• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Robot Pedophilia

I think that part of the reason child porn is illegal is that the child cannot give concent and therefore cannot legally pose for questionable pictures. So, in a manner of speaking, the potential for harm to a child when using real kids for the porn is great.

However, if it's a CGI/robotic "child", then there is no issue of concent as it is a machine. (We'll leave AI to the realm of sci-fi for the moment). If I lust after Aki Ross (who, in her own right is a hottie), and manage to find some "porn" pix of her, am I looking at real porn? She looks real enough. Do I have to get SquareSoft's permission to (ahem) use her in that manner?

So what would be the difference between Aki and this as of yet unnamed "child"? If Joe Nambla were to find the fake child porn, is he really breaking the law?

Part of me says, no. Since there is no real child, then Ol'Joe is looking at a piece of fiction. Granted, it may hold all the redeeming value of a Maplethorpe exhibit or de Sade novel or even a horoscope's platitude, but it's not a picture of a real child.

The other side of me says: "EWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!"

So it goes
 
epepke said:
No; it's suddenly acceptable because he's male and she's female.
Click to expand...

No argument about that double standard, but that doesn't explain it entirely. Even though he's male and she's female, if she even tried to do something as tame as kiss him after he turned back into a boy, I bet there'd be a big "eww" from the audience. I seem to recall another movie that touched on that recently...something about a woman's dead husband being reincarnated in a child's body?

Even taking the genders into account, it seems like everybody thought it was okay to have a roll in the hay with a mental twelve-year-old when he was in Tom Hanks' body...so why not when he's a kid again? Good as it was, a lot of that movie got a big "eww" from me.

Jeremy
 
Iacchus said:
Well, at the very least, I don't think this type of behavior should be encouraged. And perhaps just a matter of confiscating the materials if the person's behavior becomes disturbing enough.
Click to expand...

Bloody hell Iacchus - that's quite a reasonable comment!
 
Iacchus said:
Well, at the very least, I don't think this type of behavior should be encouraged. And perhaps just a matter of confiscating the materials if the person's behavior becomes disturbing enough.
Click to expand...

hodgy said:
Bloody hell Iacchus - that's quite a reasonable comment!
Click to expand...

It is? We're supposed to be monitoring everyone's behavior, and if it falls out of line with what we've decided is acceptable, we should go through their houses looking for things to confiscate?

Jeremy
 
This thread reminds me of a great Ray Bradbury story called "Punishment Without Crime". It's about a man who has a robot replica of his cheating wife created, so that he can vengefully kill it. Anyway, the man is arrested, because in the eyes of the law, killing a robot who is exactly like a human was the same as killing a human being.

Having sex with a robotic child is just about as creepy as having sex with a child. But I don't think it should be against the law, since the perpetrator would be going out of his way to use a robot instead of a child. It would seem that a person who did this does have a sense of right and wrong.
 
The much larger question, is very much more realistic and scary:

Why are such a lot of pornographic models (let's call them "mainstream" pornography) made to look like they're very underage? I'm not just talking about the "Barely Legal" type, but the deliberate modelling of women in the styles of pre-pubescent girls? Why all the ribbons, pony-tails and teddy bears? I even saw one photoset (and before you ask me why I'm reading porn, I'm not - this was in a photographic magazine article) which had a naked woman lying inside a baby's cot. Nobody in the article seemed to pick up on this.

As I get older, I get more disturbed by this "mainstream" of sexualising the underaged through such practices. It's undoubtedly the case that fashions like that get copied into the non-pornographic media as some sort of "chic" when its nothing of the kind. On the one hand, there is this hysterical reaction to pedophilia when it involves real children, but where is the criticism of the most obvious paradigm in erotic photography?
 
Diamond said:
The much larger question, is very much more realistic and scary:

Why are such a lot of pornographic models (let's call them "mainstream" pornography) made to look like they're very underage? I'm not just talking about the "Barely Legal" type, but the deliberate modelling of women in the styles of pre-pubescent girls? Why all the ribbons, pony-tails and teddy bears? I even saw one photoset (and before you ask me why I'm reading porn, I'm not - this was in a photographic magazine article) which had a naked woman lying inside a baby's cot. Nobody in the article seemed to pick up on this.

As I get older, I get more disturbed by this "mainstream" of sexualising the underaged through such practices. It's undoubtedly the case that fashions like that get copied into the non-pornographic media as some sort of "chic" when its nothing of the kind. On the one hand, there is this hysterical reaction to pedophilia when it involves real children, but where is the criticism of the most obvious paradigm in erotic photography?
Click to expand...

If I might venture a guess--the "mainstream" fascination with teen-age sexual images might have a fairly natural cause. Even in a generally well-balanced, moral person, the teen-age years are often a time of great sexual frustration. Is it so surprising, then, that fantasies emerge around imagery from that time of life?

I don't think that's new... what is new is the catering to fantasies of all kinds... boosted by the anonymity and power of the internet, but also (and this is the only part that I can even consider close to a conspiracy) the determination of the entertainment industry to push the envelope for ratings--by giving people increasingly more realistic fantasies of what they want.

It's not much of a back-room conspiracy as much as it is a simple drive for profit.

Now, the preceding applies to teen-age imagery. Sexualizing pre-pubescent imagery? EEWWWWWW... I hope that isn't becoming mainstream. Though I did find a pair of "Bratz" twin infant dolls that I found horrifying (it was given as a gift to a friend's 5 year old daughter).
 
toddjh said:
It is? We're supposed to be monitoring everyone's behavior, and if it falls out of line with what we've decided is acceptable, we should go through their houses looking for things to confiscate?

Jeremy
Click to expand...
Not without a search warrant ... at least in this country. ;)
 
Iacchus said:
Well, at the very least, I don't think this type of behavior should be encouraged. And perhaps just a matter of confiscating the materials if the person's behavior becomes disturbing enough.
Click to expand...

That's a great solution, as long as I get to decide what is disturbing. I've decided that people who use dolphins as avatars are freaks and need their computers confiscated. Looks like you’re screwed.

LLH
 
LordoftheLeftHand said:
That's a great solution, as long as I get to decide what is disturbing. I've decided that people who use dolphins as avatars are freaks and need their computers confiscated. Looks like you’re screwed.
Click to expand...
There is no such thing as right and wrong, right? Well, as I understand it, you have on the one hand what's "right." And on the other, what's "left." :p
 
IllegalArgument said:
Just put her in a room with Camilia Paglia would be punishment enough.

Yes, I know Dworkin is dead.
Click to expand...

Y'know, if it turns out this universe is some kind of vacation reality, I hope both the far left and far right feel like idiots when they wake up.

Then again, being the biggest ass possible might be the name of the game here. :(
 
Well, what about art?

The problem with child porn is that there's an actual child being victimized. If somebody wanted to do a painting of children that was pornographic, but did not work from real models, then no children are being abused. I see above a suggestion that really realistic computer models of children may make victimless child porn possible, to which I'd point out that artists have been able to paint this sort of thing for centuries with minimal technology. Most of them haven't done so, but there are probably plenty of examples out there. I'm not gonna go digging.

Creepy? God, yes! Any gallery would be well within its rights to say "Dude, no WAY are you putting that stuff up on these walls." Freedom of artistic expression means you don't get shot for it, not that I have to hang it in the living room.

But--well--much as the thought gives me the creepin' squigglies--it's not a crime to be creepy.

There are plenty of sexual perversions glorified in art--you can find woodcuts of women romantically entangled with octopi in Japanese art going back centuries, and how many times did the Rape of Europa get painted in the west?--and it's generally not considered criminal. The person who painted a graphic scene of the conception of the minotaur might face some social censure, but we're long past the days when he'd be burned at the stake (and hopefully past the days when he'd face an obscenity charge, although you never know.)

So I guess I don't see any difference on a logical level, even if I'm much more creeped out by virtual children. I mean, it's absolutely NOT my place to regulate people's sexual fantasies, if they aren't actively hurting anybody else with 'em.
 
toddjh said:
How about the flip side? In the movie Big, Tom Hanks plays a twelve-year-old who is magically transformed into an adult body. In the movie, he sleeps with Elizabeth Perkins (who doesn't know he's mentally a kid). The scene is even played for laughs: he puts his hand on her breast, then it cuts to the next morning, when he's striding down the street with a huge grin on his face and a spring in his step.

That scene always bothered me. Is a kid having sex suddenly acceptable because he's in an adult body? Sure, you can't really blame Elizabeth Perkins, because she had no way of knowing he was a kid, but...should it really be a comic scene like that?
Click to expand...
1) One could argue that since Hanks is fully aware of the situation, while Perkins is not, he was taking advantage of her.
2) The scene cut deliberately makes it vague as to what really took place. Sure we know what it's supposed to look like, but since it's not shown, you have to fill it in yourself. You could imagine, for example, that he only got her to take her clothes off (reason enough for the big grin the next day) but then chickened out at that point. Who knows?

uruk said:
even if the pictures were faked or the child was a robot, the intent is still there. The pictures and the robot are proxies, and the acts are carried out with the proxies. So I guess you have to decide wether Child molestation by proxie is a crime.
Click to expand...
The answer to this question should provide the answer to that one: If one has sex with an "adult" love doll or sex robot, is it rape since the doll or robot did not give consent?
 
UrsulaV said:
There are plenty of sexual perversions glorified in art--you can find woodcuts of women romantically entangled with octopi in Japanese art going back centuries...
Click to expand...

Is that where the modern day tentacle porn comes from? I've been wondering about that weird stuff.

As to the OP, if it doesn't hurt a real child then even though I think it's creepy, what's to punish? It's better they have an outlet that doesn't hurt anyone than to keep it bottled up. Catholic priests anyone?
 
SkepticJ said:
Is that where the modern day tentacle porn comes from? I've been wondering about that weird stuff.
Click to expand...

I've heard two theories on that. One is that the octopus woodcut (Hokusai, c1820, titled "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife") is, indeed, an aesthetic precourser to The Stuff With The Tentacles, and the other being that back in the relatively early days of animation, Japanese censorship rules forbid showing male genitalia, although female was fine. In order to skirt this line, some clever individual figured out that the censors might not let a penis through, but a suspiciously phallic tentacle doing unspeakable things to a legion of anime schoolgirls went through just fine, and voila, a genre of tentacle monsters was born.

I dunno if that's true or not, though.
 
uruk said:
even if the pictures were faked or the child was a robot, the intent is still there. The pictures and the robot are proxies, and the acts are carried out with the proxies. So I guess you have to decide wether Child molestation by proxie is a crime.
Click to expand...
Whoa ! That implies that thinking about it, is as bad as doing it...

Now, what was that about " If your eye offends you, pluck it out ." ?
 
uruk said:
even if the pictures were faked or the child was a robot, the intent is still there. The pictures and the robot are proxies, and the acts are carried out with the proxies. So I guess you have to decide wether Child molestation by proxie is a crime.
Click to expand...

To me, this is the sort of mind police the right always seems to advocate. Consenting adults doing unspeakable things to be each other in the privacy of their homes are somehow guilty of something.

Imagine the "ultimate" example of this "crime": A man who lives alone on an island creates child pornography with sticks and charcoal and paint made from plants, etc. Nobody is harmed because he's the only one there. Surely it's creepy, surely it's not the guy I want taking care of my kids, but illegal?

I think the ideal model for our criminal system is to create laws that punish or prevent people from infringing on other peoples' rights. Nothing more. If I do something and nobody is damaged, it shouldn't be a crime. Obviously, drugs generally fall into this category, and obscenity, sodomy, etc. Most of the things the right always seems to demonize and criminalize.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom