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This is probably too wishy-washy a point for both First Amendment absolutists and people who leap to the barricades at the sight of a hairless vulva, but I'll offer it anyway: the key difference between Mann and Sturges and Hamilton is that while the first two are merely frank, Hamilton's pictures, in their perfumed phoniness, are intended to be arousing. He freely admits it. "Pornography is a word that's not in my vocabulary. It is erotica. I stand by that," says the photographer, a Brit who published his first book in 1970 and who claims on his Website to be--perhaps, he qualifies it--"the most popular artist the world has ever seen." His models, he explains, are "young girls, not children," and "naturists" to boot. Do they enjoy posing for him? "They do indeed." Any objections, he says on the phone from his home in Paris, "are an Anglo-Saxon hang-up. Latins and Scandinavians don't have a problem with it. But who's to decide? It's all in the eye of the beholder."
That's not really a defense either, but it is the catch in these matters. How to define "lascivious exhibition of the exhibition of the genitals" as federal child-pornography law puts it? I know it when I see it, as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said regarding obscenity, while also offering a neat, inadvertent definition of relativity. Point conceded. It's a slippery slope and all that. But I still have a hard time understanding support for a book that portrays real girls as ripening, imminently deflowerable teases. Doesn't that make them fair game, and isn't that what children are never supposed to be?