This is not a good era for even discussing this stuff, given how the trans athletes conversation is reduced by the right to boys playing in girls sports and furries (most recently, according to Senator Tommy Tuberville) are degenerates who belong in institutions and have infiltrated our airlines (and there are still alleged litterboxes in liberal schools for kids who identify as cat).
If that’s the forefront of this conversation, then those who have untoward attractions, or who have teen sex fantasies (ubiquitous in 1970s erotic lit) or whose sexual development was shaped by their CSA victimhood are going to STFU because speaking their truth paints them in the public eye as a menace to society. We can’t help ourselves but ape out about it.
In the meantime, fucking kids is now a thing our plutocratic class does to show off they are beyond reach of accountability. The Epstein affair remains unclosed and unaddressed by any system of justice in the world, and that is far from the only child sex trafficking ring in existence that serves the upper echelons. Trafficked teens are an aristocratic class party favor now, and no society gives a fuck.
We had this conversation about lolicon. We had this conversation about CGI art. We had this conversation about CSA themes in adult fiction (specifically in Sandman #14 Doll’s House: Collectors). It’s why Alan Moore wrote Lost Girls.
We had a much quieter conversation about age-play in the kink community, though mostly they just quietly backed themselves into the hedges and vanished, because no human society is relaxed enough, or data-driven enough to have these conversations without freaking out.
We recognize the same canard, that these consumers can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality, for what it is when applied to television cartoons, to violent movies, to video-game gunplay, to romance fiction largely consumed by women. But when it applies to sex fetishes, it’s treated as gospel; the political class runs with it and uses it mostly to quash porn, sex work and LGBT+ interests.
Now it turns out a whole lot of people like little girls inappropriately. The underpinning issue of the 1970s-1980s Satanic panic was that one in three women surveyed admitted to getting CSAd. We couldn’t imagine (or cope with the reality of) the offenders being people the kids know (Parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, ministers, neighbors, peers) and so had to invent Satanic Ritual Abuse, that there are secret cabals of cultists who kidnap kids, diddle them for the Devil, and then let them go.
But we don’t want to have that conversation.
Nor do we want to address the principal issues kids face that lead to poor outcomes: Food insecurity, housing insecurity, family insecurity, healthcare insecurity. Fix these things and fewer kids will suffer CSA, and more kids will survive it better. But it’s much easier to use children’s welfare as hype to pass censorship laws.
Also, getting kids into extracurricular activities, also helps them survive dysfunctional conditions, also helps them establish better boundaries, also keeps them out of delinquency.
We don’t want to have that conversation either.
And it’s going to be a long, long time before we can dare to try to have that conversation again.
Usually being attracted to something isn’t something someone can help. I think hentai is a safe outlet. And I’m not interested in introducing chilling effect legislation to censor stuff.
That said, I don’t think hentai is effective in preventing child abuse but I also do not think it increases its prevalence either.
Admittedly my personal usage of porn is my basis: I don’t desire fems less after consuming porn of them being reamed from both ends but that doesn’t mean it also encourages me to go out and rape them. I imagine whether a pedophile abuses a child (or is capable of such) has more to do with whether they have other elements of personality or intellectual/emotional problems.
Seems it’s coincidental that someone else complained about anime in general as being wholly “harmful to morals” aka “TL;DR it’s all CSAM garbage”: https://lemmy.world/post/53091493
I said basically this on the other post about this, but when I look at the characters presented here, not a single one looks “like a child” to me. And I don’t mean “it looks like pedophilia is morally right”, what I mean is that these characters don’t have the traits children have. At least in my eyes.
They don’t look any more like a human child than Kermit the frog does, or Miss Piggy. They’re empty abstractions of people, and we breathe a spirit into them when we project things onto them, and I don’t project “fourteen-year-oldness” onto any of these shapes. Because I’m not into that, maybe?
So, like, even if the plot for these characters states that they’re 14, it certainly doesn’t seem that way. I don’t bring that in with me.
I only recognize like one or two of these characters, so I don’t know what age range is meant to be represented here, I just heard someone else say one of them was 14.
The characters in the post are not the children in question but the profile pictures of people showing up to argue
Oh! Okay, that’s my bad then
You’re needing to understand that the cloud of pfps is grown adult pedos coming to lecture sane people.
They don’t look any more like a human child than Kermit the frog does, or Miss Piggy.
You lost me there. Im not sure what you’re smoking if you put an anime character beside Kermit and said “both of these equally do not look human”
Okay, maybe Kermit was a little overcooked, but I think outside the context of an anime, if a thing with the proportions of eyes to head and head to body showed up in my house I’d want to cleanse it with fire rather than be like “oh, a child!”
It’s usually evident from behavior; from looks I’m only identifying 2 of these as definitely children, yeah
I should clarify, I don’t say this to defend the individual anime. Maybe some of them are terrible! I’m more just curious at the way y’all seem to see the work. I wish I could glimpse the characters through your eyes and see what you’re picking up, because I don’t seem to have any problem seeing the characters’ form as completely separate from the role they occupy in the plot or fictional world, in a similar way that an actor is not the characters they’ve played.
Speaking as someone who was sexually assaulted as a minor, I would rather people rub themselves off to fictional characters than have it happen to anyone else.
You cannot stop people from being attracted to minors. Making something illegal doesn’t magically remove feelings, nor does it magically prevent people from doing it. The threat of prison has never stopped prisoners.
If people are attracted to fictional minors, let them be honest about it so that parents can keep children away from them. The more the attraction to fictional minors is stigmatized, the less people will openly declare it and the less likely they will seek help.
You cannot stop people from being attracted to minors. Making something illegal doesn’t magically remove feelings, nor does it magically prevent people from doing it. The threat of prison has never stopped prisoners.
There’s a decent amount if evidence that it’s at least partially a fetish rather than a sexuality, so people are more likely to become paedophiles if they’re exposed to things that make them associate children with sex (including being assaulted as a child), and their attraction to children becomes stronger the more they’re exposed (so people who download some CSAM are more likely to want to download more and more likely to escalate to doing things in real life).
the threat of prison has never stopped prisoners.
Hardcore History has a great episode about public capital punishment throughout history, and how it has not deterred criminals at all.
Predators are opportunists, they don’t abuse children with an expectation to be caught. I don’t expect an opportunist to announce themselves as capable of deceit before committing a crime, so I don’t think permitting them to be honest with others is something they’d want to do.
Even with the most charitable perspective, people would still view virtuous pedophiles as live grenades.
Consider if someone said “I have a rape kink, I’d never act on it, so I’d still like to be invited to [insert event where people might stray from the group, or drink so much they pass out.]”
The only real answer is to remove the stigma around existing, so they can get professional help. Which is hard when “kill pedophiles” is seen as a socially acceptable reaction to news articles about child abuse (my point is that pedophiles aren’t inherently criminals).
Predators
I think this needs to be highlighted here as well. A lot of people sexually assaulting children and underage teens are not even “true” pedophiles (as in attracted to minors), it can be more about preying on the weak, and seeking satisfaction of the power over others, and of the power to break the taboos. All the rich assholes are not pedophiles, they are just goddamn evil abusers.
Well said. It doesn’t help that discussion about this topic gives people the ick and makes whoever brings it up “the creepy one”-- making a point about how not all pedophiles are rapists is a good way to get yourself labelled as both.
Nobody wants to touch this topic with a ten foot pole, which makes it an inherently interesting topic for me.
These issues need to be discussed rationally and pragmatically by politicians to change laws in order to maximise child safety.
Unfortunately, a great deal of what seems to contribute to child safety is unintuitive and provokes a reactive disgust response.
There was a news article recently about an Australian importing a child-sized sex doll. This is illegal, but it really shouldn’t be.
The evidence seems to suggest adult-sized sex dolls reduce sexual violence, so why would a child-sized sex dolls be any different?
The sad fact is it is political suicide to suggest legalising child-sized sex dolls, even if it was statistically likely to reduce crimes against children.
Topics that people refuse to discuss are often ones where there’s the least logic in how society acts.
Like, the more open society is to talking about religion, the less religious the society tends to be. In ones where people are punished for blasphemy, people naturally either believe or claim to believe the religion completely.
why would a child-sized sex dolls be any different
The theory is probably that if someone is used to having sex with a child-like object, then it’s a smaller step to having sex with a child. Maybe that’s true. It seems plausible at least. But, it also seems plausible that someone might be able to satisfy their urges or work through something that way and be less dangerous. It’s the sort of thing that would need scientific study – but good luck getting funding to study it.
good luck getting funding to study it.
Thanks for making half my point :p
The theory is probably that if someone is used to having sex with a child-like object, then it’s a smaller step to having sex with a child. Maybe that’s true. It seems plausible at least.
You make a great point, and one which has so much nuance than most people want to consider.
It’s similar to the discussion around lolicon/shotacon (hentai featuring girls/boys). Some people say that it acts as a pressure valve, and others say that it desensitises those which use it.
The nuanced point: to some it acts as a pressure valve, and to a smaller minority, it may desensitise and become a hazard for risk prone individuals.
This is basically true of any population; the subset of risk prone individuals is smaller than the one which rehabilitation efforts will facilitate.
Very sorry for what happened to you. A great line I heard once was “it’s not the child, it’s the abuse”, and that really helped me understand the problem better. I think the goal of a lot of people when hearing about CSA is to try and take children out of society as a whole (eg: don’t have them represented in media), and that’s the “solution”, but really children deserve to be in society, they deserve a say, they deserve to be taken seriously. In fact, trying to erase children as a whole is what gives abusers their power, and really it’s about the power difference which enables abuse.
Reminds me of the anime quandary I took some time to realize as a kid.
I learned about anime. This bizarre medium from Oh, Japan. It often has girls victimized by skimpy outfits or pervy characters, and I figure: Wow, kind of a guy’s haven, but women must hate this stuff.
Nope; turns out, compared to most other media I’d had an interest in, the gender demographic was fairly split there. Because, women might get objectified in anime, but at least they had a presence. Rarely is their role even relegated to something insignificant like a damsel in distress. They’d rather look up to the magical girl in the leotard that unleashes cool attacks, even though she gets creeped on, than Princess Zelda who wears a full dress but sits in a dungeon all game.
(Not claiming either of those are perfect, either! Just a matter of lesser problems)
There’s also the aspect that, especially in earlier works, the girls being perved on are able to seek cathartic and unstoppable retribution by producing a giant hammer from nowhere and bashing their assailant bodily into the pavement, or perhaps golf-driving him into orbit. No matter how powerful or skilled a man may be, there is evidently no force in anime stronger than a woman slighted. Even Bulma was able to march right up to Lord Beerus, the universe’s literal god of destruction, and deliver him a ringing slap to the face because he pissed her off.
You cannot stop people from being attracted to minors. Making something illegal doesn’t magically remove feelings, nor does it magically prevent people from doing it. The threat of prison has never stopped prisoners.
Some of these are even more defiant on social media, openly being “me gusta” (as in the meme).
With their full names. And family pictures.
I also believe that pedophilia is same as homosexuality. You can not stop people from being that way.
That statement is probably going to piss a lot of people off because they’ll see it as saying they’re both deviant desires. But, I think I know what you mean, that people are wired a certain way. The difference is that one group can act on their desires with another consenting adult and nobody gets hurt, and the other group can’t. But, as long as they don’t act on those desires, they shouldn’t be attacked based on how they’re wired.
I also think that anybody who thinks that pedophilia isn’t common is deluding themselves. Look how common it is historically. There’s the famous ancient Greek practice involving men and young boys. Admittedly, sometimes there’s another reason. The information we have on marriage ages is mostly from the aristocracy because they had land to pass on, titles to add, etc. We don’t know as much about what peasants were doing. Maybe marriages between commoners was uncommon until both were 18, but that seems unlikely.
Aristocrats were often marrying into another aristocratic family where the marriage wasn’t about love or sex but about politics or economics. OTOH, it doesn’t seem to be common for the new husband to say “Ugh, there’s no fucking way I’m consummating my marriage with that child, she’s only 15!” But, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there was an unspoken understanding that the new husband could wait until his bride turned 16/18/20 and became attractive to him.
I wonder if that gonna become removed because some idiot assumed it’s homophobic
Ugh truth. A shitllad of ani communities here are like this
So here’s the thing, someone who’s a thousand years old mentally would be quite intimidating, sexually, regardless of what they’re like physically. The thing about a lot of fictional “thousand year old” characters is that they still act like children, more or less.
There was a bit in Aeon Flux (or was it Ghost in the Shell?) where some kid (>16) was hitting on her, and she was like “oh you want to have sex? Sure let’s see what you’ve got” and the kid just like shits his pants. I think they end up having sex but in the aftermath it’s clear the kid was not in control.
So IMO you had a realistic “physically 9 but mentally 1000 year old” I think most pedos would not be into that.
I read a fantasy book lately where a bunch of gods were captured and enslaved by people. There was a warrior god, the god of night, many other gods, and, a child god. The child god was not only thousands of years old, but was a god. He had the intellect and wisdom of a god, but he was able to act like a child.
There was nothing sexual involving this god in the book, but he often wanted to be cuddled by the main character, have his hair stroked, etc. When she asked him about this, his explanation was basically “sure, I’m a god, I have boundless intelligence and wisdom, but I am able to put myself in the mindset of a child, and it gives me joy to behave as one and be treated as one.”
I thought it was an interesting take, because often when they have say an old vampire in a child’s body, the vampire feels angry and trapped to be in the wrong body. But, in this case it was almost the opposite, the god could have any body he wanted, but he often chose to appear as a child because he was created to be a child god, so that’s the role that made him feel like he was being what he was made to be.
fate/ kaleid liner prisma illya is to be expected considering the amount of fanservice
If you’re going to be a perv, the least you can do is keep that shit to yourself.
You wouldn’t be the first person to have a freak fetish in a room full of people who all agree “Freak Fetish is bad!” that just nodded and smiled and kept their fucking mouths shut.
Exactly, I don’t think people can deny or change what they’re attracted to. God knows they’ve tried that with gay men.
But of course the big difference here is that here these people can’t ever be allowed to act on it. They need to reserve the furthest and darkest place in their mind, build walls around it like they’re building a nuclear bunker and seal off all the exits. And don’t fucking tempt that shit with loli anime or other weird shit.
I think it’s actually more complicated. Things like sexual orientation, absolutely, some parts of desire are clearly hardwired in. But also there’s plenty that’s able to be induced or changed for any number of reasons.
My primary example is that when I was younger I found tattoos to be a hard turn off, piercings too. Anti tattoo sentiments were part of my family’s form of classism, but over the years I got more positive experiences with people who have them and wound up sleeping with people despite them and eventually through exposure and changing of biases got to the point that I now rarely find one to take away from someone’s beauty and often find them to add to it.
In general it’s rude as hell to assume some aspect of someone else’s tastes can (or should) change, we can’t know them particularly well. But we can challenge our own biases and be open to changes in our tastes coming from those challenges.
Now, as for pedophilia, it’s worth trying to change it if possible, and regardless building safety systems to ensure that it’s difficult for these people to offend. But also, I do suspect that the rise of the rich and powerful engaging in pedophilia is something that at least some of them are inducing. They begin by fetishizing youth as a display of power and creep towards the hard line our culture places at 18, and eventually they cross it. I simply cannot believe, until given evidence to the contrary, that such a large portion of the rich and powerful engaging in sexual abuse of minors is unrelated to the fetishization of youth, the trend of the rich and powerful chasing young adults, and the fact that they can get away with anything they want.
I don’t think people can deny or change what they’re attracted to.
I’m not even going that deep on it. I just think policing what people are attracted to (for whatever reason) is a fool’s errand. At the same time, advertising what you’re attracted to invites public criticism.
They need to reserve the furthest and darkest place in their mind, build walls around it like they’re building nuclear bunker and seal off all the exits.
Not even that. They just don’t need to throw on sandwich boards and parade around anime conventions with bullhorns insisting they have some god-given right to fuck the art.
I guess that was a bit of a hyperbole, but you get what I mean :)
I was there, when left/liberal leaning people in fandoms denounced loli/shota/cub/whatever in the mid 2010’s, mainly thanks to the Shädbase v. Keemstar drama, but also allegedly some leftist lolicons were frequenting pro-pedophile forums.
It did not help victims. It did not help anything good.
It instead created a safe-space for fascists in fandom spaces, by just vaguely signaling any interest towards the material, and by leftists treating it like literally Satan.
And also created a good surface for salami-tactics, since how frequent it is in anime. During the whole Vaush folder reveal drama it came to my mind, that those accounts could have been done by either tankies to get rid of the “anarkiddies” (whom they hate more than actual fascists), or the fascists themselves.
About the “normalizing” argument: I’ve seen the same arguments used for body hair removal, small breasts, etc. Even remember seeing some Tumblr post about “how to stop looking and sounding pedobait”.
Dude you seem to know a lot about this culture, why not tell us more of what you see ?
I think nazuna (the greyscale one on the right) is neither visually nor technically a minor. However she is actually the pedophile in this case because she is a vampire going after a literal teenage boy.
That makes them an ephebophile then. Pedo/paedophilia is younger than adolescence (ie. Single digit ages)
I don’t care what you say, Becca’s got my heart (Cyberpunk 2077: Edgerunners).
I’m not crying, you’re crying.
One of the most shocking things in Japan that I learned was that… age is hard to guess. Talked to some lady and I thought she was in her early 20’s, nope she was older than me.
Becca was older than the main character, but she chose the Loli aesthetic. A lot of people gave the shiwrunners shit for it too.
I see. The irony is that I know someone in person that looks too similar to her appearance, except she’s like almost 50. So I kinda looked it a bit differently, I guess some people accept their height and some people obsess over having a young look.
Isn’t she 21 anyway. I’ve legit seen girls with her same build who are like 27.
edgerunners II, are you ready?
No.
too bad, lets go :3
Oh, I’m gonna watch it. I’m just not ready for the inevitable trauma.
Uh. Isn’t Rei Ayanami (2nd from the top, blue hair) visually 14 but canonically like four years old during the events of the original Evangelion series? Somehow that’s not even the most fucked up part about what happens to basically everybody throughout the story, either.
She’s a 40 something 4 year old in a 14 year old body.
Shit is weird and it’s no wonder Hideaki Anno crashed out about the fans being so fucking creepy about the girls
I assume Anno made the show? Wasn’t the show also sometimes weird about them? It’s no excuse but it does strike me as a little odd to call people out if he participated. Like this is the guy who made the scene where Shinji… uhh… “melts his icecream” next to one of them in a coma. Yes he was probably saying something about it, but he still did it, you know?
Did that actually happen?
I mean, good if it did, but having watched the show, the creator strikes me as one of those same people who’d be fucking creepy about girls.
I think the death threats over the last episode were a bigger deal to him, but I can’t actually read his mind so who knows.
Huh. I mean the front and center one is male and 20 years old and not sexualized? (Kija from Yona of the Dawn)
But I agree with the whole of the post.
