CP is disgusting and everything, but I'm kinda weirded out about thought crime. If no harm is being done, not even indirectly to anyone else, why is it a crime?
It's not illegal to write a fanfic that you keep to yourself about all the weird ways that you want to torture and kill someone.
Well, if actual harm to people and children is what we want to reduce, then perhaps decriminalizing an innocuous (as in no victims) form of it may actually reduce the harm to actual people.
And btw -- it's not just about thoughtcrime, it's a major double standard, seems to me. In the West it's perfectly normal for Hollywood to put out "Rated R" horror movies that feature gore and torture, ripping off limbs, mass murders, etc. Such as the movie "Hostel". I never understood why that is OK, why the music industry has pushed gangsta rap etc. for decades, but then something like Cuties out of France which actually critiques the hypersexualization of teenage girls that is taking place, causes an uproar, while the industries doing the hypersexualization are now an accepted part of our liberal "freedom of speech".
Legalized drug sales and prostitution among adults have _fewer_ victims but that doesn't mean no victims. Legalization is better but it isn't a panacea.
> Such as the movie "Hostel". I never understood why that is OK, why the music industry has pushed gangsta rap etc. for decades, but then something like Cuties out of France which actually critiques the hypersexualization of teenage girls that is taking place, causes an uproar, while the industries doing the hypersexualization are now an accepted part of our liberal "freedom of speech".
AFAIK, everyone involved in the production of "Hostel" was a legal adult.
The girls who were the main characters in "Cuties" were not legal adults, nor anywhere close. I don't even think they were teenagers. From the clip I saw, it wasn't a _critique_ of hypersexualization so much as LITERAL HYPERSEXUALIZATION. There may have been an ironic plot around it saying "this is bad mmm'kay" but that doesn't excuse using children to engage in sexualized behavior.
There's an important conversation to be had about US culture and violence versus sex and language (South Park parodied this well), but "Cuties" is a horrible example because it used actual children to engage in actual sexual objectification.
Another similar case on shameless promotion due to fear it's the Spanish media depicting squatters as the worst evil ever, specially in morning TV talk shows targeted to middle aged women (housewifes/mothers with children).
Guess what? between the show sections, (and shows themselves) they are trying to sell home alarms with lots of ads in the morning to the viewers. Bingo.
That existed in the late 90's with the Spice Girls and preteen/early teen girls doing girl bands mimicking the dances in every school in Europe.
Yet no one gave a shit. This is the new Satanic panic, a scapegoat to avoid focusing ourselves on important shit.
Paranoia sells, and it's the main fuel of the US style Capitalism, getting a full panic state almost monthly in order to be a mindless consumer.
OFC satanic panic was the same crap, in order to keep the children and teens away to non-consumit (read: TV and mainstream toys, music and movies) so the industry didn't collapse in a few years. And, yet, thanks to internet, years later, they did.
Cuties controversy was only about some versions of the poster, and no one involved saw the movie. No one who watched the movie thought it was super controversial I think.
As for Netflix, how can the company possibly reconcile a “coming-of-age” film, and one that centers entirely on 11-year-old girls, with a TV-MA rating? This is not a random decision – it has become corporate practice.
We have frequently called on Netflix to stop hosting content that sexualizes children, such as Baby, Big Mouth, Sex Education, or that glamorizes rape and sexual assault such as 365 Days.
And Netflix habitually markets adult content to young audiences. Parents Television Council research of Netflix programming designated as “Teen” reveals that nearly half was rated either TV-MA (104 titles, or 40.8%) or R (23 titles, or 9.0%); and every single program that carried a TV-14 moniker included harsh profanities.
While we may not always see eye-to-eye with film critics, the criticism of the critics is telling. Cuties is not the first time Netflix has blatantly promoted programming that sexualizes children, but we’re calling on them for this to be the last.
> Cuties controversy was only about some versions of the poster,
False.
The final performance by the young girls was also discussed. You can find it if you want to watch something disgusting, but it was very sexual and OBVIOUSLY inappropriate for children.
That it's common to see children perform such sexual routines at dance competitions doesn't mean it's appropriate.
The idea that this was Only The Poster was a lie created by a media that thinks child exploitation is OK. Look at the media response to the film "Sound of Freedom", where it's "QAnon adjacent" to oppose child sex trafficking.
>That it's common to see children perform such sexual routines at dance competitions doesn't mean it's appropriate.
"Sexual" is relative so people will just be talking past each other in regards to that. There's no real discussion to be had there.
>The idea that this was Only The Poster was a lie created by a media that thinks child exploitation is OK
FWIW, I only heard about the poster and nothing about the full release. I'm sure some people still argued in the same way people argue about anything for months/years on end, but there was definitely a lot more controversy about the poster. Be it because it was the first look/awareness of the film, or because the film was simply nothing to write about can be left to people who actually watched the movie. I have no interest to.
The issue has become so emotionalized that if you say anything that even remotely looks like supporting pedophilia, people will tell you to go kill yourself.
It seems there's nothing worse than a moderate these days. One extreme thinks I must be a Satanist for not believing in the massive conspiracy to harvest adrenochrome from tortured children, while the other extreme thinks I must be a Nazi for not believing in a trans genocide.
I'm sort of confused by these rulings. So people got convicted for possessing loli manga/similar stuff that has no relation to real life at all.
I understand that it can be illegal at the State level, and that its a grey area at the federal level. What I don't get is the disconnect between these rulings and whatever is available on the clearnet.
We're not talking onion sites. Reddit, Twitter, 4chan, pixv, tumblr, Patreon whatever sites that you can just go to that shows up the front page of Google. They all contain similar content and almost none of it is taken down for illegality, at most because someone thought it was too ick and Ad money, or posted in a non-r18 area.
Even fucking 4chan is incredibly strict about ban hammering/deleting anything that is close to CP
Genshin Impact and Blue Archive are not popular because they are good games.
>They all contain similar content and almost none of it is taken down for illegality, at most because someone thought it was too ick and Ad money, or posted in a non-r18 area.
Simple, the internet is huge and some currently contended US law means that (past illegal content) a web host isn't responsible for content users upload. Copyright means that corporations can DMCA certain content off, but otherwise, there's not much to do. Companies don't WANT to have to look through every single post on a site that big, so if they can automate or simply ignore it, they will.
The legality in Canada is questionable, but Canada isn't looking through Reddit with a fine tooth comb (P.S. it technically is against reddit TOS to upload lol manga stuff. But it's hard to enforce on small subreddits). Canada may not even know what Pixiv is, and Patreon is often behind paywalls. It would just take a good (well, bad) mainstream awareness to answer your question, and the answer would turn out to mostly be "because politicians didn't know until CNN/Fox News blasted it".
That much was obvious during the U.S. controversy on Rapelay, a Japanese 3d eroge simulator that was not even sold in the US (nor ever has been), simply mislabeled by Amazon and visible in American's store for a while.
>Genshin Impact and Blue Archive are not popular because they are good games.
well we're getting very off topic but this is still an odd angle. There's no one reason why these games are popular and talking about fan art vs. game quality is arguing a chicken vs. the egg. Let's just agree that fan engagement in this day and age can be a force multiplier in terms of advertising something and spreading the brand. But 10,000 x 0 is still zero. Just ask how F-Zero is doing.
>It's not illegal to write a fanfic that you keep to yourself about all the weird ways that you want to torture and kill someone.
pedantic, but it depends on many factors that can make that goal realistic. You probably wouldn't get flack about how you'd kill Trump or any public figure you're far away from, but some specific individual can be seen as a threat in some countries. Even the US isn't fully lenient on that.
>If no harm is being done, not even indirectly to anyone else, why is it a crime?
politics, mostly. For example, in Japan uncensored genetalia is still illegal, animated or otherwise. Despite some of the most explicit pornography hailing from it. These come from WW2 times where the US imposed a bunch of sanctions, but have long since been irrelevant. So why not just repeal that law?
Well, what politician wants to be the one to fall on that sword and get the buck rolling? It's political suicide to the voter base (mostly older people) even if most people wouldn't be strongly affected by it. That's one among many many other factors, of course.
And that's a relatively uncontroversial aspect of society. Can you imagine trying to go to bat about the above topic?
It's not illegal to write a fanfic that you keep to yourself about all the weird ways that you want to torture and kill someone.