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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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I figure the two are not so obviously different in terms of raising appetite for the act depicted (though I don't have a strong opinion as to whether either of them does and to what extent), but a big difference is that in a modern context, violence is much more easily contained than sexuality. Slippery slopes from friendly interactions to flirtation to superficial physical acts to sexual intercourse abound, and while there are instances of the endpoint of the slippery slope that society wants to ban (age difference, intoxication, force), it is rarely practical to ban everything all the way up to the starting point or far enough that society would be around to intervene. We can't stop friendly interactions and can't even really police the flirtation step, but by the time that step is reached the interaction has usually been taken "offline". On the other hand, slippery slopes from unfriendly interactions to fighting words to violent altercation to murder are much more rare and rarely taken offline (who gets a room with someone they get along unusually badly with?). Murder has other differences that make it unlikely to burgeon due to a small difference in murderous ideation, such as invariably yielding hard-to-hide observable effects (a person is gone); circumstances where all the beheading videos you binged bubble up in your head and you think "we both want it and I can get away without consequences" seem unlikely.

If this is the actual argument, it is unlikely that people would say it out loud, since it implicitly centers an image of an act with at least superficial consent (Epstein, groupies and Discord casanovas rather than the dragged-into-white-van-at-playground scenario) which invites a whole tangle of thoughtcrime (ranging from revisiting '70s NAMBLA-style activist rhetoric to something like "I hear all the rich and powerful of the world get to engage in this. It must be really enjoyable if they jump through hoops to do it despite the risks. Why do they get to do that and I don't?"). So instead, they would resort to fielding the arguments that you list, which are socially unimpeachable but do not actually reflect the true target or expected mechanism of action of any anti-CP policy. As evidence, I don't recall "rape is actually about power" insight porn ever moving the needle on how much people want to ban CP.