortized over the twenty pageants a year you stick your kid in...whatcha think, $2500 for a chance to win a $150 scholarship?

But here's the funny part about all of this: This is NOT a huge part of the Southern experience! Millions of girls grow up in the South every year and they don't spend all their time in dance lessons, they don't go out in public wearing the whole bottle of makeup, they don't sing "Memory From Cats" every weekend in that irritating little-girl voice so that all their mom's friends can sit there cheering her on...there might be, and here I'm being generous, three or four hundred families in the entire South who are serious pageant players like the Ramseys were. Run that up by an order of magnitude for the kids who enter one or two pageants a year--maybe the elementary school pageant and the town pageant. And that's fine. It's probably good harmless fun for a kid to enter one pageant a year. Think of it as Halloween in the middle of the day, where all the kids decided to come as princesses. One pageant a year is fine. One a week is pathological.

[marions ghost]

5. hate to tell you

but the virus has spread from the South. This is a growing phenomenon with "pageant systems" around the country. Big in California. I'm not sure I'd agree it's a fundy-approved thing. Their girls are more likely to wear some costume out of "The Waltons.'

[izzie]

6. Well it sounds wild but I for one think kids grew up fast as it is.

I see no reason to make them even more adult when they are really children and should be up in a tree some place playing and also learning to get along with other kids and not counting on make up to look good and counting on those looks to make it in life. Trouble with good looks is their is always some one who looks better. It just can not be normal for a kid to grew up that way. Well just look at those film clips. Girls dress up and do that in play but these kids have out fits made for their size and all the bleached hair etc. It is just plain odd. They look like they are being taught different rules than I would have wanted my girls to know and do. What is with the father's. If the mother's do this don't father's have any say? Would a man want his 6 year old running around like that?

[marions ghost]

7. well

look what people do to poodles. It's about misguided creativity I think.

There's a lot of fetishizing of kids IMO. Stage moms and sports fanatics dads can mess kids up too. But this is even more shallow. The contestants don't even have to sing well or anything like in the little local talent contests which I think are harmless. This is all about appearances which is such a subjective thing, and so it's a real racket. Who can actually "win" without bias in one of these things? Most of the country would probably think this is grotesque rather than healthy. So what attracts people to it? I think many are suckered in by promotion and prizes and pretty soon they're not buying the latest doll, they're creating their very own live one. It's for people who can't think of a better way to express their creativity.

It reminds me of people who have to decorate a large Christmas tree for every room in their house, each with a different theme. Obsessive decorating urges. But I don't know if pageants harm kids any more than some of the other stuff parents do when they try to live through their kids too much. There is too much emphasis on fashion and appearances in this culture, anyway. The pageants are just an extreme expression of that.

[izzie]

9. I love to get my grandchild off to a good start and tell them

I am for all school children to go into uniforms. Well they go nuts but I really think it is a good thing. I went to camp for years and we all wore uniforms and no one knew who came from what we just were kids. I think we should do it in all schools. Then they start to think of other things than what they need to buy for school. Just a thought. I have seen father's act the same as the women once I stopped and thought about it. Not the stage shows but pushing their kids like that into some thing. I guess people like that show up every place. I think what gets me on these kids show is dressing them like adults, making them act like adults in an almost sexual way that gets to me. It is a puzzle to me wanting a child to do this when they are so small.

[marions ghost]

10. good point. I wore a school uniform

and have no problem with them as long as they're not too stiff and formal. (I don't care for the strictly identical military extreme). It was great not to have to worry about school clothes as a teenager. Of course the joke was that the girls would go so far overboard on weekends they were hardly recognizable. But at least at school preening and appearances was not the big focus all the time. It was liberating for all the kids not to have that distraction.

I agree that these pageant things are a perversion of the idea of what a little girl should be. But the Jonbenet case seems not to have put a dent in them. They're going strong in fact, all over the country. I don't understand the phenom either, except as an outlet for misplaced creativity and over-identification. It does make the children into little fetish objects. My point is that there is such an emphasis on appearances in general in this culture, that we should not stand in judgment quite so harshly. Look at the culture as a whole--what do you see? A lot of young girls playing up their sexual attributes, and pushed by adults into doing this. Some of them are not much older than Jonbenet.
It's in the culture and we need to take some responsibility for this. (Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see a return to the Puritan era either).

[izzie]

11. I would think it would be less costly to dress kids for school

I am sure the shows for these kids are well liked by many and it has to do with our culture. I am not sure how one can get away from that. I once lived next door to some Swiss people and they loved the USA and were going to stay. The wife said they had worked and saved for 6 or so years to get here but that they both hated our Christmas and she said I do not think we are strong enough to keep them into our Swiss Christmas. It is hard to keep ones mind on things with the endless ads etc.

[meisje]

8. Are you moving to Thailand anytime soon?