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Notes -
Yes.
Australia's CP laws consider fictional characters who are "in-canon" under 18, or who "look" under 18, to be "children", even when all actors/artists were adults. Hence, loli hentai is legally CP here, and this has been backed up by case law. Text works concerning such fictional characters are in a somewhat-grey area: IIRC the only case brought came away with an acquittal but I've been told by an Australian lawyer they're illegal.
I've been flagrantly ignoring these laws for, oh, over a decade; I have over a dozen illegal Japanese visual novels. I'm not, strictly speaking, a paedophile - they don't help me get it up, so to speak - but I sure as hell don't refrain from pirating such illegal VNs if the plot sounds interesting (and, well, there were one or two early on where I was still, shall we say, "exploring"). On top of that, I wrote a Madoka Magica fanfic a while back in which a 14-year-old character rapes a 15-year-old character (there was a prompt thread on... possibly LiveJournal?... where people gave NSFW fanfic requests, and the fic was based on two of them; the content is not my cup of, ah, "tea" but the story practically wrote itself in my head and they did ask). I don't have any real CP, and have never sought it out (I can't say for sure I've never "possessed" any, because I can't rule out the stupid "jackass posts CP in an innocent forum thread, oh noes everyone who clicks on the thread now has CP in their browser cache" scenario, but that's true of anyone who ever visits a site that allows images; I don't remember it happening). But, while I didn't hide this all that hard, I don't post on the Internet under my real name, so the vast majority of people who knew this only knew this about "magic9mushroom".
In 2021 I wound up with a new housemate in uni accommodations. He and I clicked and got along like a house on fire until I made the mistake of sharing this, at which point he started thinking I was a dangerous sexual predator who needed to get his life sorted out. Eventually he resorted to blackmailing me in an attempt to make me co-operate with his attempt to, shall we say, save my soul. I refused, for much the same reason as I ignored the law in the first place i.e. "to say the things he truly feels, and not the words of one who kneels". At this point I was clearly going to get exposed.
And if I'd been an ideal defendant, well, fine, face the music and fight the charges to try and overturn things. Except I'm not, because any serious investigation into my background would turn up one of my bigger regrets i.e. that I tried to forcibly kiss a few people (of roughly the same age as I was) back in 2008-11. And so I feared that I'd be painted as a ticking time bomb in an effort to get caselaw against text works.
So I wrote a tell-all suicide note, posted it online, and cut my own throat. I just mistimed it, and didn't make it to the carotid before campus security and then the police arrived to stop me and cart me off to the looney bin (because that's what they do when they catch you literally red-handed in a suicide attempt).
...At which point I learned a rather-vital piece of information: the courts uphold these crazy laws when cases are actually prosecuted, but the police consider them a crock of shit and don't actually arrest people for them except in highly-unusual circumstances. So I got in no legal trouble whatsoever, and the motivation to kill myself evaporated.
I don't believe people who look at (or even write) porn of anime schoolgirls are generally child-molesters-to-be, future-thailand-visitors, or groomers-in-training. That said, this is not a sentence anyone should find themselves saying. Consider not doing things you'd rather die than have people know about you?
Thank you for the frank and interesting post though.
This is a common intuition gap between the general public and the legal system. Most people walk around in blissful ignorance about how common things like sex crimes, domestic violence, or driving with substance abuse are. If we dragnetted everyone guilty of these and prosecuted them to the extent that John Q Public thinks reasonable, it would cripple society.
Necessarily, the police exercise discretion in who to throw the book at. This state-of-affairs doesn't mix well with moral panics about racism, but that's another topic.
It doesn't mix well with a lot of things; when prosecutions are massively underdetermined by the law, they're being determined by something else, which leaves a gaping hole for corruption and political repression.
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That or we'd get Singapore.
I mean, maybe we'd need to cane them on national TV rather than incarcerate them, but you get the point.
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The industrial society and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race...
But seriously, I can relate as someone that got sucked down the AGP rabbithole for 18 years. Now I'm detoxed, a normal heterosexual father, and a militant anti-porn guy. Older generations don't understand the effect weird porn ("toaster fucking") has on the younger generations, especially since they get squeamish if you discuss details.
I’m usually skeptical of the “porn made me do it” explanations.
I was having AGP fantasies before I had ever even been on the internet. And when I first discovered the porn, there was no “rabbit hole”, there was just an immediate reaction of “damn this shit is lit”.
I likewise can't blame internet porn, although I strictly speaking had been on the Internet prior.
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What, you don't find it strange that the overlap between "porn made me do it" and [some form of] "I've recovered from addiction" [generally using the words 'recovered', 'detoxed', and my personal favorite 'normal and heterosexual'] is functionally total?
I get that there are sometimes specific ideological considerations for using those words but, like, they talk like they're going to relapse any second if not for [insert here]. It's not like sex isn't addictive, and a component of a core biological drive, but I think there's an epistemic gulf between "lol fukken saved" and "this has literally consumed my life".
Understandable; most of the anime boorus don't really feature much furry content anyway.
Of course they don't, that'd be too masculine for anime. Angsty potatoes only!
Well, that got a good chuckle out of me.
In my defense, I was thinking more about the standard predator-animal sparkle dog fare when I wrote that. I figure rabbits in particular are probably close enough to ‘loli in a onesie’ that they cross-pollinate, but I dunno. I was mostly thinking about that fucking Zootopia meme anyway.
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Ah, that is less political than I imagined. As traumatic as that may have been I have to give a hearty lol at the situation. The Motte has so many interesting characters…
Are you sure you should be posting this publicly? Anyway, as you’re unusually forthcoming I have to ask. You claim to have a dozen illegal VNs and have written illegal fanfiction but all of this has zero sexual appeal to you? I have nothing against pedophiles but you must admit this sounds a bit curious and difficult to believe.
Anyway I hope you’re doing better now and have recovered without any lasting damage, either physical or social
I mean, it is a political issue, just not one that's culture-war-charged at the moment.
As noted, I posted a tell-all suicide note that got forwarded to the police. Everything I said above is a matter of public record, tied to my real name. So, at this point, why hide it?
I have three dozen legal VNs (or, well, legal to own; I pirated them, but that's neither here nor there). Also, I misspoke a little: many of those VNs with loli scenes also have non-loli scenes which do appeal to me (some of which still involve characters canonically under 18; paedophilia is the paraphilia of being attracted to prepubescents, and puberty is a long way before 18). But, yeah, some of them I find basically unarousing and would still recommend to people who also won't find them arousing! Saya no Uta and Marunomi, for sure (though, y'know, massive content warning; both are in the horror genre - without the limitations normally imposed on that genre in Western media by needing to be legal for kids to view - and Saya in particular gave me nightmares as a 20-year-old; I'm marking this post 18+ in part because I'd generally rather kids didn't look into those).
The fanfic I wrote... there are some parts of it that push some of my buttons, which does have something to do with why I wrote it, but the work as a whole is not my preferred prurient reading because I followed certain things to their logical, and frankly rather nauseating, conclusions. What can I say? I treat fictional worlds very seriously, and won't just handwave things whether for taste or "taste". "But the aaaaart" doesn't disappear as a thing just because one's writing sexually-explicit content.
I guess I have.
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Anime is in a peculiar situation because it is a very detail-light art style. A petite woman of thirty and a girl of 14 can only be distinguished by context and accessories.
Combine that with a culture that sets a lot of stories between 14-18 and you get a lot of risqué works that technically feature underage characters but don’t trigger ‘hell naw’ reactions in non-paedophiles that way a photo of an actual child would. Their age isn’t really relevant except that it means they are in fun-school culture rather than boring-office culture where the story couldn’t happen because everybody is being worked to death.
Then fan of Doki Doki Mai Haruto writes a fanfic where their favourite characters make good on their romantic tension / crush and suddenly they are a CP writer depending on jurisdiction.
I have been waiting all my life to see someone attempt the Shinobu Defense.
"Your Honor, that is not a 13 year old girl. That is a 300 year old vampire."
"She's smart and fun and loyal and everything, but every time we do it I have to turn the light off and imagine she's a fully-matured human female, your honor, or I am unable to achieve sufficient erectness"
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Lol. Okay, sometimes it’s a fig leaf.
But from a purely descriptive perspective I would bet that, say, 99% of Madoka Magica slash writers are not paedophiles.
If anything, anime lovers are closer to Zoophilia, as anime girls are just cats
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