Lolicons and MAPS are both Pedophiles by any other name. Stop fuxking normalizing child abuse, drawn or not.

Anything -con in japanese is a complex and almost certainly up to no good. I just checked with my wife (native japanese) and, yeah, that's not necessarily wrong translation.

She carves out the exception for jokes with a younger partner within reason (her specific was example was a couple/few years younger in a piss-take (like someone might say "she's robbing the grave" but the counterpoint would be "no he's robbing the cradle!" In English banter)), but it's almost always not a good thing.

My personal take is that if it's specifically referencing the ~loli fashion or the piss-take version from my wife, that's probably ok. Anything else is getting into dangerous territory.

I'm a guy in his mid-40s originally from the US and not generally into manga or anime at all, my wife a late-30s japanese who is very into anime and manga.

Edit: wife searched in japanese. The -loli part in fashion comes from young people incorporating those old fashions (again, goth-loli in my example) not, as I expected, people incorporating school fashion into it. TIL. She went on to talk about how the -loli suffic in fashion was chosen. But it's a bit out-of-scope here.

Oh, you like Rebecca from Cyberpunk Edgerunners? Straight to jail, pedophile.

The question I always asked is: does the legalization of such material lead to a decrease in sexual abuse of children or an increase ? There will always be pedophiles, that we can't avoid, what is important is to stop them acting upon their desires and abusing minors, to this end, would lolicon help by giving them materials that where created without harming children ? Or would it empower them to harm children ?

I don't even bother with anime any more unless someone else confirms there is no pedo content. With how much there is I've started to wonder if execs in the light novel/manga/anime industry force their writers to include it to normalize it.

It is difficult to have this discussion because not many really want to actually think about it but I'll do it anyway.

I guess the main concern is about how this sort of content could coerce people to attempt their fantasies in real life. However, the subject for a lolicon is a symbol and the subject for a pedophile is an actual individual. To say that lolicons are pedophiles is equivalent to say that gamers who play violent games blowing up buildings or slashing people into a million pieces are terrorists. "Cest une pipe".

What we know is that there is no direct implication between consuming this content and engaging in criminal activity. People have different minds and respond to things in different ways, lolicon is not a predictor of pedophilia. Also, the Catharsis hypothesis, the one where people say engaging on it would keep someone from committing a related crime doesn't seem to be true either.

This one is a an oldie, but it is a nice overview about this topic if you want to get some context:

https://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/127/98

I think the most important point of this paper is that the shoujo depicted in such content no longer corresponds to an actual real depiction of the prepubescent and are no more than fantasy.

based

If those anime fans could read they would be very upset