Let me answer your concern from the perspective of a person who has been sexually exploited as a child multiple times. Albeit, I don’t really like to talk about my past, neither I find the specifics of it all that important or interesting, so I will try to spare the details if that is fine with you.
I’m also was never interested in minors of any ages, in case if you are wondering what my bias is about this topic. I do have a bias about this topic, naturally, everyone will, but I take it under consideration in this response.
Let’s analyze your situation:
Your worry stems from suspicion, that by creating a demand for fictional works, you indirectly caused harm of real minors, by increasing the amounts of such works. This worry would hold value if you were to see actual CSEM, created by exploitation of a real minor. Because demand covered by a supply in the case of CSEM would mean more children would have to be abused, in order to create such materials.
But you didn’t use CSEM, you used drawn and written materials. Purely fictional, without using any minors whatsoever. So this problem is non-existent in your case.
You also have noticed, that while having such thoughts, fantasies, and using such materials your entire life, you have never actually harmed a minor by yourself. You worry is that by increasing such demand, you have caused someone harm. So the problem of you actually harming a minor person directly is also non-existent in your case. Your worry is about indirect damage.
So the list of your potential ideas in which you could contribute to the harm of a child is as follows:
- You contributed to an increase in materials that can be used for child grooming.
- You contributed to an increase in materials to which if a person is exposed, it can make them perceive and treat children as sex objects in an admissable and desirable manner.
To answer the first one. Child grooming isn’t a magical process in which you use tricks to make a child have sexual interaction with you. It’s a multilayered and gradual process, that is focused on building trust. The building of trust is the most crucial thing about it. The process of child grooming is not that different than building a relationship with a predatory adult, as adults also have to deal with individuals who have predatory intentions, and try to make a person have a sexual relationship with them motivated by their own personal pleasure as a priority, and not the wellbeing of the other human being.
You can ask yourself a simple question: would using regular pornography, convince an adult, to have sex with you?
And the answer is, no, not really.
To my knowledge, peoples argument about such artworks being used for grooming has something to do with this repetitive idea that it cause “pedophilia to be normalized”. I never managed to find any person who would be able to really define either of those concepts, so I have to assume, that what they mean by it, is that by using such artworks, they can make a minor believe, that it’s normal for them to have sex with an adult.
But it’s a completely non-existent concept. No person evaluates their decisions basing them on whenever they are considered normal, or not. Do people decide not to cheat on their partners, simply because it’s not normal or acceptable by society? Of course not. They either do it because they want to have a relationship with someone else, or choose not to because they care about the person that they are currently within a relationship. And what other people think is irrelevant. If anything, the only reason why they would think about whenever some act is normal or not would be to decide whenever they have to hide it from others or not.
Child predators actually want to achieve the opposite of normalization. They want children to think, that they have to keep their relationship as a secret. Making such targetted child think that “it’s normal for them to have sex with adults” would result in a risk of them telling someone else about their relationship with an adult. “Since after all, it’s normal, right?”.
But the thing is, that “Normality” is a factor without weight, it doesn’t influence whenever people make a decision since it has no motivating or disincentivising power, it only makes a person adjust their action if they decide to do something that isn’t considered normal.
And then there is also the counterargument, of something being considered “out of the norm”, actually creating the appeal. A lot of people, especially rebellious or antisocial individuals, like a stereotypical teenager, do like to break social rules and norms. There is an appeal to doing things that are forbidden, and unusual. It gives such things a uniqueness. Making things that are not normal, can be interpreted, as making something that is special, out of most peoples reach, a unique opportunity in a sense.
The fact that something is considered not normal or abnormal, doesn’t mean it’s something that is good for the reasons by which it’s considered nor normal or abnormal.
And just being shown some drawn, or even realistic artistic production isn’t enough to convince a person that something is normal. Even a child. When I was watching Batman movies and cartoons as a very young child, the idea of being a vigilante who dresses in dark costumes to fight against crime was never considered by me as something normal. The idea of “is it normal or is it not normal to fight crime as a superhero vigilante” simply was never something that crossed my mind while watching those cartoons.
I simply enjoyed the show, very much, knowing it’s just a fictional story that doesn’t really happen, and liked the character, knowing perfectly well that in the real world no such people like Batman exist. And personally, while I liked the idea of becoming a superhero, and I was fantasizing about fighting evil individuals and protecting the earth while playing play-pretend with friends, the simple idea of running all the time chasing other people and being exhausted due to it, being potentially shot by someone, which would be painful and could result in my death, and all the other realistic aspects of such activity made me decide, that I definitely don’t want to become like Batman. But I still liked to keep the fantasy of it, that was devoided of real-life consequences and pain, and play with others pretending Justice League heroes. Simply because it was fun, not because I believed it’s normal to fight crime in a costume resembling a bat.
And I’m talking about times I was maybe 6 or 7 years old. Children do have minds, they lack experience, they are prone to making mistakes, but are capable of basic logic, reasoning, analysis and especially: the feeling of fear, that determines most of their actions.
This is why grooming, is all about building trust. You won’t make anyone do anything unless you made them trust you. And I just can’t see a scenario in which drawings of erotica could result in an increase of trust between a child and another person. You don’t really need a child to think anything, especially if the child is really young, to make them do anything you want them to do if they really trust you.
If such drawings were really effective, for the purpose of child grooming, I have the feeling that we would hear about it in various news. Or that there would be research performed by criminologists about how exactly it works. Yet neither of those situations has happened, and artistic works of this nature have been existing for a long time.
And even if they were to have any power, I don’t think a child predator would use them. The problem with situations like rape is that they leave little to no evidence of such a crime. And it makes it difficult to prosecute accused rapists, unless you ignore the “Innocent until proven guilty” rule. But sending pornographic explicit material to a minor is not only a crime in it of itself, but it would also greatly diminish any doubts if such perpetrator were accused of sexually exploiting a minor to which they showed such materials. Using such arts is risky since it leaves tangible evidence that can be used against child predators.
Especially with erotic arts depicting characters that are interpreted to resemble children in sexual acts.
And then there is also a question, as to why such people don’t use real CSEM. Wouldn’t convince a person to be more effective if you were to give them a photo of real people, rather than drawing that is fictional?
I could enumerate issues with the idea of such artworks being used for child grooming without an end. This is how drastically illogical and flawed this concept is. And if anything, it shows a person has a complete lack of understanding of how grooming works in real life.
The steps are as follows:
- A predator tries to someone vulnerable to target. Someone with emotional problems, having a difficult situation in their household, someone who is an outcast.
- Those issues the child has are then later used to appear as a friend, as someone they child can trust. For example: if such a child is excluded from their peers, an adult talking to them might supply them with the sense of companionship and belonging that they might seek. So naturally, such child will keep contact with such adult due to this reason, thinking, this adult wants to help them.
- The relationship develops as a regular relationship would. The predator tries to garner more trust, helps the victim with their personal problems, listens to their complains, gives advice. They try to test boundaries, might give such child some benefits, like money, or gifts, or take them to some places, or spend time together doing something that interests the child - whatever will work to make the child find them more favourable and likeable. And to make them feel like they have to return the favour.
- Then, once the relationship is well developed, and the predator gained the full trust of the victim, the relationships become more sexual in nature. But this process isn’t about introducing things associated with sex. It’s about making the relationship sexual. About making the contact between two people have an erotic component, and developing the interaction in a direction that is less about friendship, and more about sexual partnership. It’s about things like ambiguous touching, or hugging, holding hands - non-explicit physical contact, that slowly progresses to erotic talk, and more inappropriate physical interactions. This is not the step in which anything concrete about sexual interaction is happening. There is still a risk of the target simply getting scared and running away, telling someone about the situation, if the actions of the predator are too drastic for that child. Making such minor do something incriminating, shameful or embarrassing and documenting it for example with a photo, is the bigger goal, for the last step.
- Which is to hold complete control over the minor, and being prepared to blackmail them into submission. There are many tactics by which at this stage such predator can control and manipulate the victim to do whatever they want. The risk of them getting caught needs to be minimized before they get into more explicit actions.
This is of course a generalization of this process. There is more nuance to it, and different situations can happen differently. In my case, for example, the first person who has exploited my trust was already having it, since it was a person from my own family, and it was a one-time situation, that this person has made under the influence of alcohol, while being in a very difficult life situation, making me believe that I will help them if I agree to do what they wanted me to do. Once again, I don’t really want to get into details, but my point is that while situations can be different, they do share a common set of rules by which such situations do happen, which these steps cover entirely.
And none of those rules suggests the usage of lolicon arts would have any positive results for such child predator. It’s a huge risk for such person, without any gain. There is no point in there where you could use such artworks for any purpose. The only case in which someone could speculate about such usage would be the penultimate step. But in here, I doubt you could make any speculation that wouldn’t also apply to regular pornography, especially if one of the actors looks very young or regular movies with romantic plots, or simply made up stories of a predator, or regular convincing with arguments. But once again, we don’t see that happening, none of these works seems to be used in stories told by victims of child grooming, at least to my knowledge.
As for the second idea of yours. I don’t really think I have to explain it in detail, since you yourself, are a great example of that, simply not being the case.
If there was anything special about such mediums to turn peoples perception of things, why a person like you, who already have been biased with having such thoughts their entire life:
Resistant to their effects?
It’s most likely because there are no such effect. But it also really depends on what you mean exactly by this hypothesis:
Since the term “treating children as sexual objects” is quite ambiguous.
One interpretation of this line is that such works can make people become attracted to children. The simple answer is that it’s not possible. No method of sexual conversation therapy has worked, and the “therapy using audiovisual erotic mediums” also was tested in such efforts. You cannot change peoples sexual interests, and this also means, that no person without a preexisting interest in such works would ever indulge in them.
I’m pretty sure there are many genres of movies or pornography that you simply have no interest in, so you never watch any productions from such genre. The same applies to such materials. So regular people who don’t find such works interesting would never willingly entertain them in the first place.
The other interpretation is that it would make people think about concrete children in the context of sexual topics. it’s kind of happening regardless of such works existence. The moral panic about pedophilia makes a lot of people think about children in sexual situations, of course, not in arousing ways, quite the opposite. But while the fact that they personally don’t enjoy such ideas stays, they still do have them, they still do evaluate children in the context of them being a sexual object, even though through the prison of how they suspect other peoples think of them.
But that convoluted explanation that I just provided, in my opinion, renders this worry obsolete. Does it matter that people think of children as sexual objects if they do it to evaluate whenever someone else might find them as sexually arousing? I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing if they use such a process to learn more about the topic and become more effective in giving their own children better protection.
But I think, regardless of what you meant by this idea, there is a better answer, which is to diminish the importance of peoples perceptions, by providing statistics in which under the assumption of this hypothesis being correct, the empirical evidence would suggest no negative consequences from people having such perception.
And seeing the statistics of Japan rates of sexual abuse of children, and sexual abuse in general, considering how open they are towards such works of fiction, allowing even more controversial things like child sex dolls, in contrast to for example Australia, that has strong religious and sexually repressive attitude to the topic of anything sexual really, that bans even non-erotic fictional production under the suspicion of them leading to child abuse, and even prohibiting pornography with adults, if they look young, seems to provide such evidence.
Australia rate of rapes as of 2010: 28.60 per 100000 citizens
Japan rate of rapes as of 2010: 1.00 per 100000 citizens
(Source: Countries Compared by Crime > Rape rate. International Statistics at NationMaster.com)
Depending on the source, these values might vary, but the enormous disparity between them is same. I used this source since it has both of those values recorded at that time by the same people with the same method. The rate of rapes in Japan has been lowering ever since steadily, with Australia, there are peaks in both directions, but it largely stayed the same up till 2020. I will not give you any concrete source of this data, since like I said, it varies from website to website. You can find them easily with a single phrase, and determine who you trust. But all of them share the same trend.
And with the history of Japan, creating and allowing distribution of lolicon since 1950 year. with an entire generation of new people living in a world where such works are widely distributed, even visible in public shops without strong restrictions. Seeing that ever since lolicon was created and named, Japan was only steadily improving their protections of minors, delegalized CSEM, prohibited minors from working and performing erotically-soft services to their clients, increasing the Age of Consent to 18 in every prefecture (with the exception of one island that is used for military tests), ever since. I think it’s beyond any reasonable doubt that such works cause any harm to minors and that maybe instead of debating whenever it should be prohibited and not used by people, it would make more sense to focus on actually finding ways that directly solve the issue of child abuse.
So even if we assume that such works change peoples perception in the way you were worried about, it doesn’t influence the amounts of actual sexual abuse or peoples attitudes to pedophilia. It doesn’t make them less effective in protecting children. So even if that is true, the question is, does it really matter then?
But that being said, I genuinely have an issue believing that erotic drawings could have any power over peoples perception of sexual exploitation of children as something positive since we do have empirical evidence and research of such situations being, generally speaking, simply not positive, with all the testimonies of people being sexually exploited as minors confirming that this is the case. And you won’t change that fact with drawings.
Before I finish, one note about one of your caveats:
You are largely correct about this attitude, but not for the reason you stated, since it implies you don’t consider yourself a Minor Attracted Person because you didn’t have any sexual interactions with any minor, and that is not really what Minor Attracted Person is defined at.
I don’t imply that you are a MAP, and I don’t care about how you identify yourself as, it’s irrelevant. But I have found this statement of yours as indicative of you having some misconceptions, and I find it important to clear up any misconceptions you might have about the topic of pedophilia so you can have a better framework of understanding this topic, to reason about your situation, since evidently, it causes you a huge degree of emotional distress.
You might be attracted to minors, without having ever an intention to have sexual interactions with them and never having such interactions.
And you can be a child predator, without finding minors attractive. Around 50% (either 40% or 60%, I don’t remember exactly) of child sex offenders aren’t pedophiles.
I have talked to many individuals identifying themselves as a MAP, and a couple of them, really a small sub-group, but still significant, believed themselves to be MAPs without actually meeting the criteria of having a pedophilic disorder (DSM-5), or even the more common definition of pedophilia derived from the definition of paraphilia, that states, the sexual interest in minors must be primarily or exclusive. With all of them never finding anyone underage, in their environment, as attractive (with the exception of one female MAP that was attracted to the young adult boy that was not really that younger than her).
But many of them enjoyed the drawn and written erotica of such theme.
Usually, after realizing that there are more people like that, I was simply asking such people a simple question: “Can you describe someone real who was underage, that you have found as attractive since you became an adult?”. This was good enough to actually make a lot of them rethink if they have figured out their identity properly, and only with one case of a person, who insisted that she is a pedophile, while the example she provided was a person that was underage, but still in an age-appropriate range of healthy interest in their own peers. So I guess you can ask yourself the same question.
Since the case might be, that you are simply a person with high openness to experience (you can make a Big Five personality test to determine it), that simply enjoys any ideas without constraints and is willing to indulge themselves in scenarios that are socially unacceptable, by using imagination, that isn’t constrained by any social norms. If that is the case, then your thoughts might not be an indicator of anything abnormal, it’s simply your personality, and the case might be that the reason why you have such persistent thoughts about this single theme has to do with the fact that you have such a strong emotional reaction to them. Your worry and desire to not think about them might be in a sense the very thing that causes you to go back to them. But that is only my hypothesis, I would advise you to consult this with someone more professional than me when it comes to psychology.
Just having thoughts or fantasies, and even enjoying them doesn’t determine your actions, as you do have consciousness for that very reason of having full autonomy over your decisions. Even if you were to stop feeling repulsion towards these thoughts and be disturbed by them, you don’t have to worry about “acting” them out, since the reason why you find them repulsive and disturbing in the first place indicates you have an understanding why such acts in real life are justifiably unacceptable and prohibited. And allowing yourself for mental entertainment won’t change that understanding.
So in summary, I don’t think you have to unnecessarily torture yourself due to having the improper thoughts alone (especially since I suspect, this torture might prevent you to solve your issue more than help), which you yourself admitted not to be in control of.
Since your actions and decisions have proven themselves not to be determined by them, and have proven your understanding of your position. You know what is wrong and what is correct, and you never actually hurt anyone. You have proven that having such thoughts and fantasies, as well as enjoying artificial erotica, doesn’t result in a person try to act such fantasies out.
And your worries, as illogical and unreasonable they turned out to be, about causing some harm to minors indirectly, further proves you are a good person at heart.
Being born evil and working hard to overcome your evil nature is the definition of decency and virtue. You don’t have to pretend that you are still “pure” since you ascended above people who are just “pure”.