The age-old argument that has been raging for as long as I've been getting my animu on bootlegs on VHS back in the 80's while in elementary school. "If You watch anime, Yer a pedophile Hurhurhur!"
Nooo... If you creep at the edge of the playground, stalk the toy stores & the toy aisles, and rubberneck when strolling past the delivery room window... You might be a pedophile.
It is true I shouldn't say "please do that" to someone on the internet; I should say "I invite you to". It would be more polite.
For me, this discussion is screwed by what definition each of use put behind the now-mainstream word "loli".
For me, not every drawn children that is cute,.or chibi, is a loli.
Drawn prepubescent girls with intentional erotic tones is loli for me.
Because for me Loli => LoliCon => Lolita Complex => novel of Nabokov in which a man grows attracted and obsessive toward a 12yo girl, rapes her, then tries to shift the blame on the girl for being way too erotic (even demonic, like a succubus).
Some of those people have even started arguing that liking short adult women is paedophilic too.
Unlike you, I actually have some screenshots. I crawled out of bed just to upload them. Link to the album.
@Era Holy sheep, not getting plastic surgery or somehow changing your genetic so you appear more grown-up/adult = pedophile enabler XD. Though I expect nothing less from Twitter. It's a whole cesspool there
@GodBroccoli11 No offense intended for your hands but lolis are the best :3
Source? This has always been the million-dollar question regarding the actual social effect of these things.
Though such things are almost impossible to study (difficulties of measuring long-term sociological impact of... well, anything, but especially stuff like this where you're relying on questionable self-reporting or some-such, and for stuff expected to have subtle effect like fiction-consumption. Short-term controlled studies can tell us interesting things but not ones we know how to apply back to real life. As I've learned going down the rabbit hole on the more prominent and better-studied "violent video game" controversy, with as open a mind as possible for a gamer)
Like i said, i saw this several years ago, several times actually, once in a japanese study, and the other time I don't remember it at all... But like I said, I wouldn't be able to find it for you (I had warned in the message just before. I said serious study, because those who conducted it were serious, at least they weren't randoms, it seems to me.
But of course, it's still very theoretical). If you look on your side, I think you can find it. I'm sorry, I confess I don't feel like spending too much time on the subject, I think I've made my opinion pretty clear. (If you're looking, look on the drawings in general, not loli/shota, because it was on the drawings in general). But, i agree that it's very hard to study, and it's obviously theory, you can't study practice on this subject... lol
Sorry o/
From my experience, their argument is that as long as the body looks adolescent/childish, then it is considered pedophilia as well, because why would you actually love someone with a child's body, but actual age is legal, right? Legitimately seen the loli/shota=pedo team made this argument several times. Then when some people pointed out that in real life, there are actual people who have physical development conditions that make them look like children (eg dwarfism), or simply that they look much younger than their age due to their faces or stature, would people who fall in love/in relationship with them be considered pedophiles too, and lmao the other team started sprouting stuff like "Real life is different", or even "as long as they don't have sex it's fine". I wished I still have the screenshots to show you though it was hilarious when they started contradicting themselves.
Well, actually, even I have a friend who is 1m61 tall, my age (19) and looks like a kid of 13/14 lol. That's why I wanted to make it clear that defining by the body is not necessarily valid. (Obviously, I'm not talking in the case of a 6/8 years old body). However; for dwarfism, in general, even if the body is small, if the person is an adult, in general it shows, except in rare cases of particular dwarfism. Then, people looking younger are not uncommon. Myself i'm often told that, but in much smaller cases, well, I often have problems at the entrances of nightclubs, or other, but hey I only have 19 x'D so i think the mistake can be made x')
Still, for some people, the difference can be quite significant. But then again, I'm not talking about a kid under 10 years old (although; it can apply for example in the case of a 15 year old who is 10, in fact).
I hope i was understood lol o/
And well, yeah that's funny x'D
Have a g'day/night.
One last controversial point XD
People who like lolis shota (not 6, but 12/15yo), in a sexual context, so not in this one i was talking about earlier... (with some exceptions) are not necessarily adults. And, it is known, but we always try to represent ourselves in a work we read or look at. Therefore, yes, I'm sorry and can affirm it with no regrets, I think I'm not far from the truth that teenagers (12/16, or even 11, nowadays...) also look at that to better identify themselves. So, they're pedo ? Hm.
We'll remember that sexuality comes at a younger and younger age, year after year.
Yes, that was a separate remark. It was just to criticize directly labelling someone.
Your last point—that some people reading are just as young as the characters in question, for, say, middle-school protagonists—is true but pretty much exclusively limits calling out specific readers as indulging in pedophilia, rather than the material itself or the author (I mean, middle-school published manga authors technically have existed, but...)
But, like, more to the point, I (and I think many others who have issues with the pedophilia issue) am even okay with there being, say, some fairly steamy coming-of-age mangas with middle-school kids? Stuff with the eye of a young teenager looking leer-ily at another young teenager is just reminiscent of places that we, as older humans, have been. Stuff with the eye of an adult leering at little kids is another matter. The impreciseness between that and this does not, I feel, magically make the latter okay.
And, as a interesting anecdotal counterpoint along these lines, regarding the subjective experience of the reader, I remember when (and here I date myself pretty precisely) as a kid we had some pirate subs of the Love Hina anime lying around (for I am an early-model second-generation weeb); a lot of the sexual stuff in that series flew completely over my head, even if I understood the gist of its romcom-ness. And I at the time thought Su-chan was the best-est character: She looked and acted about my age (the author claims she's older but that's standard for a loli in a harem), had awesome flying turtle and robot friends and went on grand adventures. Learning a bit later in life that she was a sexualized character (made to appeal to the crowd whose tastes ran thus), was, thus, pretty disturbing.
(There's a lot of kind-of-funny stories about how various harem series and whatnot looked to me as a kid—way more credulous of the pretenses, as a kid is, and of course unaware of lots of bits of sex culture... The most hilarious example had to be the absurdly godawful Happy Lesson (high-school kid with his harem of adoptive-moms who are also his various school teachers, a lot to unpack there, no?) which flew 100% over my head; it was just a happy family of a kid and his teacher-moms. But I digress.)
To everyone who classified loli based on their body size alone, let me say dis,
dat is equal an insult to ppl who are short IRL, i got neighbour who is 130cm ish at age of 43, yes iRL
wow there´s so much people who cant tell diference between loli´s and cihldren that should be throw in prison/sanatorium...
@ gmayor61 theres no human that is not evil, its just question of whenever you agree with they do and thus its considered good, or dont agree and thus its considered bad
@1sTAndy
Trying to look at it objectively, 'evil' is the conscious desire to cause unnecessary harm/suffering to others. So I'd say it's more of a spectrum, as some people want to hurt people more than others.
Where do you rank on the Evil spectrum? (I'm a 2.)