Japan to criminalize possession of child porn – but will exempt videogames!

[Mr Khan]

curl-6 said:

Kiddie porn is too big an industry in Japan for them to outlaw it outright. The sheer volume of media featuring minors in sexual situations is colossal, and brings in billions.

 

Mr Khan said:

Soonerman said:
I remember not that long ago someone posted an article about Japanese guys having way less sex than the average males of other countries because they found it a waste or time or something plus having so many outlets to please themselves like this. So in the end, I guess they're not having sex with real life minors since it wastes their time!

It's more complex than that. The lack of Japanese sex drive (for both men and women) is the result of a number of embedded cultural problems coming home to roost. I'll talk of this later though, as it's late here and i have internship tomorrow, but this post shall remind me to pontificate further.

I'm actually really interested to hear more on these issues, please remember to follow up on this!

Essentially it's about the pressures of Japanese traditionalism coming back to bite everyone in the ass. Women, for instance, are often expected to give up their career once they become mothers, and are also expected to "marry up," but the fact that, aside from those cultural pressures, Japanese women are quite successful professionally (much like other women in developed countries), means that it's harder to adhere to these expectations: if the choice is between career or family as an either-or, they'll choose career. But at the same time, they do, on the balance, adhere to that "i should marry a guy more succesful/of higher social standing than me" thing, which limits options in a lot of cases (this hits even harder in China, interestingly, both because the cultural pressure is greater and because education/achievement gaps can be much much larger).

On the male side, there's a sense of burnout coupled with the economic problems of Japan's "lost generation." While Japanese women are not expected to prosper in their careers, and yet are, men are expected to prosper in their careers, but are given far fewer chances to do so. Basically the new counterculture among Japanese men is the "herbivore" culture, which is defying the tropes of the go-go corporate salaryman who lives to work and aggressively pursues women with the goal of building a family life. Japanese men have come to see dating, courting, and even sex itself as part of the "rat race", and want nothing to do with it. Too much of a hassle.

Pornography only has a small role to play in all of this mess, mostly in that it has combined with more traditional values to create very warped expectations of women. In porn, of course, nobody sucks at having sex, no matter how inexperienced their character might be, so there's this expectation for women's performance, but at the same time, nobody wants to seriously date/marry an "experienced" woman, even if they might expect her to perform with a certain level of experience.