That fleeting moment of promise

So the first question must be - who is this woman writing a review of a book of photographs of a young woman in the nude or partially clothed? Well, I'm little more than that just that description, a mother with one adult daughter and three sons, also a grandmother of a little girl through my daughter. I may have two other qualifications for the review. I have loved the dreamy eroticism of the work of such photographers as David Hamilton since my early teens, and recently I attempted to co-author a book about the object which is central to the work of such a photographer - the eroticism of certain nude or partly clothed teenaged or pre-teen girls. [...]

We need to restore to eroticism its rightful sacredness. I believe that our society's attempts to suppress and criminalize virginal beauty and eroticism are doomed to failure and worse. One cannot block the primal source, or check the flow, of human sexuality, as these will not yield to such control, no matter how much we try. [...]

I am also going to suggest that much of so-called child pornography consists in fact of images of beautiful naked young people and what should be called 'child eroticism', and by child here I mean in the legal sense, because most of the disputed images are of 'children' between ten and seventeen. I also suggest that the interest in child nudity and 'erotic innocence' is in fact growing, fanned perhaps by prohibition and the phenomenon of the Internet, and that it is a natural strand of the greater primal flow.

source: Article 'That fleeting moment of promise - Brona Balfe reviews Eva: Eloge De Ma Fille' by Brona Balfe; Book by: Irina Ionesco; www.whatisgoingon.org/fleeting.html; whatisgoingon.org; August 2006