What happens inside us when an image becomes powerful—and what responsibility do we have for the images we put in front of ourselves and others?
When I was a kid, horror movies scared me more than they seemed to scare other kids.
During the scary parts, I would hold my favorite stuffed animal over my eyes. Dad would laugh and say, “Off to the coffee shop!”
That was his way of reminding me that the people on the screen were actors. The blood wasn’t real. The knife wasn’t real. Nobody was actually being chased through the dark.
I understood him.
My body didn’t.
My heart raced anyway. My muscles tightened. I peeked through the spaces between my fingers, saw things I wished I hadn’t, then came the nightmares about the imagery.
Eventually, I learned something simple about myself: I can’t watch horror movies. Not because I mistake fiction for reality, but because understanding isn’t always enough.
The brain doesn’t simply record images. It interprets them, remembers them, anticipates what might come next, and fills in what it cannot see. When something feels emotionally important, the body can respond before the thinking mind has finished saying, This isn’t real.
That may be why suggestion can be more frightening than seeing everything:
a shadow beneath a door,
footsteps that stop outside the room,
a scream followed by silence.
The mind completes the picture, and sometimes what it creates is more frightening than anything a filmmaker could show.
I think about that when I think about children and censorship.
We often talk about protecting children from frightening images, violence, sexuality, grief, death, or ideas they may not be ready to process. Sometimes protection is exactly what a child needs.
Children aren’t miniature adults, and what one child can watch without much reaction may stay with another for years.
I know this because I was that child.
But there is a difference between protecting a child from something and teaching a child how to encounter it. Dad didn’t make the scary movie disappear, and he didn’t tell me that being frightened was ridiculous. He gave me context.
“Off to the coffee shop!”
Those people are actors. You’re here with me. This isn’t happening to you.
He tried to give my frightened brain somewhere to put the fear.
Maybe that is part of what adults are supposed to do—not expose children to everything or hide everything, but help them understand what they’re seeing.
There will eventually be frightening things we cannot censor out of existence:
a news story,
a death,
a photograph,
a cruel person,
a war,
a broken heart,
a nightmare,
or something a child encounters online without warning.
The curtain eventually comes down. When it does, perhaps the most useful thing we can offer isn’t a completely frightening-free world, but context, language, and permission to look away. A child should be able to say, This scares me, and have an adult explain what they’re seeing.
They should also learn that fiction is fiction, an image is an image, a thought is a thought—and that a physical feeling of fear does not necessarily mean they are in danger.
That brings me to another kind of image: pornography.
When I experimented with my art, I discovered that the request from clients for nudity itself wasn’t what made me uncomfortable. As an artist, I don’t believe the human body is inherently shameful. What unsettled me was the act of turning my body into something to be looked at and consumed.
Pornography can participate in that process. After requests for naked images of myself from other people, suddenly I could see the other side of the screen. I began thinking about how easily a person becomes an image, and how easily an image becomes a commodity.
There is a difference between seeing a naked body and consuming one. There is a difference between recognizing someone’s sexuality and packaging sexuality for attention. There is also a difference between looking and endlessly looking.
I became aware of the machinery around it: the scroll, the novelty, the anticipation, the next image, the next body, the next thing designed to capture attention.
I don’t want to call pornography an addiction for everyone, but I do think about how easily powerful images create attention loops—how something that provokes desire can become something we repeatedly seek.
That brought me back to the little girl behind her stuffed animal. She knew the horror movie wasn’t real. Her body responded anyway.
As an adult, I began wondering what happens when entire industries are built around the fact that images can bypass rational distance and speak directly to attention, emotion, desire, or fear.
What happens when the human body becomes one of the most powerful images we can place in front of another person? And what happens to the person behind the image?
I don’t think the answer is simply censorship. I’m not sure it is simply freedom, either. The more useful question may be awareness:
What are we looking at?
Why are we looking?
What is the image asking from us?
What are we asking from the person in the image?
What happens when looking becomes so habitual that we stop noticing another human being at all?
That is what bothered me about nude requests—not the naked body, but the distance. A person becomes an image, an image becomes content, and content becomes something to consume.
I had entered an artist frame willingly. But once I was inside it, I could suddenly see the frame.
That experience clarified something for me: images are not nothing. They enter us.
We interpret them, remember them, react to them, and sometimes carry them into our dreams.
We may protect children from them because they aren’t ready. We may create them because we want to be seen. We may consume them because they make us feel something. And after enough looking, we may begin to wonder what all that looking is doing to us.
So perhaps the question isn’t only, What should we keep people from seeing? It is also, How can we help ourselves—and our children—understand what we see?
That is visual literacy.
We teach children to read words, recognize advertisements, and question information online. We should also teach them to read images:
Why was this image made?
What is it asking me to feel?
Why do I want to keep looking?
Who is the person behind the image?
What happens to my attention when I look at this repeatedly?
These are questions adults need to ask themselves, too.
Fear can be real without the danger being real. Desire can be real without the image being the person. A body can be beautiful without becoming a commodity. An image can be powerful without being reality.
Learning to tell those things apart is a form of literacy we don’t discuss enough.
Maybe that is what my father was giving me when he said, “Off to the coffee shop!”
Not censorship. Not permission.
Context.
A reminder that an image is an image, and that what I see is not always what is happening.
I’ve spent much of my life learning that lesson in different ways. As a child, I learned that an image could frighten me even when I knew it wasn’t real.
As an adult, I learned that an image could invite desire, attention, curiosity, and consumption. Then, for a while, I became part of the image in my art. I put myself on the other side of the screen and discovered that being looked at changes the experience of looking.
That is why I’m less interested now in deciding which images people should or shouldn’t see. I’m more interested in whether we know how to see.
Can we recognize the difference between an image and an event, a body and a product, desire and consumption, curiosity and compulsion? Can we protect ourselves without preventing others from learning how to navigate the world?
Censorship asks, Should you see this?
But another question belongs beside it:
Once you see it, do you know what to do with what you feel?
I don’t think there is one answer. But I do think there is value in learning to notice: when an image tightens your chest, when it makes you look away, when you want to look again, when another human being has quietly become an object in your mind.
Notice the frame.
The goal may not be to create a world where we never encounter disturbing, beautiful, sexual, violent, heartbreaking, or astonishing images. It may be to become people who can encounter them without forgetting what they are.
Images.
Powerful ones.
But still images.
And behind every image, there is a person, a body, a story—and ourselves.
Maybe Dad was right.
Maybe sometimes the best thing we can say is simply:
Off to the coffee shop!
Not because nothing frightening or exciting is happening, but because we know where we are.
Hopefully, for me, it’s in my own body.
Breathing deep in the present.
At an actual coffee shop.
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