CMV: Having "paedophilic tendencies" as an adult human is common, normal, and healthy.

I think that you are vastly overestimating the popularity of this genre. I doubt that the rate of loli hentai consumption is much more than 5% of the population, which is supposedly the rate of pedophiles. But I would like to challenge the strongest version of your position, so I will accept for the sake of argument that loli hentai is widely consumed and essentially normalized in Japan.

There are still two fatal flaws in your reasoning, though:

  1. you assume that the desire or “pedophilic tendencies” pre-existed the porn. It seems more likely to me that exposure to the porn created the desire in people who stumbled across it out of curiosity and developed a taste for it.

“But if they developed a taste for it,” you are saying, “they must have had the tendencies deep down the entire time!” Maybe, but most people encounter actual children much earlier, and much more frequently, than they ever encounter loli hentai. If actual children don’t awaken these tendencies, but loli hentai does, it seems to me that their desire is for loli hentai, not children.

  1. Even leaving the “latent tendencies” issue aside, your view assumes that it is the children & their prepubescent characteristics that turns people on. Maybe that’s true, but your evidence doesn’t prove that — you’ve proved that the genre is popular, but not why it’s popular. It could be popular for other reasons — it could satisfy other desires than pedophilia. People are enormously aroused by power dynamics: master/slave, teacher/student, doctor/patient, etc. The adult/child relationship is probably the most basic and powerful version of this that there is. People are also enormously turned on by anything taboo: incest, rape, exhibitionism, etc. are all extremely common sexual fantasies, and what’s more taboo than pedophilia? We hate pedophiles much more than murderers, or even Nazis. Our moral disdain for pedophiles is so deeply rooted that we experience it as physical disgust, and this is a perfect recipe for a sexual fetish. People could be getting off on the ‘forbidden’ aspect more than the ‘underage’ aspect.

I hope that I have changed your view by showing that the consumption of “loli” material is clear evidence of pedophilic tendencies.

/r/changemyview Thread