Kiddie Porn.

How's that for an attention grabbing headline?

But seriously. Taylor Lautner. Being used as a major marketing hook for the most recent Twilight. Pushed out there in all his buff glory. He's a child. He's seventeen! I understand that the target market for this film may be teenage girls, but the rest of the world is watching as well. They're watching, they're perving, they're lusting, and he's seventeen. It's close to eighteen, he's almost legal, surely he's close enough, right?

It baffles me that this is all ok when people create such a do about fifteen year old models wearing clothes on catwalks. That a film like Ken Park can be banned in Australia for depicting underage sex (between actors who are, actually, of age) when, arguably, they are sexualised to a far lesser degree than Lautner is in this film. Why must he be built (he put on 30 pounds of muscle or something for the role), buff (his body is spectacular, when you move away from the fact that he is, in the eyes of the law, pretty much a child) and waxed to within an inch of his life. Why does he need to be so highly manicured and manipulated to be this idea of perfection? What does that add to the character? What does it add to the film, other than fangirl (and fanboy) hysteria pushing the film up by another $100mil? It's a bottom-line requirement, and doesn't that effectively make it akin to kiddie porn? Really? Sure, he's not 10, but there's not a great deal of room for distinction - it's a black and white world we live in.

I guess the argument could be made that the film is an allegory pertaining to abstinence, and that by making him such an attractive being in such a sexual way it is promoting quite the opposite of carnal knowledge. Yes, he's attractive, but we shouldn't fuck him because he's a werewolf and therefore we should abstain. At least until we're married (though isn't he too young to marry?) So his sexual power is just another temptation against which we must rail in order that we may create glory to... that big man in the sky.

I don't buy it. He's seventeen. End of story. Sure, craft Robert Pattinson into a sex symbol. He's at least 23, even if I don't get the attraction. But don't deliberately manufacture a symbol who is this young. It's exactly the same as walking a girl down a runway with a see-through blouse. Worse, I'd argue, because this film is going to be seen by a hell of a lot more people than snaps of the latest Prada collection, or whatever. Most people will only see that girl's photos when the news makes a big deal about it. Everyone, everyone will see Taylor Lautner with his shirt off at some stage. And everyone will feel a rustling in their loins. And everyone over the age of eighteen should be ashamed of that.

I'd post a picture to illustrate, but I think that would be the ultimate hypocrisy. If you google him you'll find the pictures in nanoseconds.