In January a few years ago, a notice in the Daily Telegraph announced
the sale of a small collection of paintings by a minor gallery located off
Charing Cross Road in London. The painter wished to remain anonymous, for
obvious reasons. At first glance each painting appeared to be of a
prepubescent girl, naked or nearly so, but closer examination revealed
that they were all paintings of photographs. The white edge of the
photograph was depicted together with the four push pins holding it to a
surface and the electronic date/time stamp in the bottom left hand corner
could be easily read. The pictures had been taken at roughly one month
intervals over the previous year. The girl was always posed in such a way
as to reveal her vagina, though not in a deliberately lewd way.
Nevertheless, she manged to radiate both innocence and sexuality. The
earliest picture showed her sitting at the bottom of a flight of stairs
dressed in nothing more than a pair of white cotton knickers. She had
pulled the waist of the knickers out and was peering down inside, an
expression of intense curiosity on her angelic face. The next was a full
frontal nude, hiding nothing and she held a vividly coloured parakeet on
her hand. The lighting was all directed at the bird, leaving her body in
partial shade and one could argue that it was a picture of a bird, the girl
being incidental, allowing one to gaze at her at length, pretending to be a
lover of birds rather than little girls. In a later picture, she was
standing knee deep in a lake, again in white knickers which in their
wetness clung tightly to her body, revealing the exact shape of her vagina
or, one wondered, had they become so translucent that one was actually
looking at the real thing? All the remaining pictures showed her naked,
playing a violin or sitting cross legged reading a book (Nabokov's "Lolita"
with its obvious implications) and the last one showed her sitting at a
kitchen table, legs carelessly spread, her head turned sideways, her lips
open, her hand holding a up banana an inch from her lips, a symbolism lost on
few.
All the paintings were signed, "Mummy".
Word soon spread that it was an exhibition of child pornography. In
the UK, the legal definition includes the phrase: ". . . illegal to take,
make, distribute, show or possess an indecent photograph or
pseudo-photograph of someone under the age of 18." An argument ensued in
the press about what constituted a pseudo-photograph. The usual
interpretation was a computer image. Did the law include paintings? Could
a painting of a photograph be porn? Would a photo of a painting of a photo
be illegal? Apparently not, because the papers were printing them. The
gallery forbade photography, but with iPhones being ubiquitous, most
visitors took pictures surreptitiously and soon they were available in all
the tabloids. What did "indecent" actually mean? Was the gallery owner in
trouble? The Crown Prosecution Service attempted to extract the name of
the artist from him, but all he was able to reveal was the name of the law
firm that actually handled the sales, and they weren't talking.
The terms of sale were unusual. Upon arrival, viewers were given a
card with a phone number on it, nothing more. Each painting was priced at
five thousand pounds, no haggling, take it or leave it, to be sold on a
first come - first served basis. A buyer could call the law firm from
right there in the gallery and close the sale immediately.
One the first day, only three were sold, seven the next day and the
remainder went on the third day just minutes after the gallery opened.
They would all remain on the gallery walls until the end of the month and
buyers could collect them when the exhibition closed. For the next few
weeks, there was a line down the street to get in and see this new
sensation. Word had clearly got out. When the exhibition closed, buyers
wearing sun glasses and hats pulled low could be seen leaving, carrying
their paintings, concealed by bubble wrap, under their arms, smug smiles on
their faces.
A large sign in the gallery foyer announced that there would be
another exhibition by the same artist at the same time next year. People
tried to make reservations but they were told just to come and get in line.
The paintings were titled "Mummy's Little Girl: No.1", "Mummy's Little
Girl: No.2" etc., through No.12. Who was she? She certainly looked far
from unhappy about being photographed in such revealing poses, indeed, the
eager smile on her lovely face indicated she was having a great time.
The little girl was me. I was just ten years old.
______________________________________________________________
My name is Myfanwy, but Mum calls me Muffin. We live in a cottage
just outside a small village in Snowdonia in North Wales. The nearest
neighbours are a quarter of a mile away, so we have plenty of privacy.
Mum made a nice living that year, sixty grand less commission being
much more than she'd ever earned from her art before, even though her
technique was excellent. She lit her subjects like Carravagio, painted
textures like the Dutch masters, and her flesh tones seemed as if they
might feel warm to the touch. The only subject she painted was me.
She was a paedophile. I knew because she told me. "I'm a lover of
children," she said, when I was about six.
"Everyone loves kids," I pointed out.
"Yes, but I love to hug and kiss and fondle you in a special way. You
make me very excited." I didn't see how hugging her daughter merited a
special name like "paedophile", after all, didn't all mummies hug their
kids? They do, but I found out later that not all of them take showers
with their little girls and wash them all over and pay special attention to
their little pee pees, and not all little girls are utterly fascinated by
their Mum's big floppy cunt lips, to the extent that they take touch them
and marvel as they grow moist to their touch. She'd told me never to reveal
to anyone about the fun stuff we did in the shower and I thought it was
just normal Mum/daughter stuff until much later, in school, when we got
that "inapropriate touching" lecture. So Mum was different from other
mothers. Was I freaked out? Not a bit. Our fun thing was special and I
didn't want it to stop.
I wasn't her victim. She didn't make me do stuff that I didn't want
to do, in fact it was usually me who intiated things. We'd wrestle on the
rug and I'd manage to sit on her face, or I'd lie on the couch, my head in
her lap, reaching up to caress her small but firm tits, or I'd say, "I need
to pee, Mum. Get your camera and come and watch me." She loved watching
me pee. By the age of eight, in the shower, I'd progressed from merely
letting her finger my cunt, to kneeling before her and exploring her pink
cavern with my tongue. I loved it all. The smell and taste of her cunt
made my head spin. If it made her happy, I wanted to do it. One time she
was lying in the tub when I came into the bathroom and she asked me to step
in with my feet either side of her head and pee through my knickers on to
her face. She opened her mouth wide and I was amazed to see her swallow my
pee. I wanted to drink hers, but she told me I wouldn't like it, so later
I just let her pee on my chest and tummy, or I'd lie on my back in the tub
and let her pee stream hit my own little slit.
A couple of times a week, usually Saturday mornings when I was not a
school, we'd have a photo session. We'd dream up new ideas, new ways for
me to display my body erotically while maintaining a veneer of innocence.
It was tremendously exciting to undress while she watched me, then pose for
her and the camera, knowing that one day, dozens, maybe hundreds of people
would look the the resultant painting and be excited by it.
"Men are gonna like you," Mum said one day. "Most paedophiles are men
although I know of a few women who would give anything just to see you with
nothing on, showing off your darling little cunt like this. You may think
that a ten year old girl can't be all that sexy, not with your flat chest
and narrow hips, but believe me, there is a huge number of people out there
who are secretly into little girls, just like me, and I want them to have
the exquisite pleasure of gazing on your naked body through the medium of
my art." She'd look through the camera, framing the shot, and my cunt area
would tingle with excitement, with the naughtiness of showing off my
private parts. I loved it, the undressing, the posing, the adoring look on
Mum's face as she photographed me.
I was now ten, but as yet there were no signs of approaching puberty.
"I don't want you to grow up, Muffin," Mum said. "I want you to
remain a little girl forever." So I let her take pictures of me in the
most indecent poses I could think of, the more the merrier, so she'd at
least have them after I became a grown woman.
____________________________________________________________
We started to assemble a collection for the next sale. The first one
showed me wearing a suspender belt, white stockings, a whispy little see
through bra that concealed nothing and, of course, no knickers. I was
sitting on a window sill, legs slightly parted, with the light behind me
and it came out in soft focus, a new challenge for Mum to reproduce in oils
but she did a superb job. It was possible to see my pee pee quite clearly.
"Don't you think it's time you started calling your pee pee by a more
grown up name?" she asked.
"Like what?"
"Pussy? Twat? Minge? Quim? How about 'cunt'?"
I liked the sound of "cunt". It had a nice lewd ring to it. It tried
it out. "Cunt! Look at my cunt! Do you like my cunt? I know you want to
touch my cunt!"
Mum laughed. "Yes, touch it and lick it. Come her, Muffin and let
your Mummy make you happy." Even though I was only ten, her tongue could
light up my whole body.
The next picture was intended to be less provocative. It showed me
pulling my knickers down. They'd got as far as mid-thigh when the camera
flash went off. I was leaning slightly forward, tugging them down, looking
straight into the camera lens with a dazzling smile on my face. But
somehow, the presence of knickers made the whole scene more erotic than
just my naked body
"I love your knickers, my darling. I don't know what looks sexier,
you in your knickers or just naked." I put my hand between her legs and
fingered her cunt until she was dripping wet, then used my knickers to wipe
her, then put them back on again. I had no problem wearing knickers soaked
with her cunt juice. If I could happily lick and taste her, a few stains were
no problem. It was kinda intimate.
The months rolled by and the collection was coming together nicely.
Mum had taken a number of selfies of us, my face buried between her thighs,
then hers between mine and I begged her to paint one of them, but she
demurred, pointing out that all the other stuff she'd painted was
borderline porn that she'd gotten away with, but a painting of me eating
her pussy could never be passed off as "art".
"We have to keep it classy," she said. "If we cross a certain line,
the authorities could close the gallery down and we'd be fucked. We have
to maintain a delicate balance between pornography and art. We want to
appeal to paedophiles in a way that's acceptable to society as a whole.
Usually, when people hear the words 'kiddy porn' or 'paedophile' they
become outraged. There's a side to this whole question that's perfectly
benign, harmless, and in our case, beneficial. I want to acquaint the
public with the pure, beautiful aspect of child sexuality, without running
afoul of the law."
By now, the previous year's pictures had all been leaked to various
sites on the internet, spreading ever wider until they could be found
practically anywhere. I rejoiced in my fame, secure in the knowledge that
in this tiny conservative community in the Welsh mountains, it was unlikely
than our neighbours would encounter them. If confronted, we could alway
claim, with suitable outrage, that it wasn't me, just some other little
girl who looked similar. Mum had taken the precaution of painting my eyes
slightly bigger, with darker lashes and eyebrows, and a smaller nose.
"I'll leave your lips just as they are," she said. "Come and kiss me."
Our tongues met like excited puppies.
January arrived and it was time to open the new exhibition. Still
just twelve paintings, they were slightly more lascivious than those of the
previous year. One showed me squatting naked with my arms round Bandit, our
border collie, as I whispered in his ear. Squats are always good for
showing off a cunt, and though the main subject was the dog, one's eyes
were drawn irresistibly to my little girly slit. In another, I played a
guitar. You'll never see a fully dressed person playing a guitar with
their knees together, and neither were mine, nor was I in any way dressed.
Such was the crowd outside the gallery in distant London that BBC
television was broadcasting the gallery opening live. Some potential
buyers had been camped out for days, guarding their places in the line and
as the doors opened, a great cheer went up. Three men and a woman were
injured in the crush to get in the door and we later learned that all
twelve paintings were sold in minutes, as fast as the law firm could
process the calls, despite the fact that Mum was now demanding ten thousand
pounds for each one.
"You should've auctioned them," I said to her when the broadcast
ended.
"No, Muffin. No one would bid openly for them. Who'd wanna be
labeled as a collector of child porn? It's better this way. Those
buyers must be dealers who'll sell them off at a huge profit, but we don't
have to be greedy. We just want to make the world more appreciative of the
beauty of a child's body, to fight back against society's oppression of
benign paedos like me."
Before the end of the day, the pictures started appearing on the
internet, all described as "art", or at worst, "erotic art". I felt
immensely proud of myself and of my body. I looked at myself in the
mirror, closely inspecting my nipples and my cunt, but there was still no
sign of development.
_________________________________________________________
The next exhibition, a year later, was different. I was now twelve.
My tits, imperceptible in January, had slowly grown over the course of the
year until by December, they were distinct little mounds of soft flesh, and
my cunt had begun to develop lips. A few wisps of pubic hair appeared,
but Mum shaved them off. She was fighting my transformation into a woman
as hard as she could. Though I still had the innocent, angelic face of a
child, my body was a different story. I was sexy. I mean really fucking
sexy. I could see it myself. This year's paintings were even more daring
and showed me in improbable poses. A few were gymnastic in nature with my
cunt always in perfect view as the centrepiece, my contortions serving only
to display it more aggressively. The last picture showed me sprawled on a
couch, my legs spread wide, one hand covering one tit, the other hiding my
cunt, or was I masturbating? It depended on the viewers state of mind. We
were now probably over the line into the realm of child pornography.
"I'm hoping the last two years have opened people's minds somewhat,"
Mum said. "We haven't even been questioned by the authorities, let alone
prosecuted. I think we're gonna get away with it again. At twenty
thousand a clip, we're looking at over two hundred K. And next year, well,
we're gonna be rich!"
How wrong she was. What she hadn't realised was that you can take
pictures of naked kids and call them family photos, but I wasn't a kid any
more. I was a pubescent girl, about to have her first period and I was
just too fucking sexy to get away with it and I was still underage by four
years.
Once again the BBC was at the gallery to report the opening, but a
frightenly large squad of police officers were first through the doors,
which promply closed behind them. Two days later, disaster struck.
_____________________________________________________________
The barman at the village pub called us to ask if we had called the
police. "There were two coppers in here a minute ago, asking directions to
your place."
"FUCK!" called Mum, slamming the phone down. She ran into the den and
began yanking all the connections from the back of the computer. She
lifted it into my arms then pushed a handful of memory sticks into my
pocket. "Go and throw that into the pool below the falls," he said. Tyres
crunched on the gravel as I staggered out of the back door and down to the
path by the stream. A hundred yards downstream, a small waterfall fell
into a deep pool. I tossed the computer in and followed it with the memory
sticks. I got back to the cottage in time to see Mum in cuffs, being
pushed into a police car.
"Call my sister," she had time to yell. "She'll come and take care of
you."
The nightmare had just begun.
_____________________________________________________________
A week later, Mum was home again, out on bail, but she was no longer
the anonymous painter that the art world had wondered about for two years.
Her name was all over the papers, and they no longer printed the pictures,
all of which had been confiscated from their owners by the police, as
evidence. How their identities, or Mum's for that matter, were uncovered wasn't clear, but it
probably involved some computer hacking by the authorities. There were a
lot of pissed off art lovers out there, but they quickly formed into a
group to support us and help pay our legal fees. All the money we'd made
from the paintings was gone to pay the bail.
Months later, Mum went back to London for the trial which took several
weeks, closely reported in the press. Our defense team made the case that
a painting of a photograph fell outside the definition of child
pornography. "If one took a video of a bank robbery, would that be a
crime? The robbery, yes, but the video? No!" was the theme our barrister
constantly hammered at. "Is a photograph of a counterfeit banknote a forgery?
Of course not!"
Towards the end of the trial, I was summoned to testify and travelled
down to London. At Euston Station, Mum hugged me so tight it almost hurt.
"You're a brave girl," she said. "It won't be easy to stand up in court
and give evidence."
"I can do it, Mum."
________________________________________________________________
On November the second, 1960, a jury delivered a verdict of not guilty
at the trail of Penguin Books, who'd published "Lady Chatterly's Lover"
earlier in the year. The jury had been required to read the book from end
to end and their decision that it was a work of art and not an obscenity
had kicked off a social revolution that's remembered to this day.
Today in similar fashion, all three dozen of Mum's paintings were
displayed, one by one, for the jury's consideration. While this was going
on, I was sitting outside the courtroom, waiting to be called. A couple of
hours went by and I was torn between anxiety about the outcome of the trial
and pride that my naked body was once more on display for strangers to
admire. They're looking at me, I thought. They're looking at my naked
cunt. My tummy tingled with excitement. Then, my name was called.
"Were you a willing participant in the creation of your mother's works
of art?" asked our barrister. I must have looked so innocent, wearing a
school uniform, the front of my blouse pulled flat, white ankle socks on my
feet.
"Why wouldn't I be?" I replied, giving the jury my most dazzling
smile. "My Mum's a brilliant artist and I wanted to give her a suitable
subject to paint, a subject close to her heart. She really loves me a
lot."
"Did she ever force you to do anything you were reluctant to do?"
I let out a little derisive snort. "I loved being painted. I'm
proud of what I did. I'm not one of those people who are ashamed of their
own bodies." A few of the spectators clapped. Others frowned.
Then I had to wait outside again as the closing arguments were made.
The jury retired. They were out for most of two days. I was in the
courtroom for the verdict.
"Not guilty!" the jury forman said firmly. The court erupted, a
mixture of cheers and boos.
________________________________________________________________
Our customers have all had their paintings returned to them. We've
been inundated with emails, cards and letters of congratulation from the
huge number of people who supported us. But the money has gone. Just as
painful was the loss of the hundreds of photographs that Mum had taken of me
down the years. They lay at the bottom of the pool below the waterfall.
All we had were copies of the paintings that we'd downloaded from the
internet.
"Do you want to paint more pictures of me?" I asked Mum when we got
back to Wales.
"Let's get a look at you. Take your clothes off." I undressed for
her and she looked hard at me. I didn't see her eyes light up like they
used to. I turned and looked at myself in the mirror. A thirteen year old
girl, who'd had her first period months earlier, looked back at me. She
had fully formed breasts, small and firm, and curvy hips and a little bush of blond
hair was visible just above the lips of her vagina. I was now a woman and I
didn't look at all innocent.
Mum and I looked at each other. We both knew it was hopeless. The
little girl had gone. Any painting of me, however daring, would just be
another piece of run-of-the-mill porn. We didn't need to say anything.
"We gave them a run for their money," Mum said, hugging me.
Had we achieved anything? Had we done anything to erode society's
horror of pictures of naked little girls? Had we opened a crack in the
wall of intolerance of paedophilia? I'd like to think so, but I don't see
any signs of it. Our pictures were not lady Chatterly's Lover and
there's no revolution unfolding.
But I do have the satisfaction of knowing that three dozen happy
customers are looking at me and, I hope, becoming aroused by my sexuality,
and let's not forget that all the pictures can still be found on the
internet.
I lie in bed at night, thinking about the hundreds and thousands of
men and women out there, their faces lit by the glow of their computer
screens, looking at me, perhaps they're masturbating, and I bask in my own glow in
the knowledge that I've made a lot of people very happy.
The End.