It is possible to get sick of the song that goes with this.
I don't know sideshowbob.. What do you think is beneficial in portraying children as sexual objects or sexual beings to adults? What dangers can come from portraying children as sexual objects to paedophiles, I wonder? What can possibly go wrong with normalising the sexualisation of children to paedophiles....?
A point on normalization: I actually encountered an argument, earlier this year I think, that we normalize something by failing or refusing to normalize it. The point had to do with white supremacism, but also an actual self-proclaimed sex offender. And if we actually scrutinize what he said on that occasion, the functional part was that refusing to normalize antisocial behavior normalizes antisocial behavior, thus we must facilitate normalization said antisocial behavior.
And it's one thing if
I find that particular argument bullshit, but this person happens to have some manner of formal authority that can be affected by his denied but demonstrative sympathy for supremacists. It's a swindle-circle by which he pretends he is duty-bound to accommodate bigotry. And it's also just a cheap excuse to cover for himself, a pretense that he is not of the bigoted legions he struggles to aid and abet.
I mention this because, well, right. Today we seem to circle 'round a similar proposition, but more particular and grotesque, that if we do not accommodate crime then we normalize crime, therefore we must accommodate crime.
I'm now waiting on a modified drug-war libertarian argument I should never have reason to expect except for the fact of a circumstance when someone leaps into that particular shitwallow. The objectification required is itself suggestive of dysfunction; I say suggestive, and not indicative, because we lack a specific diagnosis. But the objectification is on record, hewed to in argument, and reinforced.
Nor do I think it really helpful to review an American version of the question, but drawing fantasy pedophilia ostensibly not modeled after anyone in particular has long been a niche battlefield in our speech and decency disputes. It is unclear to me how we would have approached the question if it wasn't postulated as defense and justification of dangerous individuals. And while I can remember the feeling of unease because at some point we just drew the line and said no, so it always felt arbitrary, what is much more evident to the common person, today, is the consuming and escalating pathology of sex predators. Most people can perceive, even if they cannot technically explain, the dangers of documentable and predictable predatory escalation.
But within that context we find an important rabbit hole, and it is well marked to stay clear of. The thing is that nobody will ever be able to bring the proper test case, and within that is an inherent trap of the landscape: Whether one lands there as if just because, or calculates their path and ingress to that territory, it is
still that particular territory. By the time we identify this or that person as the perfect test case, just how much effort will we have put into finding the perfect test case to justify what everyone else, including the predators who want it, would acknowledge is child pornography.
The banner image on this post, for instance. I made it a few years ago, and have used it very little over the period because I can't figure out how. To the one, I shouldn't throw it at a male because feminization as an insult is problematic; to the other, don't throw it at a woman because, well,
don't—some things are obvious. I threw it at a homophobic ideology not for feminization or juvenilization as insult, although the latter ... right, it's complex. I used it because it's a perverse family values argument.
The basic description of this frame from
Sekirei is that Matsu #02 (left, laughing), watches Kusano #108 (center, angry) argue with Tsukiumi #09 (evident at right of frame) about who gets to be the master's main wife.
Yeah. Actually explaining details like why they have numbers, are polygamously bound to a hapless, innocent nice guy who is obliged to keep a harem, or, y'know, why it's acceptable to have Kusano demanding to sleep with master, only makes it worse, such that the answer to, "Why Tsukiumi?" is merely shit icing on radioactive strudel. The joke for even making the image in the first place is that American Christianist homophobes are jealous. Okay, Kusano actually does represent a particular point in the moment: The excuse is that she has been in magical suspended animation long enough that she technically isn't a child, even if she has a child's body and mind.
To call it thinly-veiled is inappropriate; it's nod and wink. Well, tacit. Actually putting effort into nodding and winking is overstating. The term open secret implies something secret, so that doesn't work, either. Front and center is more like it, and some proverbial everyone knows how to participate. Because, if I think of another anime, there is a scene in which a man gropes a child, and it's a mistaken-identity joke, and the first time you see it you laugh at the joke because otherwise it's really,
really awkward. Artistically, cinematically, something, something storytelling, sure, I could easily postulate a justification, but at the same time, it's
anime, an industry notorious for this kind of open multientendre, and while I agree writers should throw certain barbs and punches when they can—(sometimes literally, like a timing-is-everything DV juxtaposition as scene transition)—bits like the transformation scenes engaging the traditional featureless symbolism for nudity, or an otherwise perfectly useful scene marred by the need to put an adult man atop a nude twelve year-old girl remind the underlying justification is pretty much any excuse will do.
To the other, I know a guy who went on to work a stretch as an animator for a major studio, but in junior high he was known for pencil sketches of nude women copulating with elaborate hood ornaments on classic cars; it wasn't a yearslong obsession, but there were at least a few. And why? We were fourteen, in a time of almost ineffably pervasive objectification; the answer at the time would have been to ask why not.
(I am actually experiencing a terrifying memory of childhood in the moment, a holy-shit-that's-right remembrance of my first outward-looking ... I actually can't bring myself to say the words, because I can't properly deal with them in the moment, but I can also say this was before I knew what sexual intercourse actually was; in a time when girls were treated like cookie jars, the point became to be naughty-naughty-naughty but not get caught with your hand in. And all these years later I find myself recalling this grotesque, bizarre, and extraordinarily juvenile fantasy, and trust me, the genderbending fantasies in which I was not the predator, which were a staple of my presexual stimulation, are still rape fantasies. Okay, there, now I can say it. It's hard to catalog the rape culture of my childhood because not only is it unnerving to do so, the attitudes were pervasive. In the moment, though, I'm getting pinged by this godawful recollection specifically because it's me, aged single digits or maybe ten years old, recognizing there is no way to do that to someone without getting caught. I want to call the any-excuse behavior childish, because I've known and recognized it for that long, but phuckall, it's lethally dangerous. I so did not need that memory, today. Or maybe I did; it's not a fortune cookie, but perhaps a reminder of the point about rape being about power instead of sex in particular, insofar as one can certainly learn rape culture without having a clue about sexual intercourse. Meanwhile, here we are, years later, considering sexual assault in a context wondering what if nobody knows you stole the cookie, so, yeah, maybe I did need to be rattled like that this morning, because I'm forty-five years old and apparently witnessing an ostensible grown-ass adult man make a fucking cookie jar argument.)
And I will note, this thread is a difficult discussion in any number of ways, but this one needs accounting: There are days when I would or wouldn't post an image, such as a triptych I have and recall using here before—from the other anime—because I am uncertain whether it suits the intended effect or crosses into extraneity. Rare are days like today, when I wouldn't repost the triptych because it might get someone off.
I don't feel like an imbecile either - but if I was an imbecile, I probably wouldn't know it, would I? It's a good thing I have Sciforums to inform me.
