Kidporn, and a Suggestion For Which I Will Probably Be Lynched, by Fred Reed.
The other night we watched a documentary, The Dark Net, on Netflix on child pornography. Dim as I am, I didn’t realize that there was such a huge amount of it, mostly on the Darknet. This refers to transmission of material by layered encryption and quickly becomes technical: TOR, asymmetric encryption, IP packets, session keys, and so on. The upshot is that a staggering swamp of kid porn is out there, and it is almost impossible to eliminate.
The stuff is nasty. Children of eight or nine, mostly girls, forced to do naked live-cam chat with strange men on other continents, to engage in all the sexual behavior you can think of. No equipment is needed beyond a laptop and a webcam. In interviews, pedophiles say that they know it is wrong, but cannot keep themselves from consuming the stuff. Whether you buy this or not, they obviously will watch when they know there is no danger of being caught. Which means that children will continue being forced to make it.
It tends to come from poor countries where children are easily exploited. In the bush world, corruption, official inattention, and lack of resources mean that nothing much will be done, no matter the level of Western indignation. …
Technology might provide a better way:
Some law-enforcement outfit came up with a convincing digital child, a brown little girl Philippine or Thai. She moved and talked realistically on a bogus porn site used as bait for pedophiles. If memory serves she got something like 25,000 responses in a day or two. In a big world, there are a lot of pedophiles. …
If the objection to child pornography is that it involves abuse of children, why should it be illegal to look at a digital, nonexistent child? Who is harmed?
If on the other hand the intention is to prevent viewing by the public of things many find abhorrent, would this not also justify banning, say, movies in which nonexistent people are shot, garroted, blown up, and tortured? In which evil-doers engage in terrorism, in the bombing of city streets?
The argument will be made that kid porn encourages the molestation of genuine children. Does it? Or does it allow those with pedophile inclinations to satisfy their urges through fantasy? This is the crucial question. …
If digiporn causes at least some heterosexual men to avoid the disadvantages of the real thing, might not digital kid porn have an identical effect on pedophiles? …
For the pedophile the costs of being caught are serious: many years in prison, loss of job, being put on watch lists. If penalties for possession of porn involving real children were extremely severe, and realistic digiporn both legal and available, the market for the real stuff might dry up considerably. …
A provocative note on relations between men and women:
There seems to be a substantial desire among men to circumvent the monopoly economy in sex now held, falteringly, by real women. Brothels report that growing numbers of men pop for sex robots, which improve rapidly. I think this is nuts, but I am just me. You can download different personalities. Realistic sex dolls enjoy brisk sales, or so I read.
