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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   25769 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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I mean, my memory is that the slippery slope people were not talking about transgenderism back then, they were talking about bestiality and pedophilia becoming accepted and mainstream. Same as they are now, same as they always are.

There's a difference between an advance prediction of 'X is a slippery slope that will lead specifically to Y', and a retroactive claim that 'X was the start of a slippery slope that has led us to current thing Z'.

You can make up a retroactive narrative about anything leading to anything, once you've observed them both.

But the religious people of the time didn't actually predict the things that have actually happened since then - or if they did, those predictions were tossed out alongside a barrage of thousands of other predictions that failed - and therefore, they are not 'vindicated' and don't get any credibility from it.

Well, we do have mainstream progressive outlets (Vice and Vox at least off the top of my head) writing articles trying to normalize pedophilia. Along with the current progressive push to allow children to consent to permanent alteration of their body and being encouraged to hide it from their parents or non-prog authority figures. So I'd say they were correct on that front.

Well, we do have mainstream progressive outlets (Vice and Vox at least off the top of my head) writing articles trying to normalize pedophilia.

Could you link to the articles you have in mind?

Here are a few from Vice. It looks like the one I thought was from Vox was actually a Salon article. Another from NYMag.

Certainly, I was and remain sceptical about "legalising gay marriage will not lead to polygamy". Why wouldn't it? Now that you've decided that marriage is not between a man and a woman, but between two persons of any gender orientation, what is so sacred and immutable about the number of indeterminate gender persons in the legal contract?

I expect that over time societies that are making progress will repeal laws against victimless things, with gay marriage and polyamorous marriage both being examples, alongside marijuana, blasphemy, etc.

I don't especially see an argument that one thing along that track leads to another thing long that track, just because they happen in order.

What's a victimless crime? See, I see people using this about things like shoplifting and property damage (remember when the antifa and black bloc first got mainstream attention, back in the protests about Trump winning the election? all the social media posts about "you care more about a few broken windows"?), but I don't think those are victimless.

Marijuana is victimless! And other drugs? Because right now, the people supplying User with their fun party substances are not nice people, they kill and terrorise. You can argue that this is the fault of the squares making laws making the fun party substances illegal, but the reality is that there's blood and misery associated with "my little weekend treat".

There's an incentive on the part of those pushing for changes to say "this hurts nobody, it's victimless, in fact it's a good thing". But it's only down the line we get to see if that's true or not. And I don't think "gay marriage is harmless" can be neatly disassociated from "one thing leads to another", because it was overturning an established and pretty much universal cultural practice (marriage is men and women, not men and men and women and women) for the sake of political ends (making gayness normalised and accepted by mainstream society).

It won. Do you really think the other groups who want massive social change, normalisation, and acceptance, didn't look at that, take notes about it was achieved, and are not following the same playbook? And using "but gay marriage!" as a point of leverage against opposition and criticism?

You can't saw through the branch just a little bit and no more; even sawing a little bit weakens the branch, and the next bunch who come along to saw through just a little bit are doing more of that.

Even you admit that polygamous/polyamorous marriage will possibly be the next liberalisation of the custom. That couldn't have happened without same-sex marriage softening up the opposition first. After all, if two people who weally, weally wuv each other dis much!!! deserve the right to get legally married, then three or four or five people who weally weally wuv each other dis much!!! should deserve the same, right? We overcame the irrational bigoted prejudice about the sex/gender of the spouses, why are we now hung up on the number?

All the people contorting Scripture on behalf of gay marriage ("David and Jonathan were lovers! Naomi and Ruth were lovers!") have a much better case when it comes to "more than one spouse", the Patriarchs were permitted to have several wives, and Solomon the Wise who had multiple wives is celebrated and honoured.

Marijuana is victimless! And other drugs? Because right now, the people supplying User with their fun party substances are not nice people, they kill and terrorise. You can argue that this is the fault of the squares making laws making the fun party substances illegal, but the reality is that there's blood and misery associated with "my little weekend treat".

Whatever the "reality", drug warriors do not get to claim damage they caused as being caused by their opponents. This is the same concept as when death penalty opponents object to the death penalty based on the high cost of imposing it -- well, yes, it has a high cost, but that's entirely the fault of the death penalty opponents' obstructionism, and so they don't get to use it as an argument for their position.

After all, if two people who weally, weally wuv each other dis much!!! deserve the right to get legally married…

The gays weren’t the first to start sawing off that limb; the no-fault divorce crowd were. They were the ones who redefined marriage as being purely about love and redefined love as being purely about emotions. No-fault divorce and its effects (single parent households, destruction of wealth, and the like) have caused far more damage to society than gay marriage ever will, and that’s ignoring the fact that the push for gay marriage probably would never have succeeded had no-fault divorce not fundamentally redefined marriage in the first place.

I'm petty sure the interracial marriage crowd was first, actually.

Not really. Anti-miscegenation laws were never universal.

But you could easily and trivially accuse people for the expansion of black rights to only be in it for the miscegenation.

I've argued this same point with fellow right-wingers IRL (and it's interesting which ones tended to agree), to the point of arguing that overturning no-fault divorce should be a higher priority than trying to get Obergefell overturned. First, because AIUA the former is primarily statutory, and passing legislation is generally easier than overturning Supreme Court precedent; and second, because without no-fault divorce, I'd expect gay marriage rates drop significantly even if still legal.

I disagree that poly is not victimless. I briefly dated a poly girl, and I hated being put in the double-bind of either not pursuing other women or having to have "the poly/ENM conversation" with them, and the latter made me feel like I was leaking bad memes into the groundwater. Missed out on a possible relationship with a lovely mainstream girl that way because my ethics wouldn't allow me to hook up under those circumstances. I've said this before, but a world where poly is more normalized is a world where it's more acceptable to proposition other people's partners because "they might be poly, you never know these days, she can just say no". And then you have a world where the baseline temptation to cheat is raised, making monogamous life harder for those that want it.

By that logic marriage being between a man and a woman is a step on the slippery slope. I remain skeptical about "Legalising marriage will not lead to gay marriage" Why wouldn't it? Now we've decided that marriage is between a man and a woman, whats is so sacred and immutable about it at allm? Your logic implies we shouldn't even have taken the first step!

But I think the fact many places had polygmous marriages before gay marriage means this isn't a slippery slope. One does not lead to the other.

This is a case where there are multiple overlapping groups who have different ideas of marriage and just because one is convincing does not mean the others will be in any given culture.

Clearly in Islam the polygamists generally won in a way which didn't lead to gay marriage. There is no reason why it can't be the opposite way round somewhere else.

Societies that had polygamous marriage still made it "one man and several women". And Western societies stamped out polygamy (ask the early Mormons). Redefining marriage as "it's about how you feel and your own personal fulfilment, and not about kids or families or being part of society, and now it's not even about men and women but whoever you like can be your spouse" does not put up a solid bar about "but no more than two spouses of whatever gender turns you on for as long as you both get the Obama thrill down your leg! we stand rock-ribbed traditional on that!"

But the government having to deal with multiple spouses with all that entails (tax benefits, insurance benefits, custody cases etc etc) is a strong indication that even a left wing government is going to think very seriously about expanding it further. Noticeably in most places with polygamy laws the mechanics around divorce, property, custody are all pretty much skewed towards the man, this simplifies the whole process.

So unless you are think that the whole totality of Western law is going to be rewritten this seems highly doubtful here. And if that happens then most likely polygamy is not going to be the biggest worry.

The fact is the secular administrative state did not have many reasons to prevent marriage between two men or two women, it means very little there. Add in more people and it will require significantly more changes, resources and fights, that I predict pretty much no Western politician is going to want to get involved with.

Given that we have functional polygamy, with people having relationships and kids by multiple partners, I can see someone arguing for "the conservative case for poly marriage" ('conservative' here the way Andrew Sullivan argued the 'conservative' case for gay marriage).

Instead of Jackson knocking up a string of baby mamas/Janelle having a string of baby daddies, they can now have a recognised legal relationship that gives them rights and duties. It will be more stable for the kids to have both (sets of) parents in the home. Janelle can now have her new guy move in, become part of the family unit, be there for his kids. Jackson can do the same with his new girl. There's no need for jealousy or competition or that Janelle can't cohabit with the father of her (third) child because that means she would lose her social welfare payments. It makes economic sense, it is better for the children, and it means men can't skip out on their responsibilities to the women and children in their lives, and women can't dump the father of their children with ease.

Sure, we're going to have to rejig the entire set of laws about divorce, property, custody, social benefits and the rest of it, but hey, isn't that what the courts are for, when the first cases about this happen?

We're going to the polls in March in my country to fuck around with the wording in the Constitution about the family because it's sexist and outdated. "Based on marriage"? Nah, "durable relationships" are the new thing! Nobody has given a definition of what constitutes a "durable relationship", but hey, isn't that what the courts are for, when the first cases about this happen?

If a majority votes YES, then the Constitution will change.

The constitutional protection of the Family would be given to both the Family based on marriage and the Family founded on “other durable relationships”.

The Family founded on marriage means the unit based on a marriage between two people without distinction as to their sex.

The Family founded on other durable relationships means a Family based on different types of committed and continuing relationships other than marriage.

So, different types of family units would have the same constitutional rights and protections.

You say that:

Add in more people and it will require significantly more changes, resources and fights, that I predict pretty much no Western politician is going to want to get involved with.

Hillary didn't want to touch same-sex marriage in 2008, but her views 'evolved', as did those of other politicians. When there's enough of a push and the straws are blowing in the wind, then it's worth it for the politicians to get involved.

And Clinton eventually got where her friends wanted her to go, though her change of heart came when the political risk had disappeared — close to a year after similar shifts by President Obama and Vice President Biden.

...Among the Bill Clinton-era policies that Hillary Clinton has disavowed on the presidential campaign trail is the Defense of Marriage Act, the law signed by then-President Bill Clinton in the lead-up to his 1996 reelection effort that prohibited the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage.

See? Going from "declaring that she was unwilling to support legalized marriage" to "running as a forceful advocate for the LGBT community and a full-fledged supporter of same-sex marriage."

If the polling says the people want poly marriage, the politicians will 'mature their views' on it:

By May 2012, as polls showed more than half of the country supporting same-sex marriage, top Democrats began indicating their support. Biden declared in a television interview that he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage. Obama followed soon after, saying that “same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

So give the books and book reviews and think pieces in the media and appearances on chat shows time to soften them up, same as with gay marriage. Mona and Rupert just had a glowing puff-piece in the NYT about their twenty-year long 'unmarriage' where both of them manage to have upper middle-class careers, two children, and seventeen different lovers in varying degrees of partnership and relationship levels, this is the future of marriage, society just needs to recognise the changing mores and enable them to have legal rights for their boyfriend, boyfriend's girlfriend, and girlfriend's pan enbyfriend as part of their 'unfamily'. Those are the people with the money, time and networks to get involved in pushing the politicians. It's not the single mothers with three kids living in social housing in council estates that are pushing for the Constitutional change on "women in the home" in my country, and it won't be them pushing for poly marriage in other countries.

But they'll be used as "it'll make things so much better for Jackson and Janelle" rationales by the people who wouldn't go within ten feet of where Jackson and Janelle live.

So unless you are think that the whole totality of Western law is going to be rewritten this seems highly doubtful here.

Honestly, I have to laugh here. And just exactly what did you think had to happen, to permit same-sex marriage? "No, for a thousand years anybody could rock up to the local druid, priest, or minister and say 'me and the boyfriend wanna get hitched' and that was cool, it just wasn't formally written in to the legal code!"

The scale change to require a man to marry a man using the same mechanism already codified is very different than having to rewrite for multiple people. All the existing legal structures work exactly the same way.

I also think you've pointed out how changes can happen but not be a slippery slope.

If the peoples opinions shift to redefine family is that because of gay marriage, or was gay marriage a symptom of the same thinking? If gay marriage isn't causative then it wasn't the first step on the slippery slope people were saying it was.

If the draft is abolished and you say, this is a slippery slope, it will mean we won't have the soldiers we need to fight a war, and then there is a war and you don't have enough soldiers, because Congress slashed military funding because the people decided they disliked war hawk politicians. Then your slippery slope diagnosis was wrong. You were seeing the symptoms of a populace whose opinions on war were changing. Abolishing the draft didn't CAUSE you to have too few soldiers, having a populace that was against war caused both. But funding being slashed could have preceded the draft being revoked, therefore the draft did not cause it.

Just to be clear you might still be right to oppose the policies, but you were wrong about being on a slippery slope. It wasn't that A would lead to B, it was that you were in the middle of a sea change, where A, B, C and D were all getting more popular.

The Family Research Council (James Dobson's lobbying org) was bringing up a link between homosexual parenting and increased rates of gender disorders as far back as 2004 more than a decade before Obergefell. That's not explicitly transgender but the term was much less common then. Similarly, they also discuss the lack of sexual fidelity in homosexual marriage (more like open marriage than poly but in the ballpark).

If I’m getting this right, transgender in 2004 referred specifically to post-op trans women, and gender disorder was the term in use for the majority of what we would call transgender today.

I guess there are two ways to read the relevant comments. One would be that religious people actually had better predictive modeling skills and their rejection of gay marriage and similar trends was based on them having an accurate model of how that would lead to specific bad outcomes.

The other reading has a bit more wiggle room. Maybe, conservatives and religious types had passed down and maintained social technologies that were valuable and well-honed, ironically, by a process more like evolution than intelligent design. It was from these inherited norms and values that they knew 'something' was wrong without actually understanding the complicated multifaceted societal shifts and changes that would come about in response to any given policy.

If the second position is all that is being claimed, then the internal experience might have gone something like; back then I believed in secular hedonistic sexual norms and values and thought religious people were crazy. Two adult homosexual people having relations, dating, and getting married, all seemed like totally acceptable/good things, and I supported the general cultural zeitgeist that was in favor of gay marriage.

As time has marched on, I am increasingly confronted by things that seem to be coming out of that same cultural movement that I once supported, that I know find distasteful. I can see a through-line, from the arguments and ideas that I once repeated to the slogans and activism of today. I regret the confidence with which my younger-self dismissed the concerns raised by traditional/conservative/religious figures. It increasingly looks like their social technology was correct in some way about the nebulous dangers of increasingly liberal sexual norms and values and now we are living through the consequences of them losing that battle.

This certainly speaks broadly to my personal rightward shift.

I believed that we really understood sociology and that the social sciences were robust, accurate models of reality. That all calls for traditional/religious/conservative values were born of ignorance at best and malice at worst. Then I started reading SSC and my faith in the social sciences was shatter (irrevocably?). My whole worldview came crashing down, sexism first, then racism, every aspect of the liberal progressive package was called into question. Where once it was obvious beyond question that Christianity was an arbitrary useless hatful ideology, now I wonder, how it spread so far(it wasn't always powerful and rich)? How did enslaved priests convert the Vikings? Maybe memetic fitness is a real thing and Christianity was actually a valuable and insightful social technology that made the societies that adopted it better? I don't actually strongly believe this is true, but it certainly seems possible to me now.

So I might be projecting, but when I hear someone say that 'maybe the religious doomsayers were on to something', it speaks to me. Even if I doubt I could find a specific religious doomsayer whose positions I would endorse.

Maybe, conservatives and religious types had passed down and maintained social technologies that were valuable and well-honed, ironically, by a process more like evolution than intelligent design.

A lot of this stuff was actually dictated top down in like 1000 AD or before, though.

I mean, my memory is that the slippery slope people were not talking about transgenderism back then, they were talking about bestiality and pedophilia becoming accepted and mainstream.

"Sure they said next I'd put poop in your Cheerios, but look this is clearly just pee!"

I don't think you understand what a massive blackpill it is for some of us to see the LGBT movement try so hard to include kids in their agenda. Watching them flip their wigs over a law preventing them from teaching their ideology to children below the third grade, or whatever, was bad enough. The fact that the first person to say "hey maybe the parents don't need to know" wasn't instantly exiled and nuked from orbit is, unto itself, a dog-fucking level offense in my eyes.

The fact that the first person to say "hey maybe the parents don't need to know" wasn't instantly exiled and nuked from orbit is, unto itself, a dog-fucking level offense in my eyes.

This is too much heat, not enough light. Please don't do this.

Fair enough lol

Have the other predictions failed or just not come true yet? I think the normalization of pederastic relationships is coming absent a culture shift, but I don’t think it will happen for another several decades at least.

Not a historian, but my understanding is that people have been saying 'if you allow my opponent to do the thing I dislike then pedorasty will be normalized next' for literal centuries and have never been correct. At some point you have to just take the L.

If anything pedorasty is getting far less acceptable over time, as drawing lines about what sexual ethics should be draws a clear division that pedorasty violates. I don't think Michael Jackson or R Kelly could have continued their careers after credible pedo accusations today, the way they did back then.

(similarly AFAIK laws against bestiality are getting stricter over time, I think?)

Not a historian, but my understanding is that people have been saying 'if you allow my opponent to do the thing I dislike then pedorasty will be normalized next' for literal centuries and have never been correct.

Depends on how you define pederasty. In the UK, 16-21 year olds were initially regarded as children for the purposes of gay sex, when the latter was legalised. This was lowered to 16-17 year olds, because of course 18-21 year olds. Finally, it became legal for a 50 year old man to have sex with a 16 year old boy in 2000. By definition that's not legalising pederasty in the sense of "sex with an underage boy" (but in that sense, neither would legalising sex with a 5 year old boy) but it is legalising pederasty in the sense of "sex between an adult man and an adolescent boy." It also happened via a classic slippery slope process: first male homosexuality, then male homosexuality between full legal adults, and finally male homosexuality between full legal adults and schoolchildren.

Personally, I don't have a problem with that, but it would be dishonest not to acknowledge that the social conservatives were right in this case. True, a 50 year old man with a 16 year old boyfriend will face social problems in the UK, but no more than a 50 year old man with a 16 year old girlfriend.

Still, I agree with your overall point. In general, human disgust instincts against pedophilia and pederasty seem to both stronger and be more linked to ethics than those for male homosexuality. I find male homosexuality nauseous, but I have no moral objection to it. And many people, even normal people, don't find any sort of homosexuality disgusting or more disgusting than e.g. anal sex in general.

No, I don't buy that definition game. Gay marriage has not opened the way to any age gaps that weren't already allowed between men and women. If you call that pederasty, then we've already been living in the age of general pedophilia and been fine with it.

However, it turns out that no, the sexual revolution has not actually opened up the floodgates of adults fucking kids, and in fact has been increasingly moving away from it. Where marrying 16 year old girls has been widely accepted before and younger wasn't out of question, we now only see the allowed age/perceived maturity gap shrinking (that's an AND slash, not an OR - "she was very mature for her age" doesn't cut it anymore).

Gay marriage has not opened the way to any age gaps that weren't already allowed between men and women.

Right, but that had entailed legalising sex between adolescents and fully developed men. Whether it's "normalised" it is more debatable, though, since normality /= legality.

If you call that pederasty, then we've already been living in the age of general pedophilia and been fine with it.

This is conflating attraction/sexual activity with adolescents with pedophilia.

This is conflating attraction/sexual activity with adolescents with pedophilia.

I've used the word like I see it used. I'm assuming the moral panic back then was not limited to "it's only bad when they're pre-pubescent".

When conservatives clamor that X will "make pederasty legal" when the central example of pederasty is very much "fucking young boys", "sex with 16 year old teens is now allowed for both sexes" is a technicality I'm not giving them any points on.

I’d be interested to hear any examples you can give of past pederastic predictions. I spend a lot of time reading 19th and early 20th century primary sources, and I don’t remember ever coming across that concern, nor can I think of anything that would have caused concern about it in the 16th–18th centuries. The closest I can come up with is opposition to castrati, but that’s closer to opposition to trans procedures for minors than to anything related to pedophilia. I guess there was also opposition to child brothels, but those were apparently actually a thing in some areas, and polite society was unanimously happy to shut them down.

As for the present, I agree pederasty normalization is extremely unlikely in the next several decades for reasons that you note. I can’t help but notice, though, that some pedophilic activists and sympathizers have started to mimic techniques that other marginalized groups have used to gain acceptance, and I could see a concerted effort paying dividends in, say, 50–70 years.

Not a historian as I said, and I have a lot of ignorance on this topic, I was referring to a general sense this is true that I'd gotten from reading other people talk about this argument and the slippery slope fallacy in general. I could very definitely be wrong and it's a more recent development.

Are you talking about MAP stuff and the 'gold-star' (non-offending) pedophile narrative?

I have certainly seen stuff along the lines of 'people who are attracted to minors can't help it, they should not actually be woodchippered if they haven't actually done anything to any kids, we should let them looks at drawings or AI porn to deal and monitor them to make sure they don't offend but they're not actually evil just for the thought-crime alone'.

I will say that I've seen this exist, although all the leftist spaces I'm in are pretty hostile to it and I've seen people trying it get banned from several places.

But I'll also point out that 'non-offending' is the central distinction in this rhetoric, this rhetoric relies on drawing a sharp distinction between offending and non-offending pedophiles in a way that actually draws more attention and vitriol towards hating and punishing offenders.

I wouldn't be totally surprised if in 70 years we don't talk about woodchippering people who say they are unfortunately attracted to minors but strictly use AI-generated VR porn to deal with it, or w/e. I actually would expect a world like that where those people are known and monitored (informally at least) and have outlets and a life script to follow to have less child abuse than our current world where they hide off the grid.

Unless you think you have seen people using leftist rhetoric to say why actual sex with children in reality is fine and good, and seen that get any uptake? I absolutely have not seen that, if that's what you mean.

(I'd also point out that groups like NAMBLA have tried that tactic in the past and failed, I think you will always have some people trying to appropriate the current paradigm to support their dumb/bad thing, but that doesn't mean they will succeed nor that the current paradigm favors/helps them. That's just how anyone tries to make their point)

Are you talking about MAP stuff?

Largely that, yes, though I also have in mind some of the pedophilia-adjacent things in the trans arena—child drag queens and the like. I largely agree with hydroacetylene’s comment below on how pedophilia could be normalized; I just think he’s missing an additional set of arguments borrowed from the trans movement. If pre-pubescent children can choose to medically transition from one sex to another, it really isn’t a huge jump to give them agency over their sex lives as well (personally, I’d go further and say that allowing transition but not sex is plain incoherent; if anything, it should be the other way around). The case for giving barely-pubescent children sexual freedom is even stronger, and I agree with hydroacetylene that this is more likely for children who opt for same-sex relationships, since that eliminates the concern about pregnancy and since ephebophilic relationships are already more common among gay men. (And yes, I know that technically pedophilia doesn’t include attraction to 12 year olds, but that’s what the vast majority of people consider it.)

In general, though, I tend to look at pedophilia normalization through the lens of the gay rights movement’s history. If you asked the average American in 1960—a time when sodomy was illegal in every state in the union, a year before the famous Boys Beware! educational film was released, and nine years before the Stonewall riots—whether he thought same-sex marriage would ever be legalized throughout the country, he’d laugh you out of the room. Forget marriage, he’d think you were insane if you suggested SCOTUS would rule as it did in Lawrence v. Texas. I think we might be in the same spot today with regard to pedophilic relationships.

This is why I’m not really happy about the MAP and non-offending pedophile stuff I see, even as I agree with pretty much everything they’re saying. Pedophiles don’t choose to be attracted to children, it’s wrong to conflate temptation with action, and it’s a problem that non-offending pedophiles don’t feel safe to discuss their problems with therapists, etc. I wish society would change to make those distinctions clear, but I just don’t trust that the current reasonable concerns raised by MAP activists aren’t a camel’s nose peeking its way into the tent.

Google Gemini will already tell you about the need to Destigmatize Minor Attracted Persons (MAPS).

Only a few years ago "MAP" was a fringe phrase, originally developed by administrators of the site "AttractedToChidren.org". A MAP pride flag was developed on tumblr in 2018 by exactly the sort of people you'd expect. Saying it or putting it in a bio was social death. But behind the scenes a lot of well-funded activist and public health organizations (but I repeat myself) have been normalizing it.
In 2021 Allyn Walker of Johns Hopkins University published A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity, popularizing the phrase among right-thinking (left-thinking?) people, and apparently well-trained AIs as well. Note that Walker was hired by JH med school after the book came out.

This is another one of those cases where the bleeding edge of leftist academia is at odds with the reddit-tier lumpenproles spewing woodchipper memes. And in all these cases the social mechanisms of leftist ideological dissemination lead to the academic version winning, because "umm, yikes, that view is actually Reactionary and Harmful according to my new sociology degree" is the ultimate trump card in those circles.
You can expect to see a left-wing flip on MAPs in only a few years, rather than decades.

Google Gemini will already tell you about the need to Destigmatize Minor Attracted Persons (MAPS).

Link for those who are interested.

This is a good illustration of what I mentioned in my last response to @guesswho. I agree 100% with all of this. People should really cool it with the wood chipper memes when talking about non-offending pedophiles, even as they build statues of Gary Plauche for his actions in dealing with offending pedophiles. It’s just about impossible to say that, though, because no one will believe you’re the ACLU defending Nazis; they’ll assume you’re just secretly a pedo yourself.

Reddit was halfway there when I left a couple of years ago. I’d regularly see talk about non-offending pedophiles, and Reddit was quite quick to defend the distinction between ephebophiles and pedophiles. They wanted outpatient treatment with no registrations or job/home location restrictions. Basically, a pedophile could be working in a position that left them alone with small children with no need to even disclose their desires.

I disagree with you. Actual normalization of pedophilia will take at least a couple decades; redditors are not a majority even if they could be converted over to supporting pedophiles relatively more easily.

I expect the progression to be 'well MAPs shouldn't face discrimination unless they're active pedophiles'-> 'cartoon CP isn't CP'-> 'CP that already exists isn't hurting anyone to keep consuming it'-> 'ethically produced CP'-> 'what of the child's rights to engage in relationships with adults'-> 'what's wrong with sex? You know they used to say this about homosexuals, too?'. Maybe with a parallel process towards accepting homosexual ephebophilia; AFAIK typical examples of "male bad behavior" like that seem much more accepted among the gay community than among straight people, but I don't think all or even most gay men are pedophiles or in fact want anything at all to do with anybody younger than a teenager, sexual or otherwise. But the history of left wing movements is pushing for more by taking smaller victories than the ultimate goal so as to advance the end state; you couldn't have obergefell without lawrence v Texas and you couldn't have lawrence v Texas without a large majority of the country already thinking that homosexuality is deplorable and all, but actually making it illegal is ridiculous.

Now if you'll excuse me I'll feel gross for typing that for a few minutes.

You're correct that the specific predictions didn't pan out as stated in the 90s and 00s. To cut them a little slack, nobody really anticipated a hot debate about the definition of 'man' vs 'woman' or the 'gender spectrum' to enter the fray.

However, that the Left enabled that kind of blindsiding has shown me that they can't be trusted to not flip the board and mealmouth things that I find rather horrid, like puberty blockers. I have to say that my trust for the Left to stay within reasonable lines has done a complete 180 on this topic, and I wonder if the 'kink wing' of the party is just waiting for more favorable conditions to finally push through. And they could very well do so even if the vast majority of their compatriots don't like it. We have not slid to the specific point that moral conservativism predicted, but I don't want to be distracted from the fact that a slide did occur, even if indirectly.

My suspicion is you will ultimately be found correct. There won't be a mass normalization of beastiality and pedophilia. But that's predicated on my faith that surely people don't change that quickly, and I don't know how I justify that. So personally, I'm going to extend the deadline to 2040 and see where we stand after swimming in AI futa cocks for a decade or two.

And the irresolvable difference here is just that I know a lot of trans people and think that allowing them to transition has been better for them and their lives than not allowing that, so I don't see anything unreasonable there.

I expect pedophilia and bestiality not to get normalized because kids and animals don't actually want to have sex with you, there's an actual victim there. I expect that the future will normalize a lot of things I find weird or upsetting but which don't actually harm anyone on net, which is how I see the trans movement.

We probably can't reconcile our predictions before reconciling that disagreement-in-fact.

I expect pedophilia and bestiality not to get normalized because kids and animals don't actually want to have sex with you, there's an actual victim there

They can't consent to sex. Whatever consent to sex is (not an easy concept to analyse, to put it mildly) it's not the same thing as not wanting to have sex. I definitely wanted to have sex when I was 11 (and pre-pubescent). A cat in heat wants some sexual activity and doesn't particularly care with what. The problem is that children and animals can't engage in consensual sex, whether they want to or not, any more than they can make a mature decision about whether to become addicted to heroin.

Are you opposed to animals having sex with each other?

I'm opposed to bestiality, but I do think the "animals can't consent" argument isn't good.

Are you opposed to animals having sex with each other?

No, because I don't make the same moral requirements of animals as I do of humans. "It's wrong for humans to have sex with a non-consenting partner" doesn't imply "It's wrong for animals to have sex with a non-consenting partner," any more than "It's wrong for humans to torture mice for their amusement" implies "It's wrong for cats to torture mice for their amusement."

So if you just happen to by lying around looking attractive and an animal shows up and has his way with you?

I wouldn't condemn the animal ethically, any more than I'd condemn the weather ethically for having a storm when I'm sailing and breaking my back. Would you?

What about the person though?

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It's not "morally wrong" for an animal to try that, the same as it isn't "morally wrong" for a bear to try and maul you. Indeed, I've never seen anyone judging a bear for doing that.

When you shoot an animal that does something you don't like, it's not because they're morally in the wrong, it's becausee they're doing something you don't like.

To be clear, the moral requirements are upon those who are human, specifically, and not those who are able to consent, right?

As I assume you wouldn't be okay with children having sex with animals (since you think both are unable to consent)?

To be clear, the moral requirements are upon those who are human, specifically, and not those who are able to consent, right?

As I assume you wouldn't be okay with children having sex with animals (since you think both are unable to consent)?

Not specifically humans, no. If Vulcans existed, they would also have moral requirements.

But you're fundamentally right: being unable to consent to sex is not a sufficient condition for being outside the realm of moral responsibility. However, in most plausible examples, a child who engages in sexual acts with an animal (and hasn't been specifically told not to etc.) likely doesn't understand what they are doing, so should be treated as someone who did something wrong without knowing. I think this is common sense: if you saw your 7 year old daughter doing things with your dog, you'd treat her very differently from your 70 year old neighbour doing things with your dog, and one of the pertinent differences is their likely degree of understanding what they are doing.

They can't consent to sex. Whatever consent to sex is (not an easy concept to analyse, to put it mildly) ... The problem is that children and animals can't engage in consensual sex, whether they want to or not, any more than they can make a mature decision about whether to become addicted to heroin.

This is more than just not an easy concept to analyse. From my comment here a while ago:

When it comes to the question of whether children can consent to sexual relations, the dominant position is that it is just trivial that they cannot. I mean, sure, they can consent to playing tennis just fine, but sex is completely and totally different. Why? I've steeped myself in the academic philosophy literature on this topic, and while it's a thousand times better than the responses you'll get from regular Joe, it still comes in seriously lacking in my mind.

Westen doesn't take a super strong position on the topic, but likely grounds it in what he calls the 'knowledge prong' of what counts as valid consent. A person needs to have sufficient knowledge of... something... related to what sex is, what it means, what the consequences could be, the cultural context... I'm not exactly sure what. I don't think he did the best job of really digging in to details here. This is perhaps the most fruitful line of inquiry for future academic work for those who want to salvage a consent-only sexual ethic, but right now it's seriously lacking. Any work will definitely need to distinguish from tennis, because I see kids out learning tennis at our local courts somewhat regularly, and they can hardly be said to understand the risks/cultural context/etc. of tennis any more than could be said for sex.

Wertheimer, on the other hand, doesn't even attempt a theoretical explanation for why children cannot consent. Instead, he views it as simply an empirical question of whether, in a particular society, children tend to be, on net, harmed by sex. The opinion piece writes:

[A]s categories, we experience [race and gender identity] in large part through the perceptions that others have of us, based largely on our outward appearances.

A disciple of Wertheimer might say that a large part of how children perceive sex, and whether they perceive it as harmful or not, may depend on the perceptions others have of it.

Of course, either of these approaches opens up all sorts of cultural engineering possibilities. If we team up the "sex is like tennis" folks with the "comprehensive sex education as early as possible" folks, it's easy to imagine how society could change to one where children learn the requisite knowledge and are not, on net, harmed by the sex that they do consent to. Some folks might cheer on this result, saying that society would be immeasurably improved to the point that it unlocks this new world of possible good things... but the "it is trivially true that children cannot possibly consent to sex" crowd would certainly disagree.

Your comparison to "mak[ing] a mature decision about whether to become addicted to heroin" is definitely somewhat relevant here, if you read the full linked comment. People think that there's something "more" and "different" about sex and heroin and things like that compared to "normal" things that children can definitely, totally consent to. But the theory here is just completely whack and not at all up to the challenge of explaining why. You can simply ask yourself, "Why can't children consent to sex?" When you do so, you might go down the same road I went down; you might read the same major works by professional philosophers that I read. But I really don't think you'll get a good theoretical answer. It's just sort of an axiom that is held by some. To others, it's just the dogmatic mantra that they were forced to repeat in order to help justify fighting the X-ophobes. But when the same people who convinced you to subscribe to a consent-only sexual ethic and who swear that the thing we need most is early comprehensive sex education to help children understand the sexual choices that they're allowed to make come calling, they're going to ask, "Why can't children consent?" If you don't have a better answer than the professional philosophers who are making the best case possible for a consent-only sexual ethic, you're going to find out that you're an X-ophobe. You're going to get stared at like you're an alien for making outdated assumptions about people. For Sagan's sake, everyone knows that kids are capable enough to choose their gender, have parts of their body hacked off, and keep it all secret from their parents! Of course they're capable of deciding to have a little fun with some friction on the bits.

Of course they're capable of deciding to have a little fun with some friction on the bits.

Just not with adults.

Kid on kid is fine, obviously.

Why not? They "can't consent", he said. What is it about the second player (or maybe second and third, if they're a kinky kid) that somehow converts their inherent ability to consent from a "can't" to a "can"? How does this work? And if there are cases where there's a "can consent", why didn't you jump in to tell @Harlequin5942 that he's just wrong about his broad claim that they "can't consent"?

I’m highlighting that tension between “able to consent” and “but not if an adult is involved” and the giant gray ball of arbitrary murkiness there.

There aren’t clean cut lines here in nature, but we have to have them in the law if we are going to have them.

we have to have them in the law if we are going to have them.

Big Laconian "IF". Hilariously, also a Big Lacanian "IF".

But you've kind of proven my point. You don't really have any way to justify this sort of boundary. So, when they come and ask, "Why can't children consent?" I guess, you're gonna be like, "Well they can, but I have a giant gray ball of arbitrary murkiness, if you'd like to look into it!" And I mean, uh, they're not going to give much of a shit about your giant gray ball of arbitrary murkiness; they're going to hear that you said that children can, in fact, consent, and they're going to view your giant gray ball of arbitrary murkiness as just some superstitious, sex-negative, religious prude bigot weirdness that they can safely ignore, because, "Ew."

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Why not with adults? There's nothing wrong with adults playing tennis with kids, is there?

That is my point yes.

We have drawn arbitrary lines around “adult” and “kid” and there’s no way around the fact that children develop their abilities gradually and not at the exact same rate.

The potential side effects of sex and potential for manipulation/abuse/exploitation of younger people explain the rules we have and why we have them; not some absolute concept of “consent.” Obviously, plenty of young people who are adults still have such things happen to them, but so it goes with adulthood and drawing lines somewhere.

Teenage marriage to an adult is of course legal in most places with appropriate permissions.

The comment you're replying to is filtered.

But when the same people who convinced you to subscribe to a consent-only sexual ethic

How are you using the word "you" here?

I have never subscribed to a consent-only sexual ethic.

Ah, well, then I'm sure you have some other, non-consent reason why children can't have sex. That's fair enough, but it's a bit surprising considering your comment that I responded to. There, it seemed like the pertinent question (which is the only question to the consent-only folks) was about consent, which still leaves open the question, "Why not?"

EDIT: To add one little remark, consent-only is the current dogmatic position, and you may already be an X-ophobe if you don't ascribe to a consent-only sexual ethic.

Ah, well, then I'm sure you have some other, non-consent reason why children can't have sex. That's fair enough, but it's a bit surprising considering your comment that I responded to. There, it seemed like the pertinent question (which is the only question to the consent-only folks) was about consent

Your confusion seems to be because you are missing the distinction between "inability to consent is a sufficient reason for children not to have sex" with "lack of consent is a necessary condition for sex to be wrong." It may help you to do some work on pen-and-paper using Venn diagrams: for example, you see how "All non-consensual sex is wrong sex" is logically distinct from "All wrong sex is non-consensual sex."

Similarly, that consent is one pertinent question in sexual ethics doesn't imply that it's the only question.

I also suspect that even many people who sometimes say, "As long as it's consensual, it's fine," actually make exceptions for things like "power dynamics" and "developing bad habits," but I'm not interested in rationally reconstructing their views.

I also suspect that even many people who sometimes say, "As long as it's consensual, it's fine," actually make exceptions for things like "power dynamics" and "developing bad habits," but I'm not interested in rationally reconstructing their views.

IME, in these cases, the definition of "consent" is gerrymandered to exclude them. It's not much of an additional step to add more requirements of what counts as "consent" on top of the existing age cutoffs. I kinda see it as CICO weight loss. You can talk about all the tiny little details and factors, but ultimately, it comes down to how those factors influence CICO for determining weight loss. Likewise, you can talk about all the other factors relating to sex that's bad, but ultimately, these factors only count inasmuch as they affect the consent calculation.

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Your confusion seems to be because you are missing the distinction between "inability to consent is a sufficient reason for children not to have sex" with "lack of consent is a necessary condition for sex to be wrong."

Not at all. I understand this distinction perfectly well. Nevertheless, you said:

They can't consent to sex. Whatever consent to sex is (not an easy concept to analyse, to put it mildly) ... The problem is that children and animals can't engage in consensual sex, whether they want to or not, any more than they can make a mature decision about whether to become addicted to heroin.

I'm asking you why this is. Your confusion seems to be that you can't bring yourself to answer the question at hand.

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kids and animals don't actually want to have sex with you

There are people who believe that's not true. The harm of adult-child sex (wherever we draw the line about what constitutes a child) is not the sex, it's the stigma, secrecy, and shame. The child is forced to lie, is made to feel ashamed, is made to feel they are a victim. That's the trauma, not a grown man or woman having sex with them.

Same with the zoophiles: if my (animal) lover doesn't want to have sex with me, they can protest. I don't force them. They can make noises, vocalise, wriggle out of my embrace.

Both types will make loud noises of agreement about how real rape is bad, real violation of consent is bad - but then start chipping away at "but why do you say a child can't consent? that children are not sexual beings? that adult non-human animals can't enjoy a mutually loving relationship with a human?"

Part of the revelations of the Catholic sex abuse scandal in Ireland, with a report published years back, was how many of the offending priests had convinced themselves that the children were willing, they wanted this, and besides it was 'just' taking them on the adult's lap or hugging them or intimate contact. They didn't think of themselves as forcing unwanted attention on unwilling victims.

Oh, you think paedophilia/zoophilia is gross and disgusting? Sorry, disgust reaction is not enough to make something wrong. Bigots used to say gay sex was disgusting and unnatural, too.

EDIT: We've had a guy on here going on about emancipation of minors, and part of that (once he got into his stride) was sex between early teens and adults. There's a guy (and I have no idea if he's the same one, but I begin to have my suspicions) right now on ACX arguing that adult men are naturally attracted to 12-14 year olds (I'm cutting out the links because believe me, you don't need them):

In the literature on female attractiveness it's often claimed that men find women with neotenous features very attractive. Some psychologists may run a study showing men pictures of 18+ women and ask them to pick out the most attractive faces. The women that then get picked are ones with facial proportions typical pubescent girls about 12-14. This is then interpreted to mean that men find adult women with "neotenous faces" the most attractive.

Now, I can't be the only one who's spotted the glaring flaw in this reasoning. Men find women who look like pubescent girls most attractive. Well, who else looks like pubescent girls? Who else has the facial proportions of girls about 12-14? Well, actual pubescent girls look like pubescent girls. Actual girls about 12-14 have the facial proportions typical of girls about 12-14. It's not neoteny men find highly attractive, it's immaturity. What men find most attractive simply isn't adult women but young teen and pubescent girls. Some women happen to retain the facial proportions of a pubescent girl into adulthood and men continue to find them highly attractive because of it.

Psychologists have naively started out with the presumption that a sexual preference for fully developed adults must be the norm. When confronted with evidence that men find the faces of pubescent girls most attractive they bend over backwards to avoid the obvious conclusion that their presumption is wrong by claiming that what men prefer is adult women with "neotenous faces" who look like pubescent girls. There's no law of evolution that says the males in a species have to prefer the fully developed adults. The only thing that ultimately matters in evolution is reproductive success. If the males in a species can achieve greater reproductive success by going after immature females due to the way their mating system works then they will evolve to do exactly that.

In South Korea facial reshaping surgery is popular. What facial proportions do women choose to get with this surgery? Well, the proportions typical of girls about 12-14 because they know they're the most attractive. For comparison this is a real pubescent Asian girl about 12 (Nozomi Kurahashi). She looks basically the same as the after pics

Notice also that the skin in the after pics has been made to look softer and smoother like the skin of a pubescent girl.

The BMI men rate most attractive is about 18-20 which is low for an adult woman but normal for a young teen or pubescent girl. BMI also increases after pregnancy. It would have been important for men in ancestral times to prefer females who are young and haven't started reproducing yet as these females would be capable of giving them the most offspring over the long-term. So a low BMI appears to be another sign of immaturity and nulliparity that men have evolved to find attractive.

The vulvas men find most attractive are also those of pubescent girls. Many women have had their labia trimmed down to make themselves look like a pubescent girl down there because they know men find it more attractive just like men prefer the faces of pubescent girls. I won't link to it here but there's a site called Autoblow Vagina Contest that have a leaderboard of vulvas. The vulvas at the top have the small inner labia typical of pubescent girls. If real pubescent girls could post themselves on this site I'm sure they'd be voted to the top.

The schoolgirl image. Popular in porn, especially across Asia where there's less taboo over attraction to minors. This is another sign of immaturity. If a girl is still wearing a school uniform then she's obviously not yet adult and still a bit immature.

TLDR: It's not neoteny men find attractive, it's immaturity.

A couple of weirdos convincing themselves of self-serving lies does not reverse all cultural norms and laws.

So how did we get same-sex marriage? That's an entire ton of cultural norms and laws just tossed in the bin for the sake of "love is love".

So let me just try to clear the table a bit and assure you that I'm not too concerned about people marrying their dogs, daughters, or what have you. To the the extent I would draw a connection between gay marriage and our current tensions, it's more in the possibility space that was left in the wake of its victory. For a variety of reasons I find it to be extremely unlikely and just too plain viscerally disgusting for legalized pedophelia or beastiality to ever be digested by society at large. But whereas previously I would have reflexively scoffed at the suggestion, I've lately been reduced to a more meek-sounding "well, that just seems so unlikely" and that shift low-key disturbs me.

I'll accept that your trans friends are much happier now than they were before. The tension is if this has come at the expense of those not convinced of the efficacy of activist talking points applied broadly, those erroneously misdiagnosed at an early age, and social stability on the whole (deleterious as opposed to ruinous). There are always a small number of people that would have their lives radically improved if society rearranged towards their preferences. That still leaves everybody else. Prescribing puberty blockers (or any 'affirmation plan') to minors who show an inkling of gender dysphoria is quite unreasonable to me. Ditto for any reprimands or punishments meted out to people who misgender trans or NB people. Whatever merit the the current gender framework has, I would throw it all in the bin if those are baked-in unavoidable consequences of it. That's before we even get into scenarios like 'penised individuals' raping women in shelters, which - I am not really sure how to totally quantify as a loss on net. Feels like a pretty big loss of something to me! Like a reasonable expectation that nobody would allow such a scenario to be possible?

You say there's no path towards normalization of pedophilia or beastiality because there's a lack of basic impulse for it. While I agree on the general nature of man's sexual proclivites being at headwinds with such a development, I find it hard to reconcile this with the growing body of work that suggests people really can be influenced by their media (read: porn) consumptions, and the rabbit hole of extreme acts hardcore porn addicts find themselves watching, unable to cum to anything less. Clearly our minds are highly susceptible to suggestion, and we now live with a cornucopia of suggestions available at a whim. While I still don't think that's likely to breed a generation of 'pedos and furries' as some doomsayers get on about, I do think you can get some big swings on those margins, and that leaves the question of how we should regard them.

But even deeper than this - and the thing I'm struggling to communicate - is that the language games the Left has played on this terf has nuked a lot of patience, charity, and goodwill that can be generalized to anything else they say. If they are willing to demolish the classic and useful definitions of words like 'man' and 'woman', whilst replacing them with bloated concepts and jargon that are meaningless to the average person, then the sky is the limit. We can do the same thing with words like 'victim', or 'consent', or 'sexual desire', and I have noticed this is already in the water supply. If you want an extension of this principle, see the same dynamic play out with 'protest', 'riot', and 'insurrection'. I am worried that when my opponent says he wants 'peace' as I would understand it, and I reach out for a handshake, he may stab me because "Well, duh. Of course he meant 'peace at your expense' in his local parlance! You can't even say he lied!". When a trans activist or sympathetic ally makes me second-guess what it means to be a woman, it's natural to second-guess any other term they employ that's loaded with ambiguity you didn't realize was even possible a second ago.

It's been a slow trek here, and it's informed by personal experiences as well as the public/political sphere, but the last 15 years or so have gradually cemented for me that humans are a strange species, capable of a lot I had thought was unfathomable, at least in the west. There were a lot of metaphorical guardrails I had taken for granted that were totally banking on people being constrained by 'reasonable' but unspecified assumptions about the human condition. I think those boundaries have already been crossed several times in my mind, which then in turns leads me to believe those boundaries didn't actually exist outside of social conformity and enforcement. Rewind back to 2004 and I'm betting very low odds on people marrying pets by 2024. What odds would I have placed on gender transitioning for minors, had I even known that was going to end up on the table? Assurances that nobody's gonna fuck the dogs doesn't carry the same smackdown it used to.

For a variety of reasons I find it to be extremely unlikely and just too plain viscerally disgusting for legalized pedophelia or beastiality to ever be digested by society at large.

This seems odd to me given the plentiful historical precedent for both.

There were a lot of metaphorical guardrails I had taken for granted that were totally banking on people being constrained by 'reasonable' but unspecified assumptions about the human condition. I think those boundaries have already been crossed several times in my mind, which then in turns leads me to believe those boundaries didn't actually exist outside of social conformity and enforcement.

As an Orthodox Christian, it's nice to see someone notice instead of doubling down on the madness.

A question I'd like to ask more people (if it were even remotely socially acceptable) is, "Why do you imagine anyone finds zoophilia odd?" Or leaving infants to die of exposure, or slavery, or any number of other things.

Most people would just say “well because zoophilia and infant murder are wrong!” Without any conception of the fact that before Christ these things would’ve been totally normal.

Infanticide was plenty common even long after Christ, possibly as late as the 19th century. But zoophilia? I'll admit I don't know of any society in which sex with non-human animals was widespread and accepted. The two instances I can think of are some cases of damnatio ad bestias in the Roman Empire (but that was intended to be a gruesome punishment, and probably worked as spectacle because it broke taboos) and a certain Vedic ritual in which a queen had to couple with a sacrificed horse (but that was a very specific and probably very rare ritual, and certainly not something widespread in society).

I expect pedophilia and bestiality not to get normalized because kids and animals don't actually want to have sex with you, there's an actual victim there. I expect that the future will normalize a lot of things I find weird or upsetting but which don't actually harm anyone on net, which is how I see the trans movement.

Here's a mechanism: AI-generated (or hand-drawn) CP doesn't actually have any victims. No actual person is harmed on net, except by very legally tenuous chain-of-causation. By your logic, banning this is unreasonable. However there are fairly obvious paths by which the legitimization of CP which doesn't harm anyone leads to increased tolerance of CP generally, and increasing exposure and tolerance (in the lack-of-disgust sense) to the idea of child sex as a concept.

I generally agree with the AI CP has no victims line of thought. I think you see the same basic issue when it comes to writing fictional stories about unsavory topics as well.

I think it's a bit silly when you see erotica sites with stories about high school girls who happen to be exactly 18 years old. It feels like a strange purification ritual that has to be performed at the start of a story. Like saying "bless you" when someone sneezes. "You're about to read a story about a sexy young teenager, but don't worry - she's actually 18, so you have a fig leaf of plausible deniability!"

I don't think fictional stories about underage sex should be illegal, or impossible to host on appropriate sites, no matter how unsavory they may be. I'm honestly amazed that some countries punish those kinds of stories, and I'm saddened at the increasingly puritan regime that credit cards companies and sites like Amazon are creating around non-standard porn categories recently. First they came for the mind control erotica fetishists, and all that...

Would you say it's fair for me to characterize this as sort of the same argument as 'violent video games lead to murder'? Fantasy depictions lead to exposure and tolerance leads to adoption and mimicry?

My intuitions on this just go pretty hard the other direction. I think it's just true that introducing porn to an area decreases instances of rape, and I expect that to be true even if it's rape porn.

My intuition is that separating fantasy from reality is a basic skill that pretty much every member of our screen-addicted society has to learn early, and it's a pretty strong mechanism in most cases.

Having fantasy depictions of something despicable doesn't normalize real depictions showing real living victims, it makes them less acceptable because people with an interest in that topic have a harmless alternative, and makes them less prevalent because the legal and approved fantasy versions eat up all the market share and are far more convenient and safe to find than the illegal or dissaproved real version.

Having a plethora of convincing fantasy depictions available is a viable alternative for lots of potential offenders who can wean themselves on that instead. And they can stake their respectability in society as being the type of person who knows that it's just fantasy and games and is more concerned and knowledgable about ethical consumption practices than the general public (think about how BDSM people got really mad at 50 Shades for depicting unethical BDSM in a positive light).

Etc.

That's how I a priori expect things like that to go.

The legal and approved fantasy versions eat up all the market share and are far more convenient and safe to find than the illegal or dissaproved real version

Ah yes, this is why legal alcohol is the only intoxicant anyone ever uses, and nobody bothers with the illegal drugs? And certainly have not campaigned for some of the illegals like weed to be decriminalised/legalised and on sale in retail outlets just like you can buy booze?

That's not fantasy vs real, that's entirely different neural mechanisms giving entirely different experiences.

It's also about victimless crimes, where my whole point here is that people will allow victimless crimes while drawing the line at things with victims.

I don't really know your politics (because I can't keep track of people's username over time), but from this thread, you seem to lean progressive. However, I don't know your particular politics and how progressive you are, so this may be a gotcha and it may not be.

But I'm wondering how you feel about things that feminists may consider demeaning to women, such as fantasy depictions of violence against women, or women in skimpy outfits, etc. I don't know what the party line is these days, but 5 to 10 years ago, people were falling over themselves to denounce a plague of violence against women in media and video games, on the basis that this normalized such depictions, ultimately causing more violence against women or more unrealistic beauty standards, not less. Anita Sarkeesian made a career on this, there were protests against movie ads that feminists found to be unsavory. Overall this sort of thing seemed to be one of the biggest issues of last decade.

To me there are at least two separate issues being conflated here.

One is the existence of such depictions, and the other is the ubiquity of such depictions.

In terms of the existence of an individual depiction, I think if it's clearly depicted as fantasy and wrong/bad/unrealistic/etc in a way that would let most people know not to expect or seek it in real life, it's totally fine. This covers most types of porn and lots of responsible media depictions. The danger is with irresponsible media depictions which depict them as normal/acceptable/excusable/desirable/etc, in ways that could make people not apply the 'fantasy' filter and integrate them into their expectations and plans about the real world. The details of that distinction are infinitely muddy and divisive, but I do feel like 'I know it when I see it' to at least some extent.

In terms of ubiquity, I think where you really run into trouble is when those depictions are so prevalent that they crowd out depictions of how things should be in reality and don't leave people with positive role models to build their own behaviors on. Like, an action movie may show a depraved killer who enjoys inflicting fantasy violence on people, but it also shows the good cop who brings them to justice as the actual role model to identify with, and TV has lots of non-action movies for people to find other role models that don't interface with violence at all. But if 90% of teen/early-twenties women in action movies are scantily-dressed incompetent bimbos with no agency who needs a man to rescue them, and 90% of young women in video games are bimbos who get kidnapped, and and 90% of young women in sitcoms are sexy dummies, and etc.... then you end up kind of hard pressed to not see that as a depiction of reality, and to find some countervailing role models to work off of instead.

You’re assuming a lot there with “don’t actually want to” that will not go well for you here if taken to a logical conclusion.

Leaving aside debates over informed consent and consent as a measure of moral, realistic sex robots of illegal categories are probably going to be a real problem for culture and law to deal with.

In other words, normalization can and will happen for some version of these things without being wrong per se according to the moral framework you draw here.

There was recently internet drama over a prominent YouTuber for both beastiality and pedophilia on his computer and he embraced the former as something he was open about.

For those unaware, this is reference to Vaush, a rather infamous Breadtuber who has been rather outspoken on both lowering the age of consent as well as loosening the taboo against bestiality, amoung a few other opinions.

He has also been rather vociferous against lolicon and how anime is a gateway to the alt-right.

Just recently, he was outed as a blatant hypocrite mid-stream when saving a file to his computer showing that he also had pron saved that was rather explicitly lolicon.

Take that for what you will.

realistic sex robots of illegal categories are probably going to be a real problem for culture and law to deal with.

I mean, if we're talking about victimless crimes that are just really really gross, I consider that a different topic.

There was recently internet drama over a prominent YouTuber for both beastiality and pedophilia on his computer and he embraced the former as something he was open about.

But just drawings of both, right, if it's the one I'm thinking of?

The point I’m getting at is “normalization” might happen the “gross victimless crime” way until it reaches some critical mass.

Our present standards for legal consent are not etched in stone, and we do know societal moral norms can shift pretty rapidly.

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