Dumbspectator
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2024
TLDR Community growth, social/cultural insulation plus porn and mental illness. Partially also due to profits, lack of evidence/studies that show real harm impacts, principles surrounding freedom of expression.
My best idea is this, sorry for the long post. It might be a little autismo and pedantic, but I’ve been chewing on this topic too for a while now:
Anime has never been more popular than it is now. It’s a shared experience across multiple generations, who have grown up online. The later ones have also had an unparalleled access to the internet including porn. When this is combined with an easy of access to others who share this interest and are also isolated from other forms of social interactions you get insulated communities. We all know how weird such communities can get irl because it allows unstable people to create new cultures. Culture is a very powerful molder of people’s perceptions and notions of what’s right and what’s wrong.
Now when your community is fairly small it’s also usually associated with a tendency to hold back from expressing all of their aspects to the surrounding society. That’s partly because they might be somewhat ashamed or that they perceive that their ways of behaving might not be acceptable outside of their insulated community.
The anime community outside of Japan today is in today’s world a very, very large community. This also means that the people who have had their entire lives revolve around it, who had their sexuality molded by it (because it was the main thing they connected with during puberty) are also a relatively large sub group. Now you factor in that mental illness exists as well, combined with people who have stayed in a sort of permanent child-like state late into adulthood because of their problematic replacement of normal social development with being raised by a sub culture online.
At one point this group reached a critical mass where enough people involved with it no longer feared to express their subculture. Others saw that they could do it without major consequences and then they too came out of the woodwork.
Now I still feel like the most ill group that is to say the pedos still seem like a minority, and one that isn’t completely free from being criticized/ ostracized by anime fans in general. However they’re partially shielded by the obfuscation of memes/humor, and by the fact that they grown so much in numbers that they can easily find shelter within “tolerant” communities or just stick to interacting openly with their fellows.
Plus we have to remember profits. As something becomes more popular so too will the demand for goods and services related to said thing right? Basic stuff. The thing is that with modern vtubing, conventions and a bigger demand for both sfw and nsfw anime and other drawn media that it will naturally make it more normal because more and more people are buying it and employing others making it. It also gives an incentive to not think too critically of the content because everyone is making so much goddamn money off of it. It’s an entire industry that’s expanded into every single type of media available.
And finally because it doesn’t (at least directly) constitute a crime with a victim it exists in a sort of moral limbo for a lot of people at least to a certain extent. In addition I also think and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong that we are severely lacking studies about this stuff. Specifically whether or not consuming this shit makes you more or less likely to offend against a real child or not. Which again makes it harder for people to crack down on in a part of the world where free speech (even in very controversial forms) are principally protected and held in high regard.
Now my main argument has always been that it must to a certain degree make them people in general more likely to offend against kids because it solidifies taboo fantasies.I don’t think it makes more pedos that specifically are only into kids( i think x % of any population at any time will have that deviation no matter what) but I do think it has the potential to influence the cultural definitions of what’s okay and what’s not okay. Thereby creating more people who perhaps always had a latent fringe fantasy become potential opportunistic predators. we know that the cultural norms of acceptance makes a massive difference, it’s why some fuckhead can get away with marrying a 12 year old in Pakistan and not do so in say Wales for instance.
