[Frapster]

The above is counterfactual in a very real sense: If you photograph children having sex, you have coerced or enticed them into this, an act which ranks alongside rape (and often enough it is rape) and murder for real impact on a victim. But if you open a picture editor and paste a child'd head on a naked woman's body, where is the rape victim?

Again - people will act upon what they feed their mind. They will become the very thing they hate if they embibe upon it to the point of addiction, obsession... whatever you want to call it. It's human behavior. The only thing counterfactual in this discussion is that 'pretend child sex' has no victim.

[eno_]

"Pretend child sex" has no victim in exactly the same way that pretend murder has no victim. I can imagine and pantomime and make pictures of murder all I want. There is no law against it, and for good reason. Books and movies portray crimes rape, murder, battery, torture - including child sex - without legal penalty, and it is good that they are allowed to. Imagining an act is not the same as doing it. Imagining an act and being punished for imagining it is called "thoughtcrime." Do you want laws banning certain thoughts and expressions? On the other hand, if I made a snuff flick of the act of killing you, there would be a very dead body, and I doubt the major Hollywood studios would be more interested in a distribution deal than the authorities would be interested in investigating work conditions on the set. Do you get the differece?

[donh]

Again - people will act upon what they feed their mind. They will become the very thing they hate if they embibe upon it to the point of addiction, obsession... whatever you want to call it. It's human behavior. The only thing counterfactual in this discussion is that 'pretend child sex' has no victim.

The Nixon administration founded a huge commission to validate your opinion on this subject, and it failed dramatically. There is no demonstrated scientific or demographic causal relationship between any kind of pornography and any kind of associated sexual abuse. If anything, the available data gives a slight advantage to the reverse argument: imagined anti-social sexual behavior in healthy adult males helps keep actual anti-social sexual behavior down by satisfying urges without the need of an actual urgee.

To imagine that the pornography industry invents and imposes sexual urges on men is magical thinking akin to believing that siverfish build the houses they occupy. Men had anti-social sexual urges long before there was pornography--and that is what drives the porn industry, not the other way around.

All markets are consumer-driven: why would you expect anyone to believe that only the male sex drive is so weak and impotent as to reverse this iron law of economics? Men look at porn because male sex drives have an inherent tendency toward the anarchisic, nihilistic, self-absorbed, and just plain rude.