Stop the Baby Porn

My friend gave birth to a baby boy last weekend. In celebration of the moment, they sent around a brief e-mail announcement with a photo attached. Of course, the photo was of the baby... but it was a full-on nude shot, including Baby Boy's franks and beans.

So my question to you is, "Is this appropriate?" Personally, I was immediately shocked, uncomfortable and – frankly – horrified. I mean, I know it's a baby, but I don't really want to see all that. Does anyone really need to see this?? I usually download and save every photo that my friends send to me, but this was one that I immediately deleted. Honestly, it kind of killed the joy I had for my friend - I couldn't enjoy looking at the photo or celebrating the birth because of the subject matter. I couldn't pass it along to other friends saying, "Look at friend's new baby - how cute!"

Am I alone in thinking that this is a completely inappropriate photo to blast e-mail all your friends and post on your family's Internet site? I know you are proud, but can't we do some discrete editing or something? Is this the only photo you have to send to all of us?!

It's not that I object to babies having genitalia - that's not their fault. The thing that bothered me, and my real question is, why would the parents consciously elect to send out that type of photo to everyone? They don't have to prove to me that he is a boy, I think the name "Tom" makes that pretty clear. So please don't send me a spread-eagle photo of his cock and balls. I'm just confused why the parents didn't do one of the following things: (1) tastefully and strategically use a blanket; (2) crop the full-body photo to exclude the inappropriate part; or (3) take a photo above the waist. (By the way, not only do I NOT want to see the vagina/penis in baby photos, I also don't want to see that nightmare of a belly button either! Freaking disgusting. First, they have the giant clothespin on it, then later it gets all dark, shriveled and gross. Look at the above photo - there is still blood everywhere! I understand that is this all part of the "miracle of life", but, seriously, do I need to see it?? The miracle of life also includes me taking a shit, but I don't photograph it and send it around to everyone, do I?)

OK, now THIS is more like it (by the way, it's the same baby as above). Just use a blanket or dress him up - it's not hard to do, is it?!

When we take a photographs of ourselves as adults, we make sure our hair is fixed properly and that we don't have a nip-slip, or have something in our teeth, right?... so why are we going out of our way to take photographs of our babies in the worse possible positions? You know that the babies themselves would absolutely object to many of these photos, if they could. The proof is when we are older and these photographs get shown to us for the first time. We never say, "Awh, what a good baby photo of me!... you can see my penis and everything!" No, instead, we shriek in horror when our moms pull out these photographs in front of our friends.

You would think that modestly and decently would be inherent in all of us, and parents wouldn't be trying to take photos of naked babies (let alone, mass e-mailing them out to everyone). But maybe I'm just being prudishly American and immature about the whole thing. (Believe me, I want to see photos of naked girls - just not naked BABY girls.)

My last comment just raised an interesting point... in what situations do these naked baby photos become illegal? I'm not sure what the child pornography laws are, but if someone sends me a photo of their naked baby, I assume that is OK. But what if they are 2 years old? 5 years old? 13 years old? What if they are a boy?... or a girl? Does it matter? I think somewhere along the line, we can all agree that it crosses over into "inappropriateness". I imagine somewhere along the line it also crosses over into "illegality" - I just don't know where that point is (and I'm not interested in finding out). So new parents should all do us a favor and not send around naked photos of their kids.

You can criticize me for being a baby myself and acting all upset over these photographs. I agree that one can definitely overlook the nudity - after all, it's a freshly-born baby... just hours old, and the parents are (justifiably) excited and proud. But I guess I want to criticize the parents for not using a just a little more common sense and simply taking a more appropriate photo of the baby. It just kind of shocks me that they didn't recognize and think about it. When the parents take photographs of themselves on vacation and put them up on Snapfish, they don't take photos of themselves walking around naked or in the shower, so why would they do this to the baby?

By the way, the only thing worse than a full-on nude, spread-eagle baby photo is the freshly-birthed shot with all the goo and gunk still on the kid. No one wants to see this, either. If I did, I'd become an OB/GYN.

Photo Christmas Cards Suck

I like to send out Christmas cards every year. I will confess that one of the reasons why I participate in this annual ritual is so that I can prove to myself that I still know people and that I still have friends somewhere in the world. (However, this myth is often destroyed when I get cards returned back to me from the post office that are stamped "undeliverable" because a particular friend or family member moved and decide that I wasn't important enough to get the forwarding address information. Of course, if I wasn't such a bad friend or family member in the first place, then I would have known they were moving from the beginning.)

I have also selfishly keep track of how many Christmas cards I send out and how many I get back in return from others. I've been doing this for a few years, and there are a couple of disturbing trends arising in the Christmas card tradition.

The first trend is that people don’t really send out Christmas cards anymore. This year, I mailed 43 Christmas cards to family and friends. In the vast majority of these situations, the 43 recipients have been on my "list" for many years (so it’s not the first time they are getting a card from me). In addition, I send my cards out at the beginning of December, so recipients have plenty of time to receive them, realize they "forgot" to send me a card, then mail me one.

Despite the advance and repeated mailings every year, I only received 19 Christmas cards this December. That is only a 44% response rate from the 43 cards that I sent out. One theory could be that the majority of the people on my Christmas card list actually hate me, which would explain why I only got 19 cards, even though I sent out 43. But I think it is more likely that people have really given up on the whole Christmas card tradition. For the past few years now, I have only been receiving about one Christmas card for every two that I sent out. Perhaps "mail" is getting too old fashioned in our digital age, or perhaps people find themselves too busy to send out cards at this time of year. I’m not sure why people have given up on the tradition, because I kind of like it (and I don't really like anything). What are your thoughts on Christmas cards? Are they a waste of time? Why have people stopped sending them? Is it an "old person's" ritual?

The other disturbing trend I noticed in Christmas cards is that the majority of Christmas cards that I now receive are photo cards. Perhaps I shouldn't really complain, since I just went on and on about how I don't receive enough Christmas cards, but I hate these photo cards. I'm not against the photo cards in general - I just hate what people do with them.

Of the 19 Christmas cards I received this year, 11 were photo cards – so more than half of the Christmas cards I received had a photo on them. Of the 11 photo cards that I received, only one had the full family on it (mom, dad and son) and the rest of the cards only featured the couples' children - no parents. The kids in these photos ranged in age from 1 year old to 16 years old. Of the 11 different groups of children featured on these photo cards, I have actually met/seen only three of them in my entire life (and I haven’t seen any of those more than twice in my life). So, basically, I got 8 Christmas cards from total strangers.

Who is this person, and why is she sending me a Christmas card?? (And, perhaps more importantly... why is she wearing that hideous dress?)

Can someone please, PLEASE tell me why parents refuse to put themselves in the photo for the Christmas card?! I hate getting these damn cards from kids who I have never seen in my life and probably never WILL see in my life. I didn't send the stupid kid a Christmas card – I sent one to the parents. It's the PARENTS that I am friends with, or when to school with, or grew up with... not their kids. I don't care about their kids. I mean, I care about their kids to the extent that the kids make my friends happy, and I guess that's nice. But I don't really care about them in isolation, so why do the parents make the kids the prominent (and ONLY) feature on the Christmas cards?! Maybe, MAYBE, if it was a newborn, you can get away with doing it, but why is your 16-year old on the Christmas card? You can have the kids on the Christmas card, just make sure you include yourselves. It's the parents that I want to see, not the kids (who I have never met in my life because they live in a far-off city or something). I know everyone thinks their own kids are the best – but, really, isn't it presumptuous of these parents to jam their kids down our throats by putting them on a Christmas card and, simultaneously, depriving us of a photo of themselves - the only people we actually know?

Are parents so absorbed with their own kids that they insist on only having the kids in the photo? Do they feel that including themselves in the photo would be too conceited on their part? I don't get it. I just don't get it why the parents aren't in the photo, especially when it's only the parents that anyone really cares about. Put the whole family in the photo – what is wrong with that?! Why is that so horrible and so "wrong" to do??

Are these "bad people" for putting their entire family in the Christmas card photo? (Perhaps they are bad because they also appear to be members of the Aryan Nation, but that's another discussion)

Someone suggested to me that the reason why the parents don't put themselves in the Christmas card photo is because the parents know they look like shit - they look fat and/or old, and they are too self conscious about it. That might be a possible explanation... after all, this is America, and we get fat easily here – especially after having kids. But there are cards I received from really good-looking, thin parents (both the husband and wife) and the only people in the photo are the two kids (one of which is a step child of my friend, so I REALLY didn't care about that one). So that couple wasn't fat or old, and yet they weren't in the photo.

There are other examples I can think of where the parents weren't in the photo, even though they are attractive, so I'm convinced that the reason why parents don't put themselves in the photo is because they are self-conscious and bad-looking. I have to believe that the reason is because parents feel they need to "put the children before themselves" and that they feel it is too presumptuous, conceited and arrogant to feature themselves on the front of the card. Because, if the parents are in the photo, it's because they DECIDED to be in the photo, whereas the children are kids, and they don't have a say in the matter - the kids didn't consciously insist on being on the card... they were put there. Although, I would argue that consciously putting your own kid on the front of a Christmas card ("look at him! look at my kid, everyone!") is just as presumptuous and conceited as putting yourself on the card. Frankly, I don't really advocate ANYONE being in a photo on a Christmas card, but if you are going to do it - do us all a favor and put the people who we have real relationships with in the photo. I know parents don't really want to hear this, but we don't give a flying fuck about your 6-year daughter who we never, ever met. We care about you... the people who we have been friends with for 20 years. Not caring about your kids doesn't make us a bad person or a bad friend - it makes us real people with real priorities. We care about YOU, and that makes us good people.

So, I don't know... I'm annoyed and frustrated by receiving these photo cards that might as well be from total strangers with pre-printed messages that are stuffed in envelopes with pre-printed address labels. I mean, could you get any more impersonal? Maybe this is why people have stopped sending traditional Christmas cards... because of the crap you get in return. Maybe I will join them next year and stop sending cards. Or maybe I will print up a bunch of photo cards with some random child I find on the street and see what type of response I get.

Happy New Year!

The Minister of Common Sense will begin blogging again next week (Jan 8) with regular postings again every Thursday morning. Please stay tuned and tell your friends! See you all next week