sapphi_snake said: osamanobama said: sapphi_snake said: osamanobama said: @sapphi_snake man, do you have the most extremist views on every subject. ps i think another group of people, that i consider perverts, to have a mental desease. but i dont think they should be arrested or subject to counseling because of thoughts Luckily you're not a licensed psychiatrist, just another homophobe. at least i can bask in the knowledge that im one of the only people (apparrently) on VGC that even knows what that word means ho·mo·phobe     [hoh-muh-fohb] Show IPA –noun a person who fears or hates homosexuals  and homosexuality. Source: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/homophobe Guess you're one of the only people on here who can't accept that words evolve in meaning.

great. you just proved im not one. thankyou. and i thought you didnt care

osamanobama said: sapphi_snake said: osamanobama said: sapphi_snake said: osamanobama said: @sapphi_snake man, do you have the most extremist views on every subject. ps i think another group of people, that i consider perverts, to have a mental desease. but i dont think they should be arrested or subject to counseling because of thoughts Luckily you're not a licensed psychiatrist, just another homophobe. at least i can bask in the knowledge that im one of the only people (apparrently) on VGC that even knows what that word means ho·mo·phobe     [hoh-muh-fohb] Show IPA –noun a person who fears or hates homosexuals  and homosexuality. Source: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/homophobe Guess you're one of the only people on here who can't accept that words evolve in meaning. great. you just proved im not one. thankyou. and i thought you didnt care

Since the position that homosexuality is a mental disease has long been disproven by psychologists and psychiatrists, only hateful individuals still resort to it in order to justify their hate. You're either terribly hateful, or terribly ignorant (or both). Choose at your own discretion.

This question feels like a trap... cause if I posted a picture or go in details.... you're FBI right?

Hahaha!

It's for those same reasons that I didn't Google it, and I asked my fellow VGCharterz.

Lawson L. (2003 September–November;). "Isolation, gratification, justification: offenders' explanations of child molesting". Issues Ment Health Nurs (6-7): (24): 695–705.

Mihailides S, Devilly GJ, Ward T. (October 2004). "Implicit cognitive distortions and sexual offending". Sex Abuse 16 ((4):): 333–50.

From Wikipedia:

Studying child sex offenders, a review of qualitative research studies published between 1982 and 2001 concluded that pedophiles use cognitive distortions to meet personal needs, justifying abuse by making excuses, redefining their actions as love and mutuality, and exploiting the power imbalance inherent in all adult-child relationships.^[58] Other cognitive distortions include the idea of "children as sexual beings," "uncontrollability of sexuality," and "sexual entitlement-bias."^[59]

Ok, I googled "lolicon" and I feel very enlightened.

To be fair, homophobia is also defined as having antipathy or aversion to homosexuality (or homosexuals). Referring to them as perverted would justifiably be characterized as being homophobic.

OT: I'm in agreement with those who are saying that this an unjust policing of thought. I'm in particular agreement with what Neil Gaiman had said on the issue (Hapimese had posted it on the first page).

The first is fine but the second shows that child sex offenders have a higher propensity for not being able to control themselves, not that they 100% can't control themselves as you have claimed, and the study is flawed because it only uses pedophiles that have actually commited a crime, so you've proven that people that commit sexual crimes have a higher "uncontrolloability of sexuality" response but you can't then blanket that over everyone with sexual thoughts towards children, and then even take that a step further towards anyone with sexual thoughts towards imaginary children.

You are seriously perverting these studies into something they aren't.  They don't prove anything with 100% certainty and unless you can be 100% certain then I don't want people to be punished for something that by itself has no victim or target.  Do people that like Lolicon have a higher chance of being sexual offenders?  probably.  Is it 100%?  obviously not.

One of the main issues with your posts is that you assume that lolicon and actual child pornography are basically the same thing, which they aren't. Besides the fact that one is a drawing and the other one is a picture/video of an actual human being, manga-style drawing is even typically characterized by its fantasy style which often involves large eyes, unrealistic hair colors and even inconsistent body proportions. They just don't look the same. Don't you think that's enough to consider the possibility that someone could enjoy lolicon without being a paedophile (or the opossite, a paedophile that doesn't enjoy lolicon), just like many "regular" people don't enjoy ecchi/hentai that portraits adults even though they do enjoy actual porn ? Given that there's no evidence that links lolicon to paedophillia, wouldn't that be enough to justify reasonable doubt ?

And to make things more complicated (and as others pointed out) you can't tell how old a fictional character is just by looking at it... Even in real life we use age to determine whether a person is considered capable of making decisions or not because of how appearances can be deceiving. What if you draw a character that appears to be pre-pubescent or close to it, but you claim it's 18 years old ? How can you prove that wrong ? Or if through a fantasy reason you claim that the character was actually 30 before being turn into a much younger version of itself, that may or may not be pre-pubescent ? How much proof and of which kind do you require to determine the character's age in a matter that is enough specific to satisfy the law ?

Seems to me that you have constantly assumed worst-case scenarios to refute every other argument that contradicts your own, without any evidence that justifies that logic. Have you forgotten one of the main principles of our modern legal systems, "innocent until proven guilty" ? Like others have mentioned, it's a dangerous road to start enforcing laws that assume danger without actual evidence in the name of prevention. Even if you don't agree, there's many people that would use the same exact arguments to ban other kinds of content and I still don't see how can you claim that paedophilia is an exception when it's not the only kind of mental disorder.

porn is not art

Ok, so who decides what's porn or what isn't ? The "Miller test" is certainly quite subjective and ambiguous...

Are you familiar with the work of Hokusai, more specifically, "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife" ? Today it's considered to be a work of art, yet if it were released today it would probably be called fetichist porn/hentai as it has little difference in its content to many modern hentai works. And what about the Marquis de Sade ? Its content could be considered much more "offensive" or "obscene" that your average porn movie. And then we also have the whole controversy surrounding Lewis Carroll's photographs... In the context of this discussion about lolicon, would you consider "Kodomo no Jikan" (wikipedia is your friend) to be lolicon (same as child pornography to you) or art ? Again, who decides and how ?

In the case of drawings at least, I personally believe that there's an inherent artistic value in them and I don't see why that value would just dissapear when the drawings are sexually explicit. What about all the artists that have drawn both sexually explicit and non-explicit content ? Satoshi Urushihara, Tony Taka and Shunya Yamashita are examples of respected manga artists in Japan that have worked on both kinds of content. Does their work lose its artistic value the moment they draw a naked character or one having sex explicitly ?

If your answer is that you evaluate it by its context, let me remind you that not only this is still subjective, but also that we don't always have context available when it comes to lolicon or other hentai images.  For example, an image of a father helping its son/daughter to take a bath could be easily seen as child pornography without context. And given that the artistic value of an image doesn't depend on anything other than the image itself, an evaluation of whether the image is porn or art shouldn't base itself on other kinds of context, at least in my opinion.

At the end of the day, the reason to ban actual child pornography is justified by the real abuse that exists on the minors that participate in the process and not just because is "obscene", "disgusting", etc or because it could be enjoyed by paedophiles or turn "regular" people into them (something that hasn't been proven yet). But when the victim doesn't exist, the crime shouldn't exist either. And forcing someone to get psychiatric assistance based on speculation of what he may or may not do according to their personal interests is a clear violation of civil liberties in my opinion. Not to mention the fact that once someone gets accused of being a paedophile or a rapist it's repercussions are capable of ruin someone's life in society, even if proven innocent afterwards. This is the reason why we shouldn't condemn people in advance without direct evidence of the actual crime.

PS: First post (and a long one !). Hello everyone.

I'm quite tired right now so I don't really want to get too into this, but i think this is based on faulty logic.

First, your assumption is that paedophilia is a mental illness, which is not necessarily true. I do believe paedophilia is wrong, however for it to be considered a mental illness it has to be considered abnormal. I'm going to avoid the topic of abnormality because it extremely big, but amongst other things, being homosexual used to be classified as a mental illness under the DSM and the ICD. However, in most western societies, homosexuality is accepted and has since been removed from the classifications.There is a very thin line between eccentricity and abnormality, and due to the subjective difference of a social psychological explanation of abnormality, the only true abnormality can be considered biological. Anyway to cut to the chase, to define paedophilia as a mental disorder, there would have to be considerable evidence to suggest a biological/neurological basis for it over a psycholgical one, as is the case with schizophrenia to which you are comparing it. It may be of interest to you though that schizophrenia too may be considered perfectly fine in some societies, notably in amazonian tribes where schizophrenic symptoms are considered a blessing by god. What i'm trying to say is, is that mental disorders are largely a formulation of a culture's beliefs and the contextuality of the actions. I would suggest reading the cognitive model of schizophrenia or the labelling theory for schizophrenia, all of which suggest that apart from the physical basis for the hallucinations, all other symptoms are rationally created.

So for the debate on contextuality, I'll propose a situation. If a person were walking nude down the street or walked nude into a wedding etc, would they have a more unstable mind than a person walking nude down a nude beach? In terms of paedophilia, you are saying that looking at fictional underage girls (lolita) is somehow related in context to actual child molestation or the acquiring and distribution of actual child porn.

For your example of the guy shooting his father over money and the guy shooting him because of voices in his head, it is not clear which one is 'truly' mental. The important thing is to remove the cultural bias from your view, because in an individualistic culture where money and self-empowerment are idealised, then yes perhaps the first case scenario isn't 'mental'. However who is to say that that person wouldn't be considered mental in a society who did not emphasise the importance of money and the raising of one's own status.

Anyway, I don't condone paedophilia and i don't like lolita, but if someone chooses to look at lolita because they are attracted to it and does not pursue paedophillic activities, then they have every right to.

If you have a difference of opinion i'd like to hear it because there are no right or wrong answers, only replies that we can try our best to be objective in. However, i would like your arguement to have more basis than just saying that paedophiles are (don't know how to do italics) mental, and therefore by extension so too are people that enjoy lolita.