It was a for profit buisness in many, many countries. Laws have had to been placed to kill the industry. The demand still remains unfortunately.
It's just insane that at one point ANYONE could just go to a shop and go "yes that one with the naked children, by the way John how are your kids?"
But in all seriousness I do want to know how far back do these "magazines" go? Were people making and distributing CP back in the 1860s?
I'm not sure about the more explicit ones, but it wasn't until 2011 or 2014 before the junior idol gravure magazines were nipped. I remember it for being a previous lolicaust with people freaking out similar to the Texas bill.
They straight up had web storefronts in the 2000's. Right in the open next to the geocities sites, holocaust blogs and lemon parties.
What were they? Like those Kpop idol things but the kids were like 10?
There was a time in history, all over the world where porn was becoming a more widely accepted product before laws against child porn were put in place & even years after. Brooke Shields was a victim of this when her mother consented to a photographer named Garry Gross to take nude photos of her daughter & have them published in Playboy in 1976. So it's not exclusively a japanese thing. However what is with Japan is
how long it took them to finally ban it. A lot of this is gone over in the OP in detail but a lot of lolicon culture comes from the book "Lolita Complex" which was written by a ex-convict to ape off of the stir happening in America over the book "Lolita". Lolita Complex then got popular in Japan with pedophiles to describe the feelings the had to try & legitimize a movement sexualizing children & it worked.
I do know that the age of consent in the USA was pushed because there was a real issue with young/teenage girls becoming prostitutes, and it was hard to do anything about it, as in many areas a prostitution charge was an overnight in jail or a fine or both. That's kinda why the ages aren't very uniform across the USA and seem very harsh in areas where it shouldn't be (18 year old getting prosecuted for sleeping with his 17 year old girlfriend or them getting CP charges for sexting each other-seriously in my state when we had sex-ed in high school, a local cop came and told us not to send nudes to our GFs or BFs (who were around the same age because it was high school) because if we are caught or if a parent finds out they can go to the police we can be charged with production and possession of CP, we told us he thought it was BS but the rules are the rules. But between everyone on this post, that's just highschool stuff but which becomes a non issue the second one becomes of age (aka you and your girlfriend stop being underage the second you become 18 and thus sexting stops being illegak, kinda like drinking, but again I am talking about two people of within the proper age range where it isn't fucking creepy, but a normal late highschool relationship, not men lusting after underage children.)
There are some great street interviews from like the late 1960s1970s, that I will try to find where a guy is asking some cop in times square why he can't arrest a guy for sleeping with a 15/16 year old girl (who's clearly a prostitute) and the cop says "what can I do? It's not illegal, and we have no proof she's a prostitute.
Here's an article from 1970 (
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/05/29/...oung-now-work-the-day-shift-along-eighth.html) It's an interesting read where the cops can't do shit because the courts don't want to do shit and the "girls are young"
I can't find the exact clip but here's a clip from a vintage documtery about gay prositution:
https://old.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/1cartq1/underage_prostitution_in_times_square_1980/
And a vintage NY times article about the same thing:
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/02/14/...tracting-more-young-boys-to-times-square.html
It's wild
Edit: found yet another article from 1977 but this one is about a 11 year old prostitute who died at 12:
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/10/03/...prostitution-at-11-death-at-12-veronicas.html
