Monday 28 January 2002

Pic of the day: Hi, lookit that cute little butt! Illegal in the USA? Certainly kobolds, halflings, dwarves and gnomes are all somewhat similar to children, at least in size, and could provoke sinful lusts in those of such disposition. Or perhaps not.

Virtual child porn??

While peacefully reading The Economist: World in 2002 on the commuter bus from work, I came upon an article about the Supreme Court of the USA. I started to read, given how important these people have been lately. There was a mention of a couple big decisions that would come up in 2002. Among them, to my surprise, a case about virtual child porn. Evidently some new law has made it illegal to distribute child porn that does not actually involve children in the production, such as adult actors playing children, or artificially generated images.

I know I have mentioned this in passing before, but I had no idea the morons would actually go ahead and legislate it. Let me tell in detail why this is a controversial thing to do, even if it did not restrict free speech without a proven cause.

***

There are two radically different reasons to prohibit child pornography. The net effect of these two reasons is the same up to a certain extent, but their root cause is as different as wood and bone.

One reason is that child pornography is harmful to children. They should not be forced, ordered, or enticed to do sexual things for the pleasure of adults. (Many children will spontaneously play sexual games with themselves and/or each other if not actively stopped from doing so. But this is an entirely different matter. And even then it could be psychologically traumatic to have it recorded.) In commercial child porn production, there are "businesses" that buy or even kidnap children for use in the industry. Some of them kill the children afterwards (or in extreme cases, as part of the show). This is certainly not a rule that all child porn production must follow, but the fact that it happens at all is horrifying and a good reason to forbid the whole thing.

It can also be argued that child pornography is harmful to children because it encourages people who view it to go out and actually molest children. This would be another good argument if it were true. But nobody knows. There have been no scientific studies that have verified this idea. Furthermore, the logical extension of this would be that "normal" porn encourages its readers to go out and copulate with random strangers. This is indeed possible, but a far more common effect seems to be that the poor wankers sit at home masturbating. If pedophiles could do that instead of sneaking off to rape children, the world would be a better place and we should probably give state subsidies to virtual child porn production in order to save the lives and dignity of our children. Strangely, no one seems interested in finding out which of these theories is true.

The reason is pretty clear to me. People use porn themselves, and so they don't want it to be forbidden, only hid away. But they apply one standard to themselves, and another to pedophiles. They think they can use porn responsibly, but pedophiles cannot, because pedophiles are inherently evil - and therefore somehow different from "good" people like senators and congressmen.

***

This brings us to the second cause for prohibiting child porn: It is just eevil. And the people who are sexually excited by child porn (even if there are no actual children involved) are eevil. It is a thing that should not exist, therefore we must legislate against it. Well, sure, this is how socialism used to work here in Scandinavia too: We legislated against all things we did not like. But of course it does not work. You can't pass a bill to make the sun shine at night, and you can't make laws to change human nature.

Let us first clarify some words here. In America at least, pedophile is used as a synonym for child molester. In the literature I have seen, there has been no differentiation between the sexual leaning and the sexual practice. This reflects the idea that people must necessarily act out their sexual preferences. I guess this has become a more and more common view lately, but obviously this is not possible in reality. Not all of us act on our sexuality, or die trying. Some have the common sense to realise that you can choose what to do with your own body, you don't need to obey its every whim.

There is without a doubt a similar spread of personalities with those who are pedophile by disposition. And depending on how you count, those are not so few. One (anonymous, obviously) survey showed that one in four adult men who was questioned, had at some time become sexualy excited because of a child. If we change "child" to "minor" in the meaning of "someone below the age of 18" then I suspect the results would change to something like four out of four.

I think we are at the root of something here. This is a part of human sexuality that must necessarily be repressed; there is no way around it. For some it is only the most fleeting of temptation in borderline cases; for others it is the only form of sexuality they ever experience. In each case, however, they have the choice of how to act on it (or not).

Objectively speaking, an inactive pedophile is harming no one. Even if he (or she) has sexual fantasies and masturbates, there is still no harm to others. And if they use virtual child porn, they are still not harming the children. Only their own soul, if any.

But most importantly, once they have this sexual inclination, restricting access to pictures or text will not make it go away, any more than a heterosexual man will suddenly stop being heterosexual because he can't get porn. Trust me on this, decades without porn has minimal impact on a man's basic sexual direction. The only proven way to cure pedophilia, homosexuality or heterosexuality is to kill the person. Until Jesus comes down from Heaven to judge us all, I think people should be left to sin till they puke if they harm no one. It's not our business to judge other people's soul.

(This sermon brought to you by someone who has known at least two Christians with pedophile disposition which they resisted. Neither of which used child porn, incidentally, but then again not all Christians use porn at all.)

Oh, and as for practicing child molesters, I won't keep you from cutting off any body parts that might help. Including heads, if the case is proven beyond any possible doubt. But that's another topic entirely.