Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, the author of “Alice in Wonderland,” has been called the first child pornographer. He began taking black-and-white photographs of children — some of them naked or partially dressed — in the 1850s and amassed an extensive collection. Despite the prudery of Victorian society, images of nude children were not at all abnormal. In fact, such cherubic, artistically posed images were seen as a fittingly romantic representation of childhood. It wasn’t until the late 20th century that we began to see Carroll’s images in a different light.

The sex education controversies of today have nothing on the furor over “Show Me!: A Picture Book of Sex for Children and Parents.” The book, which originally appeared in German, explained the birds and the bees with illustrative photos of naked children and adult intercourse. The Washington Post called it “beautiful, assaultive, grotesque, and seductive.” But the book was reportedly torn to shreds in protest, and from the mid-’70s to early ’80s, several state prosecutors charged booksellers with obscenity for selling it. Then-president of St. Martin’s Press Thomas McCormick argued, “You don’t have to agree with the book, but I agree with it and so do a lot of other people. I think we have a right to show it to our children.” But when the Supreme Court upheld a law banning the appearance of children in sexually explicit material, even when it is not legally considered obscene, and it has artistic or educational merit, the publisher yanked the book from shelves. Now it sells online as a collector’s item for hundreds of dollars.

Martin Scorsese is known for shocking violence in his movies, but casting a 13-year-old Jodie Foster as a child prostitute in “Taxi Driver” unsettled audiences in a whole new way. During the film’s shooting, Foster saw a psychiatrist, after concerns arose that she was too young to handle the adult subject matter. A body double was used for the sexually explicit scenes and a child-welfare worker was also on set every day to supervise. Ultimately, Foster got an Oscar nomination, and the movie launched her into a successful career.

In “Pretty Baby,” a 12-year-old Brooke Shields appeared nude for her role as a preteen who calls a New Orleans brothel home and eventually has her virginity auctioned off. Gossip columnist Rona Barrett condemned it as child pornography, and Ontario and Saskatchewan banned the film, deeming it too offensive. At the time, a columnist for the Globe and Mail observed, “Of course the child star is not new, from Shirley Temple to Judy Garland to Tatum O’Neal to Jodie Foster. But in Brooke Shields we have a whole new dimension — a pre-pubescent sex symbol.” She had the body of a child but the elegant beauty and sensual pout of someone much older. Brooke’s mother, Teri Shields, embraced this to an extent: “I don’t mind Brooke being called a sex symbol,” she said. “But nymphet and Lolita rub me the wrong way.”

It wasn’t the first or the last time Shields found herself at the center of a child porn controversy. Just two years earlier, photographer Garry Gross snapped now infamous shots of the adolescent actress standing naked, wet and glistening in a bathtub. Her adolescent body was in stark, unsettling contrast with her kohl-lined eyes and stained lips. The debate over whether the image is child porn continues today; in 2009, police in London removed it from an exhibit at the Tate Modern.

And, of course, in 1980, 15-year-old Shields premiered as the new face of Calvin Klein and delivered the seductive line, “What comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” The TV spots were banned from several stations and networks. What followed was a familiar instance of cultural dissonance: Outrage over the ad campaign only caused sales to skyrocket.

It isn’t often that a museum rejects the donation of a piece of art from a noted artist — but that is exactly what happened when Pierre Matisse gifted Polish-French artist Balthus’ “The Guitar Lesson” to the Museum of Modern Art. (For the complete image, click here.) The painting shows a female teacher with her breast exposed violently fondling a young student who is shown naked from the waist down. The positioning blasphemously mimics the Pieta de Villeneuve-les-Avignons in the Louvre. This was apparently too much for one museum trustee to stomach, so the painting was removed from the gallery.

Balthus is often compared to the fictional Humbert Humbert, and his painting “Girl and Cat” was used for the 1937 Penguin edition of “Lolita.” The artist’s son once wrote, “The fabled theme of the young adolescent girl, which Balthus has treated repeatedly, has nothing whatever to do with sexual obsession except perhaps in the eye of the beholder.” It seems most beholders are drawn to psychoanalyze Balthus, to determine the motivations behind his painting — a common theme when it comes to debates over art that depicts naked or sexualized children. The artist was matter-of-fact about the inspiration behind “The Guitar Lesson”: “I was very hard up and I wanted to be known at once … the way to get known was with scandal.”

The arresting black-and-white shots in Sally Mann’s collection of photographs “Immediate Family” show her three pre-pubescent children frolicking, often naked, against the pastoral backdrop of her summer home. She says the images merely reveal her children through her uncensored maternal gaze, but the collection was immediately assailed as child porn when it was published in 1992. As she wrote in the book’s preface, the images may be intimate, but they “are of ordinary things every mother has seen — a wet bed, a bloody nose, candy cigarettes. They dress up, they pout and posture, they paint their bodies, they dive like otters in the dark river.” Central to the debate over Mann’s work are the boundaries of private and public life, and the potential for strangers to see prosaic familial intimacies as erotic. Despite the controversy, Time magazine declared her “America’s best photographer” in 2001.

Designer Calvin Klein returned to the formula that had worked for him before and launched an ad campaign starring half-naked models as young as 15. The TV spots for Calvin Klein jeans featured models being interviewed and goaded to take off their clothes by an off-camera voice, as though they were auditioning for a porn film. This one caused enough of a stir that it became the focus of a U.S. Justice Department investigation, and Klein pulled the ads.

These ads coincided with increasing panic about the threat of the still-burgeoning Internet to children’s safety. The same year, Time magazine published a cover story on “cyberporn,” declaring, “A new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids — and free speech?” The cover featured a horrified child’s face ominously lit by the glow of a computer screen. Inside, the magazine featured illustrations of “a naked man embracing a computer and a child being lured into a dark alley by a man with a lollipop image on a computer screen,” according to one report. The story was cited as an inspiration for introduction of the Protection of Children from Computer Pornography Act, which was passed in 1998 but blocked from going into effect.

After the 6-year-old’s tragic murder, detectives immediately began investigating the possibility that she had been involved in a child porn ring. Meanwhile, there was a seemingly constant loop on TV news of footage from her child beauty pageant performances. Anchor Dan Rather went so far as to call out CBS, his own network, for airing this “borderline kiddie porn.” JonBenet became a potent symbol of how sinister the subtle sexualization of kids can be.

No discussion of anxiety about adolescent sexuality would be complete without a mention of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” The 1997 film version starring Jeremy Irons and 15-year-old Dominique Swain caused uproar, despite the fact that a 19-year-old body double was used for the nude scenes. Director Adrian Lyne struggled to get the film released in the U.S. As the U.K.’s Independent observed at the time: “[Major studios] fear retribution by a hyper-sensitive American public, which is still reeling at the brutal slaying of [child] beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, and applauding President Clinton’s crackdown on child pornography and tougher sentencing for convicted paedophiles.” The film eventually came out in 1998, but all the controversy didn’t end up in ticket sales. The movie sank at the box office.

Following protests organized by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson and Operation Rescue’s Randall Terry, Barnes & Noble was indicted in 1997 for selling books featuring adolescent nudes — none of them in sexual situations — by contemporary artists Jock Sturges and David Hamilton. Back in 1990, FBI agents raided Sturges’ studio on suspicion of producing child pornography, but he was never found guilty. In a sign of our deeply mixed feelings about sexualizing adolescents: The following year, Britney Spears donned a naughty schoolgirl outfit in the music video for “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)” — and became a superstar.

American photographer Nan Goldin’s image of “Klara and Edda Belly Dancing” was seized in North East England under suspicion that it violated child porn laws. (For the complete image, click here.) The photograph, which is owned by none other than Sir Elton John, shows two girls horsing around. One of the girls, clad in panties, a sarong and a makeshift wrap top, stands with her legs spread over the head of the other girl, who is completely naked. Interestingly enough, the piece was reported to police by a gallery worker, which might say something about the level of fear and uncertainty surrounding child porn prosecutions and punishment. Ultimately, authorities decided that it was not child porn and returned the photo.

Controversy erupted as soon as word got out that the 2007 film “Hounddog” included a child rape scene featuring 12-year-old Dakota Fanning. Some claimed the movie violated child porn laws, despite there being zero nudity. Concerned Women for America called for an all-out ban; meanwhile, the National Organization of Women commended director Deborah Kampmeier for tackling such a difficult subject. It’s worth noting that around the same time, various tools of seduction — like thongs and push-up bras — were being marketed to adolescent girls, but we seemed to be less tolerant of artistic depictions of children in actual sexual situations.

Back in 2008 — before Miley Cyrus became the subject of alleged upskirt shots circulating the Web — Annie Leibovitz’ Vanity Fair shot of the then-15-year-old loosely draped in a sheet startled an American public that only knew her as a Disney fixture. The backlash was so strong that the pop star soon issued an apology to her fans and announced that she was “embarrassed.” The fact that raunchy cellphone images leaked and went viral a week earlier only added to the furor. When even sexier cellphone snapshots emerged later, Miley secured her position as the poster girl for the “sexting” generation.

GQ commissioned notoriously pervy photographer Terry Richardson to do a photo shoot with the cast members of the high school sensation “Glee.” The adult actors posed in character and played up sexy teen clich