Some readers have asked me to explain this passage, from the post before this one, in more detail:<\/p>\n
Personally, I think that child porn and rape porn should be censored as heavily as possible (within the bounds of the Miller decision<\/a>) and driven as far underground as possible. Allowing a market for child or rape porn (including “virtual” stuff) to flourish is wrong, because those markets encourage porn producers to harm real people.<\/p>\n Beyond that, I really don’t give a damn.<\/p><\/div>\n Avram <\/a>responded:<\/p>\n And is “rape porn” depictions of actual rape, or just of people pretending to engage in rape? If the latter, again, where is the harm?<\/p>\n I suppose you could argue that such things encourage the viewers to go out and harm people, but you argued that it’s the producers who are doing the harm, and how exactly does that work? <\/p><\/div>\n The analogy I’d use is elephant ivory. Having a market for new elephant ivory is obviously a bad thing; it encourages poachers to kill elephants, leading to near-extinction.<\/p>\n What’s not so obvious is that having a legal market for old elephant ivory also<\/i> encourages poachers to kill elephants. Why? Because in practice, it’s practically impossible to tell the difference between new and old elephant ivory. Therefore, if there’s a profitable market in old elephant ivory, that will motivate poachers to kill elephants and sell the new ivory, falsely claiming that it’s old ivory.<\/p>\n If we want to take as much of the profit out of poaching as possible, it’s not enough to just outlaw selling new elephant ivory. We also have to outlaw selling anything that’s in practice nearly impossible to distinguish from new elephant ivory.<\/p>\n Similarly, it’s not enough to outlaw possessing or selling “real” child porn – by which I mean, child pornography that was produced by actually sexually abusing real children. We also have to outlaw “virtual” child porn – that is, child-porn-like images so realistic that they’re indistinguishable from the real thing. If there’s a marketplace for material that’s for all practical purposes indistinguishable from real child porn, in practice that creates a market on which real child porn – falsely marketed as “virtual” – can be sold.<\/p>\n The same argument applies to rape porn (that is, photos or films depicting realistic-seeming rape scenes). If we want to outlaw people making money by selling films of real rapes, then we have to outlaw all rape porn.<\/p>\n To see why, imagine the police raid a porn producer’s studio and find tons of photos of children being raped. The porn producer says “sorry, I bought all of these from someone – I forget who – and he said he generated them on computer.” Suddenly, it becomes, for all practical purposes, impossible to enforce child-porn laws. I’m not willing to pay that price in order to protect the market viability of virtual child porn.<\/p>\n Lis wrote:<\/p>\n I wouldn’t outlaw prose and poetic descriptions – the only “virtual” porn I’d outlaw is visual representations so realistic that they’re not easily distinguishable from the real thing, for the reasons I just described in my answer to Avram.<\/p>\n Also, I’m calling for this in the context of the Miller decision <\/a>– which says that no work that, taken as a whole, has serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value, can be obscene. So performances of Romeo and Juliet <\/i>would be safe.<\/p>\n UPDATE: Reading the comments, I think I’d better clarify something (thanks, Charles and Kip!).<\/p>\n This post is not calling for an expansion of censorship laws. On the contrary, I’m saying the censorship laws should be narrowed<\/i>, so that fewer <\/i>works are deemed “obscene” and therefore lacking first amendment protection.<\/p>\n Under current law, all the stuff I talk about above is obscene – plus many more things besides, such as Demon Beast Invasion<\/i>. What I’m advocating is that only <\/i>rape porn and child porn (as defined in this post, above) should be censored; nothing else should be. I’m arguing for less censorship than we currently have, not more..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some readers have asked me to explain this passage, from the post before this one, in more detail: What censorship laws would I approve of? Personally, I think that child porn and rape porn should be censored as heavily as … Continue reading