Porn is not art. It's jerk off material.

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.

@fordy:

No, it's really not. You're speaking in the equivalent that playing GTA would turn people into murderers. You can't just say rules apply to one group and not the other just to justify your stance. That's blantant ignorance right there.

I never said lolicon turns people into paedophiles. I said someone who would enjoy lolicon is a paedophile to begin with.

Yes, and the only threatening pedophiles out there are the ones who DO commit the abuse, not the entire community of pedophiles. Stop outcasting an entire group based on the bad ones within the group.

The entire group of paedophiles is a potential danger,. Paedophilia is a mental illness, but the majority of paedophiles don't consider that they have any problem, or that there's anything wrong with the ideea of having sex with a child (considering that they're insanse, this isn't a surprise), which means they rarely voluntarily seek any treatment.

Do you really care what someone THINKS as opposed to what someone DOES? Do you really think that people's thoughts should be policed, because your argument is treading in that very direction.

It's not as much as thoughts that's the problem (though FTR, planning to murder someone, or planning to commit a terrorist attack are also illegal, even if you're just in the plannign stage, ergo "just thinking"), as the involuntary impulses that lead to those thoughts, impulses controlled by a mental illness.