As an anthropologist, I can say that it is sadly unsurprising that this creep is an anthropology student. Anthropology has crawled very far up its own commitment to "making the strange familiar and the familiar strange". Anything that seems to invert normie values or perceptions is like catnip to anthropology in a way that has become simply shatteringly stupid.
They all think they are the heirs to Montaigne's essay "On Cannibalism" whilst producing an absolute ocean of "actually wearing hats on your head is a Western imperialist construct, before colonialism everyone wore hats on their bums" ludicrous bilge.
It's this sea in which "actually my ethnography of MYSELF rather than anyone else and my enthusiasm for child sexual abuse is the insightfulest and moast ethicalments" can happily burble and swim. it's beyond the emperor having no clothes -- it's a vocally fried uptalky insistence that actually? clothes? are an invented tradition? that never really? existed anywhere?
if any of the pseudoscholars in academia had read even one essay by Montaigne, there's no possible way they'd be so feebleminded and such unforgivably terrible writers.
Aug 11, 2022·edited Aug 11, 2022Liked by Stuart Ritchie
This article sent me into a grisly Wikipedia rabbit hole chasing 'autoethnography' and other qualitative research methods of dubious effectiveness. Hard-hitting explorations about subjective experience and adventures in masturbation should be relegated to tumblr forums and airplane literature sections, miles away from 'scientific' journals!
I think it is repellent to shoehorn a prior animus to qualitative research into discussions on a horrific piece of work which celebrates pedophilia. Quantitative work harbours equal, if not worse, sins, but that does not lead to people denouncing it per se.
I don't harbor any vitriol toward qualitative research on whole but there seems to be lots of practices of dubious effectiveness imbedded in it; and this is especially highlighted by the fact that the local academic community accepted and defended the pedophilia for so long, which is not a glowing endorsement of the academic standards at play here. Quantitative work probably also 'harbors sins', but at least a quantitative study needs to pass as something more empirical as a diary to get published.
I...I am going to defend the paper on masterbation. Kind of. Let's start with the obvious - the paper is stupid. I have zero clue what one can learn from this dudes jerk-off journal and honestly not nearly enough focus was placed on how voyeuristic and creepy it is to be reading this professional talk about cumming.
Part of what makes it so bad in my eyes is how interesting of an ethnographic topic Shota and Loli are! There's an amazing study here that just required some conversations - conversations that the author would have a much easier time arranging given that he himself is a Shotacon. This is a subject-area that is insanely stigmatized in virtually every country on Earth except for Japan. Why? What makes Japan different? Why are people Shota/Lolicons? Does it lead to real abuse? There's a million questions and literally everyone on Earth has something to share about it. And this paper didn't engage with the topic at all!
Frankly a piece ravaging CumBoy for being a Pedo can only happen because of how lazy the paper was. An actually interesting look into Shota/Lolicons would have actually addressed what makes it controversial and have SOME defense of it either by the author himself or via interviews with sex researchers, mental health providers, and Shota/Lolicons themselves. And it's a defense that's not even hard to make. This garbage research is just going to make the actually interesting work trying to understand this community harder, and that's the real loss.
I agree with this! And I actually think some of the academics who defended the paper must've assumed that it was as you describe: research on the general phenomena, trying to understand loneliness and what drives people to do it, etc etc. One look at the paper tells us that this was not the case.
"it has, after all, become a pastime on the right to mindlessly attack work in the Humanities and social science, as the very cringe “grievance studies” hoax from 2017-18 proved."
I know Helen Pluckrose slightly, via Twitter, and I don't think anyone could reasonably describe her as part of the right. She is in fact solidly LEFT-wing. She just doesn't have any patience with postmodernist rubbish.
"it has, after all, become a pastime on the right to mindlessly attack work in the Humanities and social science, as the very cringe “grievance studies” hoax from 2017-18 proved"
It seems that you are guilty in this quote of the exact thing you accuse the academic tweeters of in your article.
As far as I'm aware, none of the three authors of the hoax papers in the "Grievance Studies Affair" could be accurately described as being on "the right", and two of them would be pretty offended by the suggestion. It really takes some chutzpah to call something that took months of work and produced papers of a quality that could pass peer review "mindless", too.
Perhaps it wasn't your all-time favorite hoax, but its goal (ultimately met) was to highlight the very lack of rigor in the peer-review process that you elucidate here.
If anything, it seems that academic journals should be purposely seeding nonsense papers akin to those in the Grievance Studies Affair that contain ethical and other issues so that they have some sort of quality control on their own review processes. Even Walmart has mystery shoppers, for goodness sakes.
A pretty disappointing showing from the author of the excellent piece "Science is political - and that's a bad thing".
Do you not realise there's a whole thing for people to say "I'm a left-winger!" and then act in every way indistinguishable from a right-winger? It's an incredibly common trope (one classic example is Dave Rubin, but James Lindsay--one of the hoaxers here, and now a hardcore Trump supporter and rightwing conspiracy theorist--is even more extreme). Sorry you fell for it.
And those months of work led to a large number of papers, most of which were rejected and only a few of which got into some totally no-name journals after a lot of effort on the part of the hoaxers. If anything you could say that in the majority of cases, the system worked.
Most offensively though, the hoax wasn't funny. Just take a look at how good, how dense with jokes and hilarious comments, the original Sokal paper was. Then look at these more recent ones. It's like an IQ drop of 20 points - no artistry, and only the most basic, low-quality humour. Sad!
You know what else is an incredibly common trope? Accusing people (who don't identify as right-wing) of being right-wing. Often seen on social media when the unfortunate target has the temerity to push back against a very specific and counter-intuitive approach to social justice.
I didn't see this comment when you made it. I'll leave most of it alone, other than to drop a little something for you to consider: "right wing" is not an insult to right wing people. It only works that way on the left, because left-wing people tend to assume that their political opponents, rather than simply being wrong, are evil (though I will grant you that this attitude has begun to spread as left and right become more and more meaningless descriptors).
There is no reason for a right-wing person to "pretend" to be left-wing, and most of every society in the world—almost all of them split roughly 50/50 in terms of left/right—understand that.
Bubble-bound extremists, on the other hand, struggle.
It was surprising to see Mr. Ritchie do the exact, very same thing about the hoax he doesn't like and finds distasteful that he's rightly criticizing in other academics.
Great post Stuart! One thing I noticed that the journal of Qualitative Research needs to rethink as well is their new “Notes” format (which is what this paper is published as).
Per the QR website: “Notes is a new format for short, engaging, and imaginative submissions. It offers a more playful space for critical reflection on the craft of qualitative research. Authors are encouraged to experiment with styles of writing, and submissions can take the forms of stories, anecdotes, or lessons that impart original methodological insights.”
Interesting - well-spotted. It reminds me of the journal Medical Hypotheses, which used to allow anyone to publish absolutely anything with no peer review - and it led to some really crazy papers. They eventually insituted peer-review, which they've had for the past few years, after they published one too many papers denying that HIV causes AIDS.
Did someone step on someone else's Respectability?
I think the problem that grievance studies affair uncovered is what's "cringe." I'm honestly stunned that you don't, and, instead, believe that stunt itself is "cringe."
In the very article where you're arguing, correctly, that academic tribalism should not take precedence over substance.
it's not confusing at all: all the pseudointellectual me-search and feelosophy of "Cultural Studies" academia is both a sacred cow and a cash cow—how else are unemployable disaffected academics supposed to get ahead if they can't wrap their pseudoradical nonsense in trendy jargon?
Wonder how to make sure that the responders actually read the piece attached (assuming there is one) before being allowed to respond to it on Twitter or anywhere where there is a discussion forum. We have an (imperfect but somewhat useful) precedent in the online privacy T&Cs of various service providers. At the minimum, you need to open the document. For extra points, you need to scroll to the end. There is no guarantee that one would have actually read the piece. But there is a higher chance of someone spotting key relevant words that may colour what they are about to respond.
I also wonder if the Conservative MP actually properly read the research himself. No way he would have left the word "boy" out of his tweet. And if he did read it, gobsmacked that that nuance has so limited relevance for him to leave it out.
You wrote a great piece overall, but please don't equate this garbage with 'qualitative research' more generally. Some of us use qualitative methods regularly and it looks nothing like this terrible article, thankfully.
So can the "good" qualitative researchers please clean up their field and let us know what "good" qualitative work looks like? The amount of dross produced in the area masks the work of quality. I've been reading academic papers using this method since the 80s. Most of it is indulgent, lazy, and a waste of everyone's effort, a smirking post-modern joke to "own" people seeking higher truths for their embarrassing lack of sophistication. I occasionally hear the comment, "oh, the data is so much richer than empirical work". Utter nonsense. Students that can, research. Students that can't, are "qualitative".
Margaret Mead conducted her sexual ethnographies across the Pacific and Oceania in the 1940s, later to be joined by Gregory Bateson, precisely because she was a moral nihilist bent on undermining sexual morés. These are just several examples, but Mead as a celebrated hero of anthropology had her dark reasons for what she did.
As a retired social scientist of 35 years I can honestly say that I find the concept of "autoethnography" as simply...solipsism. Call it phenomenological, it's still solipsistic.
I agree this paper was a waste of money and didn't qualify as academic research. But I disagree the MP buried the lede. Because in fictional drawn pornographic material where no one was involved in the making apart from the illustrator, the subject matter really doesn't matter.
You ask if some people are really ready to defend pedophilia, as if it's an action or behavior, and not a condition people are born with through no choice of their own, and may never act on. Are you implying people should be shamed for traits they were born with? Or are you confused what the word pedophilia (a condition) actually means, and mistakenly think it equals child abuse (an action)?
And sure, it may be the case that the author did do bad things too - that depictions were involved that were not drawn, and if so that's highly immoral and should be dealt with accordingly.
But that's no reason to mix together a condition, a victim-less indulgence, and actual crimes as if it's all the same thing. (And no, pedophilia is not a crime for good reason since obviously you can't make it a crime for certain people to merely exist. It's child abuse that's a crime.)
Prevalence of that sort of material destigmatises sexual abuse of minors, and whilat clearly not as bad as the crimes themselves, is far from victimless. Its a contributing factor to offending.
> "Prevalence of that sort of material destigmatises sexual abuse of minors"
What are your sources on this? Does action movies with violence also destigmatise violence in real life?
To my knowledge, studies have shown repeatedly that as a general rule, people can in fact separate fiction from reality, and that just because people enjoy one thing in fiction doesn't mean they evolve greater tolerance for it in real life.
Ahh yes, the we need expert studies rather than use common sense. Permitting cartoons of child porn will help de-stigmatize pedophilia and hasten the slippery slope. If cartoons, why not child-like sex dolls? If child like sex dolls are fine, then non-sexual touching by a pedophile is also fine (long, hard hugs, stroking the legs of children).
Violence is not equal to pedophilia. When children are involved, we must be hyper-vigilant and allow nothing that may put that at increased risk. That is right - nothing.
I don't care if pedophiles are born that way. We should absolutely stigmatize sexual attraction to children, even if a person never acts on it. Yes, people should absolutely be ashamed of being sexually attracted to children. This was always the end result of progressivism - no boundaries, no limits, no shame, no responsibility.
> "Ahh yes, the we need expert studies rather than use common sense."
LOL what are you even doing on this blog if that's your outlook. I guess one will find appeals to "common sense" along with slippery slope fallacies and straw man arguments in even the most science-focused corners of the Internet.
Weird assumption given that the country in which the material originates and is by far the most popular is considered a very safe country for children.
Define what constitutes safe for children. What's the reported rate of sexual abuse in Japan? What is the ballpark rate of unreported sexual abuse in Japan? Where the material is created is irrelevant since it can easily be shared around the world.
Penetrative assault appears to be lower in Japan than in comprable countries. Also where it's from matters A TON because in Japan it's far more common and socially acceptable. In Japan you can be an internationally famous content creator working for a company so strict that you can be fired for saying your own name and openly talk about being a Lolicon. If your theory is that exposure to Loli/Shota content increases CSA then it's very strange that the country with the most Shota/Loli content and where its presence is the most normalized does not have disproportionately high rates of offense.
Thank you for the link. My issue with the studies is that they cover reported sexual abuse. I understand the focus on that. My issue is what is the percentage of reported abuse to actual sexual abuse? I'd expect this is almost impossible to accurately measure but that's my point. This research relies on flawed information and draws conclusions and drives policy on false data. I had a friend who was sexually assaulted by a man. He was 9 years old, pushed to the ground by a stranger and kissed and groped. Fortunately it didn't go further because another child came upon the pedophile and screamed. The parents declined to get involved because of the stigma to their son despite the prosecutor's office calling numerous times. This incident would now show up in any reports or stats yet it was real and took place and caused harm.
The authors of that study note "Several authors have commented that reduced disclosure of CSA in Asian countries may result from the social dimension of a collective worldview rather than an emphasis on individualism, which exists in many western countries (Back et al., 2003, Ji et al., 2013, Kim and Kim, 2005)."
The studies focuses on penetrative assault (presumably anal rape, vaginal rape and forced oral sex? It's undefined for the non-expert). Other forms of sexual abuse are evil too. I'm tired of the clinical language that obfuscates what is happening, just like the language that normalizes pedophilia, like minor attracted persons v. child attracted persons or just plain pedophiles.
Where content is created is irrelevant because it spreads to other locations. Kiddie porn created in Bulgaria can easily be viewed in France. Why should location matter given the ease of access?
One question I'd love to see addressed is "Does availability and visibility of this material reduce the likelihood of victims reporting their abuse?" No idea how you could possibly test that, but still.
Location matters to you very literally. Your theory is that exposure to Shota/Loli materials leads to CSA, so the location in which such material is BY FAR the most common and most socially accepted would seem to be relevant. If I think cannabis is a gateway drug but the states with the most cannabis use don't have more hard drug use than the ones with the least I would say that's a pretty big problem for my overarching theory.
I draw your attention to "Frequencies of Child Abuse in Japan: Hidden but Prevalent Crime" (Kitamura et al) and other works which suggest, at least to me, that you could be a little wide of the mark when you say "it's very strange that the country with the most Shota/Loli content and where its presence is the most normalized does not have disproportionately high rates of offense".
"Are you implying people should be shamed for traits they were born with?"
I was born with this terrible condition that gives me the ability to almost instantly spot blatantly dishonest sophistry (is like a superpower) and then want to heap scorn and mockery on the sophist in question.
Please don't shame me for thinking that you're spewing a word cloud of jargon to defend child fucking and for wanting to laugh in your face.
Aren't papers like this a perfect example of the trend that the "very cringe" grievance studies hoax was intending to highlight - namely, the ease with which rubbish "studies" masquerading as science can get published in ostensibly serious academic journals?
As an anthropologist, I can say that it is sadly unsurprising that this creep is an anthropology student. Anthropology has crawled very far up its own commitment to "making the strange familiar and the familiar strange". Anything that seems to invert normie values or perceptions is like catnip to anthropology in a way that has become simply shatteringly stupid.
They all think they are the heirs to Montaigne's essay "On Cannibalism" whilst producing an absolute ocean of "actually wearing hats on your head is a Western imperialist construct, before colonialism everyone wore hats on their bums" ludicrous bilge.
It's this sea in which "actually my ethnography of MYSELF rather than anyone else and my enthusiasm for child sexual abuse is the insightfulest and moast ethicalments" can happily burble and swim. it's beyond the emperor having no clothes -- it's a vocally fried uptalky insistence that actually? clothes? are an invented tradition? that never really? existed anywhere?
if any of the pseudoscholars in academia had read even one essay by Montaigne, there's no possible way they'd be so feebleminded and such unforgivably terrible writers.
This article sent me into a grisly Wikipedia rabbit hole chasing 'autoethnography' and other qualitative research methods of dubious effectiveness. Hard-hitting explorations about subjective experience and adventures in masturbation should be relegated to tumblr forums and airplane literature sections, miles away from 'scientific' journals!
I think it is repellent to shoehorn a prior animus to qualitative research into discussions on a horrific piece of work which celebrates pedophilia. Quantitative work harbours equal, if not worse, sins, but that does not lead to people denouncing it per se.
I don't harbor any vitriol toward qualitative research on whole but there seems to be lots of practices of dubious effectiveness imbedded in it; and this is especially highlighted by the fact that the local academic community accepted and defended the pedophilia for so long, which is not a glowing endorsement of the academic standards at play here. Quantitative work probably also 'harbors sins', but at least a quantitative study needs to pass as something more empirical as a diary to get published.
what does your statement about 'the local academic community mean ?'
you are basing that claim only on the statements of a pedophile, and allegedly, a criminal ?
shall we talk Tuskegee ?
I...I am going to defend the paper on masterbation. Kind of. Let's start with the obvious - the paper is stupid. I have zero clue what one can learn from this dudes jerk-off journal and honestly not nearly enough focus was placed on how voyeuristic and creepy it is to be reading this professional talk about cumming.
Part of what makes it so bad in my eyes is how interesting of an ethnographic topic Shota and Loli are! There's an amazing study here that just required some conversations - conversations that the author would have a much easier time arranging given that he himself is a Shotacon. This is a subject-area that is insanely stigmatized in virtually every country on Earth except for Japan. Why? What makes Japan different? Why are people Shota/Lolicons? Does it lead to real abuse? There's a million questions and literally everyone on Earth has something to share about it. And this paper didn't engage with the topic at all!
Frankly a piece ravaging CumBoy for being a Pedo can only happen because of how lazy the paper was. An actually interesting look into Shota/Lolicons would have actually addressed what makes it controversial and have SOME defense of it either by the author himself or via interviews with sex researchers, mental health providers, and Shota/Lolicons themselves. And it's a defense that's not even hard to make. This garbage research is just going to make the actually interesting work trying to understand this community harder, and that's the real loss.
I agree with this! And I actually think some of the academics who defended the paper must've assumed that it was as you describe: research on the general phenomena, trying to understand loneliness and what drives people to do it, etc etc. One look at the paper tells us that this was not the case.
Topping the list of Things-That-Make-You-Wish-You-Picked-A-Non-Humanities-Career.
"it has, after all, become a pastime on the right to mindlessly attack work in the Humanities and social science, as the very cringe “grievance studies” hoax from 2017-18 proved."
I know Helen Pluckrose slightly, via Twitter, and I don't think anyone could reasonably describe her as part of the right. She is in fact solidly LEFT-wing. She just doesn't have any patience with postmodernist rubbish.
That sentence stood out to me too.
Pointing out bullshit isn't cringe, even if its those dastardly right wingers doing it.
Falls into the same trap the article is decrying.
"it has, after all, become a pastime on the right to mindlessly attack work in the Humanities and social science, as the very cringe “grievance studies” hoax from 2017-18 proved"
It seems that you are guilty in this quote of the exact thing you accuse the academic tweeters of in your article.
As far as I'm aware, none of the three authors of the hoax papers in the "Grievance Studies Affair" could be accurately described as being on "the right", and two of them would be pretty offended by the suggestion. It really takes some chutzpah to call something that took months of work and produced papers of a quality that could pass peer review "mindless", too.
Perhaps it wasn't your all-time favorite hoax, but its goal (ultimately met) was to highlight the very lack of rigor in the peer-review process that you elucidate here.
If anything, it seems that academic journals should be purposely seeding nonsense papers akin to those in the Grievance Studies Affair that contain ethical and other issues so that they have some sort of quality control on their own review processes. Even Walmart has mystery shoppers, for goodness sakes.
A pretty disappointing showing from the author of the excellent piece "Science is political - and that's a bad thing".
Do you not realise there's a whole thing for people to say "I'm a left-winger!" and then act in every way indistinguishable from a right-winger? It's an incredibly common trope (one classic example is Dave Rubin, but James Lindsay--one of the hoaxers here, and now a hardcore Trump supporter and rightwing conspiracy theorist--is even more extreme). Sorry you fell for it.
And those months of work led to a large number of papers, most of which were rejected and only a few of which got into some totally no-name journals after a lot of effort on the part of the hoaxers. If anything you could say that in the majority of cases, the system worked.
Most offensively though, the hoax wasn't funny. Just take a look at how good, how dense with jokes and hilarious comments, the original Sokal paper was. Then look at these more recent ones. It's like an IQ drop of 20 points - no artistry, and only the most basic, low-quality humour. Sad!
You know what else is an incredibly common trope? Accusing people (who don't identify as right-wing) of being right-wing. Often seen on social media when the unfortunate target has the temerity to push back against a very specific and counter-intuitive approach to social justice.
I didn't see this comment when you made it. I'll leave most of it alone, other than to drop a little something for you to consider: "right wing" is not an insult to right wing people. It only works that way on the left, because left-wing people tend to assume that their political opponents, rather than simply being wrong, are evil (though I will grant you that this attitude has begun to spread as left and right become more and more meaningless descriptors).
There is no reason for a right-wing person to "pretend" to be left-wing, and most of every society in the world—almost all of them split roughly 50/50 in terms of left/right—understand that.
Bubble-bound extremists, on the other hand, struggle.
Adieu.
I agree with your take, Milky Toast.
It was surprising to see Mr. Ritchie do the exact, very same thing about the hoax he doesn't like and finds distasteful that he's rightly criticizing in other academics.
Great post Stuart! One thing I noticed that the journal of Qualitative Research needs to rethink as well is their new “Notes” format (which is what this paper is published as).
Per the QR website: “Notes is a new format for short, engaging, and imaginative submissions. It offers a more playful space for critical reflection on the craft of qualitative research. Authors are encouraged to experiment with styles of writing, and submissions can take the forms of stories, anecdotes, or lessons that impart original methodological insights.”
Interesting - well-spotted. It reminds me of the journal Medical Hypotheses, which used to allow anyone to publish absolutely anything with no peer review - and it led to some really crazy papers. They eventually insituted peer-review, which they've had for the past few years, after they published one too many papers denying that HIV causes AIDS.
Bruce Charlton used to be in charge of that, and was removed by Elsevier in the shift from editor-reviewed to peer-reviewed.
The grievance studies "hoax" is "cringe?"
Did someone step on someone else's Respectability?
I think the problem that grievance studies affair uncovered is what's "cringe." I'm honestly stunned that you don't, and, instead, believe that stunt itself is "cringe."
In the very article where you're arguing, correctly, that academic tribalism should not take precedence over substance.
It's confusing.
Seethe more, Josh.
it's not confusing at all: all the pseudointellectual me-search and feelosophy of "Cultural Studies" academia is both a sacred cow and a cash cow—how else are unemployable disaffected academics supposed to get ahead if they can't wrap their pseudoradical nonsense in trendy jargon?
The "Ok Groomer..." portion of right-wing media will have fun milking this one and honestly, I can't blame them. This is crazy!
Wonder how to make sure that the responders actually read the piece attached (assuming there is one) before being allowed to respond to it on Twitter or anywhere where there is a discussion forum. We have an (imperfect but somewhat useful) precedent in the online privacy T&Cs of various service providers. At the minimum, you need to open the document. For extra points, you need to scroll to the end. There is no guarantee that one would have actually read the piece. But there is a higher chance of someone spotting key relevant words that may colour what they are about to respond.
I also wonder if the Conservative MP actually properly read the research himself. No way he would have left the word "boy" out of his tweet. And if he did read it, gobsmacked that that nuance has so limited relevance for him to leave it out.
It would be an ironic, "stopped clock" moment indeed if the MP turned out to be a pseudocritic while being right about the paper.
To be fair to Neil O'Brien, though, he was very solid, in public, in calling out Covid deniers on his side of the political divide.
You wrote a great piece overall, but please don't equate this garbage with 'qualitative research' more generally. Some of us use qualitative methods regularly and it looks nothing like this terrible article, thankfully.
So can the "good" qualitative researchers please clean up their field and let us know what "good" qualitative work looks like? The amount of dross produced in the area masks the work of quality. I've been reading academic papers using this method since the 80s. Most of it is indulgent, lazy, and a waste of everyone's effort, a smirking post-modern joke to "own" people seeking higher truths for their embarrassing lack of sophistication. I occasionally hear the comment, "oh, the data is so much richer than empirical work". Utter nonsense. Students that can, research. Students that can't, are "qualitative".
There is historical context, of a sort, to this.
Margaret Mead conducted her sexual ethnographies across the Pacific and Oceania in the 1940s, later to be joined by Gregory Bateson, precisely because she was a moral nihilist bent on undermining sexual morés. These are just several examples, but Mead as a celebrated hero of anthropology had her dark reasons for what she did.
As a retired social scientist of 35 years I can honestly say that I find the concept of "autoethnography" as simply...solipsism. Call it phenomenological, it's still solipsistic.
This is not the first paper that has rationalised sexual deviance behind a cloak of right-on, cuddly "qualitative" research.
Someone once said too much of modern art is mere self expression. It seems that’s now leaked into academia.
I agree this paper was a waste of money and didn't qualify as academic research. But I disagree the MP buried the lede. Because in fictional drawn pornographic material where no one was involved in the making apart from the illustrator, the subject matter really doesn't matter.
You ask if some people are really ready to defend pedophilia, as if it's an action or behavior, and not a condition people are born with through no choice of their own, and may never act on. Are you implying people should be shamed for traits they were born with? Or are you confused what the word pedophilia (a condition) actually means, and mistakenly think it equals child abuse (an action)?
And sure, it may be the case that the author did do bad things too - that depictions were involved that were not drawn, and if so that's highly immoral and should be dealt with accordingly.
But that's no reason to mix together a condition, a victim-less indulgence, and actual crimes as if it's all the same thing. (And no, pedophilia is not a crime for good reason since obviously you can't make it a crime for certain people to merely exist. It's child abuse that's a crime.)
Prevalence of that sort of material destigmatises sexual abuse of minors, and whilat clearly not as bad as the crimes themselves, is far from victimless. Its a contributing factor to offending.
> "Prevalence of that sort of material destigmatises sexual abuse of minors"
What are your sources on this? Does action movies with violence also destigmatise violence in real life?
To my knowledge, studies have shown repeatedly that as a general rule, people can in fact separate fiction from reality, and that just because people enjoy one thing in fiction doesn't mean they evolve greater tolerance for it in real life.
Ahh yes, the we need expert studies rather than use common sense. Permitting cartoons of child porn will help de-stigmatize pedophilia and hasten the slippery slope. If cartoons, why not child-like sex dolls? If child like sex dolls are fine, then non-sexual touching by a pedophile is also fine (long, hard hugs, stroking the legs of children).
Violence is not equal to pedophilia. When children are involved, we must be hyper-vigilant and allow nothing that may put that at increased risk. That is right - nothing.
I don't care if pedophiles are born that way. We should absolutely stigmatize sexual attraction to children, even if a person never acts on it. Yes, people should absolutely be ashamed of being sexually attracted to children. This was always the end result of progressivism - no boundaries, no limits, no shame, no responsibility.
> "Ahh yes, the we need expert studies rather than use common sense."
LOL what are you even doing on this blog if that's your outlook. I guess one will find appeals to "common sense" along with slippery slope fallacies and straw man arguments in even the most science-focused corners of the Internet.
Study of pedophilia is a hard science. Please provide studies that demonstrate this.
Also, please define condition. Are you saying that sexual attraction to children is a medical illness?
Weird assumption given that the country in which the material originates and is by far the most popular is considered a very safe country for children.
Define what constitutes safe for children. What's the reported rate of sexual abuse in Japan? What is the ballpark rate of unreported sexual abuse in Japan? Where the material is created is irrelevant since it can easily be shared around the world.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28291536/#:~:text=Six%20studies%20that%20met%20the,males%20was%200.5%25%2D1.3%25.
Penetrative assault appears to be lower in Japan than in comprable countries. Also where it's from matters A TON because in Japan it's far more common and socially acceptable. In Japan you can be an internationally famous content creator working for a company so strict that you can be fired for saying your own name and openly talk about being a Lolicon. If your theory is that exposure to Loli/Shota content increases CSA then it's very strange that the country with the most Shota/Loli content and where its presence is the most normalized does not have disproportionately high rates of offense.
Thank you for the link. My issue with the studies is that they cover reported sexual abuse. I understand the focus on that. My issue is what is the percentage of reported abuse to actual sexual abuse? I'd expect this is almost impossible to accurately measure but that's my point. This research relies on flawed information and draws conclusions and drives policy on false data. I had a friend who was sexually assaulted by a man. He was 9 years old, pushed to the ground by a stranger and kissed and groped. Fortunately it didn't go further because another child came upon the pedophile and screamed. The parents declined to get involved because of the stigma to their son despite the prosecutor's office calling numerous times. This incident would now show up in any reports or stats yet it was real and took place and caused harm.
The authors of that study note "Several authors have commented that reduced disclosure of CSA in Asian countries may result from the social dimension of a collective worldview rather than an emphasis on individualism, which exists in many western countries (Back et al., 2003, Ji et al., 2013, Kim and Kim, 2005)."
The studies focuses on penetrative assault (presumably anal rape, vaginal rape and forced oral sex? It's undefined for the non-expert). Other forms of sexual abuse are evil too. I'm tired of the clinical language that obfuscates what is happening, just like the language that normalizes pedophilia, like minor attracted persons v. child attracted persons or just plain pedophiles.
Where content is created is irrelevant because it spreads to other locations. Kiddie porn created in Bulgaria can easily be viewed in France. Why should location matter given the ease of access?
One question I'd love to see addressed is "Does availability and visibility of this material reduce the likelihood of victims reporting their abuse?" No idea how you could possibly test that, but still.
Location matters to you very literally. Your theory is that exposure to Shota/Loli materials leads to CSA, so the location in which such material is BY FAR the most common and most socially accepted would seem to be relevant. If I think cannabis is a gateway drug but the states with the most cannabis use don't have more hard drug use than the ones with the least I would say that's a pretty big problem for my overarching theory.
I draw your attention to "Frequencies of Child Abuse in Japan: Hidden but Prevalent Crime" (Kitamura et al) and other works which suggest, at least to me, that you could be a little wide of the mark when you say "it's very strange that the country with the most Shota/Loli content and where its presence is the most normalized does not have disproportionately high rates of offense".
"Are you implying people should be shamed for traits they were born with?"
I was born with this terrible condition that gives me the ability to almost instantly spot blatantly dishonest sophistry (is like a superpower) and then want to heap scorn and mockery on the sophist in question.
Please don't shame me for thinking that you're spewing a word cloud of jargon to defend child fucking and for wanting to laugh in your face.
I can't help it, I was born this way!
So I guess your answer is Yes?
Aren't papers like this a perfect example of the trend that the "very cringe" grievance studies hoax was intending to highlight - namely, the ease with which rubbish "studies" masquerading as science can get published in ostensibly serious academic journals?