Imagine a middle aged man, taking pictures of adolescents in various stages of undress, some fully nude. Some of those pictures have at least a tinge of eroticism about them.

Imagine those pictures being circulated for widespread viewing. What happens next?

Well, the man is Australian photographer Bill Henson. He's been taking photographs of this nature for some time now, and he's had exhibits in galleries ardound Australia and the world. At home we have a collection of postcards of some of his images that we bought at the Art Gallery of New South Wales not so long ago.

To set the scene, here's Sydney Morning Herald columnist Miranda Devine opining about the exhibition due to open last Thursday.

Devine is not pleased, but the article is not about Henson, except as an example of the pressing problem of The Sexualisation of Children. This is the current Big Fear in certain circles, as our deeply ingrained collective puritan impulses do battle with strongly inculcated libertarian ones. It's one thing to say that adults should be free to choose what they do as long as they're not harming anyone else, but children? They need to be protected!

It's one thing to raise one's eyebrows at tween pop starlets gyrating in skimpy gear in music videos targeted at adolescent girls. Or to have girls of the same age wearing G-string underwear. Let's agree, at least for now, that it's not censorious or puritanical to be concerned about that, and to want to have a sensible and rational discussion of such things. And in a world where 18 year olds and up can join Suicidegirls.com, or go to a spring break resort somewhere and watch (or participate in) wet t-shirt contests or be filmed for the latest Girls Gone Wild DVD, let's agree that the 6-8 years before legal adulthood ought to be an area where we tread carefully. It's not exactly prudish to be concerned when the latest HiltLoSpears floozy is photographed sans knickers getting out of a car on her way to a Hollywood nightclub.

Hell, there's even a Senate Inquiry going on into the sexualisation of children in the media. Devine notes (snootily) that the academic authors of recent study The Porn Report (or see here) put in a submission to the inquiry. In Devine's worldview, any academic saying the sorts of things that the authors (McKee, Albury and Lumby) do means that they are untrustworthy libertines, driven by some postmodern cultural studies agenda in which anything and everything goes.

(It's OK, Miranda, I have some problems with postmodernists myself, but let's not go overboard. They've actually been doing some empirical research here.)

Back to Henson. It's not clear that his work is in anything like the category of a raunchy music video. It's not that there's no discernable sexual energy contained in his images, but they are hardly raunchy.

But Devine's conflation of all these things was just the start. After a phoned-in complaint to police, pictures were seized from the gallery that was to host the exhibition, and threats of criminal proceedings were made.

The Angry Brigade got self-righteously nasty, as the art world just got (rightly, perhaps) self-righteous.

Now, even naked bubbas in nappy (diaper) adverts are suspect.

What's all this really about? What's at stake? I'm going to invite you to join me in a short let's-confront-our-fears exercise.

One fear about the "sexualisation of children" is that we're encouraging perverts. Pedophiles prey on children, and here we go, encouraging them. It's as though there will be creepy guys in long coats wandering the galleries, looking on lasciviously at Bill Henson's images and then running off to a private spot to, uh, fantasise. The more indirect version of this argument is that we're "normalising" kiddie porn by saying some such imagery is OK. (So, apparently, says the pervert, if those images are OK, why not the two thousand naked kiddie images on my hard drive?)

Those of us who like self-determination don't hold much truck with these kind of abstract arguments.

Another fear is that somewhere in the actual making of these images, innocent kids were harmed. (Or at least, put at risk.) Spake complainant Hetty Johnson of Bravehearts:

I don't know how Bill Henson gets the consent of his models and their parents. What I do know is that he's been doing this for a while, without horror stories emerging.

This story is unfolding. Charges have yet to be laid, at this stage, and maybe they won't be. The exhibition is going ahead without the confiscated works, and Bill Henson has gone to ground. I'll post updates here as they happen.