Knew a guy for a while, one of those types who loves to say “most of 4chan isn’t bad, it’s only /b/ and /pol/, here look at this funny meme they made” I rolled my eyes whenever he said something like this but figured he was just in denial.
Then one day I mentioned to him that I cut contact with someone for defending drawn CSAM, explaining that I did it because it’s used to groom minors and accustom them to being sexualized, and his response was “I don’t care, it’s the parents’ responsibility to protect the kids, there should be no legal or moral barrier to what people draw”
Anyone who browses or defends 4chan is a fascist, a pedophile, or most likely both. Every interaction I’ve had with them only gave me further proof.
Worth mentioning that drawing for the sake of personal, artistic, emotional expression is not the same as drawing porn. Not all nudity is sexual and also, not all depictions of sexuality are pornographic.
Porn differs significantly from other forms of art because its explicit, primary purpose is to sexually arouse the viewer. The difference between Game of Thrones and Sexy Step Sis Stuck In Dishwasher is that you can skip to any timestamp in the latter, get your rocks off to whatever your ape brain is looking at and get pretty much the full experience of what the artwork has to offer. In Game of Thrones, its part of a greater narrative and the things its trying to express are more complicated and require context.
There are things worth expressing through art that justify drawing naked minors, possibly even drawing naked minors in a sexual context. An artist who has themselves been abused as a child might draw something like that to process their trauma, for example.
But the sole message of pornography, the only thing being expressed and what the audience is supposed to feel here is “Don’t you want to fuck this
child800-year-old vampire who just so happened stop to aging at the age of 8?”There are valid, artistic reasons for why an artist would want to draw the sexual abuse of children, but that’s not what lolicon art is. Lolicon art is pornographic in nature, its explicit purpose is to make the viewer horny for kids (or “child-like bodies” if you want to be extremely charitable). It tries to create feelings of sexual attraction, nothing else.
Go ahead, draw a manga about an 800-year-old vampire girl whose body stopped aging at the age of 8, show us how this affects her emotionally, how society treats her, how it affects her relationships with other people. Especially in regards to her romantic life there’d probably be some very interesting and emotionally intense internal and external conflicts to explore!
But that’s not what the overwhelming amount of loli art is. Lolicon art is porn. You’re not supposed to feel the struggle of the vampire girl, you’re not supposed to feel her despair at the dissonance of how people perceive her versus how she perceives herself and her frustration that nobody takes her seriously even though she has literal centuries of life experience. You’re supposed to feel “This child is sexy and I wanna fuck it.”