this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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It might be making more people be open about their pedophilic tendencies.
But, being attracted to kids is based on how your brain is wired, not the media you consume. I'm sure that the people whose job it is to moderate content to weed out CSAM don't start wanting to fuck kids because of it.
Like, I'm sure incest rates didn't skyrocket when porn started pumping out step-family scenes. Also in the same vein, violent video games didn't make people violent.
This kind of argument always works on at least 30% of people in casual conversation though, at least US/english speaking european society has been obsessed with panicking about this in some form or other pretty much indefinitely. In fact, before Ulysses and the supreme court case about it, the U.S. postal service was literally censoring media that it deemed possibly able to influence a dangerous person into fantasizing about doing dangerous things. Not to make this a conversation about the U.S., but this kind of moral panic about things that are clearly in the realm of fantasy becoming indistinguishable to things that are real to people is insulting, absurd and a completely evidence-free argument that relies entirely on vibes and yet maddeningly is absolutely everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Book_Called_Ulysses
Like, this is how dumb this shit is. People were afraid reading some veryyyy dense erotic literature was going to rise up wild uncontrollable desires in the masses and cause society to crumble. This isn't a joke, serious people wearing serious costumes stood in the halls of power spending hours and hours deliberating, worrying and carrying out state violence according to a fear of this. Countless people have hurt their loved ones because they were sure this is how the human brain works.
Never has this train of thought ever been anything other than a dangerous delusion.