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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24300 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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I'm a few weeks late to this, ShiftUp dropped the reveal trailer to the Stellar Blade sequel.

For the non-gamers, Stellar Blade is a South Korean action adventure game released in 2024 on the PS5, and on PC a year later. It caught a ton of media attention for its "goonbait" protagonist EVE, her sex appeal was central to the game's marketing. EVE is based on a body-scan of South Korean model Shin Jae-eun, but it's obvious that her body proportions were deliberately exaggerated in the game. IGN France ran a preview piece calling EVE "a doll sexualized by someone you would think has never seen a woman", and issued an apology for that comment after getting called out. The game was a smashing success, sold millions of copies and became the champion game for the anti-woke.

Now the Stellar Blade sequel is self published, and will feature a new protagonist, Evie. The gameplay has also seemingly taken a different style, now set in a populated, linear city area as opposed to the post-apocalyptic world of the original. Now as per tradition, the studio is caught up in a controversy again, but from both sides. The wokes are saying Evie looks like a minor but is still sexualised, now which normal adult would jerk off to that...

Edit: forgot to put it here, some users on resetera also threatened to report the game to payment processors, who were delisting certain games from Steam and other platforms last year.

But the ShiftUp CEO dismissed those criticisms, and recently reposted a comic making fun of those complaints.

The non-wokes are upset because they wanted EVE, and Evie's assets are comparatively tame. And at least some of them (including Asmongold) agree she looks too young as well.

The biggest highlight for me is how "pedophile" has become the last truly potent scare word left in the discourse. But just like "sexist," "racist," and "homophobic" during the Gamergate era (which once forced constant defensive crouching and ritual apologies from those at the receiving end), the term is now being inflated and abused by both sides. Age-gap relationships between consenting adults, anime-style character design, and anything that triggers either tribe's sensitivities gets shoved under the label. Both sides are eager to fire this particular silver bullet at each other because it's the last remaining moral failing both can still agree is beyond the pale. Eventually, we're gonna roll our eyes at this too.

East asians tend to have more-neotonous features than other races which adds fuel to the pedophilia hysteria.

There is still a puritanical element in the US that permeates all parties that manifests into such situations as:

-German tourists perplexed as to why their toddler is not allowed to be naked on the beach

-Men prosecuted for having pictures of themselves naked as child

The word is really losing its weight when every other Reddit thread includes some variant of the statement "This nation is run by (a) pedophile(s)". Big win for horseshoe theory when basic-bitch redditors are unironically using an Alex Jones talking-point.

An interesting edge case is that of fictional child porn such as hand-drawn pornography of various disney princesses and other underage cartoon characters. This apparently is mostly accepted, I guess?

Also there is the classic "1000-year-old in the body of a child" character.

An interesting edge case is that of fictional child porn such as hand-drawn pornography of various disney princesses and other underage cartoon characters.

How old even is the Snorlax pokémon? And do depictions of sex acts with fictional animals count as bestiality?

Pokémon arguably are sapient, not bestial, as many canonically are able to talk.

Right but my question is how the judge is going to view the matter.

The beedrill queen's thoracic plates retracted, revealing millions of glistening eggs. She was two months old.

Welp, time to reset the sign: "It has been zero days since I last regretted being literate".

Messy culture war battlefields are always fun. As far as I can tell, there are at least the following factions involved:

  • Left-wing moralists who want to restrict sexualisation of women/"male coomer content" in general, and especially when it affirms numerical more-is-better specs like body proportion and breast size

  • More-is-better men (socially tend to be lower-class and thrown in the pit with the right wing?) who want big tits and think that every cm³ of lost breast volume in media is a conspiratorial attack by the aforementioned against them personally

  • Hard-progressive activists who think that it is morally imperative that they control the sociosexual development of children, in order to fix whatever aspects of reality don't agree with their ideals

  • Right-wing moralists who are afraid of the preceding, and hope that whipping up moral panic about pedophiles can help them build a stronger coalition against them

  • Animecels whose sociosexual development was anime set in Japanese high school settings, and who are therefore imprinted on the 14 year old phenotype (but fail to meet the definition of pedophiles because they are neither into real children nor into age/power differential dynamics)

It's not obvious what are the natural coalitions here! No two groups can make common cause without having to sacrifice something that is pretty dear to them.

On the object level, I am much more intrigued by the sequel trailer than I was by the original, both because the protagonist actually seems memorable in design (rather than being generic cookie-cutter K-pop plastic surgery bot) and because I like the Mamoru Oshii cyberpunk city setting a lot more than the original's knockoff NieR:Automata clanker desert. Hope they can ride the controversy to greater sales.

Are there no progressive sex-positives getting involved?

Sex-positive movement is for LGBTQ, fetish, ugly women, sex work, fats, abortion, and birth control.

It is not what it says on the label. It would not like "hot for teacher", gamer men into anime girls, or Amish families with 8 kids.

It is in favor of certain kinds of left-coded sexuality, not sex in general.

Perhaps an overlap is where they defend cartoon-porn. But this is because so much of it is LGBTQ or fetish. They would not like WWII soldiers with their pinups. Too close to supporting heterosexual fascism.

Even taking this as read, you might still expect male-to-female trans lesbians who like themselves a sexy video game protagonist, no? I had been reliably informed there were a lot of those in the gaming world.

It's hard to say, but my perception of those folks is that, for whatever reason, they prefer to see themselves in a video game as the protagonist, rather than to see sexy female protagonists who appeal to their male gaze. Could be cultural, could be psychological, could be just random chance, or could be nothing.

My perception is definitely that it's mostly cultural. There are severe underlying faultlines between the trans movement and the feminist movement, but most trans people still see themselves as allies to feminism, and they were trained to hate sexy stuff and hate themselves for being interested in it back when they still thought of themselves as men.

I’d say they only get involved in a culture war matter when anyone is questioning, ridiculing, criticizing or delegitimizing women’s sexual choices and behavior.

I’d say they only get involved in a culture war matter when anyone is questioning, ridiculing, criticizing or delegitimizing women’s sexual choices and behavior.

Agreed. As near as I can tell, progressivism is 100% a who/whom ideology.

For example, suppose an aspiring male actor alleges that he was sexually taken advantage of by a female casting director. Will progressives take the man's side in order to support the principle that these sorts of accusations should be taken seriously? Generally speaking, no. Generally speaking, the best progressives would do would be to remain silent.

Agreed. As near as I can tell, progressivism is 100% a who/whom ideology.

Perhaps the same could be said of all ideologies.

The thing that gets me, though, is that progressivism specifically is supposed to be not about that, because it's specifically supposed to be about progress (as the name might imply). Which means progressing away from the old, bad way of figuring things out based on tribalism and moralizing and such, and instead using our modern, enlightened tools to figure out what the best things are. Unfortunately, it seems like there are like 30 progressives who try to think like me and about a billion witches bitches tribalists who simply use the stated principles of progressivism to launder in their own tribal opinions as the Officially Good Beliefs, almost always without conscious intent or even awareness.

Perhaps the same could be said of all ideologies.

I certainly wouldn't say it about libertarianism. But I do think that if an ideology starts to gain power, it's going to be a magnet for psychopaths, narcissists, and various Machiavellian types. The kind of people who have a very strong who/whom orientation.

Which means progressing away from the old, bad way of figuring things out based on tribalism and moralizing and such, and instead using our modern, enlightened tools to figure out what the best things are.

Not only that, progressives are always going on about fairness, justice, tolerance, being against hate, and so on. When in practice they are extremely hateful, intolerant, unfair, and unjust. What other ideologies have practices which are so wildly at odds with their stated principles?

What other ideologies have practices which are so wildly at odds with their stated principles?

The groups progressives treat as boogeymen?

The groups progressives treat as boogeymen?

Well, what are the stated principles of National Socialism (more accurately, neo-Nazism?) Seems to me they are (1) white separatism; (2) white superiority; and (3) opposition to Jewish influence. And what are the practices of followers neo-Nazism? It's hard to say with absolute certainty since they have so little power, but it does seem that they oppose non-white immigration to Europe and the United States and they oppose Western support for Israel. And I am pretty confident that if (unfortunately) Neo-Nazis did get power, their practices would be pretty much in line with these principles.

Say what you will about neo-Nazism, but there doesn't seem to be a disconnect between their talk and their walk as there is with progressivism.

I'm not sure what your point is here, but to the extent you are simply asking a question in good faith, my answer is "no."

Edit: Just to be clear, I absolutely positively hate Nazis, including the ones who post on this discussion board. It's interesting that Nazis and Progressives/Bolsheviks/Whatever-you-want-to-call-them hate each other so much that it's easy to not fully appreciate just how horrible one of them is when one looks at the horrors of the other.

Tribalism is too baked into human psychology. You can taboo all the old tribal markers, but then people will just find more indirect, abstract, and novel markers to be tribal about even while earnestly believing themselves to be non-tribal. Tribalism is not optional. Its excesses can only be mitigated. It cannot be effectively mitigated by denying or hiding it, but only acknowledging and restraining.

That very well may be true. It seems to me that progressives ought to try to do actual credible scientific research to to figure that out, and, to whatever extent that's true, to use actual scientific tools to figure out how to structure society, systems, organizations, etc. to channel people's tribalism in productive or, at least least deleterious ways. Instead, most have been just embracing their own tribalism as well as ignorance while also destroying our very ability to do credible social science research.

All 5 of them?

I'm confused. Surely the sex-positive movement is a subset of the progressive movement? Maybe it's a generational thing? There's a lot of Tumblr discourse about young (I guess Gen Z?) progressives having sex-negative views.

Sex-positive feminism never extended all the way to accept male sexuality, it's this weird thing where it's empowering to be a sex worker but evil to be a client. There used to be non-feminist sex-positive progressives but they all disappeared when SJW/wokes took over 10+ years ago.

I'm still a feminist sex-positive progressive. There are dozens of us, dozens! Unfortunately, we're all in hiding, so perhaps it's accurate to say that we all disappeared when the SJW/wokes took over.

Identify as bisexual. Then you can come out of hiding and any SJW/woke who attacks you is engaged in biphobia. You don't need to actually sleep with someone of your own sex to be bisexual nowadays.

Unfortunately, that's not really an option for people who are bad at consciously lying, even before you take into account that my sex and race are sufficiently low status enough in the woke hierarchy to negate the positives of being bi. After all, the notion that "gay men are the whites of the LGBT community" has been around for at least as long as the term "woke" has been popular to describe this ideology, and bi men aren't too far off from that. And as much as I wish it were not so, my looks also are nowhere near sufficiently good enough to counteract all that, either.

Are they? I thought they mostly care for battles involving real people getting it on; defending East Asian coomer games would put them on the side of people they don't like against people they like, without advancing any cause that affects them directly.

The games are too mediocre to get all hett up about; the booba is bland and kind of booring unless you are a fully brain melted gooner, and the gameplay is 6/10 mid "We like Devil May Cry but all the buttons scared us :( so here is a game you can play with one hand."

There's a small faction of the tumblrite left that's willing to... 'defend coomers' is probably a strong word, but at least make allies of convenience with them. It tends to be very flaky around the more it involves sexualization of women and especially women-as-coomers-like, but it's there.

But they mostly fall into the hard-progressive activist section; they just have a broader understanding of the correct sociosexual development.

Perhaps some useful additional context: ShiftUp are also the developers of the gacha game Goddess of Victory: Nikke and that game has characters that I think could be argued are both children and sexualized. For example Alice or Liter.

On the main topic: I don't think it matters at all whether Evie looks particularly childlike or is particularly sexualized. She's not a real person and so her depiction and sexualization fail to have any of the features that make it bad when it's done to a real person. For any kind of depiction or action beyond a sexualized one I think most people understand this latter fact intuitively.

If you, as an individual, are aroused by a sexualized depiction of a minor then you may want to seek help from an appropriate therapist. But declaring, preemptively, that it is immoral to create fictionalized depictions because they might arouse pedophiles is insane.

A Tumblr post, amusingly, gets this right:

"I don't want to read this" is totally valid.

"This is disgusting to me" is totally valid.

"I don't want to read this because it is disgusting to me" is totally valid.

"I don't think anyone should be allowed to read or write this because it is disgusting to me" is authoritarian.

I've only quoted the top post for brevity but the whole thread I've linked is good, IMO.

could be argued are both children

With tits like that?

There is a whole sub-genre of this stuff of the form "character who is clearly meant to be a child but with large breasts."

According to some people's sense, if it's a character with a child's proportions, a child's mannerisms and a child's face... but with tits tacked on - it's a child with tits, not an adult.

Fair enough. I find it hard to judge proportions, faces and mannerisms from pictures of anime girls (maybe it's easier to tell in motion), but the tits seemed like a tell-tale sign of clearly-not-a-child-anymore. But I grant your point.

Anime includes features like large eyes and a large head proportional to the body that make people think child anyway just by the style, so that shouldn't count.

Either that, or it all counts, and as such all fans of sexualized anime are actually pedophiles.

Of course, vanishingly few sex-negative folks or "wokes" believe this, but, like basically all "woke" criticism of any media, it's a convenient tool to reach for when one wants to criticize some piece of media that they dislike in a way that appears to be based on anything other than arbitrary personal preference.

Arguably, this is the very phenomenon happening with Blood Rain, as Stellar Blade, like other East Asian semi-realistic video games such as Capcom's Resident Evil or Square Enix's Final Fantasy, uses a stylized anime-inspired visual style in terms of character design, rather than going for actual human-like realism. The first game actually featured a support character named Lily who actually looks very similar to Evie in terms of hair and facial features (some have speculated that Evie is the child of Eve and Lily, which wouldn't be impossible given the technology of the setting, but also, seems both way too on the nose in name and out of left field in the relationships) and was also commented on as appearing younger-looking in part due to the anime-inspired style.

In any of these kerfuffles no one mentions the players who are into the gooner bait but are actually underage themselves, I remember what it was like being in the same age range as these characters and watching anime/playing jap gooner bait, you better believe I was getting a hardon and had zero qualms about it.

That's one of the weird things, right? As a 15 year old boy, if you find an anime girl age 17 to he attractive, that's fine! But the character stays the same age, as you get older, but that doesn’t mean your tastes automatically change with it.

I used "boy" and "girl" but I'm pretty sure this is fairly gender neutral; there's no shortage of adult women writing fanfic about teen boys, to my understanding. Although I suppose that also gets to the visual vs literary debate: is hentai worse than explicit fanfic in this regard?

In any of these kerfuffles no one mentions the players who are into the gooner bait but are actually underage themselves

With a general assertion that "sexuality isn't for subhumans" (which is what we actually mean by "underage"), are you really that surprised nobody looks at what said subhumans are actually doing?

Nobody cares about children and teenagers beyond the fact the right to abuse them can be (and is) handed out as a political kickback.

So, you are presumably okay with people possessing and distributing actual CSAM?

  • -23

The reason why CSAM shouldn't be possessed or distributed is because its production is inherently harmful. Not because it's disgusting.

My sympathies lean toward the side of "a grid of pixels shouldn't be illegal", but with CSAM there is a problem: it is easy to make CSAM in third-world countries, so there is no way for the US government to actually shut down production short of using international law enforcement or military force.

That said, this is the same US government that kept military forces in Afghanistan for many years, spending huge sums of taxpayer money, without eradicating child sexual abuse in the country. So it would be somewhat hypocritical of it to go really hard after the already-produced CSAM based on such a justification as I gave above, given that this government had a chance to stop child sexual abuse in Afghanistan and didn't do it.

I said "my sympathies lean", and I should clarify: I am generally extremely pro free speech, but I can definitely imagine exceptions: the fabled nuclear codes, a recipe to create a bioweapon that would kill 99% of the world population Stephen King style, etc.

is because its production is inherently harmful

Tell that to the Snapchat users; I'm pretty sure they've generated 90 if not 99% of all material that counts as this.

I'm sure they screamed did not consent to their finger pressing the send button.

I gotta imagine you'd see a lot of arguments-

"It's disgusting," "making it is terrible," "having this exist encourages production, consumption, and interest," various religious and specific ethical motivations etc etc.

Production is bad is probably the most clear and obvious bad outcome but the vast majority of people would be against drawn or AI versions.

Production is bad is probably the most clear and obvious bad outcome but the vast majority of people would be against drawn or AI versions.

I've actually wondered about how people would feel about a government making an "authorized list" of confirmed AI-generated CSAM with no CSAM in the training data, that would be the only legal form of such content to own. Assuming that the mere consumption of CSAM doesn't encourage victimization of real children, this seems like the best all around compromise, if you can figure out how to distribute it in a way the government can't easily track.

If the government can easily track it, it just becomes a blackmailer's wet dream. Although, we're in an era where "they fabricated all of the evidence connecting me to this" is an increasingly plausible claim, considering where generative AI is.

I'm definitely not comfortable with AI content trained on actual cp. That feels like extending the abuse of the victim into eternity.

I am 100% against CSAM existing in any capacity, but your objection raises a question - is it about training data? Would an AGI that can act based off of extrapolation salve your objections?

I mean, personally I think porn of real people should simply be illegal (outside of private production and consumption i.e. it's okay to take naked pictures of your spouse and enjoy them).

But in terms of a compromise within our current legal and social frameworks, yes, I think it makes sense to allow for AI-generated content so long as it's not derived from actual CSAM. Not healthy for the user, but that occurs to me as their problem, and I have no reason to believe it would make them more likely to actually engage in abuse.

And then there's written or drawn erotica which should also -- again I say in compromise with the current framework -- be unconstrained IMO. The idea that it should be illegal to write about or draw... pretty much anything strikes me as ludicrous. Especially given the ambiguity (re: age, etc.) inherent in many such works.

Thank you for indulging my curiosity!

Mandatory abortions for women who rape boys when?

That's an argument for banning production, not distribution or possession.

As anyone with small children will tell you, you get more of of what you tolerate.

If you tolerate the distribution and possession of child porn you are going to get more child porn. You may claim that you do not endorse it's production, but you will be the person enabling and encouraging it.

I'm only against those last 2 to the extent that they provide incentive to production. To whatever extent that they don't (e.g. perhaps existing images that were pulled from some FBI evidence locker), it's ridiculous that possession or distribution would be illegal. Unfortunately, it's one of those legal fights that doesn't seem possible to win, though. It's also hard to parse out exactly how much the extents involved here are, and some actual studies and models might be valuable, but I don't know if such scientific research exists for this kind of material.

Some people argue that the original victim is re-victimized each time the media is seen; I find this ridiculous as well, as there's no magical link between the markings on paper or pixels on a screen and the original person from whom the light was reflected and captured by a camera. In terms of the harms to the person who consume such media, I believe each individual is responsible for the harm that comes about from their choice to consume whatever media. If we were in a situation where so many people eschewed such responsibility that it was causing societal problems, I could see the argument that being illiberal in this case is worth the tradeoffs, but I don't think we're there, and I'm skeptical that we'd get there.

That said, who knows how fast society will change in the near future thanks to AI accelerating everything, and short-form social media content causing massive amounts of distributed media production by children. It's not a ridiculous concern, but one that I still think is wrong.

The harm would be from knowing that there are people out there looking at, and pleasuring themselves to, images or videos of you being abused.

I'm only against those last 2 to the extent that they provide incentive to production. To whatever extent that they don't (e.g. perhaps existing images that were pulled from some FBI evidence locker), it's ridiculous that possession or distribution would be illegal.

"So long as nobody was killed when the gang broke into the house and robbed all the items, it's ridiculous that the fence be prosecuted!"

Trying to divide out "but I didn't produce this shit" from the rest of it is where we get our current legal system of plea deals, non-prosecution, and egregious offences going unpunished because legal technicality.

"No, I didn't produce it, so it should be legal for me to possess it". "No, I'm not the producer, just the distributor". But that still leaves a market for the product, and "I won't produce it but I'm happy to deal with as many producers as possible and distribute their wares for a cut of the profits" means you get more of the product.

Look at OnlyFans and how that started off (a platform for creators!) and how it has ended up (come pimp your stable of hos on here!)

Some people argue that the original victim is re-victimized each time the media is seen; I find this ridiculous as well, as there's no magical link between the markings on paper or pixels on a screen and the original person from whom the light was reflected and captured by a camera.

I hope this is tongue-in-cheek because if meant seriously, it's a lack of empathy and theory of mind that borders on the shocking. The original images of abuse are only pixels and marks on paper, there's no magical link between the recordings of me raping my five year old kid and the kid himself! C'mon, don't blur out the features of the kid in the photos used in the article, I wanna be able to imagine forcing my cock down his throat! There's no magical link! So there's no harm done! MAP rights when?

of me raping my five year old kid and the kid himself

C'mon, don't blur out the features of the kid in the photos used in the article, I wanna be able to imagine forcing my cock down his throat! There's no magical link! So there's no harm done! MAP rights when?

So is your imagined paragraph written from the perspective of the rapist parent, or some random person looking at the picture afterwards? The perpetrator, if he even needs the picture to keep the memory fresh, surely should have more problems than the blurred-out features; if you are in a position to force him to blur the pixels in every copy of the picture he has, you could just jail him for the act.

Now that we're down to logic-chopping and splitting hairs, I think I know enough of your position on child rape not to continue this argument.

More comments

; I find this ridiculous as well, as there's no magical link between the markings on paper or pixels on a screen and the original person from whom the light was reflected and captured by a camera.

You need the concept "unknowingly harmed". You also need to give up the idea that harming X involves an interaction with X.

It's pretty normal to ban distribution or possession to prevent production - look at ivory.

Also, it's pretty normal to treat something produced by serious enough harm to be somewhat tainted by that harm. Interest in the Benin Bronzes declined considerably as it became known that they were essentially made by the worst slavers in Africa, we don't particularly like dealing with the outputs of Nazi 'research' labs (such as they were), etc. etc. That by itself isn't usually considered enough to merit a ban by itself, but e.g. consumption of actual torture porn or gore stuff is both rare and heavily frowned upon even when that doesn't affect production.

Neither argument applies to fiction, though.

It's pretty normal to ban distribution or possession to prevent production - look at ivory.

I'm not familiar with countries that ban possession of ivory, although its sale is often illegal.

There's also cases of goods whose possession is legal but production and distribution is not (for example, Portuguese drug policy).

Interest in the Benin Bronzes declined considerably as it became known that they were essentially made by the worst slavers in Africa

I mean, surely people always knew that those people were slavers? It's not exactly a secret what they were up to.

The bronzes are very prominently displayed in the British Museum and Nigeria apparently wants them back. They seem fairly popular though not at an all time high of popularity. Of course, the Benin bronzes were only indirectly enabled by slaving, so it's not really the same as your other examples.

consumption of actual torture porn or gore stuff is both rare and heavily frowned upon even when that doesn't affect production.

Indeed, but the consumption of fictional sexualized depiction of minors is heavily frowned upon by the general public even though it's been normalized in certain toaster fucker parts of the internet.

Neither argument applies to fiction, though.

Sure, but there's other arguments that apply to fiction. Such as:

  • People who produce or consume fictional disgusting material may have something wrong with them and belong in an institution rather than among a community of like minded people

  • People who produce or consume fictional disgusting material may eventually move on to producing or consuming real disgusting material

Etc.

I'm not familiar with countries that ban possession of ivory, although its sale is often illegal.

You're usually banned from importing it, even when it belongs to you, which is sort of a compromise. There are nasty cases of hundred-year-old pianos being destroyed by having the ivory hacked off the keys, things like that.

I mean, surely people always knew that those people were slavers? It's not exactly a secret what they were up to.

There's people and people. In the UK, the pressure to repatriate the bronzes and the buzz around them came from the progressive crowd who I think were pretty surprised to learn the historical context (I personally didn't know until maybe 2021?) and the pressure to export seems to have dropped considerably. You're right it's not the same, and maybe I was muddying the waters, but I don't know that many torture porn cases so I was feeling out the area.

there's other arguments that apply to fiction.

There are, but they're very far off "you are literally watching with pleasure a terrible thing being done to a real person that actually happened". And consequently their force is hugely diminished. Masturbating to George Floyd being suffocated to death is not the same as reading a KKK fantasy novel, even one in which equally lurid things happen.

The argument that "People who produce or consume fictional disgusting material may eventually move on to producing or consuming real disgusting material" has been trotted out many times and tends to come off very badly. DnD didn't make people satanists, nor did Doom. Grand Theft Auto did not product a wave of, well, grand theft auto. Porn is blamed for lots of nasty new sexual behaviours - mostly choking - but the direct evidential link seems weak and not in the direction that is given (it's a girl-desired thing not a guy-desired thing).

Likewise "People who produce or consume fictional disgusting material may have something wrong with them and belong in an institution" generally doesn't pass the smell test, unless you're willing to lock many, many people into a mental home and you're confident that your definition of 'disgusting' is widely shared and not going to come back to bite you.

In practice, many people privately consider these arguments hackneyed and their force has been dropping through the last century. There will always be crusaders and busybodies but equally there's a reason why governments generally avoid going on loud crusades against immoral private sexual acts that aren't actually crimes. Such crusades aren't popular and the government knows half its MPs will become collateral damage.

There's people and people. In the UK, the pressure to repatriate the bronzes and the buzz around them came from the progressive crowd who I think were pretty surprised to learn the historical context (I personally didn't know until maybe 2021?) and the pressure to export seems to have dropped considerably. You're right it's not the same, and maybe I was muddying the waters, but I don't know that many torture porn cases so I was feeling out the area.

The pressure to return artifacts has declined because of Peak Woke, not because of the specific connection of the Benin Bronzes to slavery. The claim that the Bronzes belong in the British Museum as lawful trophies of a just war against slavery is mostly advanced as a piece of right-wing trolling, although I believe it unironically.

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DnD didn't make people satanists, nor did Doom. Grand Theft Auto did not product a wave of, well, grand theft auto. Porn is blamed for lots of nasty new sexual behaviours - mostly choking - but the direct evidential link seems weak and not in the direction that is given (it's a girl-desired thing not a guy-desired thing).

Perhaps it's my viewpoint from 2026, but, none of these seem as shocking or disgusting as sexualized depictions of children. It seems obviously false that there is no media you can consume habitually that has an effect on your behavior or beliefs. Ultimately that boils down to an argument against the existence of culture.

you think 10% of Japan and many, many teenage boys who like goth loli should be literally locked in a mental home.

Japan seems like a profoundly ill society, so I'm pretty comfortable biting that bullet.

In practice, many people privately consider these arguments hackneyed and their force has been dropping through the last century

Indeed, but most people still see consuming this stuff as disgusting and at the very least indicating people who shouldn't be alone with children, even if they don't think it should be literally illegal.

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Censorship is very dangerous and a very bright line needs to be drawn around any exceptions made to the general anti-censorship principle. Documentation of crimes in the real world is a much better place to draw this line than things like obscene subject matter or a prurient tone; there's much less room for slope-slipping and constant renegotiation of norms. (I would actually be in favor of much harsher treatment of the live action porn industry in general, though, for much the same reason - it's just a thin conceptual shell of "speech" over prostitution.)

There are arguments against that that are not primarily based on "it's disgusting to me", though of course the line is thin ("disgusting to me" is easily turned into a seemingly less-egotistical "I believe it damaging to the consumer's psyche/society" at no cost).

("disgusting to me" is easily turned into a seemingly less-egotistical "I believe it damaging to the consumer's psyche/society" at no cost).

While this is true, little-l liberalism has long believed that a certain amount of "harmless disgust" or "low-impact psychological damage" should be present in society.

There are some pretty gruesome horror movies out there, that would shock and dismay a lot of unprepared people. But instead of banning them, we trust that individual consumers will avoid things they think will make them unhappy.

How harmless/low-impact is it? The Montreal shooter clearly thought easy access to, and mass dissemination of, and mass consumption of, porn was not harmless.

The problem is the slippery slope, and that can't be simply shrugged off as "pfft, that's only a fallacy". Tolerance leads to pressure for tolerance of the more extreme, little by little, and then acceptance, and then celebration (look at Pride Month). I did find the outrage over "Pride has become too family-friendly and wholesome now! it's supposed to be kinky and obscene!" funny, however.

I'm seeing it in my own country right now with pressure to change elements of the safeguards around the limited form of abortion access we legalised six years ago. I'm not surprised by this, because I knew it would come, seeing the way things went in other countries and the open declaration by pro-abortion activists back then that this was just the beginning.

But this is how it happens: no, we don't approve of this thing, but it shouldn't be illegal, however we will put safeguards in place so it will go this far and no further. Time passes, it becomes an accepted thing, then the next move is "well do we really need this particular safeguard? it only hurts and doesn't help" and then bit by bit things get chipped away, people become accustomed to "it was always like this", so the old views on harm/impact are lost, and now there's a new "well this is okay, it's normal even, but that is not good" standard.

Then, in time, the "that's not good" becomes the pressure point for "we don't approve but it shouldn't be illegal".

Move the needle on "this is only fictional/only pixels on screen" and "of course most normal people won't even look at this stuff but if it keeps the real sickos from going out and committing offences then it's worth decriminalising it" and in time there will be the dares of teenage boys to "did you watch this baby-rape animatic? no? chicken!" and here we go again: "Dear Abby, my twelve year old son watched baby rape porn at a friend's house, how do I talk to him about this?"

However, liberalism only persists so long as "the people who can suffer from low-impact psychological damage should not be helped and to a point deserve it" does. Once that's gone, liberalism "degrades into" progressivism, where the damage goes from descriptive (something that happens to people) to prescriptive (something that should specifically be visited on the outgroup).

Wut?

"I don't think anyone should be allowed to read or write this because it is disgusting to me" is authoritarian.

This is in reference to the production of fiction.

Why is the line drawn at fiction?

Because characters in fiction aren't real? The thing that is bad about CSAM is the part where a person was abused to make it. There's no equivalent in fiction.

I see your point, but it's two-sided. The demands for representation in fiction and media, for example, are a counter to "it's only fiction, it won't change anything".

No, it won't make someone who has no attraction to fourteen year olds want to fuck a fourteen year old. But someone who does have the possibility of that? Reading about it can become its own form of addiction, like wanting more and more transgressive porn. And then fiction isn't enough any more, you want the real thing. And there's no easy way to tell, amongst a bunch of teens reading and writing NSFW fanfiction, who has the seeds of that which will develop into a problem later.

It's a bit like "why do you want a girlfriend, you can have porn?" Because porn isn't enough, people do want romantic partners if they can get them.

I do acknowledge it's tricky. I read horror fiction, and I don't want to mass-murder anyone or summon up demonic spirits or unleash mind-shattering Lovecraftian entities on the world, and someone saying "but there must be something wrong with you to read that kind of stuff" is annoying. On the other hand, getting taboos made acceptable under the guise of "it's only fiction" will also be used by those who really do want to fuck fourteen year olds, or six year olds, or consume imagery of small children being tortured and abused.

"It's only fiction" when someone likes that kind of thing does make our ancestral hackles rise, and maybe there's a good reason for it (see how the Saw franchise has devolved into horror porn for the sake of it, or any other long-running horror movie franchise). I thought the premise of the Saw movies from the start was disgusting, but hey, splatterpunk was also a thing way back and almost killed off horror fiction for good at the time because "how gross and disgusting can I go?" in the absence of anything else isn't good enough.

"I like reading and looking at images of small children being tortured and raped" may be fine because 'it's only fiction, I would never in reality', but still would you let that person babysit your six year old? Even if otherwise they're a great person and fun and smart?

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That's an argument against production, not consumption. In any case, it's easy enough to come up with harms from consumption of fictionalized sexualized children (see other responses in this thread).

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The non-wokes are upset because they wanted EVE, and Evie's assets are comparatively tame. And at least some of them (including Asmongold) agree she looks too young as well.

As best as I can tell, there's like 2 non-wokes complaining about Evie replacing Eve because she's got a more boyish style and attempting to manufacture consensus to the effect, and everyone else is happy to have another sexy and hyper-sexualized female protagonist in a AAA video game industry that has been leaning away from that. I'm a huge fan of the first game, and the Stellar Blade subreddit which I check pretty often certainly has been close to 100% positive.

Funniest part to me, though, has been the entirely predictable reaction by the "wokes" to memory-hole their reaction to Eve (only 2 years ago!), which had itself involved an attempt to memory-hole their reaction to 2B, which had itself involved an attempt to memory-hole their predecessors' reaction to Bayonetta.

In terms of Evie's looks, many people have pointed out that young women in their 20s or late teens who look like Evie aren't all that uncommon in Korea and other East Asian countries, with women in their 30s and 40s looking like that not being unicorns either. I've seen at least a couple of cosplayers dress themselves up to look like her with convincingly similar facial features, though with filters and AI, it's hard to say how real those are.

Funniest part to me, though, has been the entirely predictable reaction by the "wokes" to memory-hole their reaction to Eve (only 2 years ago!), which had itself involved an attempt to memory-hole their reaction to 2B, which had itself involved an attempt to memory-hole their predecessors' reaction to Bayonetta.

Some of this could be because it isn't always the same people complaining each time. So instead of "memory holing", it's more like one group of people complains at time X, and another group of people who always liked the thing happening at time X complain at time Y.

I'm not saying there has never been an individual who made themselves of their close associates into hypocrites on this count, but I would imagine if you could have the god's eye view of social media, there would be a lot less hypocricy here than you'd think.

Could be, but it's not about the hypocrisy. It's the fact that the exact same arguments, principles, and underlying ideology are invoked each time. It's a reflection of the fact that the arguments are disingenuous, because they're fundamentally based on unfalsifiable faith-based claims that can be picked up when someone dislikes something and then dropped when time proves something popular and well-liked.

That east asian women switch from teen to grandma with nothing in between has been meme forever.

My previous opinion still holds. Expressed well by the top YouTube comment (at the time of posting): “Don't bend the knee to an internet moral police weirdo.”

I don’t entirely know why, but when I see a game like this, even though I’m not planning to play it, I feel a strong urge to defend it. It’s not pedophilia: it also happens when I see some weird furry game, or movie like “Human Centipede” or “Martyrs”, or some edgy online discussion forum or post (hence why I’m here). It’s not that I like or agree with any of these. But somehow I feel defending them protects the art that I do like and opinions I hold, which I believe most people today wouldn’t even consider controversial (although probably “weird”).

An explanation that I gestured to in the last comment: I can’t know how other people feel about my opinions without risking myself, and I’d certainly be condemned in more puritan times, which moral policing can lead to. But this is the slippery slope fallacy and thus I consider it a logically bad defense: it’s analogous to “I wish people wouldn’t get arrested for murder, because I (a non-murderer) don’t want the vague risk of being wrongly arrested”. Although it does apply to enforcement infrastructure (analogous to “I wish mass surveillance wasn't built to arrest murderers, because now it can be used by brutal totalitarians to arrest passive dissenters”; we can have cops and reduce most murders without privacy-crippling mass surveillance).

A better defense (IMO) for radical speech, is that even overall “bad” speech has some “good” parts, and you need those to prevent stagnation and decay (like inbreeding). For example, this site has a lot of opinions I disagree with, but occasionally I discover some important fact or argument I didn’t notice before, which aligns with my values (changing my object-level, like policy, opinion). I think (an opinion that’s becoming more common) woke’s rejection of uncomfortable speech has directly led to its groupthink (finding uncomfortable then rejecting milder and milder speech) and downfall. Or back to art, some great works contain vague pedophilia (or other edgy themes), like End of Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain; these have directly inspired further great works that don’t contain the edgy themes, and I doubt we’d have the derivatives or anything matching their quality (from the perspective of anyone with any taste), without allowing the originals or something matching their edginess.

But somehow I feel defending them protects the art that I do like and opinions I hold

I'm glad we can say the quiet part out loud now. I'll go further, I'm much more petty and partisan about this. I'm inclined to defend what the wokes outrage against. I'd be perfectly fine with conservatives censoring homosexuality in television. Wokes rail against male gaze on principle. But they are perfectly capable of arresting the slippery slope short of censoring female gaze/gay oriented media. I don’t want to cede the rhetorical terrain or adopt their framework. Even when they latch onto real issues, like domestic violence or sexual assault, I’m deeply suspicious of letting them set the terms. Their track record shows they weaponise these issues as cudgels against outgroups. If someone is especially invested in race riots and sexual violence, more often than not, you'd be right to suspect their real priority is narrative control and status enforcement against whites and men. I think they're perfectly aware of this too, wokes rarely let you discuss men's issues without extracting ritual deference to feminism first. And why they breathlessly defended Amber Heard, because even if they can intellectually acknowledge the veracity of the verdictv, "women never lie about DV/SA" is just a flag to be defended at all costs.

Wokes rail against male gaze on principle.

And that principle is (apparently) men are sh*tty and must be punished and humiliated.

So yeah, to borrow from the Wokies' rhetoric, making concessions to them is like making concessions to Nazis.

The censorship problem is "how far do we go, or where do we draw the limit?" Even for the anti-censorship side, there's the problem of "some stuff is so beyond the pale that everyone agrees it should not be permitted", but where do you draw the line? People like to mock the judge who said "I know obscenity when I see it" but when you try to draw up rules, it's very difficult.

"Okay, we have to tolerate some stuff even if we don't like it ourselves". Sure, I agree. But sooner or later we land in the quagmire of "This is degenerate trash, do I have to defend this?" and maybe the answer is "yes, because the same rights apply to everyone, even the horrible people".

But then we sink deeper into the quagmire, because look at human nature. "It's only a drawing, it's only fiction, it's only AI-generated imagery of vore or guro or whatever" may be tolerated, but it won't stop there. "Why is it okay if it's a drawing but not a photo?" becomes "Why is it okay if it's AI-generated photo but not a real photo?"

It's about harm? It's about consent? It's okay, the legal age of consent in this country is twelve, so nothing illegal was done. The kid consented! (Their poor family sold them* to the abuser for a couple of thousand in local currency). The guy agreed I could eat his corpse!

I have no faith in shining human nature or at hard limits holding forever. What was formerly considered unthinkable perversion has now become accepted commonplace normality - look at blow jobs, for instance. What makes us think that in a future period, some form of paedophilia (true paedophilia, not "she was seventeen and three-quarters") won't become acceptable? "Oh well twelve year olds are mature enough nowadays to make up their own minds if they want to fuck a forty year old man or woman. After all, in ancient times, twelve year old girls were legal marriage age in Rome, but never will we give in on six year olds!"

And even twelve is not true paedophilia by strict definition, since that is puberty and true paedophilia is pre-pubertal. So "twelve is fine, ten is not" is the new hard limit, but wait a little longer and that limit, too, will soften.

His horrific introduction to the insidious world of pedophilia dated back to 2005 when his Russian mother sold him for $8,000 to a member of Boy Lovers – a sophisticated global network of men whose sexual preference are boys aged between six and eight years old.

The boy was “adopted” by American Mark J Newton who lived in Brisbane and Cairns with his Australian boyfriend, Peter Truong.

Such was the extent of the abuse, the boy, who will be called Adam for legal reasons, grew up believing the abuse and exploitation was a natural part of his daily existence.

Wokes rail against male gaze on principle. But they are perfectly capable of arresting the slippery slope short of censoring female gaze/gay oriented media...Even when they latch onto real issues, like domestic violence or sexual assault, I’m deeply suspicious of letting them set the terms...

I agree, but note this also involves many conservatives: I'm suspicious of anyone too passionate about censorship.

And the arguments for even mild censorship are weak. For example, censoring hardcore porn may slightly reduce domestic violence, but I'd prefer ways that don't restrict stable men, because there are downsides (even to men who don't prefer hardcore porn, as explained in GP). I'm sure everyone has some interest or characteristic (e.g. stereotype) that, if restricted, would reduce some kind of harm; so fairly implementing every restriction "for the greater good" restricts everyone, a nanny-state dystopia.

I'd be perfectly fine with conservatives censoring homosexuality in television.

I disagree. Cable is dying, so television amounts to YouTube, Netflix, and every alternative; the power to censor anything more than realistic CSAM and government secrets from all of these would surely be abused (already DMCA is abused by false takedowns). And it may seem like a small consolation, but I'm sure there's some quality in gay porn that inspires better straight media; for example, a wholesome display of gay affection may be reused in a wholesome display of platonic or heterosexual romantic affection.

Furthermore, nobody can deny that objectively gayness exists. Related, I object to completely censoring homosexuality from children any more than heterosexuality: that means at minimum, they should be told in sex-ed that it exists and it's normal for some people to feel it. Because like it or not, some people are intrinsically gay, and trying to hide gayness from them invariably ends up hurting everyone involved: see those who come out in the most repressive communities, knowing their formerly-generous family will now try to kill them, uplifting and threatening their entire life, just to have consensual sex with another adult (or similarly-aged teenager under Romeo and Juliet morality).

However, I strongly believe that, to a reasonable extent, people should have the right not to see and hear media they don't like, and children should be barred from inappropriate (including sexual) media as much as possible without compromising privacy. This means that (E: children only if it’s too sexual for their age, same as hetero) and adults who don't want to be exposed to homosexuality must endure sex-ed and plain "gay XYZ" advertisements, but beyond that, should have technology to block it, and a distributor intentionally circumventing this technology should be illegal. Offline, when mutual coexistence is impossible, laws and government should seek separation: for example, a gay culture growing in a deeply Christian community should (as it naturally will) be coerced to relocate if there's anywhere else (and vice versa). Likewise, graphic violence, porn, etc. should be allowed, but only distributed to those who present themselves as of-age and actively seeking it.

Related, I object to completely censoring homosexuality from children any more than heterosexuality: that means at minimum, they should be told in sex-ed that it exists and it's normal for some people to feel it.

What does this accomplish? If they're gay, they'll figure it out, as gay people have been figuring out for all of history. They don't need to be told. Especially in 2026.

The political cost of this immense, as it pisses of conservatives, and it accomplishes nothing.

This is net downvoted (not by me) but I think you make a good point

Yes, needlessly pissing off conservatives for zero benefit is a favourite pastime of the modern LGBT movement. See also: drag queen story hour. I would also add trans people in prisons and sports, though those are more a case of benefits existing but not outweighing the costs, as opposed to drag queen story hour and your proposed discussion of homosexuality in sex ed, where the benefits are not close, but exactly equal to, zero.

The downvotes may be from people who want conservatives to be pissed off because it makes it easier for them to win. An LGBT movement that picks its battles better would certainly accomplish more.

the power to censor anything more than realistic CSAM and government secrets from all of these would surely be abused

I'll admit I'm being petty here, and I wouldn't have taken this stance 10 years ago. But the current censorship regime is not neutral. Wokes have spent years freely injecting female and gay-oriented content everywhere while selectively pozzing traditionally straight male spaces. Any potential abuse would likely continue flowing in the same direction.

Because like it or not, some people are intrinsically gay

I'll agree to disagree on education, though if my kid came out as gay I’d probably accept it simply because there aren’t better alternatives. I’m not religious, but I still dislike LGBT while acknowledging the underlying reality that they cannot change who they are. If reliable prenatal testing existed that could detect it, I would abort.

My main contention is that straight male oriented media should be completely off-zone for any kind of woke-washing. This means blockbuster films and AAA video games should be allowed to exclusively pander to straight men without any concessions to women or LGBT. And if this happens through the way of censorship, I wouldn't complain. Consider the backlash ShiftUp faced in Korea because Nikke featured an artwork where the placement of a female's hand somewhat resembled the small penis gesture. Objectively, it's such a ridiculous reach and you can't see it even if you squint extra hard. But as a partisan, I'm happy to see a company signal boosting against misandry after 10 years of unabashed anti-male messaging in western culture.

blockbuster films and AAA video games should be allowed to exclusively pander to straight men without any concessions to women or LGBT

Agreed

I'm happy to see a company signal boosting against misandry after 10 years of unabashed anti-male messaging in western culture.

Acceptable

And if this happens through the way of censorship

I don't think it really will, and it will have a slight opposite effect: the people pushing censorship don't care about free expression and vice versa, so if you censor their side, they will only escalate. I would gladly accept a truce where every art I like is allowed and every art I dislike is also allowed, but I already don't care about the latter. The people who care enough about offensive art to implement censorship, if they have any logic to their thinking, know it will be used against their art; they choose censorship over expression.

I acknowledge, one way censorship does reduce other censorship, is by getting bystanders to notice it used against the other side (which they already don't see), when it's used against their side, so they push back on all of it. So, maybe.

But I think promoting expression is better: you can alternatively (or both, but you only have finite resources) get bystanders to notice by creating media they like that the censors (whose tolerance is always lower than the bystanders') will target. And that has the intrinsic benefit of creating good art, and doesn't have the drawback of enraging the censors (as much) or creating censorship infrastructure (which makes it easier for anyone to censor).

My main contention is that straight male oriented media should be completely off-zone for any kind of woke-washing. This means blockbuster films and AAA video games should be allowed to exclusively pander to straight men without any concessions to women or LGBT.

I largely agree. But, devil's advocate: adding a romance subplot to an otherwise male-centric IP is (was?) a common way to appeal to women (e.g. Han/Leia in Star Wars). Allowed?

Well, it overlaps with Hero gets the Girl (even if THE hero is Luke) part of the male fantasy of growing into status and responsibility. But if you want the female romcom audience to show up, it'll have to be "soap drama wearing Star Wars skinsuit", like Superman & Lois.

Nikke featured an artwork where the placement of a female's hand somewhat resembled the small penis gesture

My understanding is that this relates to a Korea-specific moral panic over penis length, rather than being applicable to gender politics more generally. The other key difference with Korea is that the sex (not gender) wars being actively fought on both sides is comfortably inside the Overton window.

A better defense (IMO) for radical speech, is that even overall “bad” speech has some “good” parts, and you need those to prevent stagnation and decay (like inbreeding). For example, this site has a lot of opinions I disagree with, but occasionally I discover some important fact or argument I didn’t notice before, which aligns with my values (changing my object-level, like policy, opinion).

I agree with this, but also, the fact that you're presenting this at the end of your comment as some alternative or niche defense of free speech in part because the generic "pro-free speech" American normie wouldn't automatically recognize it makes me pretty depressed and reinforces my pessimism about the state of ideological/political discourse in America. When I was growing up in the 90s-early-00s going to hyper-blue/Dem/progressive schools in hyper-blue/Dem/progressive areas of America, this very point was taught to us as one of the - if not the - primary bases for supporting free speech. Literally everyone is biased, literally everyone has blind spots, and so the only way to avoid following biases down a cliff or being crushed by a steamroller coming in from our blind spot is to have many diverse people with diverse perspectives and diverse biases and blind spots be free to speak their opinion without fear of retribution merely for the contents of their opinions, to better mitigate our biases and cover our blind spots. Even so, it was clear that it would never be truly perfect, that it was just the least-worst option. This is also one of the bases of the scientific method and peer review. The thought that the very hyper-blue/Dems/progressives that championed this would turn out to be its most effective killers never occurred to me as a child or even as a very young adult, though by the time I was in my late 20s, it almost flipped to being almost obvious.

Now, there are many failures that led to this happening, but one thing I've noticed is that a lot of people seem to refuse to think recursively. In terms of free speech, we know for a fact that we're all, individually, biased; as such, if we are to judge what sorts of opinions are "within the bounds of free speech" and which opinions aren't, we will helplessly, inevitably, gratuitously, and likely moralistically, falsely judge opinions that we are biased against as being out of bounds, even though, in fact, they are within bounds. As such, no individual or even particular group of individuals can be trusted to make that kind of judgment call. This is why I want opinions that I personally find hateful, evil, pathetic, and even harmful to be spread openly and without any fear by the genuine opinion-holders. The positive contribution to dialogue and society at large comes from the very fact that I and people like me can't read their opinions without shaking and having to suppress our urge to shut them up.

Another aspect is the psychological finding* that fans of teams tend to judge even playing fields as being biased against them, and ones that are biased in favor of their team as being even. As such, if I genuinely want an even playing field, I must seek a playing field that appears biased against my side. This is one reason why I try (try - I'm imperfect) to steelman and to privilege opinions from people who I viscerally or Pavlovianly find, again, hateful, evil, pathetic, harmful, etc., and believe it's the responsibility of anyone who wants to get at truth to do something similar. Refusing to do such on the basis that it's hard or doesn't feel good makes one little better than a blind partisan. I must admit, I'm probably a blind partisan due to cowardice in most contexts.

* The replication crisis does put question to this, but in my biased mind, I believe that this would be one of those findings that would actually come out to be true or true enough if, in the future, psychology researchers were able to gain enough credibility to conclude such a thing from their research.

I also remember growing up in the 2000s being taught and hearing most people defend near-unconditional free speech (except government secrets, immediate threats, etc.). Maybe that’s why I find it particularly important, and strange when it’s criticized.

A report aggregating polls on free speech from 2021 suggests:

  • Support for “people can say what they want” is still generally high in most nations (94% overall). Support to explicitly allow offending minorities and religions is much lower (an embarrassing example of the framing effect), but still 66% and 78% in the US

  • From 2015 (notably, before Trump) to 2021, support generally hasn’t decreased globally, but somewhat in the US and some other Western nations

  • “In the US, young people, women, the less educated, and Biden voters are generally more restrictive regarding free speech” - young people is particularly worrying

Maybe they think people should be allowed to say what they want because they don't think people should be allowed to want to say offensive things.

Yeah, "you can say what you want; the crime is not saying it but that you wanted to say that sort of thing" feels like it comes rather close to the revealed preferences there, what with people trying to dig up evidence of secret beliefs with the same vigour as recording taboo speech.

I agree with much of your comment, although I question your dismissal of slippery slope arguments as intrinsically fallacious.

The slippery slope argument works against any good policy, because it can be framed as going in the right direction, but extrapolated, far off into the wrong direction.

Extreme example: “we should feed malnourished children” can be extrapolated to “we should significantly overfeed malnourished children”.

It’s a meaningful argument against anything that takes significant time and effort, because then it’s a buffer against a malicious group (which occasionally has power regardless of your ideology, and includes a criminal who temporarily breaks into the the security room).

But in particular, trying to prevent the Overton Window from shifting in the right direction backfires: people discover obvious conclusions on their own (if they’re outside the window they’ll just keep quiet), so if you oppose obvious conclusions, their priors will shift away from you and towards any opponent pushing a more radical conclusion.

There is no "steelman" for pedophilia, unlike for racism (freedom of association), sexism (traditional gender roles), and homophobia (traditional sexual morality). There's no virtuous principle or sympathetic situation that causes people to think "hmm, maybe sex with kids isn't so black and white." So I expect the taboo to hold indefinitely barring a radical shift in the legal and social understanding of what childhood is and what children are.

As for the sequel's main character -- look, I grew up on early chan imageboards and the unfiltered early 2000s internet so I have a pretty high tolerance and probably a quite warped sense of what's within the bounds of good taste -- but even in my opinion, that's a 7 year old's face on a young woman's body. That's bad enough, but all the exploitative and opportunistic camera angels make it uncanny and perverse. I probably wouldn't play it unless they aged her up at least to adolescence.

EDIT: I'm not talking about the SJW version of "pedophilia" meaning attraction to women under 30. And yes I'm aware that people online like to motte and bailey the term in bad faith. I don't have any problem with people playing this or making this game, just saying it's not for me.

There is no "steelman" for pedophilia, unlike for racism (freedom of association), sexism (traditional gender roles), and homophobia (traditional sexual morality).

True, which means one merely needs to arbitrarily stretch the definition of pedophilia if one is lacking for rhetorical cudgels to beat the outgroup over the head with. The temptation to wield the last remaining Power Word of the discourse is irresistible, and only grows as the supply of still effective Power Words steadily dwindles. As previously discussed, the headlong rush down the euphemism treadmill will continue until morale improves P-word potency degrades. Sexual taboos are definitely not exempted from this, cf. the meaning of "sexual harassment" going from grabbing em by the pussy to ending up on the wrong side of the Human Resources comic. Mental gymnastics regarding "pedophilia" are already in the water supply too, she was 17y364d old you sick fuck, if you like father/daughter dynamics you are a pedo, child vs. child (Japan), etc.

look, I grew up on early chan imageboards and the unfiltered early 2000s internet so I have a pretty high tolerance and probably a quite warped sense of what's within the bounds of good taste

AFAIK even Nikke for all its overt horniness plays relatively safe around lolis/hebes, the most they have is like Liberalio?, though I'm not that well acquainted with Nikke and there may be more coomer skins. But in any case you don't even have to reach very far back for examples, just imagine something like Shuten-Douji hitting the internet in current_year. I honestly have a very strong vibe-feel that the hysteria around virtual underage females (in gaming at least) is a very recent phenomenon, dare I say even manufactured - people used to just... not really care?, and now even on 4chan you see regular shitstorms on the topic (though that is more an indictment of modern 4chan) - but I have no pwoofs and can't really put my finger on it.

There's are a lot more baileys out there than the "women under 30" one, including both ones farmed by the left-leaning and the right-leaning. The motte, as I understand, is "legal adult literally having sex with a prepubescent child". Baileys include e.g. adults fantasising about doing this to a child (imagined or real), but not physically doing it; older legally underage individuals; underage individuals having sex with each other rather than adults; adults fantasising about the latter ("I wish I could have acted on my crush on Stacy in seventh grade"). For each of those, it is in fact not hard to come up with virtuous principles and sympathetic situations.

that's a 7 year old's face on a young woman's body.

The more I read this the more I'm convinced nobody saying this has seen an actual kid in many, many years. (Or they have, but were trying so hard not to crimethink that they didn't actually perceive them.) If I didn't know any better I'd say it's something puberty does to you, but I actually think it's in-built preference. Or maybe you're old enough that even young adults have started to look like kids (something else I've heard people say- never sure if they're serious).

Actually, there's a better and more recent example of this about Diana [from Pragmata], whose character design is actually trying to be a kid (with the associated and predictable discourse about how transparently obvious it was that whoever was complaining definitely wanted to fuck her, lmao this was Harmful and Bad). She isn't really "sexualized" in the game outside of maybe that one DLC outfit (critics remain correct that the coat's cheating her age in the downwards direction; she can be as curvy or not curvy as you imagine under there, the mechanic outfit just makes it obvious); this protagonist is pretty obviously fully grown, which you can see clearly at 2:47-2:48 in the trailer.

The most kid-like her face gets is the final frame at 2:50 (you'll have to go frame by frame for it), and note that she's slightly looking up in that frame (reducing the apparent length of her face) and taking a "pose" that minimizes the shape of her face more generally. If that shape was the default, the argument would maybe be more valid, but everywhere else you see her face it's adult-length (and comes to a finer point typical for adults), so...

But, I dunno. Maybe I'm completely miscalibrated in terms of what a kid actually looks like- I'm expecting a round/truncated face on top of a body with relatively straight lines up and down. But then again, I've also noticed people are just really bad at guessing ages, even those that should by all rights know better, so...

It’s literally just the very first shot, I think it primed people

The more I read this the more I'm convinced nobody saying this has seen an actual kid in many, many years. (Or they have, but were trying so hard not to crimethink that they didn't actually perceive them.)

This is hardly surprising. In a demographically imploding and atomized society, children are scarce and not present in many social locations, and couples with small children normally interact with one another and not with singles.

I think the first face reveal bit she looks underaged, the third-person model looks generic young-but-legal anime and the other cinematics look a tad young but nothing crazy.

Or maybe you're old enough that even young adults have started to look like kids (something else I've heard people say- never sure if they're serious).

It happens, although they don't look like literal prepubescent children. It's more that they look under-cooked and could use more time in the cloning tank to fully finish.

There is an alternative steelman of homophobia based on refusing to memory hole the AIDS crisis.

First, the AIDS crisis made every-one notice that homosexuality includes both Love is love nest builders and bath-house high scorers. That matters because lots of people go along with gay lib on paradigm of Love is love nest builders. Noticing forces a rethink.

That rethink may include a father deciding

It is OK if my fine young son turns out gay and builds a nest with the man he loves. It is not OK if he gets sucked into the bath house scene, gets trains run on him, and dies young when antibiotic resistant syphilis turns up. Let us have common sense gay control.
The AIDS crisis had libertarians and gay friendly people saying "Unholy shit, that is a lot of sodomy!"

Gay men are degenerate sex fiends, but that's because they're men, not because they're gay. Straight men would be elated to have as much sex as gay men are having; they are prevented from doing so by women, who are generally much less interested in sex.

(Obviously not all gay men, not all straight men, not all women. But you get the point.)

The AIDS crisis had libertarians and gay friendly people saying "Unholy shit, that is a lot of sodomy!"

Also the amount of gays that did not (and still don't, though anti-retrovirals have changed this somewhat) care about having and/or spreading AIDS gave and still gives a lot of people pause.

The "standard fuck party" clip from this documentary about bugchasing still makes the rounds on /pol/ from time to time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(2003_film)

Worth looking up the clip, it doesn't show any actual sex, it's some middle-aged gay guy giving a tour of the house where he hosts gay orgies. One of the other guys in the video, who is visibly very sickly, talks about how he doesn't care about being sick or potentially spreading it, he just wants to have fun.

I realize that "not all gay people" are like that, but given the massive amount of gays that do engage in such behaviors I think homophobia can be completely justified. But like you said, the "We just want to get married and live like normal people!" gays are carrying water for their hedonistic fellow gays. It also doesn't help when news stories of the "nest builder" gays being pedophile rapists come out, like this disgusting example:

https://au.news.yahoo.com/qld-boys-horror-raised-global-075915383.html

And the (now deleted) article titled "Two Dads are Better Than One" about the same gay couple adopting a kid:

https://static.life.ru/posts/2013/07/115738/Snimok_ekrana_2013-07-01_v_12.40.27.png

Edit: BONUS ROUND, turns out the female journalist that wrote the puff piece about the gay pedophile couple wrote a response to the controversy. Accountability is nowhere to be found, but getting mad at American conservatives is! https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-10/gorman-second-thoughts/4809582

What kind of accountability do you expect? She had no way of knowing. Unless you assume all gay men are paedophiles, which is blatantly false. Nearly all children raised by gay couples experience no sexual abuse. These cases are vanishingly rare.

I have a "want to get married and live like normal people!" gay brother, and even before he came out to me, the people who reliably made my skin crawl were the moralizers, the ones who can't watch someone live an alternative lifestyle without reaching for the pulpit. That impulse disturbs me more than anything happening behind the bush.

And yes, there are millions of gay men getting their backs blown out and gagging on cock behind that bush, and I seem to know half of them. That's what happens when you spend a questionable amount of time in gay spaces because the conversation is genuinely good (and the drinks are cheap). I'll keep it simple. When two consenting adults do something gross in a way that touches only the two of them, the harm doesn't fuck you in the ass or to the kid down the street. When their lifestyle does turn harmful, the fallout lands almost entirely on the people who opted in. I have zero appetite for assless chaps or golden showers. As long as nobody touches me up, which has never happened because I'd sock them, it stays squarely none of my business.

I'll turn my gaze to the strongest version of the other side, because I'm an even handed and bored person. Bugchasing is "real". The documentary exists. The visibly sick guy saying he doesn't care if he spreads it exists. The tail of the distribution is not empty.

There. Done being even handed. The "standard fuck party" clip recirculates on /pol/ for the same reason 2003 Rolling Stone "Bug Chasers" article went viral. It happened to be lurid, enraging, and claimed bugchasing accounted for up to a quarter of new HIV infections among gay men. That figure was downstream of a single source and fell apart on contact with reality, in part because Freeman had casually reclassified every barebacker as a bugchaser regardless of intent. When researchers actually combed profiles on a bareback-centric site, the share of HIV-positive men actually trying to infect partners came out around 1 percent. Most self-described "bugchasers" were roleplaying a fantasy they never acted on. Your feed is tuned to churn up that 1 percent because it enrages you, which means the sample is poisoned before you ever start counting. Base rates people. Look them up.

The most questionable things get signal-boosted to awareness. That is how the internet works. Nobody forwards clips of a gay accountant making lasagne for his husband, two mildly overweight lesbians arguing over oat milk, or some HIV-positive man taking his ART, remaining undetectable, and living a life so boring it would put /pol/ into a coma. The transgressive, and morally alarming material travels. Normality is busy tying laces. You can build an entire worldview out of the most alarming 0.1% of a group, but at that point you've given up on sociology. You've ended up producing pornography for your prejudices. And whoever enjoys that hobby should take up yoga and go fuck themselves.

My own anec-data, for whatever an n-of-my-social-graph is worth? I have the ethnographic essays, and after snowball sampling through the gay men I actually know, nobody could name a living bugchaser. Only the gray-haired ones remembered a few, and those few were dead. AIDS, obviously.

The calculus of harm has gone to bed, while some of the panic remains like a bad hangover from 2003. A virally suppressed person on antiretrovirals transmits HIV to sexual partners at a measured rate of zero. Howdy, PARTNER: we've logged tens of thousands of condomless acts between serodiscordant couples and recorded not one linked transmission when the positive partner was suppressed. "Undetectable equals untransmittable" is the CDC's official position, and that happens to be backed by the largest prospective evidence we have. Is there any problem better drugs can't cure?

Sigh. I really can't spare more effort for the old "some members of group X do something disgusting, therefore contempt for all of X is warranted." Run it against any large population and watch it generate nonsense. The worst 1 percent of evangelicals, of soldiers, of parents, of whatever demographic you happen to belong to, or dislike. That's where the ruin lies.

So sure, go off, kings (or queens) who disagree. I've made my peace with being one of the rare freaks in this thread who is actually open-minded and willing live, let other people live, or die.

When researchers actually combed profiles on a bareback-centric site, the share of HIV-positive men actually trying to infect partners came out around 1 percent.

What is the practical difference between engaging in loads of casual homo sex and rejecting condom use because you’re sticking to the principle of not lowering yourself to such a laughable lame-ass normie norm as a proud gay man, and engaging in loads of casual homo sex and rejecting condom use because you’re a perverted psycho intending to infect other men with venereal diseases? Because I imagine the former practice is much, much more widespread than the latter.

The former ends up as serosorting, either because people avoid serodiscordant pairings or everyone who doesn’t ends up HIV positive, and either form is compatible with enough ART compliance to drastically reduce the threat of new infections, even if out of survival than for any moral cause.

It’s definitely not good, both in the obvious ways and in some less obvious ones (mixing multiple strains of HIV and other STDs is a bad idea).

But actively seeking to cause or receive new infections, by tautology, will mitigate at least some of those countervailing physics. While the objections to bugchasing/giftgiving are more focused on the moral aspect — and it is a moral abomination — the pragmatic side of things does exist and probably takes more of the weight if you look at it unblinkered.

Normality is busy tying laces.

The calculus of harm has gone to bed

Godammit, dude.

Please see my reply to George.

Normality is busy tying laces.

I know you'll be annoyed to read this.

Back, say, as little as three years ago, I might have read this short, evocative metaphor placed among longer sentences and thought it was an interesting image. Now--and I am not entirely sure why--it reminds me of LLM output. Which is not to say I'm pointing a finger at you. Rather, this is what flags (to me) writing as LLM these days. Something about it. Like the calibration "write with style and a touch of wry humor." I think that perhaps for some of us, if we are to write in the age of LLMs but distinguish our own writing from output, we are going to have to purposely start not writing like they do. I'd feel happier if you said this actually was an LLM tweak to your own original passage.

To your point: For about a decade due to circumstances somewhat outside my control I hung out socially almost completely with either gay men or lesbians or what we used to call fag hags (as far as I know this is a term coined by gay men.) I saw all types, I was youngish and a pretty boy, and I was often plied with booze and told, as you say you've been told, that I was really a bit gay myself, wasn't I?

I wasn't. Nor was I ever curious enough to test the waters, as it were. But it was a gay gay gay gay world, and mostly not pretty. I'm not even going to go into it. You know what I'm talking about. I would take issue with your comment in another reply actually, that straight men don't engage constantly in illicit sex because they can't. Yes, some would, and I know them. I wouldn't, could have (perhaps even still could) and haven't, and even for those who might say "yes you have" I'd counter not nearly to the same degree as the gay dudes I've known who have had triple or more digit partners. There's something else going on. I could be wrong of course.

I am, in fact, annoyed to read this. But only slightly, and neither of us need to lose sleep over it. That sentence is, unfortunately or fortunately, entirely human written. With the thumbs I've been twiddling. There are only so many ways to rephrase or repurpose "A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.”—Mark Twain. That em-dash being part of the Google search snippet I've snipped and pasted.

I suppose you must have been prettier or more twink-passing than me, because I can't say I've been plied with booze on a regular basis. Not that I would accept the booze, really. I can buy my own drinks, and to quote myself:

Etiquette required reciprocation. Also, heterosexual uncertainty suggested that free liquor in a gay bar might have exchange rates I was not qualified to negotiate, so I bought two shots and took them over.

I would take issue with your comment in another reply actually, that straight men don't engage constantly in illicit sex because they can't. Yes, some would, and I know them. I wouldn't, could have (perhaps even still could) and haven't, and even for those who might say "yes you have" I'd counter not nearly to the same degree as the gay dudes I've known who have had triple or more digit partners. There's something else going on. I could be wrong of course.

I do think you're wrong. And most gay men don't have triple digit body counts. Google informs me that depending on who you ask, the median is 19-23. The mean is higher, because some of them really get around.

That is why I chose "[straight] male supermodel" as the reference class. I've done pretty well with the ladies, and I am quite keen on shacking up and settling down. But if I could get away with, I would very much have racked up or stacked up similar numbers by that point. Unfortunately, I'm only decent looking, funny and in possession of a modest amount of social status, not a supermodel. I have to work for it.

In other words, straight male sexuality is bottlenecked by the lack of women willing to really exercise it. That is not true for the gay men. The straight men who are hot enough to have as many women as they desire tend to sleep around a lot. Good for them. I don't deem it pathological in either instance, as long as it doesn't make them bitter and unhappy (which it sometimes can). And I can't pity them, because I would trade places in a heartbeat with the straight ones.

For ze record, I never accepted bought drinks at a bar, usually I was at someone's apartment, either before, during, or after some home party. I'm surprised mildly that you trust self-reported statistics of this sort; it seems to me that there would be a bunch of reasons to over- or under- report one's sexual stickers on the fuselage. But the alternative is believing my opinion based on what others have also self-reported to me, so you're probably fine.

You sort of lost me when you said straight male supermodel. I know of one, I think. But he's old now. Sorry about the LLM thing, but if you give the reply you wrote a while to get cold and go back and read it, you might see what I mean. Maybe you will. Possibly you won't.

The gay male promiscuity thing may indeed have to do with just being male, but being male following an ethos that has to some degree thrown off social mores regarding sex. Very few men who are straight (exclusively straight) have done that, at least in my experience. Once all is permitted, if the whole of the law were Do what thou wilt sexually, and if the gates were open to us to almost any woman, well it's hard (cough) to say. But that's a hypothetical. It does seem to me that gay men get around a lot more than straight men, though it's true in the finger-pointing there is probably some hypocrisy.

This is meandering.

When I was younger we used to call gay people "faggots," which was the style at the time. Increasing acceptance and exposure (as well as the same stuff that eventually created "woke") rendered that inappropriate and impolite and the world verboten.

For a time in between those two states you would call someone a faggot if they were gay and obnoxious about it. You don't do that anymore but you can have some very important adjacent insights. Plenty of gay people are just like "straight men" who have sex with men. Plenty of are flaming gays and it's those who have a disproportionate mindshare in the minds of straight men and conservatives.

This is for good reason - they are socially aggressive, much more likely to sexually harass, culturally evangelical, beloved by straight women and therefore a distraction and a bunch of other shit.

Psychologically once you establish a culture without shame (and especially if it has widespread support like you see for gay and trans communities right now) things can go off the rails very fast. Drag queen story hour is fundamentally the same stuff as a gay couple who refuse to stop having sex in public (and unlike a straight couple make no effort to hide).

That couple is rare, as bug chasers are - but they have no guilt or shame and a social milieu which fully supports bonkers and inappropriate behavior.

Most gay people may in fact not be like this, but as many of my gay friends complain - they are culturally marginalized by gay men who are assholes or inappropriate (and those get support from the woke victim complex). Bug chasers are also rare but they are real and like any rare but high impact group they can cause problems.

Some of the bad behaviors are by no means rare however. Sexual harassment by gay men is crazy common. Once I stopped being young and athletic women stopped sexual harassing me (yay?) gay men never stopped. It's not a lot of them (but sadly it's more like 10% then 1%), but the ones who do it harass enough that it's a common experience.

Like most modern Americans I don't really have any issue with gay men (or any other demographic) that acts within the bounds of polite and appropriate behavior, but again enough people from these groups exist and they are metaphorically forced down our throats by pride initiatives and the woke (a similar annoying demographic is the militant lesbian who ex complains about manspreading on the subway but sits with her legs as far apart as she can because "men do it" and doesn't understand hip morphology).

Some of the bad behavior does have more direct impact on the rest of the population though. AIDS is a disease of the gay that took a lot of work to get into the straight population and this was caused by gay men who made zero effort to change their behavior.

Another similar problem (in the U.S. at least) is a rise in STIs and drug resistant STIs because gay men have hundreds of partners, refuse to use condoms and then fuck bi and "straight" people. Because they can't get pregnant and HIV is no longer a death sentence they refuse to use safe sex practices. Shut the fuck up and wrap your shit or have a reasonable number of partners, "benign" STIs are significantly more problematic for the female population.

So I do think some of the aggravation in this thread is coming from a reality based place.

I've logged an unfortunate number of hours in "gay" environs. Sadly I can't put that in my actual logbook or portfolio. Perhaps I'm not young (and was never particularly athletic), but I've never been sexually harassed. The closest was some four-eyes weirdo friend-of-an-acquaintance who was coked up, drunk to his man-tits, and convinced by the coca-ethylene to attempt to convince me that I wasn't straight. Very intense. Very retarded. I sat there in increasing discomfort, trying to tell him (politely) that I wasn't interested. Eventually he gave up and went off to go hit on other straight men, or I went off to get a pint and throw darts. I suspect I had a better hit rate. This was just a regular pub, on the seedy side - it had both pensioners and people propping up the Albanian GDP in the toilets.

Nothing else ever happened. I find it very funny when the gay men in actual gay places hit on me. It's good for my ego, or at least it was before I worked out, put on nice clothes, got a nice haircut and enjoyed attention from actual hot women. It's been known to happen. I don't blame them for trying (by which I mean the men). Yeah I'm fucking sitting there in a gay bar, notorious for hosting straight men first and foremost.

I can only say that I've done more time than you have, probably. But the world is a big place, and I don't claim to have performed an exhaustive or representative sampling of homosexual behavior on a global scale. All I can say is that the UK is as or more friendly to the gays than the States is. And it's fine. It's fucking Pride Month and I haven't seen anything ridiculous. I would have, I suppose if my little brother had shown up and I had a reason to expand his horizons. But no, as far as I'm concerned, things are fine.

Another similar problem (in the U.S. at least) is a rise in STIs and drug resistant STIs because gay men have hundreds of partners, refuse to use condoms and then fuck bi and "straight" people. Because they can't get pregnant and HIV is no longer a death sentence they refuse to use safe sex practices. Shut the fuck up and wrap your shit or have a reasonable number of partners, "benign" STIs are significantly more problematic for the female population.

Do I approve of this? You can guess. But there is no point to getting angry about it. The average straight man or even the above average straight man doesn't fuck hundreds of women raw because the latter have standards. The mid gay man can (but not necessarily does) fuck like a straight male supermodel because he's not restrained by feminine sexuality. You are complaining about men being manly men with other men. The straights would do it if they could. They just can't.

You are complaining about men being manly men with other men. The straights would do it if they could. They just can't.

I'm not convinced this is the case, or that this is a full account of what male sexuality is like. You can't simply look at what gay sexual practices look like and assume this is what straight men would be like if women had more casual sex. Gay hookup culture came into existence under certain conditions (particularly ones where you had to grab whatever sex you could get because it was so rare, and could not be connected to intimacy or commitment because homosexuality was clandestine and often criminalized), and persists both because of cultural inertia and because the scripts people are handed limit what they can conceive and expect from others.

Le'ts assume you're a gay man like your brother, or perhaps someone like your brother but without his good and firm insight into what he wants. What does gay culture railroad him into? What will the men he meets on grindr/tinder with gay settings/a gay bar offer him? What will their sexual expectations be like? They're likely to be body-first, push relationships towards casual trysts rather than long-term commitment, emphasize sexual contact over emotional intimacy, and most importantly get bored of him and find someone else if he doesn't put his dick immediately on the table. Because the assumptions of gay culture are body-first, anyone who doesn't play along is presumed to be a liar or simply not that interested. And like straight men learning the Game, people are very good at picking up what is necessary to get them the intimacy they crave and contorting themselves towards it.

Inevitably obligate homosexual men under these conditions, whatever their theoretical desires, will end up having to get on their knees for this system, which they did not create and may not even meet with their aspirations. And especially if you're purely gay, the entire cultural and social system of gay culture will put every pressure on you to believe that hookup culture is liberatory and fun, while monogamy is internalized homophobia.

Like most people under social pressure, it's far psychologically easier to come to believe in the system than to stand aghast at it, especially if your sexual access becomes absolutely dependent on accepting it. The gays don't run "pray away the frigidity" camps, but like every culture this one has its own means of forcing misfits into a tight orifice.

This process has been going on for a long, long time in gay culture, while cultural movements towards restraint, safe sex, dating before fucking, or STD awareness is pattern-matched by many gay men either to dastardly heteronormativity or to Republicans calling AIDS a punishment from God, and therefore resisted.

Do I approve of this? You can guess. But there is no point to getting angry about it. The average straight man or even the above average straight man doesn't fuck hundreds of women raw because the latter have standards. The mid gay man can (but not necessarily does) fuck like a straight male supermodel because he's not restrained by feminine sexuality. You are complaining about men being manly men with other men. The straights would do it if they could. They just can't.

The male sex drive is so strong because it has to be to deal with female frigidity. You can clearly see what would happen if both partners had a woman's sex drive in lesbian couples; it's called lesbian bed death.

It is only by combining male horniness and aggression with female selectivity and passiveness that you get a healthy relationship. We're complements, designed by Gnon to bring out the best of each other. Gays demonstrate the worst of mankind; male sexuality unrestrained.

Kind of hard to take such profound arguments seriously when your usual argument is for removing the women's ability to select.

More comments

It's certainly possible my community was particularly aggressive, that it was an American thing, or that that time is now over - but for a good decade or so if you were in a gay space you'd get groped, or get comments that were rather unacceptable or forward. Some of this is the lack of time wasting in the gay community but even gay men will complain about this - someone who wants a more heterosexual romance can often find it hard or impossible to find and just end up barraged with dick picks, promiscuity, and harassment.

The community is degenerate, and to some extent that is okay - but it's a problem when it impedes on people outside the community (it does) and has reached the point where some people in the community are mad about degeneracy (see: growing number of gay Republicans).

With respect to the STIs - yes many straights are just jealous and straights would have similar behaviors if allowed (and celebrities do do that) but celebrities are small in number and the rest can't so gay people are currently causing a public health crisis (and did in the past when parts of the community declined to acknowledge the existence of AIDs).

It's selfish and anti-social behavior that does in fact hurt others and while I don't think it should be banned it does annoy me that we don't have the social technology to make things better. Likewise I don't agree that we should just let them die from venereal disease but it should be doable to understand why some people feel that way.

Most STIs are much, much more of a choice than the average lifestyle disease. Avoiding addiction and overeating is hard. Putting a goddamn condom on is easy.

Social technology is grossly inferior to medical technology. We couldn't shame or blame or diet away the obesity epidemic. Ozempic is doing what no amount of moralizing can.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/

Society is really hard to change. We figured drug use was “just” a social problem, and it’s obvious how to solve social problems, so we gave kids nice little lessons in school about how you should Just Say No. There were advertisements in sports and video games about how Winners Don’t Do Drugs. And just in case that didn’t work, the cherry on the social engineering sundae was putting all the drug users in jail, where they would have a lot of time to think about what they’d done and be so moved by the prospect of further punishment that they would come clean.

And that is why, even to this day, nobody uses drugs.

On the other hand, biology is gratifyingly easy to change. Sometimes it’s just giving people more iron supplements. But the best example is lead. Banning lead was probably kind of controversial at the time, but in the end some refineries probably had to change their refining process and some gas stations had to put up “UNLEADED” signs and then we were done. And crime dropped like fifty percent in a couple of decades – including many forms of drug abuse.

Saying “Tendency toward drug abuse is primarily determined by fixed brain structure” sounds callous, like you’re abandoning drug abusers to die. But maybe it means you can fight the problem head-on instead of forcing kids to attend more and more useless classes where cartoon animals sing about how happy they are not using cocaine.

What about obesity? We put a lot of social effort into fighting obesity: labeling foods, banning soda machines from school, banning large sodas from New York, programs in schools to promote healthy eating, doctors chewing people out when they gain weight, the profusion of gyms and Weight Watchers programs, and let’s not forget a level of stigma against obese people so strong that I am constantly having to deal with their weight-related suicide attempts. As a result, everyone…keeps gaining weight at exactly the same rate they have been for the past couple decades. Wouldn’t it be nice if increasing obesity was driven at least in part by changes in the intestinal microbiota that we could reverse through careful antibiotic use? Or by trans-fats?

How prescient. Lucky that I've made my peace with never being as good as Scott. Well, I'm content with being the fourth best psychiatrist blogger on the internet. I can only name two who are better, but eh, humility is clearly my greatest strength.

Likewise I don't agree that we should just let them die from venereal disease but it should be doable to understand why some people feel that way.

I understand these people, on an intellectual level. I understand why schizophrenics are the way they are too, but I don't relate to them from a phenomenological perspective or like their actions.

More comments

Uh, I'd caveat that the summary has 20% of HIV-negative men in the sample not caring about the HIV status of their partners, and the full document has 7.5% as HIV-negative seeking HIV-positive specifically. That's not the strict definition of bugchasing -- they could theoretically just practice very safe sex -- but it's closer than the HIV-positive-seeking-HIV-negative 1% number (actually 0.4% in the full paper).

On the other hand, I'll also point out that the sample was selected from a 2003/2004-era bugchasing-specific website, and that the total N=1228. That's... not representative, and while it's probably not the strict maximum (ie, I think there were probably more than a hundred bugchasers in the United States in 2003), it's closer to that than a good population-level estimate. I'm... not sure there even is a modern equivalent -- in addition to the survival pressures, a lot of the reasons behind bugchasing-as-a-kink just collapsed as it became understood HIV could be avoided or managed.

I'm aware of one bug-chasing-adjacent incident (technically, just an HIV-positive guy being incredibly careless, but close enough for government work) in the furry fandom, and the convention circuit treated the guy more seriously than they did a fellow who brought a loaded gun. Even as a fantasy, there's only two-digits worth of bugchasing images on e621; that doesn't just get dwarfed by (other) snuff or gore as a category, it gets dwarfed by extremely specific forms of gore. A quick google search pointed to a modern descendant of the website Grov-Parsons monitored... with <500 members. I couldn't find many others, and none of them were bigger.

The end result of the mix points heavily to "if you want to stop X from happening, stop X from happening", not fucking around three or five levels distant.

((Conversely, there are serious financial and resource allocation arguments. PReP spending is a nonzero line item, and while the actual breakdown by orientation and location gets complicated because it's nonlinear, but the Ryan White CARE Act started in the hundred-million range and got to the billion range. Not the worst payoff compared to some other public health spending, at least if you buy the metrics at face value, but neither would they be topping the chart at effective altruism metrics, nor do them seem immediately better turn than 'dudes, just go with frottage'.))

Separate from the bugchasing thing, I'd also point out that many of the people who seem extremely transgressive in summary aren't necessarily so in actual sexual practice. There's a thirst trap fursuiter on youtube with a recent output titled things like "How to FLUSTER your BOYFRIEND", "GOOD BOYS sit on your LAP", "I got EXPOSED for this..." and has a body count of six, total. I'm not going to say that all of the extreme and transgressive people aren't, in reality, but a lot of people who seem like a lot are much more boring than it looks.

This really is a "More than I ever wanted to know" post, but thank you, sincerely. I did look at the Ryan White figures at about the same time, and I knew that someone would show up to nitpick the bugchaser stats. Didn't think that someone would be you, but I'm not really complaining.

and has a body count of six, total

Because it's hard to fuck in a fursuit without getting heatstroke? Should I even ask? Do I really want to know? Tell me anyway.

Sorry about the nitpick.

Because it's hard to fuck in a fursuit without getting heatstroke? Should I even ask? Do I really want to know? Tell me anyway.

Just picky about his hookups (cw: nsfw audio). Dude's pretty built, so I guess he can afford to be, but pretty far from what the stereotype would say.

There's a social conservative complaint that 'demisexual' just describes normal sexual functioning, and from a social conservative perspective that's probably not wrong so much as overloading the definition of 'normal'. But when the uwu maid outfit gay guy is less comfortable with a one-night stand than urquan, it points to something that exists as a meaningful distinguishing marker.

There's a social conservative complaint that 'demisexual' just describes normal sexual functioning, and from a social conservative perspective that's probably not wrong so much as overloading the definition of 'normal'. But when the uwu maid outfit gay guy is less comfortable with a one-night stand than urquan, it points to something that exists as a meaningful distinguishing marker.

Ha, fair enough.

But typically the "demisexual is just normal sexual functioning" arguments are applying to women, specifically. Which is true in some ways, not true in others. I'm not inside the heads of these folks, but there's very much a difference between "sexual desire for a person" and "active willingness to have sexual contact with a person", and I understand that demisexuals claim that both of these come after familiarity. Which for me, is true for some people and not so true for others.

It's very true that many people who talk about sex a lot are also people who don't have so much of it, or have a normal amount with a normal number of partners. I know people who are... prolific, but not promiscuous. Perhaps I'm starting to grok the demisexual thing.

But I also grok where Mr. Meow is coming from here, I could see making out with someone... fairly early in getting to know them, but sex is something to build up to.

Also, wow. "I know your body's a work in progress, but one day you can look like this" is a pretty hilarious thing to tell someone you're trying to have sex with. Hard to wrap my head around what that guy was thinking with it. Is this a "Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power" negging move? Get the guy to feel insecure? I mean, it seems to kind of work on him...

The "hey, want to play games on discord?" as a bonding mechanism is definitely true-to-form here. A bargain-basement level of rizz pointed at a picky guy is pretty funny.

I'm not opening that video, unfortunately. Instagram seems to think I'm a gay Chinese woman, and YouTube shouldn't get any ideas.

But when the uwu maid outfit gay guy is less comfortable with a one-night stand than urquan

I shall not intervene in a lovers tiff. Unless you pay for couples counseling.

Because it's hard to fuck in a fursuit without getting heatstroke?

So that's why it seems so much more common in Nordic countries!

Indian furries either never existed, or like the Asiatic cheetah, have gone extinct. They won't even survive the journey to the air-conditioned convention center.

When their lifestyle does turn harmful, the fallout lands almost entirely on the people who opted in. A virally suppressed person on antiretrovirals transmits HIV to sexual partners at a measured rate of zero.

Who pays for these antiretrovirals and other PLWH costs?

You, me and everyone else who is a net positive tax payer. In theory, I'm not subsidizing the lifestyle of an American with HIV, or even just their life.

But we subsidize a lot of things dawg. Old people. T2DMs hitting the soda fountain while their kidneys spit out sprite. Children with leukemia. Not smokers, since they pay for their sins by saving the taxpayer money by denying themselves old age <3

In the US the tab runs through the public ledger far more than the private one (your healthcare system is deeply in the closet, and claims to be privatized). Medicaid is the single largest payer of HIV care, Medicare second, and the Ryan White program bottoms underneath both as the "payer of last resort," funded at roughly $2.6 billion in FY2024. Domestic federal HIV spending sits around $28 to $33 billion a year, the large majority of it mandatory entitlement money that swells with caseload. Per head, lifetime care runs about $420,000 discounted and north of a million undiscounted, with something like 60 to 68% of it being the antiretrovirals themselves. So yes. It is socialized. I'm not going to pretend otherwise to protect my flank. Or my ass, which is unviolated by anything but NHS negative-ply today.

But you gotta spend money to make money. And in this case, you do make money.

Then the part that should actually interest a cost-conscious person, because it cuts the other way from how you're swinging it through implication. Because U=U holds (UwU) and a virally suppressed person does not transmit, the single most cost-effective prevention tool available is putting positive people on the drugs and keeping them there. Every suppression is an infection that never happens, and every averted infection is another ~$420k to $510k lifetime tab that never opens. The modelling supports this, AFAIK: in the Botswana combination-prevention work each averted infection saved about $9,200 in downstream care and pushed the whole intervention into cost-saving or near-cost-saving territory.

ART buys a lot of QALYs for the treated person, and viral suppression also prevents expensive future infections. At U.S. drug prices, the treatment itself is costly, but interventions that get people diagnosed, treated and suppressed often become cost-saving once avoided transmission is counted.

ART for diagnosed HIV? A fucking bargain at about $21k per QALY.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23318310/

Well below the usual threshold of $100k per QALY.

ART for prevention? Even better, because you're averting transmissions and secondary QALY/financial losses. HIV is highly contagious (surprising nobody here, I hope, there's a reason it's everywhere and has been for decades).

Finally, ART costs money because people live for decades and keep taking drugs. Duh.

Untreated HIV is not free to the pool. You must consider opportunistic infections, ICU admissions, and onward transmission, all of which cost more than the pills. If your genuine concern is my wallet (doing fine) or yours (can't say) the wallet-minimizing policy is more treatment, started earlier, not less. I'm libertarian-adjacent, and I'd prefer that people pay for themselves really, but if we're going to pool risk and expenses, we might as well do it sensibly. Why yes, I work for the NHS.

If you're trying to pray away the gay, or AIDS, it's not going to work. Things were worse in the 80s and 90s, when the disease was a death sentence. I have little interest in considering "solutions" that involve trying to get rid of gay men being gay men (good luck, even immense social stigma and a near lethal disease couldn't do it), and it's not like most countries don't spend on primary prevention or awareness programs. I'd suggest cutting the budget for expeditions in the ME first, not that anyone listens to me about that. The drugs continue to get cheaper, and I continue to get drunker while the Ritalin wears off.

That is all I have time for, because I'm at a straight pub and I intend to enjoy myself.

These are a lot of words to say that "spreading HIV actually costs the taxpayer a ton of money and even the best way that we know how to reduce the costs still costs a ton of money and all things considered it would be better for society if people didn't engage in risky behaviors that spread HIV."

And yes, this is also true for a lot of other things - simple overeating is a much larger drain on the taxpayer than HIV, and you shouldn't pretend like that doesn't have negative externalities either.

And yes, this is also true for a lot of other things - simple overeating is a much larger drain on the taxpayer than HIV, and you shouldn't pretend like that doesn't have negative externalities either.

And I never have. I'm voting for the party that supports Universal Public Ozempic.

These are a lot of words to say that "spreading HIV actually costs the taxpayer a ton of money and even the best way that we know how to reduce the costs still costs a ton of money and all things considered it would be better for society if people didn't engage in risky behaviors that spread HIV."

Are you surprised that I am internally coherent and know the facts? Don't be. The nerd who calculates QALY figures isn't. You can also use more words too, really, but I'd presume that if you found an actual logical flaw in my argument you would have pointed it out.

More comments

You, me and everyone else who is a net positive tax payer.

While your contributions are undeniably positive, if you work for the NHS, you can't be a net positive tax payer.

I can and I am. In the wrong tax bracket. Mostly being taxed of patience and the will to live.

yep it's all fun and games until we remember we live in a society with mandated health insurance with no pre-existing condition exclusions that socializes costs.

BONUS ROUND, turns out the female journalist that wrote the puff piece about the gay pedophile couple wrote a response to the controversy. Accountability is nowhere to be found, but getting mad at American conservatives is! https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-10/gorman-second-thoughts/4809582

She's also a Jewess with roots in present-day Slovakia and described on Wikipedia as a 'Australian social justice journalist'. Jokes are surely still just writing themselves.

Also the amount of gays that did not (and still don't, though anti-retrovirals have changed this somewhat) care about having and/or spreading AIDS gave and still gives a lot of people pause.

Another example was the so-called Patient Zero of the AIDS epidemic in the USA:

"Shilts interviewed epidemiologist Selma Dritz, who reported that in 1982, she informed Dugas that he was infecting other people, but he refused to cease having casual sex in spite of this."

I mean there's the whole ephebophilia thing that comes up here a bunch and you can argue as long as you want about 18 being a fairly arbitrary line and the whole '17.99999999 years old you sick fuck' situation. Personally I feel like arguing the point always veers off into a ditch so I ignore it but I also feel if I lived in a society where legal consent was at 17 I'd probably barely notice a difference.

The best argument I've heard is along the lines of "Yes, there are probably 17 year olds that are mentally capable/ready of consent and 19 year olds that aren't. But we need to clearly draw the line somewhere (and somewhere close to where we can be reasonably confident that most young people will be capable/ready), because otherwise we'll get all kinds of arguments from creeps about why they should be allowed to fuck a 10 year old that they say is totally capable of consent."

And this is true of laws in general. There are probably people who can drive safely with a blood alcohol level of [two percentage points over whatever the legal limit is in your jurisdiction], and people who can't drive safely after imbibing so much as a thimbleful of sherry. But in order to enforce laws effectively we need to set cutoff points somewhere.

I think you can argue all day about where the line should be, but in the established metagame that is 2026 Western society there are better uses of your time and generally if you're arguing passionately about this it's not really for productive reasons.

If I moved into another neighboring society and the line was anywhere between like 16 and 20 I can't imagine it having too big an impact on my day-to-day life or being something I consider a grave injustice eitherway.

Unfortunately, 'drawing the line somewhere' still results in arguments about how a 24 year old shouldn't be allowed to fuck an 18 year old. The line works only one way.

She’s young enough to be your position coach’s daughter, you sick fuck!

The usual Schrodinger’s feminism, where young women are strong and independent badasses one moment and then helpless children the next.

There is no "steelman" for pedophilia, unlike for racism (freedom of association), sexism (traditional gender roles), and homophobia (traditional sexual morality).

There absolutely is, and, somewhat ironically, it was something pushed by the pre-"woke" and even pre-"SJW" progressive leftists certainly in the late 00s. I still see some of it now, with the woke-natured push to retire that word and replace it with Minor Attracted Persons.

The steelman is pretty simple: pedophilia is a sexual orientation like any other, a sort of innate characteristic of someone that they're helpless to change, and finding something attractive doesn't imply actually doing anything to fulfill that attraction. As such, pedophiles deserve compassion, not condemnation, along with the structures to help them never make their attraction come to fruition in a healthy, non-shameful way. This wasn't a popular topic of discussion, but it absolutely was one among college leftists when I was a college leftist, involving things like future realistic androids or future VR experiences. I remember listening to a friend who was a psych major talking sympathetically about some therapy recording with a pedophile he heard in class, and how that man was clearly in pain and suffering due to his helpless feelings of attraction, which he knew he had to suppress.

Blood Rain, of course, is a video game that uses computers to generate imagery by modeling a virtual world, so it's pretty akin to the VR experiences mentioned above. Assuming that Evie were actually child-looking (a judgment I disagree with, but that's irrelevant here), it's perfectly defensible to have a game that overtly sexualizes her, and plenty of people have indeed defended such a notion.

Sorry, my comment was sloppy. You're right about the MAP thing. I didn't mean that there was literally no possible steelman, I meant that there was no steelman that would be convincing to the mass of normies since aversion to sex with children runs too deep for the vast majority of people.

There is no "steelman" for pedophilia

Sexism didn't lose its taboo because of a "steelman". What happened was exhaustion, we saw it liberally stretch from "repeal the 19th" to "why is there no female Bond??" with near equal levels of emotional and ideological fervour. Eventually, it became apparent that it's mostly just bitter and depressed women who just wanted you to be as miserable as they were. Most people would still broadly agree that you shouldn't be a dick to women, even though hair-trigger ideological enforcement is mostly gone.

Nobody is thinking "hmm, maybe sex with kids isn't so black and white." I'm wondering, "uhh do you mean 40yo Steve molested his 8yo niece or did he just go on a date with a 25yo office worker?" This deliberate conflation is not at all minor. And the second and third order effects won't be trivial either, think an ever expanding breach of civil liberties and digital privacy.

that's a 7 year old's face

Dawg, I live in a mostly Asian suburb and I'd say they were roughly 40% of my classmates in school, I've never seen a 7yo look like that. I've seen adult aged e-girls on douyin look like this. But I will concede that on the sliding scale of neoteny, she is on the higher end.

I feel like in the very initial prerendered part of the trailer she looks chubby cheeked enough to be disconcertingly young but the other angles/actual gameplay model looks perfectly adult

Most people would still broadly agree that you shouldn't be a dick to women, even though hair-trigger ideological enforcement is mostly gone.

Sure, but I think that the sort of actual unambiguous sexism that used to be roundly condemned now draws less outrage than it used to. I'm predicting that desoite attempts to abuse the term "pedophilia" to smear men who like women in their 20s, there is a floor on how much the power of the word can erode since the central examples of pedophilia are just too abhorrent for the vast majority of people, unlike racism or sexism.

Dawg, I live in a mostly Asian suburb and I'd say they were roughly 40% of my classmates in school, I've never seen a 7yo look like that.

Dawg, I have also spent a little time around Asian people I disagree. Yes, Asian children look different than the apparent fantasy-Caucasian main character front he video, but the facial age is quite clear to me.

Sure, but I think that the sort of actual unambiguous sexism that used to be roundly condemned now draws less outrage than it used to

That was my point though, nothing is immune to "crying wolf". You don't have infinite oxygen for anything. In around half the world, the central examples of sexism are still "women are just baby machines", which is still abhorrent to most western people. What they're too exhausted to combat is someone simply tweeting "your body, my choice". Because in your immediate proximity, and near ambient personal experience, "sexism" is mostly "this 2D comic book woman is too busty!" Getting tired of verbal cheapshots need not numb you to the actual act itself.

there is a floor on how much the power of the word can erode

Okay, we have a floor. But where's the ceiling? Can a normal person just stand upright without hitting their head?

there is a floor on how much the power of the word can erode since the central examples of pedophilia are just too abhorrent for the vast majority of people, unlike racism or sexism.

I'd consider Muhammad and Aisha a pretty central example of pedophilia, and they made a religion out of that which, in the present day, has about 2 billion adherents, nearly a quarter of the world's population. Humanity's moral floors are generally much further away than you'd like them to be.

As for the sequel's main character -- look, I grew up on early chan imageboards and the unfiltered early 2000s internet so I have a pretty high tolerance and probably a quite warped sense of what's within the bounds of good taste -- but even in my opinion, that's a 7 year old's face on a young woman's body.

Echoing what @RenOS said below – between the ages of 26-27 I was in a relationship with a Chinese woman who was a year younger than me. Whenever she went to buy beer in a shop, she was asked to show her ID, literally every single time. (The fact that she was five feet tall certainly didn't help.) The median East Asian woman legitimately looks significantly more childlike than the median white, Hispanic or black woman.

Responded here. I'm aware of the neoteny but I think the character in the video looks like a child. It's on a different level than stylized anime or looking younger than white people.

The steelman is that a 30-yo man having a normal, consensual relationship with a legal adult female age 24 is something that currently can fall under "pedophilia" in the national discourse. The issue isn't that "real" pedophilia has some redeeming quality (it doesn't), it's that because of that very evil, we will never be able to define it narrowly enough to stay pure evil. People will always be looking to smear that taint onto stuff that isn't quite, or even close to pedophilia.

And anyone who argues the minutia (e.g. "ephebophilia") just gets bulldozed as "pro-pedo".

I'm getting a lot of replies in this vein, but AFAIK the "she was 29 you sick fuck!" crowd is mostly deranged internet leftists? Is anyone getting cancelled for "pedophilia" for dating a woman over 18? There's a lot of screeching online about it, but it reminds me of "patriarchy" or "shitlords" or whatever. I agree that some people try to make pedophilia mean "age gap," but I don't think the vast majority of people buy it at all.

Deranged internet leftists have never been able to stampede major institutions into implementing their demands? It's all online screeching until the DOJ mandates the screeching.

So yeah, I'm gonna stay in the pocket on this one too.

That's not what I said. If we see Woke 2.0 then sure, I wouldn't be surprised if wokescolds managed to force some institution to pass "anti-pedophilia" codes of conduct or whatever that protect 29 year old women from "predatory" 35 year old me. But I don't think the vast majority of normal people bought into "system racism" when Woke 1.0 was at its peak, and the opinions of normal people are what the original comment was about.

But I don't think the vast majority of normal people bought into "system racism" when Woke 1.0 was at its peak

Yes, they did. The opinions of normal people are the opinions the vanguard tells them to have, and they hold them quite sincerely.

I mean several things get wrapped into pedophilia:

-Age gap relationships.

-Socially approved Ephebophilia (such and such sexualized pop starlet is 18, now we can stare at her).

-Socially not approved Ephebphilia (such and such sexualized pop starlet is 17 and 360 days old).

-Clearly not okay relationships that fall afoul of age of consent laws.

-Clearly okay relationships that fall afoul of age of consent laws.

-Historically accurate but icky relationships between a post-pubescent but young child and a much older person, usually a noble or equivalent figure.

-Actual relationships or physical contact between an adult and a prepubescent child (aka actual pedophilia).

Obviously I've approached this a in a loaded way, but all of these things get labeled pedophilia by some people. Your lines may not match what the woke feel is appropriate for instance, nevertheless they've had a lot of success at labeling the first item pedophilia.

Realistically we need other words for icky behavior but we don't have them, even as an anti-woke person what Leonardo DiCaprio gets up to is weird and deserves some social censure. But we have the one weird and it gets tossed everywhere.

With respect to the matter at hand - I know lots of Asians and Asian enjoyers who are like "yeah this looks normal" even if you don't feel that way, and I have seen some cosplayers already look like the character.

I'd argue that it's romantic relationships between teenagers (normally between a teenage girl and a slightly older boy) that can be categorized as 'socially approved ephebophilia', as socially generally tolerates such sexual acts within certain limits. Society is also generally OK with male college students having relationships with 17/18-yr-old girls. Relationships between older male groomers and underage teen girls, on the other hand, are cases of socially not approved ephebophilia.

While disgruntled women may not like men looking at the 19 year old cheerleader/athlete/celebrity most men are going to find that acceptable (outside of woke circles),*

I tried to capture your example in age of consent laws, which (at least when I was a teenager, I don't know if this has been patched everywhere) could get you in trouble for dating a high school student while you were in high school.

*Notably in porn, most places don't use "jailbait" or "teen" heavily anymore but stepsister porn is high popularity and while the reasons for existence have less to do with the age stuff, it's definitely by implication underage people even if the actors involved are clearly in their late 20s and make sure to loudly explicitly state "I'm over 18."

Your lines may not match what the woke feel is appropriate for instance, nevertheless they've had a lot of success at labeling the first item pedophilia.

That's what I was asking -- have they really? Does anyone actually care what those people think?

With respect to the matter at hand - I know lots of Asians and Asian enjoyers who are like "yeah this looks normal" even if you don't feel that way

There's really nothing I can do here but take your word for it, so okay. FWIW I don't care if other people enjoy the character, more power to them. Just looks like like my elementary school kids' classmates to me, personally.

I think the initial face reveal in the trailer looks disconcertingly young but the game play model just looks generic pretty girl but not illegally young. Mostly since the initial face reveal has chubbier cheeks

That's fair. The action scenes that were in 3rd person looked fine to me. Maybe it was just the face reveal that looked off.

Yeah it's the cheeks for me but the third person view looks pretty generic Squenix final fantasy protag to me

You may have a heightened degree of sensitivity for this topic (which is by no means wrong, the heat generated by it is kind of the point, see other poster's comments) or an increased ability to perform facial discrimination and be actually correct - but you have seen enough posters quickly post their anecdata, many people aren't really seeing what you are seeing (again doesn't make us more correct, just reflecting the views of others).

With respect to the woke scolds. Yes. Yes people care what those people think. Those people run the culture and decide what is allowed and permitted and what gets you fired. A small but lovely part of watching the World Cup was seeing beautiful people from around the world representing the appearance and character of those countries. That's banned now, so when the camera scans the crowd it's mostly fat old guys in costumes. The world was made dimmer by the woke scolds and they are working on age gap relationships right now.

As to the frequency of these beliefs.... I work in healthcare so I'm around tons of basic bitch women all the time, they've all obtained the download and find everything bad and to be truly "pedophilia," even the ones who fantasize about a rich age gap relationship for them. It's just how they are.

A small but lovely part of watching the World Cup was seeing beautiful people from around the world representing the appearance and character of those countries. That's banned now,

FWIW, they’ve been subtly bringing this back. I’ve watched quite a few of this year’s World Cup matches so far, and pretty much all them have included at least one obvious “check out this hot girl” crowd shot for each country, usually more. Not as blatant as the gratuitous “zoom the camera directly in on her boobs” shots you’d see in the 2000s, but they’re clearly not sticking to the ostentatiously sexless #metoo-era posture either.

Fundamentally though I agree with you. It doesn’t matter much that most people don’t really care about woke-scolds’ pet issues, because woke-scold types are vastly overrepresented in positions of power; they will enthusiastically use that power to advance their positions; and normal people do remain terrified of upsetting them, because they are disproportionately common in positions of power. This is all true.

I will say, when I interact with people younger than myself, the age gap stuff seems to have few true believers. Zoomers seem to be stuck in a collective action problem where no one wants to be the first to break from the perceived consensus, and many (especially girls) feel the need to performatively enforce the perceived consensus lest they be shunned, but the consensus doesn’t really exist.

For example, a friend of mine was working for our college’s IT department after graduation and eventually started dating a sophomore who he basically met through that job. Based on what you see online, you might expect that this was somehow fraught or they’d have to defend their gasp 3-ish year age gap or the fact she was a student and he was staff. In reality common sense prevailed, and there was no such friction. Well, we did rib him a little at first (“you can’t even take her to a bar bro lol”). In fact they’re still together several years later and I suspect they’re going to end up married.

I'm actually quite sympathetic to the people responding to me. I really dislike all the people who smear anything cute, sexy, or childish as "pedophilia!" and I do strongly agree that the word is intentionally and systematically abused to smear what are basically normal healthy instincts for heterosexual men, namely attraction to post-pubescent women.

I actually wouldn't have posted my opinion outside the Motte since I don't want to aid and abet that crowd. I was hoping to share my view here merely as a data point, not as an implied condemnation of the game or anyone's taste.

many people aren't really seeing what you are seeing

I actually wonder about that -- maybe so, or maybe they're trying to prevent a weakman from becoming a superweapon. If it's the latter, I understand.

I'm around tons of basic bitch women all the time, they've all obtained the download and find everything bad and to be truly "pedophilia,"

I'll take your word for it since I'm not around those sorts of people much these days.

I actually wouldn't have posted my opinion outside the Motte since I don't want to aid and abet that crowd. I was hoping to share my view here merely as a data point, not as an implied condemnation of the game or anyone's taste.

Love that!

Superweapon

Probably, but a lot of people here are autistic enough to be like "that 16 year old looks 23 and massive tits why is this in the same category....." (with threat of social censure making most not say that and many of those believe it). While Stellar Blade is a different situation those lessons metastasize elsewhere.

DW's shitty cultural milieu

Between my social scene and work I am very fortunate to have access to pretty much the full range of people. It's really important to remember the lessons of "its just those kids on college campuses" we started hearing that in the early 2010s and now our culture is unrecognizable, if you have a lot of woke access you'll see that the stereotypes and worst ideas are all full throttle. I was talking to a former NFL player turned business exec at dinner this weekend. Guy is about the most anti-woke manly male you will ever see, but his wife and daughters are woke crazies so he uses his charisma and authority to push their agenda.

The crazies are crazy and have ways to make the rest of us suffer the crazy.*

*Because of the specific topic I will clarify I mean specifically with respect to healthy age gap relationships, I don't want anyone thinking I am a pedophile because even posting anonymously it's a scary thought that someone would incorrectly think that.

It's a korean game though. Asians already are more neotenous than caucasians on average, and the women even moreso. Back from when I was doing my PhD, my supervisor was a tiny asian women in her 30s who easily could pass as underage. She sometimes had problems ordering beer at the pub for us. Several of the other PhDs were also asian girls in their 20s and some of them looked downright pre-pubescent when judged by european standards. Once you internalize this, the uncanny aesthetics of animes, chans, asian videogames etc. imo make a lot more sense: It's basically a projection of what european women would look like if they were as neotenous as asian women + some minor other asian characteristics often considered attractive. Basically combining all attractive features of european and asian women into one person, as judged by asian men.

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree. Asian people are indeed more neotenous, but not to the degree that the character in the linked video would be mistaken for a teen or young adult.

That's not quite what I mean; Asian women are naturally more neotenous, so once you spend enough time with them, this just becomes normal to you. European women are naturally less neotenous, but this also feels normal if that's what you're used to. The uncanny aspect comes from combining both in a way that doesn't work naturally. Though I agree that it's sometimes not just combining them, but outright turbocharging it.

I understood your point. I think what I was trying to say was that "a projection of what european women would look like if they were as neotenous as asian women + some minor other asian characteristics often considered attractive" is not what we're seeing in the linked video. I think that a better example would be sexy female anime characters or K-pop stars with heavy plastic surgery. Both are highly stylized and a bit uncanny, but IMO they both usually look like adult or at least teenage women (1,000 year old loli dragons aside).

There is no "steelman" for pedophilia

Depends what you're steelmanning. As usual, what's happened is a word referring to a genuinely bad thing has had its meaning tortured to make it into a useable weapon where it doesn't apply. Finding big eyes cute does not mean that you're going to go off and rape a baby, any more than asking a man with a dress to use the mens' loo means you're going to go and machine-gun the Hutus.

There's no virtuous principle or sympathetic situation that causes people to think "hmm, maybe sex with kids isn't so black and white."

There doesn't need to be. There is no sex with kids in that trailer. Look at racism: there is no sympathetic principle that makes people think that beating an old black man to death because you hate looking at his dirty skin is okay either; people tire of 'racism' because that's very clearly not what's under discussion.

I don't know anyone IRL who thinks having sex with a 17 year old (bailey) is the same as having sex with a 7 year old (motte). It's a convenient rhetorical cudgel, so people pretend they believe that, but I'm pretty sure almost nobody really believes it. If you called someone who had sex with a high school senior a pedo, most people would roll their eyes; if you called someone who had sex with a 7 year old a pedo people would agree and be out for blood. They bailey might erode, but the motte is not going anywhere.

Contrast that with "racist." Getting called a racist in the 90s was a serious allegation and could make you radioactive even if the underlying charge was ridiculous. But now both frivolous accusations (bailey) AND substantive allegations (motte) are drawing eye rolls. Soon the word racist will be completely powerless, and even actual racial supremacists and chauvinists will be able to mostly shrug it off if they act civil enough. Not so with "pedophile." That one's going to stick around.

Okay, I see your point better now. I partially disagree with your assertion - genuine expressions of pure racial hatred draw more than eye rolls in all but the most edgy communities.

I’m very far from woke but I’ve left group chats because they really were just nastiness about Jewish noses and things.

A lot of that is that Jewish hate became cool amongst certain groups and then lowest common denominator figures got about it in very gauche ways. I'm all for questioning the power of Jewish people in major western countries but 'baby eating cabal of Satan worshiper' stuff just gets gauche very quickly

I actually feel the same way you do, I quit 4chan because it just became nastiness and wasn't even funny, just the same racial insults and tired jokes repeated ad nauseam. I admit I didn't just roll my eyes and keep scrolling, I left. But I think the difference is that I didn't feel righteous outrage at the extreme racism, I just thought it was distasteful and stupid. I imagine it might have been the same for you, if you've grown up online. Holocaust jokes are dumb and mean-spirited but probably not particularly shocking. You close the browser and immediately move in.

In constrast, I don't think I would ever have such a low key reaction to actual pre-pubescent pedophilia. Even SFW sexualized depiction of pre-pubescent children are extreme creepy and disturbing to me, and I don't think I'm unusual in reactiomng that way. Theoretically you could imagine a society where everyone has been desensitized to it, but we're nowhere near that and a lot would have to change first. Even here in Japan, the vast majority of people find the sexualization of children to be really creepy and beyond the pale despite what "Weird Japan!" clickbait websites claim.

There is no steelman for sex with pre-pubescent children, but the current public understanding of "paedophilia" includes sex with physiologically mature teenagers who are below the local age of consent, and in some cases with teenagers who are above the age of consent but where the age gap is large enough to give curtain-twitchers the ick. The steelman for this expanded definition of "paedophilia" is that it is just normal human sexuality.

the current public understanding of "paedophilia" includes sex with physiologically mature teenagers who are below above the local age of consent

Say you’d want to get it on with a cute 17 yo when you’re in your 30s and you will be accused of being a pedophile even though the age of consent is 16. It really is just a way to moral police something that gives the accusers the ick.

That falls into my second category of "teenagers who are above the age of consent but where the age gap is large enough to give curtain-twitchers the ick" - I agree with you that a lot of scolds will at least hint at it, and some will actually call you a "paedophile" straight up. But the British tabloids are careful not to throw around the "paedophile" word when the girl was 17 because it would be legally defamatory. If the girl was 15 essentially everyone would be calling you a paedophile, and would be happy to defend the allegation as straightforwardly true in front of a judge.

That's true, but the point I was trying to make in my comment was that while "racism" and "sexism" might erode completely, the central examples of "pedophilia" are abhorrent enough that the accusation will never fully lose its power and be met only with eyerolls as OP suggested.

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