“Sacred meme”? For real?
Yeah, objecting to child rape (and it’s advocasy) is exactly the same as taking evolution out of school (or whatever). You are so much more enlightened and non-judgemental than the rest of us. :rolleyes:
Not only is it NOT a strawman but your statement is blindingly obvious. That’s not the point I was refering to.
My point is: If we accept whatever sexual desires we are born with as natural; be it gay or hetero, what biological process takes place in a pedo that is so different that it makes it un-natural?
Except that we’re not talking about child rape. And certainly no one here is advocating it. The OP posited that a graphic portrayel of underaged sexual activity is not equal to the deed and specified an instance where both participants were young and the act was consensual. Moreover, the question was apparently academic. I’ve no doubt you could find several things wrong with the OP’s position - I can think of a few myself. But to engage, as you and others have, in ad hominem attacks on the OP for voicing an unpopular opinion does nothing to strengthen your argument. It just makes you look petty and moralistic.
SS
I went back to your original post and if I did strawman you I am sorry. but I am still am not clear on your premise. You ask- “should we be feeding into these peoples sickness?”
then you say, “we have NO right to censure these peoples sexuality”
It seems to me that you speak from two sides of your mouth.
Also, you seem to be unhappy that pedo desires are considered unnatural, so I will avoid that here.
I believe that it could be difficult to protect an endangered group from from the NATURAL sexual desires of another more powerful group -without, in some way, censuring the NATURAL sexual desires of that potentially harmful group.
The OP wasn’t talking about a “portrayal”.
There are other forms of demand than the purely pecuniary.
Certainly there are a fair number of professors who view that as a duty, and it may well be that the OP’s professor is one of them. Personally, though, I think that that behavior is trolling, and just as contemptible in real life as it is on a message board.
Giving him the benefit of the doubt, that might just mean that he’s really bad at trying to engage people in debate.
As to the argument about whether pedophilia is natural, well, it probably is, by any reasonable definition of “natural”. Which is completely irrelevant, because whether something is natural has nothing to do with whether it’s right. It’s perfectly natural for various bacteria and vira to attack me, for instance, but that doesn’t mean I feel any compunction at all about fighting them off, even using less natural methods to do so.
One of the interesting questions here is, ‘does CGI child porn decrease the propensity for a child raping son-of-a-gun to do harm to a REAL little boy or girl’.
We have the proper Petri dish (so to speak).
I suggest, for the better good, we experiment.
After all, these deviants are known.
After a given period of time, we release them into the population.
Perhaps, we should give them free access to simulated pedophilic sex.
Yeah, it sounds icky as all get out, but, either we kill these folks or we handle their affliction.
Or keep them imprisoned for life.
On the contrary, that is exactly what the OP was talking about.
Portrayal (noun):[ul]
[li]a graphic or vivid verbal description[/li][/ul][ul][li]a representation by picture or portraiture[/li][/ul][ul]
[li]any likeness of a person, in any medium; "the photographer made excellent portrayals[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]representation by drawing or painting etc[/li][/ul]
In this case, pictures of children having sex.
Most people, myself included find child pornography distasteful, deplorable, even heinous. I also think lynching (for example) is heinous. But a quick run through Google turns up dozens, hundreds of photographs of lynchings that anyone can view without fear of censure or criminal charges. The picture does not equal the deed, and for anyone to judge my intent in viewing these pictures is to attempt to prosecute thought crime…something we try to avoid, at least in this country.
As to the practicality of targeting end users on the grounds that “it reduces demand for the product”, well, we all know how well that has worked out vis-a-vis the "war on drugs"®
Enough of that…I really don’t care to be an apologist for pornographers or their clients. My first reaction to reading this thread was one of bemusement at the great number of purely visceral responses to the OP’s dog whistle of “child porn”, to wit;
*your professor watches child porn. *
*what is on this creep’s computer? *
Your college professor needs to be fired.
*You should have reported this man *
*Creepy Professor is creepy. *
*has he ever mentioned anything about “showering lessons?” *
*Where the hell do you go to school? *
…and so forth.
For a group of people that supposedly values reasoned discussion, that’s a lot of knees jerking. Obviously, the mere thought of “child pornography” pushes a lot of buttons. Which may have been the OP’s (or the professor’s) intent.
unless the professor was playing devils advocate expecting an obvious rebuttal this isn’t merely a function of his personal opinion. He’s advocating a serious crime. Assuming it’s not an academic exercise it would be irresponsible not to bring this to the attention of the college.
From the OP:
He clearly wasn’t talking about staged or faked pictures. He was talking about actual sex acts.
How is someone acquiring those pictures anonymously fueling that demand?
“I believe that everyone should be able to take any drug they want at will”, “I believe that if people want to commit suicide due to deteriorating health conditions we should be able to assist them”. Should I be brought to the attention of various bodies for making such statements for advocating these serious crimes?
Do you not see a problem running to the ‘police’ every time someone makes an extreme statement you don’t agree with especially in a university environment where open discussion should be allowed and promoted?
I see a problem with you not addressing what I said.
I said it should have been taken to the ‘University’. And no, I don’t see a problem dropping a dime on someone promoting the exploitation of children. The teacher might as well have handed out pamphlets for North American Marlon Brando Look-Alikes.
It was just a few months ago that a student at York University made trouble about her professor’s anti-Semitic remarks, when in fact the professor had specified that he was offering examples of unacceptable and dangerous opinions: http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1053247--jewish-prof-forced-to-defend-himself-against-anti-semitism-claims
The OP has offered little context for the professor’s remarks, and I don’t think we have enough information to determine what this professor’s point about child pornography was really supposed to be. We can debate the merits of the position described to us, but I don’t think we can draw conclusions about the professor’s true beliefs or motives.
Explain how anything illegal can be discussed without someone ‘dropping a dime’? Promoting homosexuality? Promoting inter-racial marriage? Promoting legalizing marijuana? I’m sure someone would have liked to drop a dime in these discussions.
Btw, I’m in no way promoting sex with children, just in case you don’t see the distinction between having a discussion and and promotion…Actually, it appears you don’t.
The creation of those photos is not the purpose of a lynching. That is why the child porn itself is bad: it is not simply a depicition of a crime, it is the proceeds.
This is a question that pushes hot buttons on nearly every non-sociopathic adult. NAMBLA, lolita websites, pornographers exploiting and abusing children – who could fail to be angered by it?
But the very nature of the criminal law is such that it defines clearly what behaviors are proscribed, what items are contraband to possess, and any wiggle room left to allow for judicial discretion tends to invalidate the statute by making its terms too nebulous to enforce. For example, one could outlaw a nude figure in a “lewd pose” – but is a naked woman lying on her side, smiling and gesturing with her free hand, lewd? It depends on the opinion of judge and/or jury – and what of the artist who intended it as a figure study, not a pornographic nude? On the other hand, a few minor, ineluctible shifts in the posing, and that same figure is by most people’s standards unquestionably lewd in its connotations.
To avoid this sort of problem, the law can get positively draconian in its standards, and thereby create another set of problems. Is a Norman Rockwell-like painting of boys skinny- dipping obscene? A mixed group of nine-year-olds playing on the beach in the altogether? Taking the point raised earlier about opaque clothing, is a child swimming in wet underwear (which is clinging to its body and has become less than opaque) unfit for anyone to see?
The question of consent becomes a bit nasty too, liable to bite the lawmaker or judge unexpectedly. Very few Dopers are stronger for the principle that children cannot be expected to always exercise mature judgment, but again there are limits, and questions to be asked. There’s an apocryphal story of two teens, boyfriend and girlfriend, who used their cellphones to take nude pictures of themselves in their own bathroom mirrors and sent them to each other. When the girl’s parents discovered this, they turned the matter over to the D.A. – and found that both kids were subject to prosecution for transmitting child pornography, i.e., the nude pictures of themselves, to each other. (If anyone happens to have a cite to the actual story of this, please supply it – I am repeating it here, but noting that it is apocryphal.) Or consider the probable reaction to a teenage boy offered the opportunity to have sex with an attractive young woman. Yes, there are serious issues about how he deals with sex in later life as a result of that experience – but they are scarcely affected by whether this is something happening privately or whether they’re co-starring in “Horny Housewife Seduces Yardboy.”
Two anecdotes will wrap the comments I want to make right at this point. First is that I recently read an interview with a young man named Felix Russo, who apparently is well known in gay porn. Mr. Russo, who looks like a high school junior, had recently turned 19. He noted that he had been having sex with other guys since he was 15, and when he turned 18, almost the first thing he did was to sign a contract with a porn studio so that he could get paid to do what he had been doing, and enjoying doing, for the better part of three years already.
The second point is something that has apparently been big news in Dutch journalism the last couple of years. And this really gets to the heart of the question. A lot of the child pornographers apparently really abused the children they exploited and preyed on, and the Dutch authorities eventually went after them. But one case came up worth talking about.
There’s a legal maxim: Bad cases make good law. It takes the extremes of Fred Phelps or a white supremacist to test out the implications of freedom of speech. It takes a Gideon or a Miranda to test out the right not to incr4iminate oneself. And so I present the story of Bernard Myburgh.
Myburgh is in late middle age, originally from South Africa, a longtime resident of the Netherlands. He is apparently a very skillful artist – draftsman and painter. His typical product is a nude drawing or painting of a boy approaching or passing through puberty, the body depicted highly realistically and typically sexually aroused, with the addition of angel’s wings to the boy’s back. Up to that point it sounds open and shut – nude, erect young boy, painted as aroused and perhaps engaged in sex play with another boy – no question that’s pornographic, right?
Except that since leaving South Africa, where he was ostracized for his artwork, he has never used a live model. Every picture he has done has been based on a photograph readily available over the counter in a magazine at the time he bought it, except apparently for some recent ones that worked from pictures he downloaded on the Internet. To sum that up, he has been prosecuted for trafficking in child pornography for turning into paintings pictures from magazines that he purchased legally and openly.
And on that one I don’t know what to think.
Yes, there are stories of kids imprisoned and/or drugged, make to do the unspeakable with adults, for sick appetites. And there are others who have been burned by that fire. And I’m having a little difficulty seeing where the limits need to be drawn.
As RickJay pointed out up thread, a person in Canada was prosecuted for drawing pictures that only he used. Assuming we have all the information, no models were used, just his imagination. I fail to see the demand created or who could possibly be hurt by it.
Yet were I to discuss whether this was acceptable behavior at a university many would turn me in to the administration for it thus jeopardizing my job.
What was the strawman that you were objecting to then?
I’m not certain that paedophilia is a sexual desire like any other. Any sexual desire that involves coercion is about a hell of a lot more than sex. That’s why rape is a good analogy; are there people who are born with the sexual desire to rape?
That’s completely different. The professor in the OP was talking about actual child porn, not drawings. Whether or not such drawings are porn makes for a good discussion (which has been done on here at least twice that I know of), but it’s not really relevant to this thread.
As to whether he should be reported, it depends on what the class was and whether he made it clear that he was playing devil’s advocate. Not sure how anyone can say it doesn’t matter what subject the class was. If he just spouted these opinions in the middle of calculus then I’d strongly suspect that they were more than just opinions.
I mean, this thread is in Great Debates and the OP wasn’t personally advocating child porn, but if she/he popped up in a thread on football scoring in the Game Room and wrote it as if it were her/his POV, wouldn’t you report it or question the person directly?