bearington

A cool bear havin' a chill day

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hi

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in reply to @shel's post:

I'll echo another person here and say even if it's not CSAM fiction can still have very real consequences. What I'm having trouble understanding is why the potential for damage is different because writing cub or loli or whatever isn't an industry? Couldn't you just as easily convince someone something is normal via stories?

Adolescent sexuality is normal.

[edited]
Okay, that wasn’t helpful.

The thing is, there are people who think that children should not be exposed to stories involving queer adolescents because that might teach them that queerness is “normal”. The solution can’t be a blanket ban on stories involving any adolescent sexuality at all. That harms kids indirectly because it deprives them of positive role models for their feelings and desires.

Now I'll clarify here because in the original post I was talking about porn. While it's normal, eventually, conflating porn with queerness seems reductive.

I've since learned a bit more and I understand people use this type of material as a way to deal with trauma.

Originally I was under the impression that people essentially wanted to use a loophole or something sorta, untoward I guess.

It's additionally complicated by the fact that in the current state of the world, porn is how a lot of people were (and continue to be) able to even attain any awareness of queerness in the first place. Which is not ideal but it explains why a lot of people (especially folks in deep red areas) treat it as being a refuge for queer people.

After talking with more people I fear my ignorance is being taken advantage of. While porn may have been a gateway for some- I don't know, something about all this doesn't sit right.

Part of it is that a lot of people are coming from very different circumstances so the same things can function quite differently in their particular contexts.
So there can't really be a large scale analysis so much as several small contingent ones that may seem contradictory if one doesn't get into the weeds of it.

People whose trauma comes from being physically abused are having different mechanisms involved than people whose trauma comes from being mentally abused with "you're not a Good Kid if you have a libido before marriage, and if your libido isn't hetero you're basically as bad as a serial killer, deep down in your soul" type of things.

Since the nature of the trauma is different the way things interact with it is going to be different.

As always, the world tragically makes easy answers impossible.

hi

the damage is from the abuse of a minor, in the case of a minor used as a reference image. not from normalization from a reader/viewer.

in the case of the reader/viewer i would offer that if a minor reader/viewer is seeking out hardcore fetish pornography that some sort of "normalization" has already taken place - most likely sexuality for them has been ABnormalized as pornographic due to poor education and poor parenting, hence seeking sexual information from pornography rather than being able to trust anyone in their life to provide honest answers. not coincidentally, the home is where the vast majority of this type of abuse occurs.

ALSO not coincidentally, this state of affairs is what leads to the abuse that takes place outside the home. it is again not normalization, but abnormalization, that is to blame - the idea that the victim is special and only understood by the abuser. rather than understanding that their sexual feelings are normal and that their peers have them as well, what is presently "normalized" is the idea that a Good Kid doesn't have any of this. This creates an insecurity which can be exploited by various parties, including abusive adults.

I should have been more specific when I originally wrote that and that's my fault: I meant it's ability to be used as a tool for grooming.

I will say: I'd be careful with the assertion that all of it is explicitly made with CSAM reference images, but just like the FA ruling situation. Is on-model Sonic porn proof that a person download CSAM? If it's shit like Zaush then yeah 100% search their computer.

I'll admit I'm a tad biased from past experiences cuz it took me years to realize what this person was doing.

I take it back. I think I'm just agreeing with people because I'm not 100% familiar with the topic. I know the result of the art and the writing and whatnot. You're still making porn of an underaged character.

Like if you're going that route you can't also claim a moral high ground is all I'm sayin'. Ain't a law against it but, it is what it is.

So when you produce child pornography involving an actual child who is a person that exists in the real world, you have abuse and exploited a child.

When that content is purchased, hosted, or consumed by customers, it creates an industry that is profitable, and encourages further abuse and exploitation of an actual child to produce more of that content.

The issue with illustrations is tricky because in theory you don't need an actual human being involved for that. But there are international laws regulating it that must be considered, and there have been cases where lolisho and cub artists were revealed to have been using actual child pornography as references for their drawings (most art uses references, it's not all from someone's head usually) so the result is that those illustrations now feed into the industry of child pornography which abuses actual living children. There have even been cases of these artists uses human models, so it's still an industry issue.

The harm is at the point of production. It doesn't matter what it does to someone mentally looking at it. It's important to not feed into the production.

Harm at the point of consumption is very hard to regulate. The harm mentally to an adult or child for looking at this stuff is entirely psychoanalytical conjecture. The idea that groomers are using illustrations let alone writing is a ridiculous concern on Cohost because children are not allowed on Cohost and there is no private messaging feature. I also hardly think that 12-year-olds are going to be particularly enticed by a reading assignment from the hypothetical Groomer who has to tell them to register an account with a fake birthday in order to even access the link. Actual groomers have more effective methods and the deciding factor is not going to be literature.

This entire moral panic around Groomers using Literature to abuse children by scrambling their brains with gay comics or whatever is a right wing conspiracy that came out of QANON. It's disappointing to see so many queer people buying into it on here, in a space where, again, there is nobody younger than 16 and nobody is able to talk to anyone privately. And the 16 year olds can't see any of the adult content unless they lie about their age. And there's no way for us to act in loco parentis and prevent them from doing things that some but not all adults think is dangerous to their psyche.

I think it's less buying in to a Qanon conspiracy theory and more seeing as a double standard and not looking too much further into it.

I will admit, consuming media like that as a way of dealing with trauma is something I wasn't familiar with. Or rather I was but the last person I had heard anything about it from I had a really bad falling out with and I just assumed they lied about everything.

In any case: I see your point. Even if it's verifiable one artist didn't use CSAM references you can't guarantee all of them don't and that just opens the floodgates.