So the question I have it this: Does Reddit have some sort of powerful magnetic attraction to the pedophiles and pedophile defenders of the world, or is pedophilia and/or pedophile defense simply endemic amongst the young male tech geek demographic that’s so heavily overrepresented on Reddit?
This is a question that naturally sprung to my mind after reading a couple of recent posts in ShitRedditSays, documenting Reddit’s strange sympathy with the child porn enthusiasts of the world. A woman stands up on Reddit and declares herself a feminist? She’s a “bad person,” a “female supremacist,” an “utter piece of shit.” A man is jailed for possession of child porn? He’s being unjustly persecuted for a “victimless crime.”
Fxexular on ShitRedditSays has assembled a roundup of some the most disturbing comments in a thread devoted to the aforementioned man jailed for possession of CP. Amongst his finds:
Heavily upvoted comments comparing viewing of child porn to smoking weed and playing Grand Theft Auto.
A comment with 15 upvotes suggesting that the perp should only get “a stiff fine and a few weeks of community service … for a crime the judge himself probably committed half a dozen times on any given weekend.”
A comment with nearly two dozen upvotes lamenting that the child porn possessor is going to have his “life ruined over socially non-normative pictures. … this is a predictable outcome of a corrupt government which is obsessed with its own power.”
But these are just the tip of the pedo-defense iceberg. Take a look at the thread itself, where you will also find heavily upvoted comments from Redditors comparing the “persecution” of pedophiles to past persecution of gays and witches; an unintentionally ironic comment lamenting the cruel treatment of a perp who is “only 26” years old; and a comment making perhaps the strangest argument I think I may have ever seen anywhere about anything:
My core problem here, as a computer scientist, is that any photo he had is really a bunch of zeros and ones… which for anyone who is at all familiar with binary, is a number. Basically, by outlawing the storage of some form of data, we have said that it is illegal be in possession of certain numbers. Yes, these might be huge numbers that you don’t encounter in your daily life, but they are still simply numbers.
In a different thread on the same case, another Redditor gets 75 upvotes for comparing child-porn-possessing pedophiles with African-Americans in the era of the Civil Rights movement. Here’s the comment itself; here’s the ShitRedditSays thread discussing it. And here, for good measure, is the same commenter offering a Redditor who’s confessed to molesting his sister advice on how best to avoid prosecution.
Meanwhile, in an unrelated thread in Reddit’s Videos subreddit, pedophile (sorry, ephebophile) Redditors mount an all-out attack on a girl who had the temerity to complain about skeevy Redditors masturbating to pictures of herself she put in a private album on the internet when she was 14.
In ShitRedditSays, jamie11 collects together some of the creepiest comments, including these:
“Fuck yea she is developed AND judging by her smug smile, she is loving every second of this. Sure she says “OMG, so creepy herp derp” but in reality it is kind of a big EGO boost. EDIT: in b4 misogyny accusations!” [+7]
“She is an attention whore. She is really dumb. She will probably ultimately profit from this in the model/porn/coors girl industry.”[+10]
“Shes much hotter when shes quiet.” [+32]
The numbers in brackets indicate the numbers of upvotes.
Again, tip of the iceberg.
EDITED TO ADD: I hadn’t noticed before, but r/mensrights has its own discussion of the child porn case. It’s pretty much what you’d expect: Possessing child porn is just a “thought crime” that doesn’t hurt anyone.
The creepiest fellow of the lot is probably logrusmage, who offers this defense of the child porn possessors of the world:
consider that a majority of “kiddy porn” are pictures of sexually mature females taken by said females for boyfriends that got leaked on the internet or via text, where the female happens to be under the age of consent.
When someone points out that, um, the fact that these pictures are “leaked” means that the subjects of said pictures didn’t consent to them being put online (and, also, they are below the age of consent), logrusmage offers this rebuttal:
Consent is not needed for something that does not directly effect someone. Like looking at them. … Looking at a picture of someone does not require their consent.
Presumably he’d be fine if someone secretly filmed him picking his nose while taking a crap and put it up on r/creepydudespickingnosesonthecrapper.
That’s beyond defense, beyond even acceptance; he’s arguing that it’s normal to look at child porn, gosh don’t we all.
I’m having quite the unpleasant flashback to that study that found that the only people who think all men are rapists … are rapists. I’m guessing the main group of people who think looking at child porn is normal and something everyone does is, you know. People who look at child porn.
That was exactly what I said during the Jez argument, Holly, except that I also pointed out that it was likely that a fair number of feminists would take the same approach. I got a pious lecture about how actually lolicon serves as a useful outlet for people’s urges and doesn’t at all normalise child abuse, with an odd little side note about how I was somehow attacking Japan as a nation by not wanting to hang out with people who create lolicon or shota.
It was weird, and also disappointing. It’s always a shame when people you thought were OK say stuff like that.
Lolicon manga is in the category of things that I think should be legal, but I’m not going to be friends with anyone who has any. Kind of like white supremacist literature, I guess.
-Bingo.,
There are tons of things in that category for me. It’s always a bit odd when you say you don’t like (whatever) and the person you’re talking to immediately goes all YOU CAN’T BAN THOUGHTS, HOW DARE YOU, INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM and you hadn’t said anything at all about banning the items in question. Like the “everyone reads it” response, it makes me wonder what’s going on in people’s heads.
The only thing I want to ban ban is exploiting actual children.
And yeah, “just looking” counts there. Saying you don’t abuse children because you only look at child porn is like saying you’re a vegetarian because you only eat animals that someone else already killed.
People tend to form groups of common interests, legal or no. The pedophiles of the world? Seek out others like them… They can then point to their objectively small group and say “see? everyone does it!”
I’m in Holly’s camp about animated cp. Essentially, it’s not the cp itself that is the problem, but what went into making it, which is essentially harming children. Banning distribution and criminalizing possession attempts to stop whatever sources are producing it.
*sigh* Of course, pedophiles would just argue that cp isn’t actually harmful, children are fully grown and sexually mature, yadda yadda yadda. I suppose they think that the guy from the recent Penn State scandal was just a-ok.
Hey all. I’ve been a Manboobz lurker for a little while and have been debating about posting. Preferably, I wanted to start off on a positive note and this seems like a derail welcoming time.
I hope the embedding works.
I had to google Lolicon as I wasn’t familiar with it, and I’m sorry I did.
I always find it weird and interesting when someone says that they dislike or are uncomfortable with something, and the other person assumes that they mean that they want to ban it. It just seems sort of weird and overly defensive to react that way unless someone is actually saying that they want to ban the thing in question, or put legal sanctions on the people who consume it.
In terms of lolicon I don’t want it banned mostly because I’m worried about the legal precedent that might set. But it squicks me out, and I don’t want to hang out with people who produce or consume it, and I do think that such people may be a danger to children in real life. And I also think that consuming it probably helps to normalise the urge to abuse children in people’s minds, especially if they’re plugged in to a community of other fans.
ersatzmoons, welcome! Weirdly but conveniently, you don’t need to do anything to embed youtube videos on wordpresss, all you need is the raw url. (I actually removed the tags from your comment so it would work.)
Dawgie!
Pets put up with such ridiculousness from us humans.
Sorry, hellkell. Here, have a cat video as brain bleach.
Are all derails acceptable? Because I have pictures from the game I’m playing I’d love to put up, and a burning need to pretend that this thread isn’t about the OP.
Do it! I attempted to get onto the cooking derail , but that did not take. Pictures of games are good things.
How much do y’all wanna bet that NWO’s gonna pop up soon demanding that all cp is basically just young sluts doing what sluts do, and how dare we fight for women to be treated like grownups only when it is convenient?
I find this really weird cos I just got back from watching Old Boy O.o
Thanks for the cats, Cassandra!
Rutee, please do.
I just came back from looking at some of the comments. I can’t… I just can’t right now.
Slowass Sloth!
Congratulations, David Attenborough, you got an exclusive interview with a sloth!
Observe, a cry for attention that’s actually cute!
Learn from this, MRAs.
IMO, the reason that it’s such a magnet is that anyone can sign up, and it’s not really policed. Almost ANY website of ANY kind meeting those requirements will become a hotbed of pedos.
For example, with very little research, you can find massive pedo rings on youtube and other mainstream video sharing sites. If you leave the door open for these scum, they WILL come inside.
The thing that bothers me most about these discussions is the persistent conflation of normalcy and ethical acceptability. It produces a marked failure to understand the actual reasons why having sex with and viewing porn of children, and having sex with and viewing porn of “sexually mature” but extremely young girls, are both unacceptable, or at best, dubious: issues of experience and neurological maturity which make verifying that truly informed consent for sex and/or media distribution was gotten difficult or impossible, in both cases. (This is more true of out and out child sex, clearly.) Whether or whether not lots of people do it, or would like to on some level, is entirely beside the point.
That the teenaged girls involved are physically post-pubescent, and that it’s normal for adult men to be attracted to post-pubescent female bodies, is continually cited as proof that actively pursuing them is “okay.” It ignores the actual problem, which is that their brains are not fully grown even if their boobies are. They are not adult in their decision-making capacities. Not coincidentally, the same reason why nobody gets to blame them for having taken the pictures and posted them wherever (and why I’m as against the under-aged being prosecuted for possessing nude photos of themselves as anyone).
I also see attraction (not unethical–not even voluntary) and acting on attraction (very voluntary) being confused. It’s not a case of thought policing if what’s being objected to is an action, not a thought.
And none of that even begins to touch ethics of privacy and image creation/distribution in general. “But it doesn’t directly effect anyone!” is an obvious oversimplification when dealing with material the sharing of which can have incredible emotional and practical consequences for those it depicts.
I guess it’s not so much “a thing” that bothers me about discussions like these in particular. It’s a lot of things, which explains why the comments I’ve made on this blog have all been in response to similar posts.
I totally support the legality of loli and other forms of CP that don’t involve hurting children; I think it’s far better for pedophiles to have an outlet that isn’t molesting children. But getting off on hurting children is sick, wrong and evil.
Also, it’s possible to be into loli without actually wanting to molest actual children, in much the same way as it’s possible to be into rape porn without wanting to rape people, or extreme BDSM porn without actually supporting slavery. Fantasy and reality are not the same thing.
Child porn involving real people, however, is FAR beyond the realm of fantasy and anyone who uses it deserves a long prison sentence.
The thing is, all those other things can be acted out with a fully consenting adult partner. Loli (and shota) cannot. I think it’s in a totally different category from something like fantasies about BSDM.
And ugh, I am not getting into this on another feminist blog. People are allowed to have squicks, and that is one of mine. I’m not necessarily in favor of banning it for all kinds of reasons, but I’m entitled to think that it’s horrible and wish to avoid people who read it.
I’m not really for laws restricting what you can do with cartoons and dirty stories, but is there any evidence that pedo themed drawings and such make people LESS likely as opposed to MORE likely to act out or move on to actual CP?