Mods of Reddit, what's the creepiest thing you've had to take down?

I've been wanting to make a post along these lines for a while, because every time this comes up, I see a lot of people conflating "should be immoral" with "should be illegal." The former is fine, it's great even if you find it immoral and wrong. The former should have zero bearing on the latter, however.

And of course, even though I'm going to say right here that I don't get off to this kind of thing and find it repulsive, I imagine people will ignore it and still say I'm a pedophile.

That said. The reason the laws against child pornography exist in the first place is to protect those who aren't adults from being preyed upon by adults. It's to prevent victims and give those who were victimized some form of closure for the abuse they suffered. They don't exist because it's somehow inherently immoral to find a fully-matured body attractive (because if it was inherently immoral, there would never be countries where marriage at or below the age of adulthood were acceptable)

Somehow, the internet has gotten into its head that it's totally fine to demand that things that are morally objectionable be made illegal, though. And this is such a scary line of thought that I can't imagine how they think it's okay.

But let's take a look at other things that are morally objectionable to some, but have varying degrees of legality dependent on location: Scat play, ass play, sadomasochism play, incest roleplay, rape roleplay, and animated depictions of all these things. Why are they generally legal, though, despite many people finding some of them inherently abhorrent? Aside from rape roleplay, where it can return a sense of security and empowerment to victims in some cases, it's because they are all victimless fantasies.

But for whatever reason, something I've never understood, everything in that last paragraph is begrudgingly accepted, while animated depictions of imaginary people who are underage is somehow the vilest thing imaginable and must be made illegal. And remember, rape roleplay and graphic animated rape scenes were included in that last paragraph. And the general consensus is that rape victims face lifelong mental trauma from they suffer - and yet rape roleplay and rape fantasy is completely fine, because there are no true victims. Not even the perpetrators.

It's bizarre. And ultimately, harmful. Because every time laws are made against things on moral grounds, and not to protect victims, it always ends up hurting someone and doing nothing to help anyone. But no, because it squicks us out, and because it's an "acceptable" moral crusade, we should burn everyone who dares to even suggest that it should be legal, if not icky, for fantasy depictions of completely imaginary underage people to exist.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent