The irony is that nobody has ever proposed that drawings of murder or torture or dismemberment should be illegal.
Has the prevalence of internet tentacle porn resulted in an increase of octopus rape?
Aren’t you the savior? Don’t you know?
Jesus doesn’t save Japanese people.
Ah-HA! So he admits statutory rape! That narrator should be arrested and prosecuted!
Or real life videos of those things.
That’s such a disturbing thought. There’s nothing illegal (at least in the US) about movies like Faces of Death where they show actual people dying and being injured, yet we have some provision in the 2003 PROTECT act that makes at least “obscene” types of cartoons illegal.
ETA: Can we get some people who voted for Yes or for “Some other option” to speak up?
I think this really strikes at the heart of the issue. For most girls, if they are any older than about 15, it is virtually impossible to definitly say that they aren’t 18 just by looking at a photo. How much harder is it when you are talking about a drawing?
13-year olds CAN have large chests, while 30-year olds can be flat chested.
It’s impossible. “She’s a thousand year old elf.”
Hmm; a thought just popped in my head. If you have a Freaky Friday style body switch between an adult and a kid, and the kid-in-an-adult-body character is shown having sex, is that illegal?
It gets even more problematic when you bring in fantasy or science fiction settings (which is trivially easy, given that it’s all drawings anyway). Suppose, for instance, you had porn drawings of Kes from Star Trek: Voyager (I’m sure this already exists somewhere on the Internet). Per the canon, she’s two years old… But her species matures much more quickly than humans, dying of old age at 9, and so she’s fully adult. Or on the other side of the coin, you could have a long-lived race that are still children at age 50. Is it chronological age that matters, or level of maturity? And heck, what if you have a hypothetical species where psychological maturity comes at a different age than physical maturity? Or where all sex biologically must involve one of the participants being psychologically immature, as with Heinlein’s Martians, which are female when young and who become male with age?
The written erotica site Stories Online has interpreted the Canadian law that way and has forbidden new uploads that contain sex scenes depicting characters younger than 14.
Frank Thorne’s “Rann” has a situation like that: an adult man has an accident with a rejuvenation machine, and is reverted to the physical age of twelve or so. But it’s still the same guy. The art clearly depicts a 12-year-old boy having sex with adult women. Does the justification in the story make it legal (in jurisdictions where such depiction would be illegal?)
I have a sense that the censors don’t bother studying the script or paying any attention to the plot. They’d simply see the boy having sex and they’d start wielding their red pencils.
(“Promiscuously.”)
Well, despite her looks, we KNOW Lisa Simpson has reached the age of consent. Hell, Maggie is old enough to fuck! The show’s been on for like 25 years.
So as long as the story comes up with some pretense for the person to be chronologically older than 14, but has all the physical characteristics of a very young person, that would pass muster?
And likewise, if a story claimed that the person was only 13 real earth years old, but through some technological mishap got put into an old body, that would be considered illegal?
These laws are so ridiculous it’s hard to parse out anything meaningful from them.
Would the 2500 year old Arwen be robbing the cradle with the 81 year old Aragorn? Is the extreme age disparity be a problem?
Which seems to me to mean adjudicating the “legal age” of a cartoon or literary character is absurd.
I recall reading that some hentai DVDs actually did/do something like the former—the label specifically noted with a big sticker that the (animated) characters were all 18+. Now, I forget if the pretense was that the (teenage) characters just happened to all be 18…or if they were literally supposed to be older fictional characters playing underage characters in a show-within-a-show.
That would be the most metahilarious way I can imagine of circumventing censorship regs…just stick in a “prologue” scene of the “actors” arriving on set, establishing that they’re actually all in their 30s, getting through makeup/wardrobe/etc., taking their places, the director calls out “Action!”…and the rest of the cartoon procedes “normally,” like the rest had never happened.
The norm was to say everyone portrayed was supposed to be 18+. Included convoluted prologues making claims to the effect that some Japanese Junior Colleges still use schoolgirl uniforms, as well as suitable editing of the subtitles and dubs.
One thing about this is that (a) as may be known to followers of Manga/Animé, often the artist DOES portray a canonically-adult female with the neotenic features of a tween, or just has every female 14-to-40 looks virtually alike except for hair color and eye size, so how the heck would anyone tell and (b) in any case the mainstream-Hentai-artist(*) would usually cast the “teenage” characters to be above the Japanese Age of Consent, which happens to be lower than the US norm but still culturally not pedophillic, so (c) the dire warnings often had the ironic effect of having your Western perv imagining that the “teenage” porn characters were even younger than they were canonically.
(*as opposed to properly Lolicon artists)
Well, thing is, under the Miller decision, whatever you got IF it is obscene it may be prosecuted. So as it stands you could have all along gone after it as plain obscenity, this is just TPTB deciding they need to make a special case for it just to prove how much they Think Of The Children.
Even the fictitious children, bless their animated souls.