Emperor Has No Clothes - CP

The Emperor Has No Clothes

The duration of this post will use the abbreviation CP for illicit sexual representations of the underage because paste-bin's filter refuses to let a public paste exist with the full words in it.

I’ve never imagined I’d be writing this, because it’s too controversial a topic and has never seemed personally important to me. In my life most issues where the default opinion was dead wrong, such as marijuana or homosexuality, have resolved themselves in time. Usually they go from “unspeakably bad” to “no big deal” astoundingly quickly once they hit a tipping point. But there’s one more issue where the default opinion is dead wrong and it’s now coming to the fore.

Our attitudes on CP are dead-wrong.

A lot of us have fantasies. I’ve met many men and women who have had wild fantasies. Taboo fantasies. Illegal fantasies. Armie Hammer even gets his rocks of thinking of eating people.

Fortunately fantasies aren’t reality. Fantasies are perfectly harmless, even awful ones. Believe it or not, you can have a fantasy about murdering people, running from the cops, and dying in a shoot out. And you would be sharing that fantasy with a million other lovely people who have enjoyed the video game Grand Theft Auto.

Fantasies are great because they provide an alternative outlet to doing things for real (be it punching a pillow or just imagining sex in a public place).

We all have taboo fantasies. If yours isn’t a sexual fantasy or video game it may be slapping a certain politician or robbing a bank. Almost never do we even consider acting on our illegal fantasies. Around 15 years ago people learned to stop pearl-clutching over the violence in video games, understanding that most normal healthy people play them. And in 2015 people stopped pearl-clutching over BDSM, understanding that most people who have that fantasy enjoy it responsibly.

And someday soon we will all say “Obviously it’s okay to let pedophiles look at CP, if it’s simulated. Everybody knows that. The alternative is crazy, do you want them to store up all that energy?” Most people already know this. Much like they knew all along that weed was harmless, but didn’t want to speak up and look like a stoner. Or they knew that homosexuality was harmless, but they didn’t want to peak up and  risk being called gay. The emperor has n.

The emperor has no clothes.

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It should go without saying that creators of unsimulated CP are sexual abusers and should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Similar, though less cut-and-dry, arguments can be made for those selling such material (unsimulated), because they have an indirect effect on the market. The logical bound for this argument would be those purchasing such material.

Even though I am bringing this up now that the specter of CP is being used as justification for expanded incursions into basic privacy, that’s really just the straw that broke the camel’s back. These policies have never made sense, however they have slid under the radar because they simply persecuted a minority that had no particular liking of.