Shocking Photos: Spain's First Daughters Appear to be . . . Teenagers

In the realm of world diplomacy, it was about the most innocent occurrence imaginable: In the midst of a United Nations session in New York, President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama hosted a reception for visiting heads of state and other foreign dignitaries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The new American president wowed them with a radiant and "amazingly consistent" smile that created a viral video, as the president and first lady posed for more than 130 photographs with their guests.

Those pictures were later posted to the State Department's Flickr page and live there now, except for one, which was taken down upon the request of the government of Spain. That's the photo, naturally, that everyone is talking about. Pictured with Barack and Michelle Obama is Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, his wife Sonsoles Espinosa and the couple's two daughters, Laura and Alba.

It seems that images of the two girls, aged 16 and 13, have never been published in Spain and that there is a Spanish law prohibiting such photographs. After lobbying the State Department to remove the photo, the Spanish government ordered state-owned Spanish news agency EFE not to distribute it. Nonetheless, the incident sparked a sensation, along with a worldwide conversation about privacy and the suppression of information.

For one thing, nothing digital ever dies. And so, the photo lives on, almost certainly generating more scrutiny that it ever would have if it had just been left alone. Before it was censored, the photo appeared in a few newspapers in the girls' home country, prompting interest mainly because Spaniards had never seen images of them before. Both were adorned all in black, with the older one sporting heavy black eyeliner and black combat-style boots – a style that in Spain, as in the United States, would be characterized as "goth."

Spanish news agencies pixilated the girls' faces, complying with the letter, if not the spirit, of that nation's privacy laws concerning the minor children of public officials. Yet, politics being the family's business, these editorial decisions were not made in a vacuum. The conservative newspaper El Mundo placed the photograph on Page One. The leftist El Pais ran an explanation about why it had decided against publishing the photo of the Socialist president and his family. Meanwhile, the e-mail inboxes of the Spanish people filled, as they would in the United States, with doctored versions of the photo showing the teenage girls as members of the Addams Family, the metal band KISS, and as Orcs from J. R. R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

The episode also generated a discussion about the proper level of protection children of politicians should be afforded in the digital age – as well as backlash against censorship. Writing on Daily Beast, Republican Sen. John McCain's daughter Meghan expresses amazement at the overreaction by the Spanish government:

Yet, in the western media not bound by Spanish sensibilities, an instructive thing happened – something that might give Spain's critics pause – and that was the widely churlishly characterizations of the girls in the photos.

"First Daughters of Spain Appear to Be Secret Goths," wrote NBC News. "O Goth! Bam outs Spain prez's kids," blared the New York Post. "Spanish prime minister's daughters pictured for the first time . . . looking like Goths," asserted Britain's Daily Mail.

Although the United States does not have that kind of censorship, the White House press corps has long wrestled with questions about the privacy of presidents' children.

Photogenic, young, and innocent, such questions have not yet swirled around Malia and Sasha Obama. But George W. Bush and his wife Laura were dismayed that the high jinks of their college-aged daughters – even if typical – were considered fair game by the media. As vice president, Al Gore persuaded most major Washington news organizations to ignore a minor brush with the law involving his 13-year-old son and namesake. And Bill Clinton went justifiably ballistic when conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh poked fun at Chelsea Clinton's appearance. It was one of the few times Limbaugh apologized.

As for Prime Minister Zapatero's daughters Laura and Alba, was criticizing their appearance fair game? Probably not, but if it wasn't one thing, it would have been another. For those girls belong to a subset of the human species even stranger than "goths." Those strange human beings are called "teenagers."