I'll never understand why a lot of people are ok with drawings and stories as if that's innocent or truly not harming people.
I guess because they hold with that "slippery slope" theory.
Honestly, as much as I find child predation abhorrent,
I don't want folks jailed for writing stories or drawing pictures depicting child sex abuse.
I mean, what if it's a female writer, a former victim of child sex abuse, and writing a story based on it is cathartic for her? Or a female artist, a former victim of abuse, who finds it empowering to "own" these experiences and turn them into something positive (ie, art)?
There's a lot of that kind of thinking among feminists I've known- it seems to apply to both rape and child sex abuse.
Although I'm not an abuse survivor myself and don't really know anything about it firsthand, many survivors I've talked to have mentioned feeling a lot of guilt about the fact that they experienced some semblance of sexual pleasure during the abuse (concurrently with pain, horror, disgust, and fear), especially if it was long-term. Apparently this is not uncommon, and some women find "breaking the wall of silence" and talking about it to be empowering.
It is not beyond the realm of possibility that creative-minded women might want to write about it, or paint pictures of it, or make sculptures of it, or express it artistically in whatever their medium of choice is.
If perverts then look at this art/ read these stories and get turned on, well, that wasn't the intention of it. The intention of the creator was to exorcise her demons and empower herself and other abuse survivors. To turn a horrible, helpless experience into something powerful and positive.
Another point: do you realize how many popular and classic novels contain descriptions of child sex abuse? Are we going to purge the libraries and have a giant book-bonfire, and go about arresting famous writers like during the McCarthy era?
I guess that's the point when it comes to this slippery-slope theory: where does it logically end?
What constitutes a depiction of "child sex abuse"?
Are novels containing descriptions of teen sexuality to be banned?
If so, I guess I won't be able to write my memoirs after all, as I'd always planned.
I plan it to be something along the lines of
Riding in Cars with Boys, a sort of teen-mom empowerment story (although unlike in that esteemed work, the subject of my memoir will
not be going on to college and getting a high-powered executive job, ha ha, but will live a semi-fulfilling life nonetheless).
Are we going to ban Vladimir Nabokov's singularly beautiful literary masterpiece,
Lolita, which even McCarthy never managed to do? Nabokov's dead now, but perhaps we can go arrest his son, who owns the rights and receives the royalties to that book, which has become an enduring cultural icon throughout the more than half a century since it was published.
Where will we draw the line? Will we ban work and arrest artists who depict children in any manner which we perceive as sexually "inappropriate"?
Who will be the arbiter of what is appropriate and what is not?
We all come from very different backgrounds and experiences, we've all led very different lives.
Artists and writers draw on their lives for their material.
What you're basically saying is that some
lives are inappropriate, and therefore those artists and writers are banned from drawing inspiration from their lives, ergo, in effect, banned from writing/ making art.
Then we get into the government interfering with the right to freedom of expression, which is a fundamental right, the very cornerstone of democracy.
And that ^, I suspect, is why most on this forum don't want artistic depictions and literary accounts of child sexuality banned.
They feel the government is already too large and intrusive.
I'm basically a socialist, and so that's not my objection, but I'm also a writer, and the idea of writers being banned from writing about something that is real and exists- or artists being banned from depicting it- concerns me more than I can express here.