I have lived in Japan since I was quite young (late 20s now) and don't see what the problem with lolicon is. It's not my thing, but if someone enjoys it that's their business, they aren't hurting anyone. That's just my gut feeling on the matter, I'm interested in hearing others' thoughts.
Child sexual abuse is bad because it's traumatizing children (also sexual abuse is bad, duh). But "curing" pedophiles seems to be hard, similarly to how you can't "cure" homosexuals.
Child porn would supposedly be a safe outlet for pedophiles, at the cost of possibly eroding social taboos around child sexual abuse. But the tradeoff is irrelevant, because the production of child porn is usually exploiting and abusing children, making it morally bad.
Lolicon doesn't harm any children. The only potential harm left is eroding helpful social taboos. But that seems easy enough to fix: make lolicon legal, but semi-taboo. If it's not seen as normal, it doesn't normalize anything, and you have all the positives without the negatives.
So I will view you as weird if you enjoy lolicon, but I don't have a problem with it. I would even advocate for its existence.
Somewhat related, I also can't really justify the US standard for child porn. Nude pictures of 10 year olds are bad and should be illegal. But what is the harm in nudes of 17 year olds?
>Nude pictures of 10 year olds are bad and should be illegal.
I would like a more specific standard than "nude". Namely the picture should be sexual/pornographic in nature. [0] That is to say, I don't see any problem in, for example, children skinny dipping; nor in taking pictures of them doing so.
Outlawing nude pictures of minors also creates an unnecessary legal grey area with the inevitable exemptions. For instance, I don't think any object to photographing a genital to document a medical issue, so there will be some such pictures that are considered "ok". Outlawing nudity of children in images in general inevitably leads to situtations where one would avoid taking such a picture, or prosecute someone as a result of misunderstanding the context of such a picture.
[0] Legally speaking, this has the obvious problem of defining pornographic. I think the actual standard should be to look for abuse in the creation of the image.
> I don't see any problem in, for example, children skinny dipping; nor in taking pictures of them doing so.
That also depends on who was taking the picture. People should stop calling child protective services on parents who took pictures of their own kids skinny-dipping on a camping trip. If a stranger sneaked up on the campsite to take the same kind of pictures, on the other hand, that could be problematic.
> Lolicon doesn't harm any children. The only potential harm left is eroding helpful social taboos. But that seems easy enough to fix: make lolicon legal, but semi-taboo. If it's not seen as normal, it doesn't normalize anything, and you have all the positives without the negatives.
I think the approach should be similar to violence. We have plenty of video games where the player is encouraged to steal, murder, slaughter or otherwise engage in unacceptable behaviour but society hasn't become less clear that these things are wrong. Everyone knows that murdering a random pedestrian with a golf club on the street is wrong but we still let people play GTA.
I've thought about this over the years myself. There are several issues here. First is the age of consent, it varies from 16 to 18 throughout the US. So 18 catches all the states, but it's not illegal to have sex with a 16 year old in many places.
Second, sexual maturity has physical, emotional, and intellectual components. There have been 21 year olds that I am not attracted to because they're too immature, and there have also been 15 year olds that I have been attracted to because they are (or appear to be) sexually mature. Somebody had to draw the line somewhere, 18 is an arbitrary designation that probably doesn't catch enough of the edge cases.
Third, there's a big difference between having sex with someone and paying them for sex work. I've seen my share of depraved porn and I guess my feeling is that it would be harmful for a student in high school to be making it. But again I understand it's an arbitrary number and a society where the age of majority was calibrated to 16 years old might work, who knows.
What about porn featuring unpaid minors? Well, it's basically just volunteer sex work, there's no real difference between amateur porn and professional porn in terms of consent. I think for the later years it's mostly about protecting the transition from teenager into adult, not about stopping pedophilia.
I don't think there's really an easy answer to any of it... my opinion is subject to change, etc.
I was mostly addressing the moral question ("what is the harm..."). And also equivocating all the way down the line, if you didn't notice.
A federal law that results in some states allowing the possession and sale but not the production of certain goods sounds strange to me, do you have any examples?
I just want to cherry-pick one thing that you said without offering commentary on the rest of your comment.
> But "curing" pedophiles seems to be hard, similarly to how you can't "cure" homosexuals.
I understand what you mean here, but I think you could have made a better analogy. Homosexuality is not predatory. It doesn't seek to exploit anyone, even indirectly. Pedophilia, when practiced, exploits children (directly or indirectly). Certainly, you can be homosexual or a pedophile and reject the inclinations that you have. Being a "practicing" homosexual does not harm anyone--except perhaps those with delicate sensibilities--while being a "practicing" pedophile does. "Curing" homosexuality implies changing someone's harmless disposition. "Curing" pedophilia implies rehabilitation of someone who actively seeks to exploit children for their own pleasure. Governments and organizations have no place deciding whether someone should be "cured" of homosexuality because it doesn't affect or benefit any member of the public. There is no need. Governments have a responsibility to keep children safe, though, and rehabilitating sexual predators is a crucial part of that.
The distinction is an important one. A better analogy would perhaps be a comparison to addiction. Addiction is very hard to treat, and there is no truly successful cure for it. Addicts don't harm people, but the people procuring drugs like heroin and cocaine often do.
Pedophilia is not predatory either, just like homophilia isn't.
Plenty of celibate 'adult-lovers' prove that just because you can't get what you desire, doesn't mean you will act on it.
Even if you want to act, I'm sure there are plenty of adult sex workers who will help you with your fantasies. Still no exploitation involved.
As for your comparison with addiction, that is actually a victimless crime. Even procuring drugs (including harddrugs) doesn't lead to harm to anyone. Ask Portugal. Only when your laws make drugs so expensive that only Wall Street bankers are able to afford their addiction (and guess where a lot of cocaine addicts are!) does it lead to problems.
> Plenty of celibate 'adult-lovers' prove that just because you can't get what you desire, doesn't mean you will act on it.
But there are also prison cells filled with pedophiles that do produce or consume child porn. Children _cannot_ consent and do learn from abuse. Homosexuality exploits exactly nobody across the entire world population. You said it yourself: pedophiles _desire_ something that we can all agree is harmful, and even if some individuals show restraint, exploitation happens. That's inarguable, and pedophilia carrying stigma is not unwise. Drawing a comparison between homosexuality and pedophilia blurs that distinction between and normalizes stigma against LGBT people. That community doesn't need or deserve any more demonization.
> As for your comparison with addiction, that is actually a victimless crime. Even procuring drugs (including harddrugs) doesn't lead to harm to anyone.
Addiction is a condition, and a lifelong one at that. You don't get rid of addiction, though addicts can live sober lives. In that way, it's not so different from a predisposition like pedophilia. I can empathize with both of these cohorts because they got dealt a bad hand and they can't change it.
Just because addiction shouldn't be a problem doesn't mean it is not, and just because drug use is "victimless" doesn't mean addicts and their families don't suffer and drug traffickers don't do terrible things. Have you ever seen the aftermath of a meth lab explosion? Or driven past the wreckage from a drunk-driving accident? What about seeing a family member fall victim to prescription painkillers, fueling an industry hell-bent on creating addicts? And then watch them sneak away in the early morning to withdraw money at the ATM so they can get a quick hit of something to take the edge off until they can get their prescription renewed because two pills doesn't cut it anymore?
Your final assertion might not be completely false, but it is a vast and undeserved oversimplification. People predisposed to addiction will always be predisposed to addiction. Portugal might have low rates of death from opioids and other drugs (because they're actually treating it), but they're eighth in the world for alcohol consumption. 3.8% of people in Portugal die from alcohol, which--depending on how you measure--can be more than double what we have in the US.
Children and young people getting a hold of lolicon comics, where pedophilia is normalized through the story, can harm them for life. No one seems to have the imagination to think about this.
Adults looking at it is of course harmless, but don't make it easily available on the internet. If you do I'd say you're acting immorally and I support legal repercussions. I know people who have been messed up when they were very young and found it.
There are lots of vices and tasks that adults can usually handle but minors may not. Alcohol, tobacco, drugs (in as far as these are legal in a given jurisdiction), voting, operating heavy machinery, driving cars…
In Japan sexually explicit comics are strictly 18+, clearly marked as such, and are sold as you would sell liquor or cigarettes. Making sure children don't have access to these is a matter of public awareness and parental guidance — it seems to work pretty well there.
> I know people who have been messed up when they were very young and found it.
Messed up from lolicon (i.e., Japanese comics featuring minors in sexually evocative situations) or messed from access to porn in general (or even actual child pornography)?
As I said explicitly, messed up from freely available lolicon comics and content on the internet. The vices you list all require physical exchanges with others or would usually be noticed by adults nearby, and so they aren't really comparable.
True, unmonitored access to the internet can expose minors to things that can have an adverse effect on their psyche. But let's limit ourselves to freely available online content. Singling out lolicon (or any other form of drawn porn) seems dangerously inconsistent to me.
Violence, hate speech, gore, (adult) porn; even written fantasies containing content that may stimulate forms of destructive behaviour — the list is endless! Either you shield children from all of it (which is sensible for young children, but not tenable for teenagers) or you educate, guide, train, and accompany your child as they learn to handle an ever increasing amount of freedom. Parenting and education are key here, not banning everything that may harm a child's mind.
One might argue that the reason people get messed up if they are exposed to certain types of content at a young age is not because of the nature of the content itself, but because of other people's response (or lack thereof) to it.
When everyone else is either judging you or trying too hard to pretend that nothing happened, you internalize a sort of guilt or shame that can haunt you for life. People who have seen terrible shit in their childhood but turned out okay, on the other hand, often report that they had someone to help them understand what was happening without rushing to a judgment.
I don't know who would judge a child for seeing lolicon, since no one would know about it but the child. I would agree interpersonal emotional support and therapy needs to be a more available and acceptable resource for everyone.
> I don't know who would judge a child for seeing lolicon, since no one would know about it but the child.
Children usually want to tell everyone about what they saw. If they keep it to themselves, it's often because they understand that someone else would judge them, punish them, get angry at them, feel disappointed at them, etc. for seeing it. Their friends might have told them that it's taboo. Their parents might have acted really awkwardly around similar content in the past. Or a predator might have said that what happened in the shed is a cute little secret between them.
Whatever reasons they have for trying to hide it, it's a symptom of a society that discourages talking frankly and objectively about certain kinds of things.
Is there some study you could link to? I would think that IF there is any harm (and I doubt this since porn is very historically normal and even in classical art) it would be not significantly worse than the generic case for any such porn.
That could be likely to happen if the lolicon art were remotely realistic. I talk to artists a lot and see a lot of different art float by in their media feeds, and the lolicon stuff is almost always extremely stylized ot the point that they're entirely fantasy creatures with only a passing resemblance to humans. At the same time there's still a visceral shock to seeing the occasional rare picture where the characters actually look like human children.
> They're not illegal in the US. So maybe your incorrect assumptions are why it is confusing for you?
You need to be careful about this. In many jurisdictions possession of such an image is a "strict liability" crime and you are guilty--even if that nude image is of your own child.
Now, normally this isn't a big deal as humans in the system normally treat these images as they were intended.
However, add a nasty divorce into the mix and you can wind up in very deep trouble.
Didn't say or imply that there weren't consequences.
If you aren't rich enough for appeals court then none of your rights matter and it is helpful to be aware of what the collective conscious believes is legal / illegal.
That's one factor, the other is the culture around youth appeal through drawings. Mangas were filled with teenage erotism. So lolicon is not a huge stretch from there.
I admittedly find it bizarre, to say the least. But the opinions and discourse here are definitely challenging my intolerance. I also haven't lived in Japan, so I can only repeat an observation I read from someone who had, which was that the consumption of this type of media or cartoon rape-porn seemed to be fairly acceptable to do in public (openly reading such content in a crowded subway for instance was not uncommon). Which could reasonably make people feel uncomfortable or belittled, especially if you're in the same class of fictionally victimized people.
On the other hand, I suppose people in the States are free to walk around wearing swastikas. So, I guess the takeaway is that, in either scenario, you're just an asshole legally exercising your rights?
Making a scene in public is considered to be immature here, so most of the time people ignore "deviant" behavior on the subway. Making someone (especially the kind of person who watches porn on a train) lose face by shaming then is likely to make that person very, very angry.
Yeah, I couldn't find anything during a quick search that indicates that Japan has a higher rate of child sexual abuse than countries where ethical/drawn child pornograpy is banned.
I would be interested to know if the reason why (to put it bluntly) porn in Japan is so extreme is due to their cultural repression of sexuality. The reason I ask is that many Asian countries have similar social stigmas around sexuality, and they also have similarly extreme forms of porn.
Not to mention the existence of hentai, yuri, and ecchi. All of which don't really have widespread western equivalents, despite western cartoons being fairly popular.
Hentai etc are descendants of shunga pics; you've probably seen Hokusai's "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa". You may have seen "The Dream of
The Fishermans Wife" (NSFW)
In social interactions maybe ? Japan seemed to be a very repressive/elitist society. You had to be polite in everything, and sexuality is often the opposite of that (you could probably have sex through polite chat beforehand, but I'm sure it requires maturity that most people don't have)
Just because people have a different view of sexuality, and confine it to a specific time and place, doesn't mean that it's a repressive society. You have to realize that most Asian cultures are heavily focused on context, and place, and not just the pure, isolated act.
I remember reading an article talking about how all the tentacle porn in Japanese hentai exists because USA banned the depiction of genitalia in the media after WWII, so they had to become creative about it.
Actually it's the other way around.
Post WW2 the allies actually removed most of the censorship laws.
But the premise might be correct tho the material predates Allied occupation by 150 years.
United Nations data show that Japan is still, in fact, the world’s largest producer and consumer of child pornography. Its usage is widespread, with as many as one in 10 men admitting they’ve watched it or that they own it, according to the book Sexnomics, by economist Takashi Kadokura.
Almost 80 percent of the child pornography transferred over the Internet is said to come through Japan. According to Interpol, Japanese “entrepreneurs” at home and abroad are also major producers of child pornography in the world market.
That Interpol statistic seems to be an estimation from Interpol in 1999, when child pornograpy was legal in Japan, so it's not relevant at all anymore.
Crappy journalism in my view not to mention that the statistic you use is from a different century.
I'm interested in if this statistic (1 in 10 men) includes comics (which one would be justified in believing are harmless) or 'real' CP, as in, requiring the abuse of a real child and its recording. The number is surprisingly large if the latter is true, though it does little to indicate that child abuse is higher in Japan (or at least, this statistic does not show this anyway), and further, the necessary link to the production of pornography showing fictional characters, which would have to be fulfilled to justify the making of lolicon art/literature illegal.
I'm from Australia. I personally don't find it morally objectionable (because it's not hurting anyone) though I would consider it to be a grey area. I believe that lolicon is illegal here (or at the very least not explicitly legal), because it's effectively a depiction of child pornography. That's the reason most people find it objectionable, effectively due to the (entirely justified) taboo around underage sexuality and the worry it will lead more real child pornography.
It is also illegal in Canada (similarly with stories), some US states, some European countries, and England, Wales and Northern Ireland (though only drawings rather than stories as far as I know).
Yeah, now I remember reading the news about that case a few years ago. I think that decision is understandable, though I don't agree with classifying something that is obviously not child pornography as "child pornography".
Also note that in Australia "supreme court" does not mean that its rulings determine federal common law, that rests with the High Court of Australia (the next court up)[1]. So on paper, other States could have different laws on the topic (but I haven't checked whether the case was appealed to the High Court).
Thank you for your information on the system, I had no idea, I'm only vaguely familiar with the system in England and Wales. It's worth noting, however, that the fact it is illegal is specified in the state code rather than being decided by this court case. There is a similar case which I think is rather silly that a man in Australia was convicted of having 'Simpsons porn' which featured two underage characters from the Simpsons.
> It's worth noting, however, that the fact it is illegal is specified in the state code rather than being decided by this court case.
Ah, you're right (I didn't read the whole document). In case you're interested, in other states there is a different criminal code (called the Crimes Act (1990) in NSW)[1]. The section on "child abuse material" (15A) is quite vague on what limits there are for something being "material depicting child abuse" and there is also a catch-all statement saying that something is also considered child abuse material based on " the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults".
In general I would be surprised if it was legal in any state. I also checked, and it's considered "objectionable material" in New Zeland[2].
As another poster points out Japan does not have a higher rate of actual child sexual abuse. So, does the lack of any actual harm influence your opinion?
You have to take into account that in Asian countries the reporting of sexual abuse is likely much lower because of social stigmatization. From what I've heard second-hand it's perceived as being shameful for your family to be a victim of such abuse, and I imagine that would affect the statistics.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with whether it causes actual child sexual abuse, it's just something to consider.
There is some bias in that reporting. The US rate of autopsy 8.5 percent the Japan rate is 11.2%. So, if your comparing the US with Japan it's the US that's more likely to miss something based on national rates. As to the second, US rape victims are often told not to report and prison rapes are frequently just ignored.
From a sociology standpoint you need to be careful when doing cross country comparisons. But, reported statistics are not simply accepted at face value.
