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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
There is no scientific basis for the claim that biological determinism of sexual attraction is true. Even my old queer theory prof (probably one of the most likely people, categorized by occupation, to support your political goals) said that she was agnostic on biological determinism.
There may be a spectrum between video games and opioids on the nature/nurture spectrum, but we have pretty much jack for good evidence on where anything is or how the spectrums are structured. I could sit here and propose a hundred plausible reasons why existing data on one looks different than existing data on others, but we wouldn't have the ability in this thread to devise/execute the necessary follow-on experiments to tease out any real answers.
To that end, I'm simply going to assert that I find it unlikely that we're going to flood the market with cheap fake child porn without having the result be some increase in the number of problem users. If you disagree, this is probably just a fundamental disagreement that is the crux, and which neither of us is going to have a chance of providing suitable data for convincing the other.
That said, if the cost of a substitute good is decreased, the price of a good will also decrease.
Really? Might I introduce you to my friend Mr. Darwin? If biology is not king here, then how did your millions of primitive ancestors who lived in no real society at all decide who was hot or not?
I don't think there's any way I can be both perfectly nice and perfectly clear about saying that there's probably no breed of "intellectual" I have less respect for (or value the opinion/"knowledge" of) than anyone involved in "queer theory". (And I will absolutely have to question your intellectual faculties if you took this class voluntarily.)
Almost certainly not, given that my political goals include the elevation of fascist/Aryan power and absolute masculine dominance over females, reducing them to property/chattel slaves.
Okay and you have not proven that's the case here even though what you thought hadn't happened yet already has. (If a legally registered site full of free lolicon being more popular than some of the most well-known porn brands in the world isn't the market being flooded, then what is?)
Mr. Darwin absolutely was not the final word on the nature/nurture debate. Like, at all.
It was right at the very beginning of when some of the principles of wokeism were starting to become more widespread (before the word "woke" existed to describe it). I couldn't quite figure out what the hell was going on with the ideas that were starting to be 'out there' and thought that maybe I could go find some core motte that made some sense. Spoiler: I did not.
You may be right that the market is already flooded. The market was flooded with prescription opioids long before it became commonly understood that we were causing a problem. "There are two ways you go broke: very slowly, then all of a sudden." Frankly, this paragraph is related to the last one. Wokeism was long-brewing, and even when it started leaking it was "just a weird group of losers in a small number of universities". Someone like you could have pointed to data on violent video games and sworn up and down that such a thing couldn't possibly sweep the world in such a fashion. I was early to the game of realizing that wokeism was a problem, late to the game of realizing that opioid prescriptions were a problem (was a 'normie' on that topic, not paying any attention to it, really), and maybe I'm just on the early side on this one.
No, of course not. By "Mr. Darwin" I more meant evolution in general. How do you have an iterative process of fitness-based selection involving sexual reproduction without at least some inherent sexual preference?
Fair.
Nobody swore up and down that they weren't going to sweep the world. People swore up and down that they weren't going to significantly alter people's inherent preferences and incentives in regards to engaging in real violence, and they for the most part seem to be right.
And if you're going to use opioids as an analogy, then aren't you implicitly acknowledging this all as a natural, fundamentally neurological phenomenon? You can get addicted to opioids without knowing the word "opioid". Opioids cause issues by hitting a perfectly natural little button in your brain that makes you feel good. There's no social contagion aspect behind the fundamental harms of them (obviously their spread is influenced by social factors, but again the harms of exposure are still present in the complete absence of those).
Sure, lots of people have some level of inherit somethings, but we have approximately zero clue how it really works. We can't bootstrap from, "People might have an evolution-influenced desire to command resources, because having access to resources aided fitness," all the way to, "Kleptomania is biologically-determined." (It might be! I don't know! Neither do you!)
Sorry, I wasn't very clear. I was imagining a hypothetical conversation where a hypothetical person was trying to claim that the excesses of wokeism weren't going to sweep the nation. They could have made reference to violent video games. I don't think that those two things stand/fall together; I don't think violent video games/sexual orientation stand/fall together, either. All these things could end up on weird and different parts of the nature/nurture curve.
You can probably get addicted to sex with children or child porn without knowing the words.
It's complicated. If it was utterly impossible for someone who is prescribed opioids to acquire them via other means (or some other such thought experiment), then maybe the harms wouldn't be present? Like, prescription opioids are good (at least at what they're designed to do), and can be used for really good purposes. They don't actually have an inherent badness to them. It's only when the biological meets the social that things seem to inevitably hit the fan. The problem is that we have absolute garbage for understanding how this actually works. We just have a pretty decent idea that the more people who are prescribed more opioids, the more problems we have.
In any event, I'd say we have way way way more understanding of the biological mechanisms surrounding drugs than we do things like sexual preferences. And we still have basically no clue how the relationship really works; we're basically hopeless for sexual preferences beyond something pretty basic like, "If we flood the market with cheap fake child porn, we're probably going to end up with some number of problem users."
Really? Zero clue? We can't say, for example, with any degree of certainty that people are inherently attracted to more symmetrical faces in human partners?
That's exactly my point, because, as with opioids, the manner in which they create/possess attraction/appeal/temptation/pleasure is fundamentally inherent in the human mind, not borne of a process of social reinforcement.
Yes this is of course likely (in a hypothetical thought experiment where you can make illegally acquiring opioids "utterly impossible", unlike in the real world). My only point is that the harms themselves are not implicitly social; if humans had a different neurological configuration that didn't respond to opioids in the manner that our actual one inherently does, then no amount of social reinforcement could make them as addictive. (And, conversely, no amount of social reinforcement is likely to make banana consumption as harmful to anyone as opioid consumption; the fundamental potential for harm just isn't there, just isn't reflected in human neurology/biology.) They'd just be sugar pills.
Because opioid addiction is pretty much objectively a bad thing. Now this has to be equivalently proven in regards to people being sexually attracted to or even engaging in sexual conduct with minors. (Keep in mind you've spent the last few posts claiming we have very little real scientific insight into inherent human sexuality; it's going to be pretty difficult to prop up the ol' inherent, universal trauma myth if that's what you're implicitly basing your opinion of the subject off of in light of that.)
Also, my understanding is that opioid abuse overall is still rising/spreading in spite of tightened restrictions on official medical prescriptions of them. This seems to support my model of human behavior (at least their genuine behavior, how they'll behave when they think nobody will know) as primarily a result of inherent preferences (opioids feel good) multiplied by present incentives (society sucks worse than it did when prescriptions were the primarily vehicle of opioid abuse, so people's increasing desire to relieve some of that pain has edged out decreased ease of access) rather than primarily a result of social influence (which, as I stated in the replies I linked earlier, is absolutely a factor, but one with limited ability to overrule the two considerations prior: for the most part you can't socially influence non-suicidal people into jumping off of bridges, same with totally reconfiguring their sexual desires). After all, if social influence were the primary factor, then why didn't society, after discovering how bad opioids are, just socially influence people into not enjoying them? Because you can't.
I mean, we can look at the data and see that they are attracted. Can we say why? Can we say that it's inherent? Probably not.
Look, when I was taking neuroscience in grad school (aligned with my actual work, unlike the queer theory (which I didn't even take for credit, just sat in on)), I learned about pair bonding and infidelity. There, we have an animal model (different species of voles) and a genetic correlate. Relative to the evidence we have for other human sexual preferences or attraction to symmetrical faces, it was pretty dynamite evidence. Now, was that even remotely enough evidence to actually say that infidelity is entirely (or even "mostly", or even "greater than X%, with X being like, I don't know, >20") biologically inherent? Not at all. Not even close. I don't think you have any clue just how far off we are.
Interestingly, the social use of sugar (and flooding the market with cheap sugar) has had quite harmful effects on plenty of folks.
Actually, it doesn't. My points don't require it. I have dug deep down the rabbit hole of sexual ethics in the past. I've even made arguments on reddit along those lines that other people have labeled 'pro-child sex'.
We have arrived all the way back to the very first comment I made in this thread: it's extremely common to fail to think on the margin.
We can't say that it's likely inherent if it's a consistent pattern among divergent cultures, including even isolated tribes that couldn't be affected by any social contagion? How far does this rabbit hole go? Can we not say that people are inherently generally attracted to other humans instead of trees (which some people are) then?
Almost every culture in human history, including highly divergent ones before they interacted to any significant degree, has had some manner of infidelity taboo. That's enough for me, because there's no other good causative mechanism to explain so much convergence without communication.
Okay, then they'd be zero carb sweetener pills. Point is, they'd be inert and harmless even if you could convince people to pop 5,000 of them a day (which you probably couldn't no matter how much purely media-based influence was applied because they're inert and thus pointless, which is my point).
Then what grand harms are you even worried about arising from the greater apprehension of minor sexual appeal?
Does the margin matter? There was a meme going around a while back, mostly a right-wing troll but still a victim of Poe's law, that White leftists should kill themselves to make reparations for their contributions to system racism, White privilege, etc. As far as I know there is not a single confirmed case of anyone biting. If it had been promoted more, say by the mainstream media, I bet you'd still get less than 500 people (probably far less) going for it and we'd almost certainly be better off without them anyway. Of course as mentioned above you need to define what concrete harm you're worried about before you start worrying about the margin of it.
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