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Ah, I see it now... in a second separate reply on the same level of the subthread. (PS: A Google search is not evidence, even if it's Google Scholar.)
Do you not realize how different the notification system here is from Reddit? What made you think I'd magically see two words in a mountain of text I'd already be scrolling past to get the latest level of replies?
If you forgot to include everything in your reply before posting, edit your existing reply if it's quick enough or wait for the next round of replies. You don't get to sneak in new stuff into past rounds like you had presented it all along and your interlocutor is the dumb one for not responding to it.
Pretty ironic that you'd do this (multiple times in fact) while accusing me of having poor communication skills.
??? But it's not. Lolicon, etc. is completely legal* (in the US at least along with Japan and many other localities), mostly accessible, and far less taboo than the real thing. That's the whole point of our conversation, that it's legal and real CP isn't, as has been the case for decades. (Actually it has never been illegal other than in small stints before such prohibitions were overturned by the Supreme Court.) I've said this in the clearest possible terms dozens of times in our conversation. Are you actually functionally illiterate? (Based on the OP of this subthread, did you think that Pixiv, a mainstream corporation that operates in the US, was currently willingly hosting illegal content and just considering possibly removing it?)
Well, I think I finally get what you're not understanding. You realize you spent 50 posts arguing because of the equivalent of you not knowing that the Sun doesn't revolve around the Earth, right?
*It is not covered by the same laws as actual CP. It technically could count as obscenity, same as adult pornography, but obviously nobody describes adult pornography as being illegal given how rare prosecutions are for it. So a purely lolicon-only site is in the same boat as PornHub legally, that is, legal.
Section 1466A of Title 18, United States Code, makes it illegal for any person to knowingly produce, distribute, receive, or possess with intent to transfer or distribute visual representations, such as drawings, cartoons, or paintings that appear to depict minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and are deemed obscene.
And 18 U.S.C. § 1465 makes the same for essentially all pornography, including that of adults, illegal:
Is your next inane argument going to be that all pornography then is similarly illegal to real child pornography? It's well known that US obscenity laws, though still on the books, are not generally enforced. Or why hasn't Belle Delphine, for example, been arrested?
See the wiki for example cases of it actually being enforced.
Yes and that's happened to adult pornography too.
You will also note from your article:
(If something is prosecuted so rarely that it's four cases in decades, most of them as a tacked-on charge involving other crimes, and they all get detailed on Wikipedia because they're that rare, then it's basically legal. There have been tens of thousands of prosecutions of real CP in the same timeframe.)
You will also note that unlike with real child pornography, the law you cited does not make strict liability possession illegal (only possession with the intent to distribute) which is a big difference.
Sorry, but you're just plain and simple wrong here.
For example, nhentai, which openly hosts thousands of lolicon doujins and is so well-known that you may have seen the meme even on Reddit and Twitter of a string of numbers being used to refer to a doujin (which also happens to feature drawn underage sex) in its catalogue (which is so popular it even has merchandise), is more popular than BLACKED.com, Bang Bros, /r/GoneWild, 4chan (which also openly hosts lolicon on its /b/ board), popular anime blog Sankaku Complex (which also hosts lolicon), Truth Social, and Mastodon (other than during its recent post-Elon spike), and is close to the most popular legal anime streaming site Crunchyroll. (That is, it is not some obscure site nobody knows about and is actually quite popular.)
It's been legally registered in the US since 2014. So, no, a few prosecutions tacked on to other charges doesn't change much unless you can point out an equivalent to the above for IRL CP.
This thread is basically becoming unreadable/unusable, which kind of sucks, because we're finally getting back to economics: apparently, these things can also be complements. It's a shame we're not going to get some good econometrics for how strong these various effects are. As I said before, it's probably silly to think that we can flood the market with cheap prescription opioids and not end up with problem users; it's probably also silly to think that we can flood the market with cheap fake child porn and not end up with problem users.
Okay but if by "cheap fake child porn" you mean erotic material of fictional children like lolicon (as opposed to AI-generated or whatever stuff that is indistinguishable from the real thing) then this has already happened as I've just proven. So whatever effects you're proposing should have been in place for decades now. So you'd have to define what "problem users" are and be specific about what you think should have already been the effects.
"Problem users" can take a few forms, but the most damaging form is those who find that real child porn is a complement for them. The effects could include things like causing enough people to think, "This isn't a real problem," that we have silly ideas percolating in academia which normalize sexual attraction being primarily oriented toward kids/fake kids.
Considering this gets into "Does GTA cause real violence (or maybe an increase in consumption of snuff films)?" territory and the answer to that overwhelmingly seems to be "No" then I think you'd need some serious evidentiary justification to think otherwise in this case.
It's implicitly biology that creates the norms of sexual attraction (the inherent and internal ones anyway, which are the most important as sexual attraction is primarily a psychologically endogenous phenomenon). You could put glossily-highlighted bottles of brake fluid in tiny thongs posed on silky red sheets on billboards for years and people still aren't going to become sexually attracted to them anyway because there's no internal impetus for it.
Thus, social structures can, for the most part, only stigmatize what is already there as far as I can tell. (And your response to this can be to say that certain things should stay stigmatized, but that's a different argument.) If viewing minors sexually is at risk of being destigmatized, then that must be because it's already relatively psychologically normal (per our brake fluid example, or perhaps maybe a reverse campaign to try to stop people from being attracted to something they inevitably will always be attracted to like nicely-shaped asses), and those same psychological impulses are almost certainly those that lead to the consumption of lolicon, etc. in the first place.
(If you had asked me I definitely would have told you that lolicon consumption and consumption of content of real children are by no means exclusive in many cases. I just see no reason to think that it's the lolicon somehow implanting a desire that wasn't there as opposed to the same inherent desire leading people to both (with it naturally leading people to real CP less because of course they're going to make a risk/reward analysis of consuming it and the fake stuff is much less risky, which has been my whole argument so far). If implanting sexual desire were significantly possible, then why haven't corporations used their massive media influence to give us all a findom-esque fetish for giving them money by now?)
You may be interested in these other replies I wrote on the subject:
https://www.themotte.org/post/181/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/32004?context=8#context (You may want to pay careful attention to the argument in the edit at the end of this post which I glossed over a bit in the main section but I think is crucial for predicting the social effects of the widespread consumption of any pornography.)
https://www.themotte.org/post/181/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/32330#context
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