Lifted from comments: A flickr trend that worries me

[elfs]

Someone wrote about my most recent photo of Yamaraashi-chan:

I hadn't realized how grown-up Yamaraashi-chan was getting till that photo. It's a great picture of her as a young woman, where previously I've seen great pictures of her as a child.

I'm not picking on the writer, really; I happen to agree with the sentiment, even while I'm cautious endorsing it. Yamaraashi-chan is still just a kid who spends her days vacillating between playing with dolls and watching The Most Extreme Animals, and tweening out, lying in her bed looking up at the ceiling, brooding. "I'm not brooding!" she insists. "I'm thinking."

But while the layout is still set as it is, go take a look at my flickr account. You might notice a pattern. I've noticed it before myself, but this time it's particularly icky. Many of the photos there aren't on my blog. I took 450 photographs this trip, selected them down to maybe ten per day, then picked four or five to send to flickr, and finally choose two or three for each blog entry.

Some of the flickr'd pictures have gotten nine, ten, maybe 16 views. Yamaraashi-chan's picture had, as of this morning, been downloaded 65 times. And the paranoid part of me wants to know if between my fatherly pride and wise caution, pride isn't making exercising caution impossible.

I'm tempted to stop talking about the girls entirely, because this trend just icks me. I don't want to think about why that picture is five times more popular than the average photo on my flickr account. But I probably have to.

Comments

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

I quite understand your dilemma. My first thought was, "Well, the other pictures tend to be of trees and bridges and tents and things, and people will naturally look at pics of other people in preference, as a general rule," but then I clicked around and looked at the stats, and there does seem to be a trend. It'd be enough to make me, as the parent of a way too pretty and precocious ten-year-old girl, myself, have a momentary surge of "Oh ick!!!"

However... they are good shots, and people _can_ enjoy pictures of happy, smiling children without having a sexual motivation behind it. And while I agree that it is a parent's duty to protect their children... it's also a parent's duty to teach them caution rather than fear. I don't like the idea of some slimy jerk looking at pictures of my Shali with a way, way different view that that in which they were taken... but I also don't like the idea of her thinking that she has to hide from the world in order to be safe. That the thoughts of a small minority of people should control any part of her life. That she can't be pretty and happy _and_ safe all at once, or that she has to hide to do so.

So... caution, yes. Not posting an address or phone number with the pictures, definitely. Watching out for people who are physically present and seem to be paying the wrong kind of attention to the kids as they play, other standard safety things, like knowing where she's going, with whom, and making sure an adult is present... all of that sort of thing seems, to me, to be perfectly reasonable. But I truly don't believe that you should have to stop showing off your sweet, pretty little girl's pictures just because someone might be looking at them and getting turned on. Wouldn't the obvious next step be to stop letting her go out in public in shorts and strappy shirts, because someone might be looking at her and thinking like that? Then stopping letting her go out at all, because no matter how you dress her, those who think of little girls that way will still see her and think about her pretty eyes when they touch themselves at night. Of course, there's always a line there -- For example, I might defend my daughter's right to wear shorts and tank tops in 100F+ weather... but I will be damned if I'll buy her a french-cut padded bikini to wear to the pool! -- and everyone has to decide for themselves what that line is, but I do think it's important to not sacrifice basic freedom in exchange for theoretical safety, and given the current trend of our society (sacrificing every freedom for imaginary safety while actually increasing danger and labeling those who object as either selfish, traitorous, or dangerous themselves) it seems even more important to teach our kids that free people are not ruled by fear.

Of course, knowing that doesn't do anything to tone down the occasional impulse to buy a burka and a chastity belt and lock her in her room until she's 21 and proficient in at least three times of unarmed combat and a dozen or so good weapons, but I do _try_ and I figure that as long as I don't actually _do_ it, just having the instinctive overprotective urges isn't necessarily a bad thing. Of course, her daddy is going to have a very rough 8 years, I'm afraid. :)

Anyway, it was a lovely photo, and I'm betting it's one that she is pretty proud of herself, so don't let the actions of anonymous internet people who neither you nor she are ever likely to meet ruin it for you. That fortuitously captured beautiful moment is something to treasure, not something dirty.