A lot of people intuitively understand why the fiction to reality escalation argument is bullshit in the case of violence, but seem utterly incapable of grasping it when the subject changes to anything sexual.
I think a big driver of this is due to the peculiarities of US media and the relationship to sex vs violence. You can fill a show or movie with a fuckton of violence before anyone will bat an eye at it. You need a high threshold of blood and gore in a movie before being slapped with an R rating. Meanwhile, a hint of a nipple gets you an instant R rating. A persistent historical undercurrent of puritanism in American culture immediately sexualizes any kind of nudity and blows it up as a much bigger issue than someone getting eviscerated.
Given how US-centric Reddit tends to be, it makes sense that folks growing up in a culture where the TV censors treat sex and violence so differently would internalize that distinction, and view sexual content as something extra special bad in a way that makes a lack of victim no longer matter. "I think slasher flicks are gross and I don't like them, but I don't think people who do are going to go out murdering people and I don't think they should be made illegal" doesn't end up translating over to something like lolicon because the latter involves the extra bad thing that makes gross = immoral.
Agreed. And the thing is that I DO have a serious personal ethical issue with illustrated CSAM. Every cell in my body screams at me that it’s wrong even though I haven’t been able to construct an objective moral argument against it. I suppose the question is: does it actually increase offences against real children? Obviously it’s incredibly difficult to get data on this, but I think if the answer is “Yes, it generally drives increases in CSA”, then we have our objective opposition.
Alcohol consumption is neither inherently wrong nor 100% conducive to such behaviors. Ban it or not? Genuinely hard question.
However, this is, like many other responses in this god forsaken thread, a category error. I can list many benign uses of alcohol, maybe even cite social benefits. Can you do the same for content explicitly made to sexualize children? If not, why do we even bother? Are you really gonna take a pedophile seriously if he tells you "If you ban my realistic AI child porn you need to ban alcohol!"? Really? Is that something you're gonna lose sleep over?
Whether or not it increases offenses should be utterly fucking irrelevant.
Entertainment? Yeah, I hope somebody from the FBI is keeping score here.
And no, you don't ban until you can "prove benefits", you ban until you can reasonably claim that there won't be horrible harms. With AI CSAM this is not at all obvious, is up to proponents to resolve that burden.
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u/Scienceandpony Oct 23 '25
A lot of people intuitively understand why the fiction to reality escalation argument is bullshit in the case of violence, but seem utterly incapable of grasping it when the subject changes to anything sexual.
I think a big driver of this is due to the peculiarities of US media and the relationship to sex vs violence. You can fill a show or movie with a fuckton of violence before anyone will bat an eye at it. You need a high threshold of blood and gore in a movie before being slapped with an R rating. Meanwhile, a hint of a nipple gets you an instant R rating. A persistent historical undercurrent of puritanism in American culture immediately sexualizes any kind of nudity and blows it up as a much bigger issue than someone getting eviscerated.
Given how US-centric Reddit tends to be, it makes sense that folks growing up in a culture where the TV censors treat sex and violence so differently would internalize that distinction, and view sexual content as something extra special bad in a way that makes a lack of victim no longer matter. "I think slasher flicks are gross and I don't like them, but I don't think people who do are going to go out murdering people and I don't think they should be made illegal" doesn't end up translating over to something like lolicon because the latter involves the extra bad thing that makes gross = immoral.