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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   34788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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ooh, this is a pretty exotic thing to see in the wild. From a first-person point-of-view, do you think that child porn increases or decreases your desire for real children and the probability of actually molesting a child? To me most of the morality of the situation condenses to that one question.

We're going to masturbate to children, real and fictional.1 You know we are, and you can't stop us.

This is true for sophisticated pedophiles who already know where to find this stuff, but making it really hard to get child porn still reduces the viewership on the margins, as dumb people or only mildly-pedophilic people won't have the knowledge and/or motivation to go seek it out.

I cannot comment on CP use. However, I've always heard that watching regular porn decreases your drive to go find regular sex. It does make sense to me.

ooh, this is a pretty exotic thing to see in the wild. From a first-person point-of-view, do you think that child porn increases or decreases your desire for real children and the probability of actually molesting a child?

I think it's pretty much irrelevant. It's just the classic Grand Theft Auto debate of whether it makes you more likely to engage in violence or not. The general scientific consensus seemed to end up overwhelmingly as "Well, it makes certain indicators of conflict and aggression-oriented cognition more prominent temporarily in the brain, but other than that it's probably neither going to significantly or even really at all affect the probability of you turning into a mass murderer nor being prevented from being one." No amount of GTA was probably going to stop Salvador Ramos from doing what he did (some future Holodeck-like perfectly realistic simulation, maybe, but that's a different story for a time we're not yet in), and no GTA addict is probably going to turn into Salvador Ramos because of it.

Does watching "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" make you more or less likely to want to be a millionaire? Of course the question is nonsensical, because all we know that people are only interested in the premise of the show because they already have an inherent desire, independent of and predating the show, to be a millionaire. (That's implicitly understood by nearly everyone in this case, but applying it to other situations tends to reveal the foolishness behind less commonly agreed upon media controversies.)

The same is true of Grand Theft Auto. People play it and enjoy it because (among other reasons of course) other people kind of suck and it's sometimes fun to imagine just getting to mow a bunch of them down without consequences. Does that mean you're likely to actually do it? Yes if you're predisposed to and no if you're not (same as game shows are unlikely to convince people with a genuinely low natural acquisitiveness that they are suddenly desperate to be rich).

And the same is also true of pedophiles and child porn. The desire predates and drives the search for the content. Same as with GTA, it's going to influence your cognition temporarily, make sexy lolis dancing around in your mind (that is, whatever neurological indicators there are of active pedophilic attraction) more prominent (though, as the characteristic quirk of male sexuality, (for most men anyway) you'll suddenly be totally uninterested in it for at least a bit once you cooooom, a threshold that isn't as hard/visible in regards to violent stimuli). Whether you'll go further than the screen is almost entirely dependent on other factors. And the desire in general is wholly unaffected.

This is true for sophisticated pedophiles who already know where to find this stuff, but making it really hard to get child porn still reduces the viewership on the margins, as dumb people or only mildly-pedophilic people won't have the knowledge and/or motivation to go seek it out.

I actually wasn't talking about child porn (which I don't look at anymore, as it's often, in my view, generally inferior in technical quality and erotic character to the more legal stuff which is in great abundance and thus not worth whatever hassles/legal risks are involved in acquiring it, even though those are still relatively minor (at least in likelihood, not in expected downside) with even a small bit of education). I was talking about the abundance of legal but sexualized content of minors all over the Internet. You are correct about child porn though in that even though it's actually fairly easy to find and consume it safely, doing so is still often definitely is too much for many dumb people (particularly young zoomers who often can't do anything technologically if it's not in convenient app form).

Edit: Though I should be clear that I interpreted your question (based on the phrase "desire for real children") as being in regards to one's behavioral inclination to have actual sexual contact with children assuming that circumstances making the opportunity available were already present (that is, if someone would do it or not in the "moment of truth"). Overall, I do think child porn availability likely reduces instances of sexual contact with children via the same mechanism by which porn reduces instances of sexual contact with/between adults (including rape, but also consensual ones): it saps your time/willpower and occupies energy/moments you could otherwise spend pursuing IRL mating activities. It's as true of pedophiles as it is of anyone else.

Going based on my prior analogy, it's like how any amount of time spent watching "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?", will, if anything, most likely reduce your chance of actually becoming one, if not just because watching it is not an activity that actually actively productively contributes to the process of becoming a millionaire (in most cases, unless you're training to get on the show and win yourself, but that's a long shot, kind of like claiming that (child or adult) porn is going to train you in how to seduce females and sexually satisfy them, which may occasionally be true for some but only very rarely).

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