By Misty Meadow
{ This story was originally posted at Lesbian Lolita in January 2017 }
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 easily be 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 managed 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, 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 this 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.
On 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 sunglasses 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 number 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 lesbian paedophile. I knew because she told me. “I’m a lover of little girls,” 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 excite me.”
I didn’t see how hugging her daughter merited a special name like ‘paedophile’. After all, didn’t all mummies hug their kids? Well, most of them 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 cunnies, and not all little girls are utterly fascinated by their mum’s pussies, to the extent that they caress them and marvel as they grow moist to the touch.
She’d told me never to tell anyone about the fun stuff we did in the shower, so I thought it was just normal mum/daughter games until much later, in school, when we got the “inappropriate 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 anything that I didn’t want to do, in fact I was usually the one who initiated 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 want to make love, Mum.” She’d smile and take my hand, and we’d drift into her bedroom and undress each other.
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 feed her my pussy. So I squatted down onto her face and she licked me to a lovely orgasm.
A couple of times a week, usually Saturday mornings when I was not at 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 wispy 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 cunny quite clearly.
“Don’t you think it’s time you started calling your cunny 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. I 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 here, 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, but 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 always 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 girl lovers 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 viewer’s 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 frighteningly large squad of police officers were first through the doors, which promptly 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,” she said.
Tires 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 tightly 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 2, 1960, a jury delivered a verdict of Not Guilty at the trial of Penguin Books, who’d published Lady Chatterley’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 is 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 foreman 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 is gone, spent on legal fees. 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 at me, then sadly shook her head.
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 erotic art. We didn’t need to say anything.
“We gave them a run for their money, anyway,” 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 society’s intolerance of child lovers? I’d like to think so, but don’t see any signs of it. Our pictures were not Lady Chatterley’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.
And there’s my wonderful mother. Even if I can’t convey the innocence of a child, Mum still finds me desirable, and we are still lovers.
I lie in bed at night, next to my naked mother. We’ve just pleasured one another, and she is asleep. I’m 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 masturbating, and I bask in my own glow in the knowledge that I’ve made a lot of people very happy.
The End