There is a grave danger in letting the government decide whether a particular fictitious representation represents minors or adults. In much of Anime, it’s often difficult to distinguish between anime minors and anime adults. The government ought to focus on prevention and putting an end to, actual felonious offenses that cause actual violations of another person. Robberies, burglaries, torture, grievous bodily harm, rape, sexual abuse of anyone, homicides, extortion, are real crimes with real victims that can have very long, and up to life time amount of trauma for the victim, and even for those around the victim.
The justification of the prohibition of underaged sexual imagery is that it harms real people: the people depicted in the imagery. They have rights. The same is true in cases of retribution porn, or recordings of abuse (like prison rape videos). Such depictions also have no business either being distributed.
In the case of a cartoon, that cartoon has no rights to protect, it makes no sense for such depictions to be illegal – on the condition that it’s kept out of the hands of minors like any other type of pornography.
No fictional artwork should be illegal, regardless of the portrayed topic. It is a completely neutral atmosphere that is uncontaminated by physical constriction. It doesn’t need a reason to be legal. Art literally implies limitless freedom.
In the realm of art and music, ALL thoughts, emotions, and interests are naturally allowed to be objectified, expressed, and projected onto a physical medium and shared, because none of this causes direct harm to any living being. There is no justification for lawful intervention here.
Banning any form of art is the epitome of evil by causing once-innocent people to become criminals instantly out of mere disgust of their artistic interests. There is no justification to ruining lives simply just because of the existence of fictional content.
Well… the big issue with censoring fiction is that you will never win. Period.
A war against fiction is a war against human consciousness. You can target child abuse, but not the idea of child abuse if the end goal is to prevent more children from being abused. People who see fictional/virtual child pornography as an issue will just need to face the fact that it’s a necessary evil and deal with what they can, which is the prevention of child abuse by way of education and punishment, rather than targeting the idea or the desires.
In the UK, loli/shota and the like are illegal, for no logical reason. Except … the law is applied inconsistently. There are paintings in art galleries that would almost certainly result in a prison sentence if they were produced today.
Ah, but those were created by recognised artists, as long as you’re a well known artist obscenity laws don’t apply to you, otherwise don’t even dare depict a nude child in your artwork! /s
Look up William Sergeant Kendall (1869-1938) sometime. I first became aware of him because one of his many nude paintings of his daughters is displayed in the Baltimore Museum of Art.
The Roman “Loving Cup”, not to mention numerous other ancient Greek and Roman sculptures and frescoes, would definitely raise a few eyebrows at least.
On the other hand, I remember the hoohah generated by an exhibition by photographer Tierney Gearon, many of whose photos included her children with no clothes on (but not doing anything untoward), a sculptor from London and a photographer from Cornwall, whose names escape me, both of whom have been, ahem, spoken to by the police for including young people with no clothes on in their productions.
The situation is absurd. Especially when the British definition of “child porn” - “Indecent Images of Children” - need involve neither children nor be pornographic to be actionable. (For example, when Daniel Radcliffe appeared in Equus at the age of 17, this was, technically, illegal, and the fake publicity shots definitely so.)
Most people would say fictional revenge porn and abuse should be legal, but they exclude lolicon because it “offends” them. They dont have any good reason to single out the lolis, but people just dont follow the evidence when i comes to certain topics. If you accuse a youtuber of murder, robbery, or assault with flimsy evidence it will get nowhere and the accuser would become a meme. But if you call someone a rapist or molester with 0 evidence you will get 15 seconds of fame untill your story collapses. Think of it when was the last time there was a false murder allegation against some ““influencer””