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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?
One of those things is something pretty much every male goes through during at least a few years of his life. It's impolite in polite society, however, to even speculate whether or not it's supposed to go away once the young man goes past the age of majority.
14 year old boy fancies 14 year old girls. Normal. 20 year old guy fancies 14 year old girls. Maybe a bit iffy. 30-40 year old man fancies 14 year old girls, that's when the trouble really starts.
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This is an extremely underdiscussed point. The cognitive dissonance is bad enough that I've started seeing lots of people convince themselves that it isn’t even normal for fourteen year old boys to be attracted to fourteen year old girls in the first place.
That makes me think this is another one of those self-reinforcing cycles, as more and more males lack ability to partner up with women after they enter adolescence due to women being more and more likely to reject them, more and more of their sexual experience is limited to solo activity with porn, which is more and more generated via popularization of both anime and AI, which will be shaped based on what they found attractive when they first started watching porn, which is getting younger and younger, which results in women being more and more likely to reject more and more young men due to their judgment of their preferences.
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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).
It is a an argument about consumption as well.
A - To what extent does a child have to have their stop the worst moment of their life from being circulated?
B - That consumption of real CSAM is a form of demand, and demand leads to increasing supply to meet demand.
A - The same extent as any adult male. /r/combatfootage and [whatever LiveLeak's successor is] is a couple clicks away- a shame most of the claimants aren't alive to make the claim, but what can you do. (Note that the same seems to not hold true for women; they're trying to have pornography of themselves treated the same way we do for children now, and in some jurisdictions are succeeding.)
B - Has the supply of step-sisters stuck in holes in the wall increased to fill the demand PornHub seems to assert exists?
That would be funnier if real-life cases of imprisonment for the purposes of rape didn't exist.
The argument rests upon "if you don't know about it, is any harm done?" and yes, if the now twenty year old victim doesn't know the original images of their rape and abuse between the ages of four to twelve are still circulating, are they being harmed? But the harm is, in part, that the same kind of people who enjoyed the original abuse are still getting enjoyment from that abuse, even years after the fact. It's still being used for entertainment and pleasure. It's still a real thing that happened to a real person for the same purposes and ends as the ends the people ten years later are using it for. It should not be indulged in or explained away or excused as "but the guy in 2026 who is jerking off to videos of a ten year old child being forced to drink piss from the cock in their mouth wasn't there in 2016 when this was happening!"
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With /r/combatfootage, you generally have the argument that the people who die in it either outright volunteered to be there or at least are perpetrators to the same degree they are victims.
I'm personally actually rather on the "decriminalise possession/distribution, punish production" side here, but I do think that one the flip side if you want to have that kind of moral system then for consistency real people (preemptively) or surviving relatives ought to be able to suppress circulation of /r/watchpeopledie style non-combat death videos too.
Which also applies to most of the high-profile "revenge porn" cases, and every case involving teenagers sexting (which a naive approach of "punish production" would still catch, though "the privilege to arbitrarily have your daughter's boyfriend jailed" is something traditionalists do like...)
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