legal beagles?

The redoubtable bradhicks has some doubts about the legality of fansmut with underage characters. Well, he's got no doubts; he thinks it's illegal. I don't know anything about the cases and precedents he cites, so if anyone out there who's really together on the topic wants to weigh in on his thread, that'd be awesome. He's a hugely widely read blogger, and this would be an important place, IMO, for fandom to make sure all the facts are straight, if they aren't currently.

The latter part of his post is, I think, even more interesting, and it's something I've been thinking about a lot ever since the debate started -- in brief, even if the art and entertainment we consume doesn't change our behavior, it's impossible to argue with a straight face that it doesn't change what falls inside and outside our sense of normalcy. Things that sound scandalous when you've never really heard of them before, or only in dark whispers -- well, it's much, much harder to continue seeing those things as scandalous, or even newsworthy at all, if you've seen the movie, the video on MTV, and read all the fic, you know?

And our definition of "underage" is one place where it isn't just maybe going to happen, it has already happened. Come on, those of you who are old like me, don't you remember when it was sort of shocking and awful, a Sad Commentary on Society, when fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls were sexually active? Not that it didn't happen -- it's always happened, obviously -- but there was this sort of universal tsk-tsk, because it seemed so very young. Now, post-Britney, post-Buffy, the same idea seems to pass by without much of a blink. There's a shrug response instead of a tsk-tsk, because teenagers, what are you gonna do?

And I'm not placing any particular moral value on that. Or rather, I think a pretty wide range of moral responses to that are understandable, from who the hell cares to real fear and frustration to the somewhat bizarre combination of the two that I feel. But the point is, since we know that community standards do change, in terms of what's perversion and what's kink, in terms of what's dirty and what's hot, in terms of what's pedophilia and what's a good, clean appreciation for the teenage pop princess of the month -- since we know that, can we in good conscience say that our edge-play will always remain edge-play and that we won't unwittingly produce so much of it that people start to think it's just another matter of taste? And as Brad points out, if nothing else, couldn't that make it a lot harder to convict real pedophiles, once you have a population (read: jury pool) that has come to view teachers who have sex with students or anyone who has sex with nubile adolescents as just another type of perfectly normal sexuality, perhaps one that's being unfairly persecuted by outdated and draconian laws?

Of course, that begs the question -- what if it is just another type of perfectly normal sexuality? Or to phrase it more accurately, if normal is just what we say it is, how can laws like age of consent and what constitutes sex with or porn about minors *not* be constantly in flux? And what does *that* mean, and is my lack of panic over Stuart/Nathan or my attraction to Emma Watson a genuine shaping force in changing the cultural parameters, even in ways I didn't set out to want them changed?