Hey ok so I just want to know ur opinion on this one topic. So there is this fandom I follow and the Author created a 15$ NSFW tier with age restrictions and everything. Now she says that the pictures of the characters are meant to depict the characters when they are older and of consenting age(because they are not of age in the comic). The characters are as young as 15 in the comics. Do you consider this pedophilia?
No, I don’t think I do. The reason being that pedophiles are attracted children because they look like children. They are sexually attracted to the prepubescent body. It’s not pedophilia to find an adult attractive. That dilutes what it means.
The issue here is that there’s many people who are adults who still “look fifteen” and there’s plenty of fifteen year olds who could pass for well over the age of majority. So teenagers are significantly more dubious than children and that’s what makes people uncomfortable because the difference between someone at 15 to 18 can range from virtually nothing to night and day.
The debate on when it’s “okay” to be attracted to a post-pubescent person’s body isn’t solved. It’s not clear cut. There’s a lot of debate surrounding it and what is normal to be attracted to.
So in that respect I don’t have an answer. What I do have an answer to is that people who are fixated on teenagers and adolescents are still deviants. When they specifically and personally focus on trying to have romantic or sexual relationships with them then that’s a problem. Those years are about learning, among your peers, how to navigate non-familial relationships that have weight, intimacy, and lasting repercussions. Teenagers need this time to learn, at least in a basic form, how to handle themselves, how to protect themselves, how to judge character, how to communicate in a mature way, and develop into a mature adult. They don’t have the life experience yet, so the danger of deviants is more about the attraction to the abstract of what it means to be a teenager and the attraction to someone who has enough agency to make decisions without understanding in whole what they mean and are less likely to identify signs of abuse and manipulation.
So we are talking about (1) a character which someone cannot abuse, manipulate, or otherwise influence and (2) that character is aged up to the point where someone who is a deviant would no longer be attracted to them.
So to me it’s not pedophilia. My boyfriend being attracted to me isn’t pedophilia because I was once a child. Someone being attracted to the character of Maya Matlin, a character who grew up in the show Degrassi, as she is now as a 19 year old is not a pedophile because she was once a child on the show.
My question would be to people who think this is pedophilia would be: if the comic continued and the character reached the age 18 would you still call it pedophilia to be attracted to them at that age? No. You wouldn’t. So it shouldn’t be considered that when someone makes aged up fan art either.
As an aside:
I want to bring up that while I was, for a very long time, someone who believed that drawings were not child pornography (there is no legal precedent in the US that makes this legally true, in the one case that is used as proof he was found guilty of related crimes but not because his hentai was considered child pornography): now that’s changed slightly since I sent off that list to the FBI. I saw hyper-realistic images of children that at first glance seemed to depict real kids. I saw hyper-realistic edits of prepubescent child stars in sexual situations. I saw people sharing toddler loli hentai while they were actively involved in child pornography networks and trading (so it’s not clear cut that these images prevent people from harming children, as some people say). That’s really made me reexamine what I think. However, I do still believe real children will always be more important than fictional depictions.
