This is 32 years ago. 32 yrs before that it was legal in Germany to whole-sale slaughter people. A young girl, naked, and the title 'Virgin Killer'?? Nasty indeed. I am a broad-minded lass but this is completely inappropriate in 2008, as it should be. I also fail to see the artistic merit and historic value.

@UnstableMabel: Hmmmm...Yeah, I don't about the whole artistic merit and historic value thing either. I mean "Piss Christ," and all that art with sperm, piss, poop, abortion blood (whether real or not), etc etc is fine by me. I understand shock and controversy can create a dialogue and therefore perhaps such pieces can be argued as having artistic merit...but, well, this, which is outright child pornography...I don't think so. Also, I'm wondering if this image was created specifically for this album, or was it a found/stock photo...

And come on now, this is Scorpion here..."artistic merit"?!?!??! Really?!??!?!

Yup. Child porn. And not just that, but child bondage porn.

Yes, but creepy was the point of that, not sexy. That IS art, it's just creepy art.

And the Scorpions are pretty far out there. But I know a guy who toured with them as part of the warmup act and they were so bad the Scorpions threw them off the tour. To this day, I have no idea what they did, just that they had to pay their own fare back to Vancouver from some godforsaken industrial town in Germany somewhere.

This album -- with the same cover -- is also available on Amazon right now. (It's $90 because it's the Japanese import.) And it's up on a ton of other U.S.-hosted servers. Will the FBI start picking off every Google Image Search result for this picture, or is Wikipedia just being singled out? And if the FBI is just now coming around to getting offended by this cover, shouldn't it start looking into prosecuting *Amazon*, since that site has made the cover commercially available via a $90 import copy? Or any of the other record-collector havens where this album has no doubt been available since its release 1976?

On the bright side, this controversy has probably resulted in the prices of a 32-year-old album by the freaking Scorpions going up at all those record-collector shops. Yay capitalism!

(Nice way of blocking the naughty bits, btw.)

The worst part is, I know that girl -- and she was not a virgin when they took that picture.

"I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert. Have you seen those photographs of him with little girls? He would make arrangements with aunts and mothers to take the children out. He was never caught, except by one girl who wrote about him when she was much older."

Vladimir Nabokov, 1966, in an interview with Vogue Magazine.

Of course it's porny. But the Scorpions are an easy target. If this were the Rolling Stones the FBI wouldn't dare.

@dannyisme: Yeah, Lewis Carroll was so great.

"Historical note and artistic merit" does not a valid defense for child porn make.

I was not defending Carroll's photographs. I was simply noting that they do exist, and they are fairly easy to come by.

@Helman: Where is the bondage coming from, exactly?

I just don't get it. Why is this considered "porn" when a picture of a naked baby is considered cute?

@DaDuckster: You're probably not being serious, so we won't answer your question.

@twobighands: It's the teddy bear.

@Maura Johnston: Will the FBI start picking off every Google Image Search result for this picture...?

Yes, starting now.

@DaDuckster: Do you see anything alluring about the way babies are usually posed or the expressions on their faces? Contrast that with the pose and facial expression of the girl featured on the album cover.

@In Other News...: It's actually kind of a terrifying thought. Ridiculous as it is, it made me paranoid to click on the link to the Wikipedia page. WE LIVE IN AN AGE OF FEAR!!

@crotchety: But I think DaDuckster's point is that some people do find even naked babies alluring -- so if the standard for porn is something that turns "some people" on, that standard will identify both examples as porn.

Puzzlement over finding proper standards to identify porn -- I'm afraid that's not a trivial question. In fact you could easily argue that every memorable public attempt to find such a standard, up to and including the Supreme Court's, has been a logical shambles. There's definitely room here for some radical rethinking.

@skahammer: ". . . so if the standard for porn is something that turns "some people" on, that standard will identify both examples as porn."
But the standard for porn can't be something that turns "some people" on because we all know that many items that don't affect the majority of the population in a sexual way, animals for example, will always turn some people on.

You really can't see any efforts to make the above example alluring? You think that's the look she had on her face for her school ID or the way she sat in church?

@skahammer: At the same time, I'm not sure Justice Stewart's old "I know it when I see it" bit doesn't have some validity. I'm a huge fan of the ideals of Western government, which advocate writing down the most specifically concrete rules we can and applying them as disinterestedly as possible; but at the same time, we appoint human beings as judges for a reason, and whatever some people think, a situation in which we tried to streamline our standards to the point where they were yes-or-no questions a computer could answer wouldn't be ideal.

So, it's not a trivial question -- but that's exactly why every attempt to find a standard has been a shambles. I don't think we ever could find a standard, given that there are hundreds of millions of individual opinions in the U.S. alone, and given that those opinions can and will change over time. Nonetheless, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do our best. And while we have to be vigilant about no one's rights being ridden over roughshod, the fact that a few people find babies sexy or that a few people don't think the album cover is sexually provocative shouldn't deter us from rendering a cautious legal judgment about such things.

But anyhoo, I love radical rethinking, so consider this more like an addendum than a disagreement.

@DaDuckster: Actually I think all those naked kids in the bath pictures that everyone who was a parent in the 70s/80s took at one point to stash in the family album and pull out at properly embarrassing moments are technically now illegal.

@crotchety: Isn't most child porn about innocence not allure? (this is what I have learned from law & order SVU)

Shame on Valleywag! Must you bring out porn every 2 days in your posts to get ad clicks and pageview? It's one thing with the NY governor, call girls and I bear with it, now you have to drag everyone down to child porn. Disgusting!!!

This is the lowest point in Valleywag's history I think.

@crotchety: Now, I was really going to engage you here, challenging you (constructively) to devise a standard of your own. I was even going to ask you to take into account someone like me, who has worked with junior-high-school age children and thus has strict rules about having sexual thoughts about them in any setting, and so why should someone else's lack of such self-discipline affect my (nonprurient) interest in being able to look up on Wikipedia the album cover that's causing so much fuss.

But moff is on the case too, and he's way ahead of that argument. The fact is that some rules are so strongly needed that they'll be enforced even if the search for a widely applicable standard comes to nothing -- and this is probably one of them.

So thanks a lot, moff. Here was my chance to lure some poor sucker into maybe trying to recapitulate decades of inconsistent Supreme Court jurisprudence on pornography -- and there you go being all judicial-realist and stuff.

Eh, well done.

@skahammer: Oh, man. This isn't the first time I've gotten in the way of the recapitulation of decades of inconsistent Supreme Court jurisprudence on pornography! My mom's gonna be so angry. "Why can't you just look at LOLcats like everybody else, Moff? You're an embarrassment to this family!"

@crotchety: Yeah, I don't think skahammer was disagreeing about the alluringness -- just playing devil's advocate in the name of free expression.

Well she's certainly old enough now, so who really gives a rats ass?!

Chick probably has grandkids by now.

When the fuck are we going to start arresting the people who bought this album for the music?

@moff: skahammer was putting on the gloves and I tell you moff, I'd have never come out of it alive. I haven't been in the ring in years. Thanks for stepping in.

I think it all hinges on the question of artistic merit. Since it is a well-photographed cover and there are no allegations that the subject was abused I would say leave it, but one could hardly be shocked if it gets banned.

@KarenUhOh: Please don't lose respect for me if I tell you... I liked "Winds of Change." Which at least wasn't off of this album. "No more Presidents...
And all the wars would end
One united world
Under God..."

So trite, yet so heart-tugging!

@Sillius: You're going to have as much trouble, if not more, coming up with a satisfactory set of standards to define artistic merit as you would for pornography.

@In Other News...: And the whistling! And Gorky Park! It's a pretty song!

And no one better even think anything bad about "Rock You Like a Hurricane."

I'm on the fence about this image. Europe has very different attitudes about nudity than the U.S., and Germany is fairly pro-nudism (as in naturalists, not necessarily nudity of a prurient nature). Obviously this image was intended to be provocative, but I 'm not sure that means sexually arousing.

I look at the picture and see a naked little girl, that's all. But I came of age in the hippie 70s, and I'm an artist and, with life drawing and all, have seen an awful lot of naked bodies in non-sexual contexts, so I'm probably more blasé than the average person.

@seejanewrite: I think it has to do with the INTENT of the photograph/photographer so those bath pictures of you as a kid are not nor will ever be "porn". They were no doubt taken by loving parents who just wanted to remember a time in their child's life that was innocent and fleeting.

If my 2 little boys are running naked in the sprinkler on a hot summer day, and i take a photo of it, it's to remember a nice summer day, and how young my boys were, and the fun they were having.

Photos like this album cover, however, are clearly posed and lit to generate a sexual reaction, and when that is done with an underage model, it is wrong and is child porn.

It has to be the intent, no just subject matter.

@mwynn13: While I completely agree that nudity is no big deal, and everyone - kids and adults - should be encouraged to feel good about their bodies, in my eyes, this pose is inappropriately sexually provocative, even with the teddy bear. Maybe if the girl was five years older...

I tend to be rabidly anti-censorship. I don't feel like my dislike or disapproval of something is cause to eradicate it, and I don't think that extends to groups or majorities either.

Then again, the production of child porn is harmful to the subjects, and there's at least an argument that its existence, once produced, encourages the creation of more victims. I'm definitely in agreement that those things should be criminalized and prevented if possible.

But there's definitely an argument for "this happened, it was a part of the past, and hiding it away under the shame blanket isn't going to right any wrongs or do any real good." I guess I feel like this and the Carroll pictures fall into a very limited, specific category where they shouldn't just be suppressed at all costs. They shouldn't be popping up on your screen by accident when you were googling a quote from Alice, but blacking all of this out seems unfaithful to our blemished past.

Could they be regulated, like handguns? For, you know, scholarly/historical purposes? Fill out the application for a more specialized library card, sign something that lets people check up on how you're using it?

It just seems awfully black and white to me: "It's kiddy porn, destroy it" when obviously there's a bigger story there. It wasn't created just to be kiddy porn, however misguided, they were making some kind of artistic statement, and I get the queasy feeling saying, "What they chose was unacceptable." Bringing the merit of their artistic integrity or quality of music into it just makes me feel even more queasy.

But I also feel queasy thinking about the photo shoot that produced the photo. Lots of queasiness in this one.

How to counter the argument that a "normal" person doesn't get aroused looking at photos of underclad minors, and that anyone who does is inappropriately sexualizing the presented content? Why punish the photographer/publisher for another person's deviant (in this argument) sexual urges?

Why would someone even think about releasing this?

@LeGagneur: Welcome to my world. I feel this way every time someone starts a new reality show featuring modestly-skilled individuals pitted in impossible competitions where all they can do is turn on each other.

Somehow, I have learned to press on nevertheless.

@mwynn13: I agree with you, for the most part. I think the main intent of the image was to be provocative, and the provocative part is that it is using pre-adolescent nudity in a sexually suggestive way. I would actually have zero problem with it if it ended there. I've seen way more upsetting images.

But: Thinking of the photo shoot that produced the image really turns my stomach. I have a bit of experience with child performers (being one, working with them) and I can tell you that the power dynamic is out of control. Adults are supposed to be parents/teachers, not co-workers. There's no such thing as negotiating with your boss. And even if you have really on-top-of-it parents, eventually they're going to have jury duty or be stuck in traffic on a day when it matters, and someone is going to ask you do to something and it's not going to sound right, and you're going to do it anyway and then be fucked up about it for years. I'm not talking about sexually, necessarily. It can just be that the adults were human and made a mistake, you were supposed to do X and the other girl was supposed to do Y but the authority figure, who doesn't give a shit, switched it up and then screamed at you when you got confused. This is something an adult would take in stride, but to an 11 year old it's traumatic. But it's happening all the time, because there aren't recess times and brightly colored posters with The Rules posted on them.

So what I'm saying is, kids don't have any sense of where the lines are, and all I can think of when I look at that picture is what it must have felt like to be told to do the things that she was told to do and be lost in the fog like I imagine she must have been.

Two very extreme reactions to one picture. I 100% defend people's right to consider it art and have it available as such, but I 100% defend the rights of children not to become anyone's idea of art at the expense of their own comfort and well-being.

@Zorica:

"But there's definitely an argument for "this happened, it was a part of the past, and hiding it away under the shame blanket isn't going to right any wrongs or do any real good." I guess I feel like this and the Carroll pictures fall into a very limited, specific category where they shouldn't just be suppressed at all costs. They shouldn't be popping up on your screen by accident when you were googling a quote from Alice, but blacking all of this out seems unfaithful to our blemished past."

Well put.

I disagree that the photograph is cearly intended to spark a sexual response. Her pose could be argued about, but I think the look on her face is completely neutral. @Helman who mentioned bondage, you neither looked at the photograph nor read the description.

It's been mentioned already but I'd like to say again, I've seen plenty of parents who let their kids run around naked at the pool. I'm not comfortable with that but it is a decision made by the parents, as we can assume this photograph was.

Out of curiosity, does anybody know the actual age of the girl when the photograph was taken?

Someone on Wikipedia Review brought up another album cover : [upload.wikimedia.org]

[wikipediareview.com]

It seems like we are 32 years too late for the real meat of the argument on this cover. At the time it was released, were there laws on the books in the U.S. regarding child pornography? Seems like there were, though I'm not a lawyer. So, at that time, the album was considered controversial and a new version was released. But it wasn't "banned" in that sense and no legal action was taken. Its seems pretty unprecedented to ban something 32 years later after it has been legally viewed (and sold as an album) for all that time. It would make for an interesting precedent.

If Wikipedia chooses to take down the image, then I find that okay. They can decide what content is acceptable and what offends their viewers and as a private company, can determine what action they wish to take. Its the legal ramifications of this action that are worrying to me.

On a slightly off topic note: Its funny how our moral standards continue to evolve. On one hand, we have more nudity and cursing on t.v., but we also have more parental controls and better filtering of this content around children today. Try watching a PG movie from the 80's and see if you would still consider it so today. For instance, Rick Moranis says "Fuck" in Spaceballs, and that was PG. I remember watching Grease as a kid, and now showing it around children I see the rampant smoking, teen pregnancy plot, etc., as pretty risque for the tween and under set. I think of how controversial Madonna's "Like a Prayer" video was, and the buzz around the Black Crowe's album cover with the pubic hair and American flag bikini. Both seem pretty tame and innocuous now. However, we have more outlets controlling this content (WalMart, for instance) and not selling to consumers what they deem too out of line. Morality, and the public control of it, continues to evolve.

That being said, I do think this particular image sexualizes a child. It made me uncomfortable to see it on Wiki in its full exposure. I'm just not sure banning it 32 years later makes much legal sense. Should have been banned at the time, in my opinion, if ever.

@moff: Agreed.