generally, when you take a picture of a child in a swimsuit you've already seen their genitals a million daiper-changes ago and hey, they came out of your better half's cunt anyhow.

that's just a very different animal than paying for a 14-year old girl to do a bunch of "panty shots" and then sell them to someone who can either make money off 14-year old "panty shots" or wants them themselves.

the difference between the kind of artists going for the kind of push-the-envelope statements those guys did is

-they DID do it for the shock value and as a statement

-most importantly, they understood SHOCK ONLY WORKS ONCE like that. frankly, i'm all for wakeup-calls. REPEATEDLY taking the same kind of borderline-pedo shit and COMMODIFYING it isn't a statement. it's sure as fuck not art if you've been snapping and shopping panty-shots like that in a lunchpail-manner for a few decades.

we can argue all day about whether anything's still a statement if you do it again and again always in a manner more erotic to pedophiles and do it in a cookie-cutter and profit-oriented way.

they're taking advantage of the writ of the law to make a buck selling something as close to child porn as possible, i'm all for the government taking advantage of their civil liberties right back. because you have to have some pedo in you to take those pictures every day in the first place. even if you're too much of a pussy to go to jail for it and we don't have hard facts on these guys in front of us, there's NO WAY these guys don't do bad shit to kids at a signifigantly-elevated rate than the general population.

knowing some guy with a badge knows who you are and likes asking around about you once a year is a tremendous way to make someone who hasn't acted-out much and isn't incurable think twice about touching their next kid.