An Open Response to the"Normalizing" Child Sex Abuse claims

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I’m a firm believer that fictional material or media, be it violent, sexual, hateful, or is otherwise offensive or deviates from the presumably “normal” or “acceptable” standards set out by a community or majority culture has no negative effect on those norms.

During the early to mid-twentieth century, pornography was a hot-button issue. America was undergoing a “sexual revolution” with new advancements in technology and communication. It was as easy as ever for movies and publications to be produced en masse and distributed to their audiences nationwide, which included sexually explicit pornography.
A lot of people, especially in rural areas, felt this didn’t comport with the status quo as they knew it, seeing it was “corrosive and destructive” to the moral fabric of their communities or country. The idealistic nuclear family was put at risk by this.
It wasn’t just pornography, though. Easy access to birth control, interracial marriage, abortion, rock music, and a plethora of other things all became part of a culture war that would rage on and evolve throughout the years.

In the 80’s, we watched the “satanic panic”, where rock music and fantasy RPGs were accused of being “un-Christian” for their themes and imagery, with many believing them to incite human or animal ritual sacrifice, hard drug use, and other deviate behaviors in minors and adults alike.

In the 90’s, we had violent video games, with many people believing they had a negative impact on society, wherein they would allow people to simulate, re-enact, plan, or otherwise engage in unhealthy, violent criminal acts that would disinhibit them from committing actual crimes.

President Nixon would characterize the perceived cultural harms of pornography by arguing that if movies, books, etc could inspire great change, then they could also inspire negative action. This mindset would become cemented as the bedrock behind the “normalization” arguments.

Of course, we all know now that none of these alleged fears came to be true.
People are still getting together and having families, raising children, and living traditional lifestyles, with both parents working, be they husband and wife, wife and wife, or husband and husband.
Rock music has flourished and the video games industry is now worth billions.

Violent crime has observed to be unaffected by violent media. A murder in real life is still revered for its effect on human life and as a danger, despite being seen in just about every video game, movie, or entrainment medium imaginable.

And sex… Sex crimes have actually gone down over the years, and decline in statistics seem to correlate heavily with the availability of pornography, be it adult or fictional child pornography.
With the advent of the internet, we’ve seen an explosion of sexually explicit material. A diverse world of different tastes, ideals at the palm of your hands.

So tell me, why can’t we look at sex the same way we look at violence? Surely we can all agree that humans can tell the difference between reality and fiction, right? Surely we can depend on our own senses of right and wrong to understand where and when certain ideals are to be entertained?
And surely these things can serve as an outlet?

There is no evidence that the availability of child sex dolls or virtual/fictional child pornography will have any negative impact on society, or its ability to care for its children.
It is my firm belief that we are witnessing a moral panic, rather than an objective assessment of the state of affairs.

All members of the forum are encouraged to offer feedback.

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I was thinking about this ‘normalization’ they parrot on about and it got me thinking about an experiment that basically says “if you are right, then this works, but if you are right then you are also wrong”
I call this thought experiment “the escalating normalcy theory”
Lets say you have a clinical experiment involving at least 100 confirmed non-offending paedophiles and every 3 months they are handed a sex doll. In the beginning the dolls have a low age range responding to the paedophiles sexual interest. For arguments sake suppose it is 6 yrs old in appearance.
But the next time it is 7 yrs, then 8, then 9 and so on.
If normalization is a thing and that there is a nugget of truth to it then we would expect the paedophiles from the experiment after a number of years to be successfully using and attracted to dolls who look 20 yrs old.
In that case they would be correct but also incorrect on banning the dolls. The reason being that a lot of their argumentation is that the doll in itself influences behaviour or can change someones behaviour in a real sense, but if that is they case then you can create ‘escalating normalcy’ .

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And sex… Sex crimes have actually gone down over the years, and decline in statistics seem to correlate heavily with the availability of pornography, be it adult or fictional child pornography.
With the advent of the internet, we’ve seen an explosion of sexually explicit material. A diverse world of different tastes, ideals at the palm of your hands.

Feedback: do not conflate correlation with causation. Reduction of sex crimes may have nothing to do with increase of porn. Even if true that porn reduces sex crimes… Sex dolls are not a form of porn. So no reason why these dolls would have their intended impact.

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True. That is important, but this is something that has been observed over the course of several decades and has always yielded a consistent result. I’d like to see more studies on it, but something like this is hard to replicate in such a way where you can get consistent results in reference to predictions made by scientists, as well as reviewing respective cultural factors.

But they are a form of porn, technically. Pornography is a form of artistic expression that is normally consumed as a masturbatory aid, in that it allows consumers to personally express and indulge in their own desires. Sex toys offer the similar level of usage.

Under the broad definition of porn, anything can be pornographically consumed by the right person. A swimsuit or lingerie catalog is porn to some people, as are artbooks or paintings or certain depictions of outfits worn a certain way.

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I believe that you are wrong in your understanding of the problem, just as people who see it as a problem. Like, “normalizing” something is, making it something normal, routine, unimportant, etc. And what you said is more about changing people’s “sexual preferences” based on this normalization. Anyway, where does this “understanding” come from? :confused: Like why do you think that something becomes more sexually attractive if it is more common? :confused: Well, In my experience (as a person addict to hentai since the beginning of the internet XD) is exactly the opposite ^^", the more “normal” it is something related to sex, the more boring and undesirable it becomes. And this is an opinion shared by several sexologists who are against pornography, since in their view (and mine) when a person starts to consume a lot of “normal” pornography, this normal becomes boring, and the addict then ends up looking for other types of less “normal” pornography. Which was something I already thought about too. Like, when people struggle to remove CP from the internet, they are making it less normal … And technically, using this logic, being less normal it ends up being more attractive instead of less attractive ^^". Its like they say , “it tastes better when it’s forbidden”.

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To be honest, a lot of virtual child pornography points are so blaring obvious, it almost feels like an insult to my intelligence to be seriously debating whether it could be false. Rather, it is that some people, out there, are some mind numbling ignorant, that I cannot even begin to process it. How could such ignorant beings exist?

Violent video games decrease violence. Some researchers believe it may increase aggression, but it also preoccupies individuals who would otherwise be spending their time out and about and causing trouble. It is a net positive.

Well, you know what my views on that are. But yeah, that should be correct. The actual problems tend to be far more mundane. For instance, whether someone has the cognitive capacity to legally “consent”, and whether they have given consent to appear in any particular movie.

To anger EthicalAI. If you sexualize a child photograph of yourself as an adult, that should be fine (but it’s not because of stupid laws). But, if it was distributed, it would be extremely difficult to tell it apart from any other sexualization, and enforcement would be nearly impossible. It is also a very niche and likely improbable case.

This is just a random thought passing through my mind.

I have observed that America needs an enemy of some sort. Like some country in the Middle East hoarding weapons of mass destruction, otherwise the country just eats itself. There are also a lot of tensions, and these tensions can released onto the “others” as a form of release.

I don’t really like the fetishism of non-offending, especially as it turns people into others. And pedophiles get othered enough, without some pedophiles othering other pedophiles in public sight for some brownie points, only to get backstabbed by the researchers who see them as little as lab rats.

I only view there being two (three if you count wannabe or pseudo pedophiles) types of pedophiles. Preferential and exclusive. Extending the concept beyond ends with pathologizing normality, which is dumb, and it turns pedophilia into a joke to be harnessed by wannabe social justice warriors.

But, okay I’ll follow this premise for argument’s sake. How would you know someone is indeed non-offending? Could they not lie? Why would they tell the truth to anyone? Anyone could turn them in at any time? And even if it were logically the case that someone wouldn’t turn them in, the perceptions and fears would be so powerful, that they still would not tell them.

So, let’s suppose we have a mind reading device, and we have magically deduced a hundred individuals who have not committed crimes. Presumably, if you could “train” an interest, like a muscle, then you would climb up the ladder eventually. This would be correct. However, it isn’t really like that. It is more that you jump to an age and it is just straight weaker. No matter how much you train it, nothing happens.

If you could train it up, someone would also have been able to do it a long time ago, as in the point you’re trying to make. The clear explanation here then is that people think pedophiles are being difficult, that it is a lot of energy to train, and that pedophiles can’t be bothered to do this. Or that pedophiles gradually remove their moral inhibitions and this “gives them access” to wider realms of degeneracy to explore.

There are several possible reasons porn may reduce crime.

  1. It’s entertainment and distracts pedophiles from committing crimes.

  2. It’s entertainment and it livens up the life of a pedophile. They’re less motivated to go out and commit a crime.

  3. It feeds the apetite of the body.

These three reasons could equally be applied to a sex doll. Sex dolls also have the benefit of providing a pedophile, who may not be attracted to adults at all, with companionship (yes), so it has that going for it over pornography. If it cartoon pornography, it is also possible that a sex doll might be more realistic than a drawing, and that a physical object has it’s charms due to effects which are difficult to reproduce in software (yes).

In multiple countries. Japan. Denmark. United States IIRC. Czech Republic. Coincidence still?

I think that would make something easier to stop too. Well, maybe. The more you worry about it, the worse it gets.

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They reason with emotions, trying to rationalize them, instead of realizing that their emotional response, might be an overreaction, to began drawing conclusions from derivative things, trying to understand the topic a little bit more, to realize that their anxiety is simply unreasonable and that they have no reason to worry.

Could you reference research papers that concluded the decrease in violence? It could be a correlation, but I doubt causation was able to be infered. It’s hard to isolate effects of a single factor on a single variable when it comes to research about human psychology, sociology and well, most soft sciences.

A random but very correct one, I have to admit that.

Not only America, most people need an enemy, or at least, someone they can blame for all their problems. It’s an emotion regulating mechanism.

I have met a lot of such people as of recent, but I’m surprized that I’m not alone in this observation. Can you say something more about this type of a person?

I like that division, personally, I prefer to use “pedophile” meaning “non-offending pedophile” and child predator meaning “offending pedophile”.

I think a better way of putting it would be “It allows the person to reduce their sexual frustration, making them think more reasonably, eliminating emotional bias from every day human interactions”

Kind of like chemical castration, but without any side effects, and with pleasure, which can be motivating for a willing person. Making it more effective and way cheaper solution than chemical castration, on top of easier distribution.

I think people can develop relationships with fictional characters as well, so erotic fanarts of existing characters from anime or cartoons can provide this aspect as well. Either way, it’s still a better idea for a person to be attached emotionally to an artificial child-like thing, than to a real child, in my opinion.

Not a coincidence, correlation. Not necessarily causation. Causation can exist, but it’s impossible to know from that data. So it’s unscientific to assume it. But because correlation showed a decrease of sex crimes while pornography accessibility was increasing, the hypothesis that “Pornography causes rape” was proven to be incorrect.

It doesn’t increase rape.
It might or might not decrease rape.
It’s most likely not having an effect on people whatsoever, and different factors play a more important role in lowering the rates of sexual abuse.

Statistical analysis isn’t something a person can understand without studying.

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If you get a paywall, disabling JavaScript can get around it :stuck_out_tongue:

Or Web Archive:

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So, the document referenced has 41 pages, so I didn’t read it all yet. But it does seem legitimate. It uses video game sales, separating them into groups of violent and non-violent ones, and compares them with amounts of crimes during periods of times of those sales. The result is a pattern of lags, in which there is seen a clear reduction of violent crimes in days where violent video games were sold in huge numbers. It’s a correlation, but the repeatability of that effect does strongly suggest the possibility of causality. I wouldn’t call it a definite proof, but rather, extremely strong evidence, that video games can have a cathartic effect on people who want to commit a violent crime.

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I believe the same principle applies to pornography and sex crimes as well, though, we are in desperate need of stronger evidence to further highlight this correlation, aside from the wonderful work of Milton Diamond that has been repeatedly cited on this forum.

I firmly believe that pornography is a form of entertainment. That which entertains is also what titillates the senses and the mind, but in their own different ways.

These types of studies make me optimistic that the SCOTUS will finally see reason and fix our First Amendment.

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In case you skimmed over one of my links.

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There is another factor. How willing authorities are to investigate.

Germany has suspiciously low child sex rates. Extremely low. And they put a disproportionate amount of focus on “progressive” programs, which would only cover a tiny number of people (most culprits would not fall under them by default), and which already have indicators they’re no better than placebo, which is an indicator that people just play along with it to get a lighter sentence.

Germany also hasn’t quite legalized lolis, and they’re moving to ban sex dolls. There are also surprise discoveries, like huge rings of people being discovered out of nowhere, and associated sex abuse there. My suspicion is that Germany isn’t taking their problem seriously.

They don’t investigate, they don’t get numbers. This is similar to the West in the past where all the cases involving priests and Boy Scouts were hush-hush quiet. In some of the papers for Prevention Project Dunkelfeld, it turns out the same hands-on offenders keep getting access to children over and over and over and over. They focus on trying to therapy them out of the problem with solutions which clearly do not work.

In Japan, they are a lot more paranoid about offenders, and there are incidents in some papers where they kept going after “suspicious people” who turned out to be fairly normal They take it seriously, although they take the hands-on side a lot more seriously than indecent imagery, which they view as more of a minor crime than the West does.

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Trust me, I had this in mind when talking about “different factors”. There are factors that reduce actual crime rates and factors that reduce the number, without changing anything in the real world.

It scares me that these stories don’t surprise me anymore. The same situation was within the UK, with them (of course) banning lolicon artworks, and prosecuting people for possessing them, but then keeping a list of individuals who happened to create grooming gangs targetting teenage girls and kids, from fear of racial tensions escalating. If I recall correctly, one of the politicians had the opinion of “If those (underage) girls come back to them, that must mean they like it”. They didn’t display any will to do anything about the situation, and I don’t know if anything was handled in the end.

The mere fact of absence of any shreds of evidence that such arts or sex dolls could reduce or increase sex crimes, making both possibilities equal in probability, and politicians skewing into one side over the other on false premises suggests to me that their attitude to protecting children is nothing than just performative.

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They’re loyal to one thing and one thing only - their personal feelings. I find it difficult to take a country seriously when they send out journalists to Japan, only to say things like “why can’t you Japanese be more like the UK?”

“I was interviewed by this lady at my workplace. One-on-one Q&A session for three hours. Through that I realized one most important thing. I was thinking about releasing it online as manga but… The core difference between this interviewer and myself was the attitude towards human being. My position is… “all human beings have “dirty desires”. Isn’t it better to be vented appropriately?”. On the contrary…Ms Susie(sic) stated this. “All human beings are naturally innocent and have no “dirty desires” and reading media…media depicting erotic, pedophilic, and gore contents will affect them to be corrupted”.

Then I realized. So the definition of human being, or Operating System(sic) is different. After three hour long interview, this realization was the most productive experience, I think. Oh, on top of that, she said, with a look of a hitman in BLACK LAGOON , “My desire is to put all pedophiles, and ones who produce pedophilic media into jail”. Ah, “Justice” is kinda scary when it infects people. Isn’t she trying to substitute everything into the subject of that sentence? It’s been two times where I was interviewed like this. She ignored me when I said… “Don’t look at us to turn away from your problem within the UK”….

During the interview, we touched upon ways that we can tackle the child abuse issues in Commonwealth world. She said “banning all fictions like this!”. I suggested “Well, solve poverty first. Legalizing fictions that has no victims will lower the crime rate”. She seemed like she didn’t get the idea. It seems that her view is a common one throughout the Commonwealth countries (that’s why you get arrested… for having porn comic in Canada), so objection in words might not help much. It might be better to foster… young, enthusiastic “comrades” within them.

It drives me up the wall when I see sound reasoning like the one presented by this man fall by the wayside to some pompous, self-righteous, arrogant Anglo bitch with absolutely no respect for anything that doesn’t conform to her beliefs, ideals, or presumptions.
Yes, it’s true that Japan has had some issues, but to assume, without evidence, that the fictional material they create and consume has anything to do with their ability to tackle issues such as this only furthers my original claim. It’s very saddening.

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I have a feeling that the science behind all of this will come to reflect what it is that we already know, that these materials do not influence, normalize, or incite actual crimes or instances of child sexual abuse and that they serve as a safe, healthy outlet for people with said desires.
We already have a distinction between pedophilia and pedophilic disorder, as outlined in the DSM-5. People should be allowed to reconcile who they are sexually through expression and indulgence via masturbation, regardless of what their interests are. To deny them that right out of some puritanical illusion of “preserving morality” is totalitarianism.

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No, you dummy. It is literally food. It just goes in another stomach. Think about it, it makes much more sense than you think :stuck_out_tongue:

And the bit which I won’t bother quoting is the equivalent of saying. Oh, it’s better than being barely kept alive on hospital drips.

I might be inclined to agree with you. If you didn’t just tell me to go die with a beautiful euphemism at the end of your post. Thank you very much. Consider reading what other people actually write for once. Correct your conduct or leave. Don’t bother me with giberish.

At the very least, the term hands-on offender can be useful. Predators inspire a far more sinister image in my head, than simply an opposite of non-offending. But, perhaps that is because someone can offend by looking at the wrong image / video, so it doesn’t count much weight heree.

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It’s a correct observation. A lot of people in the west seem to have this belief, of people being good by nature and becoming evil through the corruption of their moral values or some other singular arbitrary concept associated with “goodness”. And I think the Judeo-Christian basis of many of our countries is really to blame for that idea existing to this day.

What is more, it’s easily disprovable. Psychopathy, for example, has extremely strong evidence of heritability, suggesting the predisposition for psychopathy is genetic and can manifest itself as a result of the person’s interaction with an adverse environment (like a bad childhood caused by abusive parents).

Psychopaths have a lot of differences in brain structure in comparison to other human beings, like for example: reduced connections between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for empathy and feelings of guilt, or the amygdala, which mediates fear and anxiety. This affects their decision-making process in a way that results in them being more prone to harm people and commit crimes.

So some people, are just being born evil. That doesn’t mean they can’t be good, that doesn’t mean all psychopaths are destined to become criminals, most of them don’t. But the ones who did commit crimes were born with a predisposition to commit them. So the very foundation of this idea is simply false.

Also, wasn’t BBC also responsible for this one popular article (some lolicon on Twitter has sent me a link to it, but I don’t remember the name of it and I can’t find it, maybe someone will know which one I mean), where a journalist has investigated the lolicon artworks being sold in Japan, admitted that Japan has improved a lot of laws, delegalizing child pornography possession, delegalizing the practice of hiring young teenage girls in cafes to perform sexually suggestive services on their clients and so on in recent years, where lolicon artworks were distributed legally, but then made a claim, that lolicon works will result in “normalization of pedophilia”?

This person has observed, that during a long time span of many years, two things were happening in Japan:

  • Lolicon works were freely distributed
  • Japan has improved protections of children

And their conclusion was, that certainly, lolicon works must cause Japan to change in some never defined by them way, but most likely negative when it comes to children wellbeing. Regardless of what they believe this concept means, I think it’s irrelevant since both of those observations that this journalist has made didn’t result in Japan making any decisions that would result in more children getting hurt, the opposite has happened.

I regret not saving this article, since it’s genuinely impressive to see a person debunk the conclusion of their own article with the article itself, unable to see their ideological inconsistency of their reasoning.

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It could be argued that those other things are disappearing, because pedophilia is becoming less normalized, and that lolicon hasn’t disappeared yet, but that it’s presence helps push back in the other direction. Their point isn’t contradictory, but it does follow the fundamentally flawed notion of normalization.

I can understand a country which decides child pornography possession is not worth the risk in terms of censorship or privacy to pursue, but hiring young teenage girls in cafes is just purely sketchy. It sounds so sketchy, it sounds like the infamous vending machines, which weren’t even really real in the end. Child pornography was never really that legal either, as it was still obscene IIRC.

Japan also had a problem with gropers on subway lines, although they have improved on this a lot lately.

An important reminder. To cut off lolicon and sex dolls, all that has to happen is that the people in Japan decide it isn’t really “acceptable” any more. It may have been more so when weird cafes or images were kind of tolerated, but now it is the last wall, and it is one which could fall very fast. Removing the mosaics might even be the final blow, as they wouldn’t need pubic hairless girls to carry on that facade to evade that law.

Those cafes sound so freakin weird.

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The hypothesis was that these artworks will normalize pedophilia. It wasn’t that it normalizes pedophilia ineffectively, making Japan still able to denormalize it. I like that you play a devil’s advocate because it’s always good to question your own conclusions, but in the case of this article, there was undoubtfully a bad faith intent on the part of the journalist. The entire article was written in a way that was trying to show Japan in a bad light, as the country that “festers pedophiles”.

I don’t know how true this was, but I think Japan has or had a lot of cafes with young women dressed up in maid costumes etc. I think the article mentioned services like “saying dirty words to the customers”, things like that. Nothing sexual, but sexually suggestive.

But that is unlikely to ever happen. For ages, those works caused no problem, and Japanese still do remember the era during which they had strict governmental censorships on arts. With fans of the mediums produced by Japan constantly growing, it’s doubtful the amounts of people opposing prohibition of lolicon works will shrink. Quite the opposite, it seems to me that there are way more people willing to defend it, even though they might not personally like it than it was 20 years ago. It’s a possibility, but a very unlikely one.

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What a joke, do they even know what a pedophile is. Can they tell one apart from a hebe? I doubt it.

The trope shows up in anime, but I can’t say how real it is.

The first step pushed by parent’s groups was to regulate it. Restrict rape scenarios. And I wouldn’t be surprised, if they pushed up the ages bit by bit. If it’s a tougher ball to roll, they might do that. The same is happening in America where they’re starting off by cracking down on younger ages and turning up the heat.

If you presume that it was toddlercon which screwed over Eychaner, rather than lolicon, that might make a lot of sense. And no one will even notice, because it doesn’t affect them, and they can blame it on his “sex offender status”. Toddlercon appears to be the only thing which actual pedophiles come close to consistently liking, go figure.

P.S. If one more fucktard tells me I am fucking disordered. I am going to jump off this fucking building and just end this bullshit. Stop inventing fucking disorders. That is how a fucking pedophile is. Yes. Pedophiles are emotionally unstable. Pedophiles are treated like shit. Fucking deal with it. Don’t give me the false friend bullshit.

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