Not true. Fictional pornography depicting non-existent minors has been, for the most part, legal in the United States since 2002 thanks to the SCOTUS decision Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition.
It has also been correlated with significantly lower rates of sex abuse in countries where it is legal, as opposed to countries where it is illegal, providing support for the claim that it may serve as a legal, safe alternative to real CSAM.
We understand that correlation does not mean causation, but when the statistics are so consistent among many different studies, one can only wonder how much more apparent it can become.
Also, the psychology behind paraphilias is much more nuanced and complex than you think.
The DSM-5, as does the majority of the medical establishment, recognize a difference between a pedophilic sexual orientation and pedophilic disorder, wherein only the latter is recognized to be linked to the commission of sex crimes against minors.
In regards to mere pedophilia, there is no evidence to suggest that the consumption of fictional/virtual pornography will progress towards pedophilic disorder.
And any evidence regarding pedophilic disorder and its relationship with CSAM or pornography is limited and largely inconclusive, with many different studies providing different conclusions as to whether or not the consumption of even illegal child pornography “whets the appetites” of those with pedophilic disorder.
What’s even more interesting is that most of the studies which do claim a positive link will also admit that said link between the consumption of CSAM and a likely tendency to commit contact offenses against children is very tenuous, with most of the emphasis being drawn towards a convergence of different social or psychological deficiencies and disorders in conjuction with a sexual interest or obsession in minors, rather than just an interest in minors or even a tendency to view CSAM.
Obviously, nobody here (or anywhere) will advocate for the legalization of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), nor is it our wish to downplay or trivialize the severity of child pornography and its damaging effects on its victims. Many of Prostasia’s supporters and members of this forum (myself included) are victims of child sexual abuse.
We just want the focus drawn on what really matters, which is the prevention of child sexual abuse.
Evidence already shows that the prohibition and state-sanctioned censorship of fictionalized or virtual pornographic materials will not prevent or protect children from being abused, and will only serve to cause unjustified harm and persecution for individuals who’ve done objectively nothing wrong or harmful, as well as jeopardize the rights, liberties, and freedoms of us all, all for no objective benefit.
The purpose of funding this type of study is to explore the implications behind virtual/fictional material, as opposed to real CSAM. It is already well-understood that the human mind distinguishes between reality and fiction and will impart information appropriately. We see it with movies, video games, stories, etc. Could that also extend to pornography? Statistics seem to support it, but we won’t know until we take a comprehensive look.
There has been an unsatisfactory level of research which seeks to ask those types of questions, as most of the focus has been on actual CSAM, which, given what’s been happening in Australia with regard to Japanese pornography and the desire to ban sex dolls, we need scientific concensus on whether these actions are appropriate.
People’s lives, rights, and freedoms are at stake.
America is such a strange country. Over and undercriminalization at the same time. In your country, even implying violence can be considered criminal!
But yet “It’S FaKE cP” is some how a defense. Yeah fuck that. The problem with “Fake CP” is that it harms every single person who has ever had a childhood. The person that was harrassed off this cringy forum told me how knowing that fictional CP exists made him remember his own childhood in a less happy way. It’s a reminder to him that some adults may have seen him as “sexy” which is repulsive. This is why “fake CP” is harmful even if it does not fuel pedophile’s urges.
If you are trying to keep fake cp legal, you pretty have a fucking good damn reason because it still causes a ton of harm. Nowhere as bad as actual cp but it’s still harmful. fuck pedos
Sorry. Hurt feelings don’t count. No one is obligated to appeal to anyone else’s sensitivities. Heck, according to my law professor, even the 9/11 terrorists are not responsible for anyone driven to depression for the death of loved ones, even though they are obviously responsible for the deaths themselves. For example, I see many people moaning when I assisted in this fictional suicide:
I still find the quest hilarious. I see your molestation and raise you suicidal depression.
Because threats are serious, be it threats of violence or sexual assault.They weren’t “candidly implying the possibility” of violence, they were imposing threats. And that’s not okay, nor will it be tolerated on the forum, just as it isn’t in the eyes of the law.
So let me get this straight… Someone else is claiming emotional harm, therfore it’s automatically harmful? That’s now how harm works, or anything works! “I’m offended” is not a valid reason to restrict free speech, nor is it really a type of “harm”.
I’m sorry to hear about your friend, but that’s not anybody’s burden to bear but his and I hope he gets help.
If his psychological trauma is so serious that even knowing about an opinion he doesn’t like will set off flashbacks, then that’s likely indicative of something beyond the capacity of the broad public to reasonably accommodate.
It’s not a fortunate one, but it’s the sad, cold truth that people have these thoughts and desires. You, your friend, or anyone else’s inability or refusal to accept the truth is not, nor shall it ever be a reasonable justification to censor it.
And the mere fact that someone may feel disgust, offense, or anxiety about said desires is not a justified or rational reason to censor/ban it, nor is it a type of “harm”. It’s a drawing. It isn’t real. You can’t stop people from feeling or thinking whatever it is they think or feel without impeding on the rights of everyone.
Nobody’s forcing you to look at it. Nobody’s presenting it to you. Nobody’s acting against you on behalf of it or because of it. The acts and attitudes depicted are not going to be “normalized” as a result of it existing. The only reason why people say it “hurts them” is because they allow it to offend them.
As much as I hate the tone that comes with this, just accept reality for what it is and move on.
Because threats are serious, be it threats of violence or sexual assault. They weren’t “candidly implying the possibility” of violence, they were imposing threats. And that’s not okay, nor will it be tolerated on the forum, just as it isn’t in the eyes of the law.
Banning threats is not the issue. It’s expanding the definition of a threat. It needs to be kept narrowed down.
I’m sorry to hear about your friend, but that’s not anybody’s burden to bear but his and I hope he gets help.
If his psychological trauma is so serious that even knowing about an opinion he doesn’t like will set off flashbacks, then that’s likely indicative of something beyond the capacity of the broad public to reasonably accommodate.
Thankfully he told us he had a great childhood and was never abused, physically, emotionally or sexually. He’s one of the lucky ones if anything. His problem with even fictional CP and child sex assault dolls is that they make him remember his childhood less rosy. Why the fuck should we taint everyone’s childhood just so a handful of sickos can get the rocks off?
Do what you will in the States. As I said, your country and it’s weird laws criminalize implying violence while legalizing fake CP. But here in Australia, we have standards. We have the classification board to make sure anything particularly immoral is not allowed to be distributed. We most certainly will not tolerate cgi or drawn CP because it harms every Australian’s mind. But we won’t go to extreme lengths to broaden threats to include mere implying of violence. People need to be able to warn others harm may come there way without being risked being prosecuted.
Considering this is my first post on this forum, I have this to say.
I’m not a type of person that derives any pleasure from participating in discussions, quite the contrary, I very much prefer to stay in the shadow and just read other peoples thoughts, making my own conclusions for myself.
So don’t expect me to stay for long on this forum, at least not as an active user.
But I will make this one exception, especially for you dopeko, for reason, I will explain later.
First off, you initially stated that:
But then changed your narration to:
So which is it? Did some group sent you an email about this organization, or was it your friend, that told you about it? Or maybe both, and it just so happen, conveniently, that some unknown group of people sent you an email with informations about this organization, while at the same time your friend was allegedly harassed by them? Considering how small and unknown this foundation is, I find such coincidence to be near impossible.
This is, of course, a nitpicking on my side, pardon me if that is incorrect, but applying critical thinking and scepticism is simply in my nature, regardless of beliefs, opinions or people. It’s not a particularly important detail that very much could be excused by you simply intending not to be precise about the identity of your source of information about this site until it was necessary, for privacy reasons.
But at the same time, I’ve been seeing a lot of weird activity on this forum in recent weeks, that seems like an organized, malicious effort on part of, most likely, two or three people in my estimation - judging by the style of writing, interpunction, and the fact, that many of those accounts regurgitate the same talking points and arguments in the same manner as previous, no longer used accounts, despite them being answered on multiple occasions - who create multiple accounts, trying to impersonate different kinds of people, in an attempt to provoke members of this forum into making incriminating responses, that could be cut out of context, while at the same time, polluting the forum with intentionally crafted posts that could be later used to create a public narration, that “Protasia platforms and supports dangerous individuals”, as an effort to defame the entire organization and the people involved in it through character assassination, using guilt by association, to destroy their credibility in the eye of the public. Not with good faith effort that debunks the potential misinformation that Protasia could be spreading, which would be a good and understandable reason to oppose Protasia if that were to be the case, but by a mere manipulation, which indicates to me, that the opponents of this institution haven’t found any actual misinformation on this site being spread, otherwise they would use it, yet still double down on opposing it, for an unknown reason, which considering that Protasia is a child protection organization, looks quite disturbing all things considered, in my option.
Do I accuse you of being one of the people responsible for this effort? No, since no one is capable of really knowing if this is really the case, and I’m a human being that can be wrong, so you don’t need to defend yourself if that isn’t true. But I find many of the posts that you made, and your activity on this forum, as quite abnormal regardless.
Most people seeing this site would either completely ignore it, since they have no interest in the topics that his organization is concerned with, or read some articles to develop their opinion about the organization, and then ignore it as well, since they have no reason to bother with something that doesn’t concern them, and their lives are busy enough, without the addition of unnecessary things.
Only a small portion of people will find the site with such topics worth checking out at a regular basis, most likely because they are, in one way or another, affected by the topics it discusses. I, for example, was abused sexually, emotionally, psychologically and physically, my whole childhood, and I grew resentful towards many people in my environment during that time. People who predominantly were Christians, and who knew about my situation, yet were complicit in keeping it a secret, giving me a promise to help me, but never giving me any help that would actually matter, in order to keep me in a state of false hope, since they were worried, that otherwise, I could try to seek help elsewhere, giving the information about my situation to other people, and that could hurt their reputation. So naturally, one of not many organizations that deal with child abuse prevention and isn’t made by Judeo-Christian individuals or groups, took my interest, even though I’m still fairly sceptical about it. So I come here from time to time to read about things when I have some free time to spare.
Which raises the question about why you are here, and what your motivation is. Making a quick account to ask a couple of questions is something that some people do, but usually, they leave once the questions are answered. You got your responses, you stayed silent for a while, and then began continuing making posts the next day. You put conscious effort into coming back after a whole day, having this site in the back of your mind, and if it wasn’t for the fact that most of your posts, don’t have any of the characteristics that would imply that you want to get something from the community of people in this forum, I wouldn’t raise my brow.
But most of your posts are just statements of your opinion, stated as undeniable facts, while in reality, they are just unconfirmed hypothesis that you assume as true, and don’t have anything that would even resemble a proposition of topic to discuss. You don’t even present any reasons as to why you think they are undeniable, reasons that could be used as a point of reference by other people in order to discuss your beliefs. In general, your posts lack any function and don’t indicate your intent, looking more like statements made for the sake of stating something, which seems to be a pattern I’ve noticed in the other accounts that I was talking about previously as well, like for example, the account of cewisil.
At first, I thought, as you said, that you are here because you thought that your friend from QAnon was harassed by the Protasia.
But you admitted that you searched through this forum:
[quote=“dopeko, post:5, topic:992, full:true”]
I saw no threats? I searched this forum, the most I saw were suggestions that doll manufacturers who create child sex dolls would be putting themselves at risk of an attack by vigilantes and that the manufacturers would deserve it/be their fault. How the fuck is this a threat?
[/quot]
So, have you found anyone on this site harassing your friend, or anyone similar in beliefs of your friend for that matter? You either didn’t searched this forum deeply enough, which discredits your claims that you saw no threats made by “QAnon supporters or whomever else” as Chie stated, or you did searched through this forum thoroughly, and you didn’t found any signs of your friend being harassed. In which case, reconsider how much trust you put in your friend, considering that he lied to you about such serious matter as being harassed, purposefully trying to make you think badly about an organization, that deals with child abuse prevention, for seemingly, no legitimate reason.
I don’t think it’s a good indicator of one’s morality if a person tries to purposefully manipulate his own friends, and I don’t think it’s a good indicator of one’s morality if a person tries to spread false rumours about child protection organization. I find it to be quite disturbing.
But we can actually answer this question since your account actually holds information about how many threads have you seen. At the time of me writing it, the value is “17 topics viewed”, which most likely includes the one topic that you created by yourself.
This forum has 390 topics created, with additional ones in members section that are hidden to people who aren’t members. Assuming that you haven’t watched any more threads before you made your account, which might be the case, albeit your first posts suggests that you only recently learned about Protasia, and quickly created the account upon discovering this forum to ask “Why did someone send me this organization in my email?”, you read only ~4% of this entire forum threads.
Of course, you don’t need to read through the entire forum when it comes to finding signs of your friend being harassed, considering he isn’t a long time user. But thankfully, Protasia has also information, on the very main page of their forum, about the number of threads made by month in each section, which at the time of writing this, is 73 threads per month, meaning you only read ~23% of the threads made in this month, or the past 30 days counting from today, depending on how the information of how many threads in each section per month is implemented by the site’s code.
Which suggests, that you didn’t searched this forum thoroughly, that you didn’t care to dig deep to verify the claim of people on this forum, that there were people who were threatening them, and yet you confidently claimed otherwise, that you “saw no threats”. An interesting double-speak, may I say, that at best shows your laziness, and at worst, indicates that you have a bias, which makes you a fairly uncredible participant of any discussions onward.
That pretty much eliminates this potential motivator as a reason why you continue to stick on this site. Since there was nothing on this forum that would show that your friend was really harassed. And the idea that people in here decided to harras some random person on the internet outside of their forum, with no sign of organizing such effort in the first place, for no rational reason, doesn’t sound convincing. And considering as I said before, that most of your posts are just statements of your opinion, I doubt your motivation to stay here is to learn more about this organization, people in this forum, their beliefs, or anything else.
Instead of asking people kindly, in good faith, questions about their reasoning, in order to hear them out and develop your opinion about their approach, to hear why they have such beliefs and opinions, resolving any potential miscommunications, that every discussion has, and exchanging your ideas about their responses, observing whenever people in here are even competent to have such discussions in the first place, you usually began throwing conceited, intimidating statements, in what it sometimes seems, a highly agitated state, which is understandable considering the emotional nature of matters discussed in here, but not when prolonged above the period of initial impression, that considering you spend over a day in here, learning about the people who spend time on this forum and having your initial misconceptions resolved with answers, should already fade away. Let’s take an example post that you’ve made from the thread about “Blogs hosted by Prostasia?”.
That seems to be a general pattern of most of your statements, and with some other previous accounts, like cewisil. Normally, I could assume that the reason why this is the case is due to you belonging to the same group of people as the ones who created the previous accounts, in this case, it would be QAnon, or at least people impersonating QAnon. And if that was the case, the same pattern of expression would be explained by simply spending a lot of time withing a group that does have such a way of expressing themselves, and simply getting used to this way of speaking. But you said, that:
Which indicates to me, that you aren’t a part of the same group, and the only possible way of you having exactly the same pattern of speaking, as the previous accounts, is through spending an enormous amount of time talking to your friend. Which is very much a reasonable possibility. But considering that your friend is “from Q”, yet despite that, you knew nothing about it, does imply you don’t talk that much, otherwise, this topic, especially if he is passionate about it, would show itself up on multiple occasions during such time, and that seems not to be the case.
And to answer your response from that thread.
If Protasia were to host blogs written by pedophiles, they would be obligated, and even strongly motivated, to report any of their clients publishing illegal materials as fast as they could, because otherwise, their credibility would be lost. Kind of like in the case of pornhub, who under the pressure of unconfirmed, albeit most likely true - since every platform, facebook, twitter, youtube deals with this issue - allegation of hosting such materials, made a lot of drastic changes that strongly affected their revenue, simply to save their brand in the long term and avoid expensive lawsuits.
Meaning, that if what you are worried about were to ever happen, such pedophile would quickly end up in jail. Wouldn’t you agree that it would be a good outcome? To have such a person, who already broke the law, committing an offence against minors, end up in jail before potentially hurting someone else more drastically?
Not allowing pedophiles to host their blogs doesn’t change the fact that people who do post illegal materials online do exist, and they do it on a constant basis. And if Protasia were to ever consider such option, to host such blogs, they would be one of the safest organizations to do it, to make sure that pedophiles who want to promote the lifestyle of celibacy to other pedophiles with their own example, showing them that it’s possible to have a good life without sexual interactions with other people, are able to do it, while at the same time making sure, that your worry wouldn’t ever result in any harm, and quite opposite, that would end up in a lot of people that are prone to breaking the law ending up in jail.
Isn’t that something you should be happy about? Do you really think that Protasia, would willingly, host illegal materials, waiting for people who oppose them to notice it and use that against them? It’s not a difficult logic to realize, yet you instantly assumed that not allowing such blogs to exist in the first place is a better solution, than the one that would potentially result in a lot of people posting CSEM ending up in jail. Closing your eyes and pretending that problem doesn’t exist doesn’t solve it, but that seems to me is the mentality that most people have when it comes to the topic of child abuse.
And I don’t try to make a case about whenever it would or wouldn’t be a good idea to host such blogs. I don’t know, so I’m not qualified to answer this question. But I used this example to point out that you clearly don’t consider all possibilities of certain actions, and that indicates, that you don’t put any effort into even trying to understand ideas of the people on this forum.
Which kind of reminds me of cewisil, who is also an Australian just like you, and became strangely defensive about the fact that Protasia pointed out that the Australian police ran child abuse website for almost a year.
He either didn’t check this allegation, or he downright preemptively denied it without even trying to verify it. And considering that it’s a serious allegation to him, judging by how emotional and intimidating his response to that news was, not only because as he claimed, he is an Australian, but also because he claimed, to care about protecting children, it’s weird to see him completely dismiss the fact that children were hurt in his country. Protasia in no way accused Australians of doing something wrong, and didn’t claim Australia as a country is to blame, they simply mentioned that a big scandal concerning abuse of minors has been thrown under a rug and forgotten, so it’s not like there was any reason for him to get offended by this tweet.
They simply, as a child protection organization should, pointed out a situation where a group of people participated in a huge child abuse scandal. And that made cewisil extremely angry. I’m not an American, but I do consider myself a patriot of my country. And one of the duties of a patriot is to address and fix the issues that my country have been involved in, especially when it concerns the youngest citizens of my country. With this post, cewisil proved that he is not a patriot, nor a person concerned with the safety of children. He proved that what he cares about is his own narcissistic perceptions of himself and what he identifies with, and instead of addressing the issue, he wants to hide it from others, because it threatens his beliefs.
Cewisil on some occasions has tried to make a case, that Protasia is a shady organization that promises to save children, but does the opposite.
But considering his other posts, this thread that he started suggests that his accusations were a projection. He is the one that tries to defame a child protection organization using mirror arguments, but his actions speak volumes. In the situation where he had to acknowledge that his country was involved in the abuse of children, he chose to defend the abusers of children, simply because he made an association of those abusers with his identity as an Australian. His ego was attacked, and that is the most precious thing to him, which is why he decided to retaliate against Protasia. He must have interpreted it as an indirect attack against him, and flight or fight response made him decide to fight back.
And the reason why I’m telling you about him is that a lot of things indicates, that he is the friend that you’ve talked about. You have similar rhetoric and attitudes towards things, albeit I must admit, I find you to be way more likeable and collected than him. And you both are from Australia. And considering not a lot of people have created their accounts recently, there is a significant probability that I might be correct. Cewisil displayed a lot of psychopathic traits during his time on this forum, and your friend also showed having some manipulative tendencies. Which is the reason why I decided to respond to you. I don’t know if cewisil is or isn’t your friend, I don’t need that information, but if he is, read about dark triad personality traits and be observant of him.
His exaggerated antagonism to anything related to pedophilia, for the sake of it being related to pedophilia, looks like an effect of him not having even the slightest clue about why exactly, the sexual exploitation of children is wrong and should be opposed, and instead, he feels like he has to perform what in his mind is typical behaviour of a regular person in the society, that “opposes pedophilia”. Which is why his behaviour is so exaggerated because it’s his imagination that is at play and not observations. A textbook example of how moral panic affects people. The question is, why exactly he takes such position, and have such a strong desire to signalize his stance on the topic? Is it because he is afraid of standing out in a society that hates pedophiles, with him not understanding why? Is it because he personally feels distressed about his moral standing and tries to reinforce his position by showing moral outrage, believing that his position is right and moral simply on a mere fact of him being morally outraged? Or maybe he struggles with his identity as a pedophile, and tries to reinforce his belief of him being a good person, by pretending to be the opposite of what he is afraid of becoming?
If it was a social media site, there would be also another option, of him being an actual child predator trying to create an image of antipedophile to disguise his activities, but considering the anonymity and reach of this forum, is extremely unlikely.
Either way, psychopathic and narcissistic personality traits combined with moral panic has a huge probability of a person becoming completely deranged in falsely accusing innocent people of being pedophiles, and then harassing, doxing, sometimes even physically attacking or killing them, using morality as a justification, since in their eyes, they didn’t attack an innocent person, they got rid of a “disgusting pedophile that could hurt children”, and that is “a moral thing to do”. I’ve seen that happen once, with a pedohunter, who at first actually did a good job finding proofs about a person who legitimately was grooming a teenager online and in person, and did a proper thing of notifying authorities about it, but then got hungry of the power and praise he got on social media and started fabricating proofs on innocent people, organizing harassment campaigns on them. Eventually, he got a 14-year-old girl to kill herself, but I didn’t verify this accusation at the time, so I’m not sure if that is entirely true, other than having suspicions based on his responses, during which at first he denied the situation happened, but once he got pushed, he began shifting guilt and responsibility from himself onto that girl.
Once you get accused of being a pedophile, regardless if that is true or not, there is no one else to help you, because if anyone were to do that, they would be called a “pedophile apologists”, and they would start attacking you for “defending pedophilia”, feeling vindicated in their actions, and finding all sorts of rationalizations. Let’s just hope your friend doesn’t end up in such a position as well, or that I’m wrong about everything.
I couldn’t have said any of this better myself, quite frankly. Such a detailed and eloquent response only furthers the need for rational thought on these issues.
The conclusion that fictional pornography depicting minors is not one that you simply have or stumble upon, rather, it’s one many have to be convinced of. Most people unknowingly support the contention, but have to be convinced to accept it if they value freedom of speech.
I can speak for myself that I’ve never harmed anyone in all my years of collecting dolls and lolicon, for what its worth (probably nothing). Rape is not justifiable. It’s cannot even be a consideration for me.
So I would very much appreciate to not be mindlessly lumped in by society with those who do those things. Fantasy material is not real material. It is the extreme polar opposite.
Thanks for speaking up. The stigma surrounding all sorts of unusual sexual interests (not just yours) has certainly contributed towards our society focusing on the wrong problems. The research that we are commencing will be a step towards correcting this by placing discourse about fantasy outlets on a more factual and less hysterical footing.
While I am very supportive of Prostasia carrying out this research I don’t think it will change anything.
There are already numerous studies that prove ‘‘NO, fantasy outlets do not cause CSA’’ but no matter how many studies are done, people are encouraged to ignore them and easy access to them is suppressed in order to maintain the status quo.
I just want to say that I’m extremely thankful to have organizations such as this one to take up the effort and pursue this type of research.
It is my hope that the empirical data collected from this will trigger a surge of interest in the scientific community and serve as an empirical basis going forward when guiding decisions regarding treatment and policy.
It feels great to know that I’m not alone in my position and it gives me hope. Hope for a better future, and hope for a more rational policy.
And pray tell, how are you planning to test this? What is your methodology? Scraping posts on forums? Running surveys? Getting 20 people in a lab, and seeing if they think it has made their chances of assault to go up?
Don’t forget the visually indistinguishable from reality. People get very frustrated when more realistic things are put away because people are scared of the legal consequences of it. This is starting to become a very, very big problem.
If you send the study my way, I’ll give you feedback on it, as it’s in my own interest, but I still don’t like you.
Child sexual abuse prevention received a huge boost last month as Prostasia received our first major grant from a charitable foundation. The $100,000 grant will be used to hire staff and to support our unique research project on fantasy sexual outlets and prevention.
This project is a pilot 1-year study to investigate how fictional and fantasy sexual outlets (e.g. shoticon/lolicon, stories, child like sex dolls) are used within the Minor Attracted Person (MAP) population. Data and results obtained from this project are expected to contribute to the development of an ongoing multi-year research study into not only the roles fantasy and fictional sexual outlets play in the MAP population, but also how they affect coping behaviors/skills, interpersonal relationships, and contribute to offending behavior.
The project has two strategic aims:
Identify the “what” of fantasy/fictional sexual outlets. Who uses what material, in what way?
Identify correlates of use as possible risk or protective factors for offending behavior.
This project plays a vital role in child sexual abuse (CSA) prevention. Without a full understanding of how MAPs may use these outlets, we may be missing a critical opportunity for investigation into possible protective factors. It is currently assumed that access to any sort of fictional child-based sexual stimuli will act only to increase the likelihood of the person to engage in CSA behaviors. Without evidence for that assertion, it is entirely possible that within subpopulations of MAPs, these outlets actually act as protective factors. This project will allow us to identify those factors and develop rigorous empirical investigations to test them.
I gotta say… this is very encouraging, but I was hoping to see if we could get conclusive results sooner. Are there any other research organizations taking a look at this type of issue??
I’m gravely concerned about the overall state of the sex doll industry and we are in dire need of some form of empirical data to shed light on the issue of child sex dolls.
The interesting thing about this whole class of studies (including all studies directed at whether or not pornography foments callousness) is that they have an uneasy intersection with the problem of free will. If free will exists, then one of its primary places of action is in identification with other people. There is a switch where, if you go one way, you end up taking an I-Thou standpoint toward someone (or a class of someones) represented by an image, and if you go the other way, you end up taking an I-It standpoint (terms from Martin Buber, I and Thou - Wikipedia).
Can there be any tendency intrinsic in human biology that imposes a trend on how likely someone is to choose I-Thou over I-It? If so, we know little or nothing about it, except that we can see that children usually love their parents, which might suggest an automatic I-Thou pitch in childhood. That’s reasonable enough: it probably helps infant survival significantly. It’s hard to conceive that that sort of evolutionary bias extends to something so non-biological as looking at an image - but it’s not impossible. For example, there could be some ape-like level of normal inter-human affinity vs. hostility that would bear on how people respond to images of random Others. Whether this would then alter the way they perceive real people is, as far as I know, not addressed outside of the subject of pornography, thus making any trend in this area a potential confounder of any results obtained from pornography studies. Images in newcasts and even Tiktoks may in theory be no more or less alienating than pornographic images. Has any study of heterosexual porn effects ever included a control group that just looked at a similar number of photos of random female celebrities from tabloid coverage?
Now, what about cultural impositions? Could trends in culture cause people to tend to be mentally respectful of, or disrespectful of, subjects shown in images? Andrea Dworkin is famous for suggesting that the reductive nature of an image allows men, in particular, to imagine themselves in a role of subjugation over those whom they view in erotic imagery, and that this reinforces their tendency to extend the same reduction to real, live women. Male culture may further reinforce this, she believed, with typical ‘hey, hey’ wolf talk about ‘babes’ and ‘broads.’
No one who has thought about genocidal events like the Holocaust would question that culture can temporarily make large numbers of people switch from I-Thou to I-It with a group of people targeted for stigma. Reductive images like anti-Semitic cartoons may even contribute to these processes. However, if you were to do a scientific study on the pure topic, “do cartoons showing Jewish people engender or prevent anti-Semitism,” you would run into what I call the “polling problem.” In effect, you’d quite possibly be taking a poll about a temporary cultural situation rather than addressing any underlying causal question about human psychology. Cartoons showing Jews might seem causally linked to anti-Semitism and horror for five years, and then, after the defeat of the Nazis and an upsurge in sympathy towards the Jewish victims and Jewish people in general, might then switch to seeming causally linked towards sympathetic attitudes towards Jewish people. The kind of peer pressure that causes mass cultural swings toward I-It and I-Thou in attitudes among human subgroups might have no causal input from the fact that images or other simulacra appeared reflecting the trends.
Many people know that the reproducibility of psychological studies was dramatically called into question by the Reproducibility Project in 2015, as it attempted to replicate studies from 2008 and found that a large proportion were irreproducible (Reproducibility Project - Wikipedia). I was intrigued that discussion of this problem was almost entirely focused on statistical issues and only minimally on the possibility that some of the items studied might genuinely have changed, either over time, or among the populations tested. And yet, the majority of psychological studies are precisely constructed as polls, surveys of subjective responses.
Do we need to be concerned that a study of sex dolls vs. callousness (inhumane or dehumanizing attitudes) might be skewed by cultural trends? Will the same results be generated in an every-person-for-himself-and-damn-the-hindmost subculture like MAGA Americans, and in a let’s-cooperate-and-give-everyone-a-leg-up subculture like liberal Danes? And even if the study population is found to have a significant swing toward I-It perceptions of real people, associated statistically with desire for or use of sex dolls, will there be any stability in this trend over the course of time? In principle, any tested individual actually taking the improbable stance of “well, the human is just a livelier version of the doll, so let me just have my way with that livelier one, instead” (I-It) could have a crisis of conscience at any moment and say, “wait, there’s an actual human, just like me, involved in the latter case,” switching to I-Thou. Can statistical trends that last over the course of years truly be generated for the likelihood of this happening or not happening, in a way that cuts across enough cultural trends to make it a statement about the psychology of human relations?
I’d be interested to know if there’s a theoretical review paper addressing concerns about this type of study - studies that essentially propose that there are trends in inter-human identification that statistically eliminate the effect of free will, or even support its non-existence. Anyone got one on hand?
