Hello,
I recently joined the forum and since you haven’t received a reply on this post yet, I figured I’d share some of my thoughts regarding your situation.
So, for a bit of context, I’m 22 and I live in Canada. While I’m sexually attracted to adult women (real and anime), I also like lolicon. Lolicon is criminalized in Canada, as you probably know, so I use Roblox Rule 34 as an alternative (although I have viewed some lolicon in the past).
I remember back in 2011, or 2012, I was in a furry group where they banned any porn, and someone mentioned that liking certain characters who were young was pedophilia.
I’m in a hentai group where they ban furry porn and lolicon, although the latter is justified, given it’s a Discord server (lolicon is against Discord’s Terms of Service).
The funny thing is that they allow artworks of underage (anime) boys and some of them look… pretty lewd.
Sexualizing underage girls is unacceptable. But boys? Totally fine!
As for the part about it being pedophilia, I wasn’t sure myself for a long time whether it was or not. I understand now that liking lolicon doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a pedophile.
Most lolis look more like dolls than actual children. Many of them have big eyes and a big mouth. My guess is that is to make them look cuter.
Comparing a loli to a real child is like comparing a grown woman to a barbie doll.
Have you seen Queen Elizabeth II? Have you seen her Barbie doll counterpart? Sure, the Barbie doll has a resemblance to the (former) Queen, but there’s no way someone would mistake the Barbie doll for an actual human being.
As weird as it sounds, one day not too long afterwards, I got the FBI virus screen that says my computer is locked as I broke the law. I panicked. I read that the cause might have been child porn, or other offenses.
Something similar had happened to me a couple of years ago. I was using a tablet and browsing the Internet for… research. Yeah, totally. I clicked on an image that I found on Google Images and it sent me to a website that, if I remember correctly, was dedicated to hosting porn of barely legal women (all part of the research). All of a sudden, my screen was locked and there was a message that appeared saying something along the lines of “POLICE ATTENTION! YOU HAVE VIOLATED THE LAW AND BROWSED CHILD PORNOGRAPHY!”
Technically, I could set myself out of the Internet app and do other things on the tablet, but the Internet app itself was locked onto that page.
There was a secondary message as well that indicated that, in order to continue using the Internet app, I had to… go to a local gas station and purchase a gift card that would save someone money when they purchase gas at the pump.
Needless to say, this was very likely a hacker. Fortunately, I managed to back out of the website on the Internet app by pressing the “return” button multiple times.
It has never happened again since then.
There was a black truck parked near my house, a truck I didn’t remember seeing before.
That’s why I prefer to order from Amazon Prime instead of UPS.
“Are they here for me?” I thought to myself. I went to check the child porn law, and it said clearly that drawings and cartoons are not included, and I saw the affirmative defence. I then thought the FBI thing could be a virus, researched something about it, and indeed, it is a virus and nothing else.
Not to mention that there are viruses that are specifically designed to store CP/CSAM on a person’s computer.
Remember to not click suspicious links. Do not click this link!
I began reading the wikipedia article on the legal status of fictional porn again, and saw the cases, and felt different about them as I had said before. “What if this is actually illegal?” I remember thinking. “What if I read everything wrong?”
I don’t really have anything to say about this part, other than I don’t have to worry about asking myself such questions, since I already know the answer.
Although, I think this thread is pretty relevant: Is Lolicon illegal in the US?
So more damage was done. All of these incidents made me so scared that I began deleting all the young-looking cartoon porn I had. I thought I might still be screwed. Part of me still wanted to look at loli, but I didn’t want to go to jail. So I suffered a lot without being able to look at loli. It wasn’t so bad as I also enjoy adult characters, but it bothered me that I didn’t feel as free as before to look at characrers that were younger. I wasn’t hurting anyone! It’s just a drawing! I am not into real kids at all! But I internalized the whole “it’s illegal” bs so much that I even began trying to convince myself that those drawings would cause me to do something if I saw them. So I used this to further keep myself away from the material.
I also had a porn collection on my computer, if that’s what you were talking about. It was mainly just amateur porn and hentai. I kept reading stories of people getting caught in Canada because of lolicon or because of, you know, actual CP/CSAM on their computer.
There was one image that I had that actually made me worried though. It was a hentai drawing of an underage boy (I think maybe first grade) having sex with his teacher. Now, I didn’t really care about the boy, my focus was on the teacher. I think I must’ve projected myself onto the boy and fantasized about said teacher.
Well anyway, I deleted my whole porn collection because of that one image. I wasn’t planning on taking a chance with any of it.
I regretted doing that as it had taken me two years to make it. So, about a year later, I used a file recovery program, Recuva, to retrieve the deleted images. Unfortunately, only a handful of the images were recoverable (including, ironically, the image with the boy and the teacher that I mentioned), most of them were unrecoverable.
Since I originally deleted the collection, I made a new consisting mostly of amateur porn videos. For images, I mainly just browse the Internet now.
To make a longer story short, I was paranoid. I felt like I was doing something wrong even thought I was just looking at fiction, material that now I know is not illegal.
How did I get to this point? It was very slow, it took a lot of reading, and a lot of time. Now I understand what obscenity is much better, and know not to psych myself out as bad. I look at lolis and cubs without guilt.
What do you think? Was this “it’s illegal” thing caused by my own overthinking? What do you think happened to make me feel paranoid?
Well, for me, I was worried because of guilt. I know that the hentai image with the boy and the teacher that I mentioned would’ve most likely been considered shotacon. I have seen lolicon online in the past. Unlike in the US, this stuff is very much illegal in Canada. I was worried that, at any moment, the police would come knocking down my door and seize my computer.
The worst case scenario is that I get arrested. But you know what? I doubt that will happen. Besides, there are more concerning things than that, such as how many minors may have been harmed while the police were busy arresting some guy looking at “gross” drawings.
In the end, I’m glad that you were able to overcome that paranoia of yours.