The police have raided a local art gallery and taken away 20 photos of an allegedly 13 year-old girl from an exhibition by Bill Henson. The Prime Minister, presumably caught in the middle of discussing the budget, was shown some of the photos and found them "absolutely revolting." The police, as dirty-minded as ever, described the photos as being of a young girl in a "sexualised context". The curator of photography at the Art Gallery of NSW says they are "classical", like Greek vases. (I'll let you know what I think if I ever get to see one of them.)

The photographer is one of the best known of Australian artists, whose work is held by galleries all over the world. For 30 years a major focus of his work has been adolescence. Presumably for this very reason, he is taught in schools. I was buying a couple of bottles of wine this afternoon and the woman behind the counter interrupted her text messaging long enough to take my cash and glance at the front page of the afternoon paper. "Ah!" she said, "Bill Henson" and picked up the paper to read more. OK, maybe she's working her way through art school, but more likely she's just an ordinary young person working her way through some other course. The point is that both the artist and his work are very well known.

The art world is rushing to Henson's defence, with loads of references to Juliet. But in Shakespeare's day the representation of "children" in a "sexualised context" hadn't yet been thought of. Girls were married off, before puberty even - there was so much housework to do back then - and what happened to them after that was not a matter for public concern. Nowadays capitalism needs teenagers to stay in school longer without getting pregnant and they call it a victory for feminism when a woman has both a paid job and an unpaid one raising kids. Childhood thus needs to be prolonged for the sake of economic productivity, even though children are reaching puberty years earlier than their parents and grandparents did.

[In case I'm sounding critical here I should say that I approve of the prolongation of childhood for women. It gives them a bit more time and experience before they have to think about breeding and its consequences for their futures. It's just that I don't think it is something we've fought for and won. We have way too strong a tendency to let other, more powerful, people decide what's good for us.]

For women, the prolongation of childhood means that they are no longer simply house drudges or "unskilled" labourers, though whatever their talents they are still paid less, less likely to get promoted and generally derided if they act out of line. Moreover, during this prolonged childhood, at precisely the time when they're learning about being second class, they're confronted with all this stuff about their sexuality. Most notably, they learn that if they are beautiful and act sexy, people will pay more attention to them and show approval, while if they act nerdy, people will think they're weird and unacceptable. Could Bill Henson really capture this dilemma photographically? I haven't seen the photos that our Prime Minister has called 'revolting', but the ones I have seen do, I think, capture the mood brilliantly. Whether or not Henson himself gets it doesn't really matter - its what the viewer sees in the picture that counts.

It is really hard to say anything sensible about this case without seeing the offending pictures. The gallery has already caved in to the thought police and decided to eliminate them from the exhibition and if no less an art expert than the prime minister has decided that they affront his view of womanhood... um... childhood, what hope is there of ever forming a proper judgement?

ETA: This is pathetic. You can get a pretty good idea from the picture here of what the cops think is a "sexualised context". Oooh! Dirty old men! For fuck's sake.