Porn and suicide

I've been noticing lately quite a bit of news reports about suicides that are apparently linked to pornography -- especially kiddie porn.

"And what's the problem with that?" you ask. "If the slimeballs involved in kiddie porn want to off themselves, they're doing us all a favor!"

Yeah, well, if only life were always so simple as we want it to be! In scratching beneath the surface, I see numerous problems here.

For one thing, in at least one of the reports I spotted -- the one about the cop in St. Louis -- the guy never harmed any kids. He just had a collection of porn on his computer that he had (probably) downloaded . To jack off with, in other words.

It's illegal to own pictures of kiddie porn, and the social stigma associated with it is pretty severe also, so the guy blows his brains out.

Probably a smart move, actually, because -- as he surely knew, being a cop -- if he had gotten convicted and sentenced, he would have not only spent a goodly amount of time in the slammer, when he got out he'd have to go live under a bridge because of the new laws that prohibit, for the rest of their lives, "sex offenders" from living in most habitable places.

It's much worse to get caught jacking off to pictures of kids fucking than to spray bullets into a grade school class, in other words. For the latter, the government might take care of your suicide for you, or, in some states, they might just keep you in the slammer the rest of your life with three squares and a bed. But for jacking off, you'll be left to roam the streets, marked with a scarlet letter for the rest of your life.

Well, OK, I know the argument about how the jack-offs who create a demand for kiddie porn are the ones who ultimately make the production of it happen. But I was reading somewhere recently where now it's also illegal -- at least in some places -- to possess depictions of children involved in sex even where no actual children are involved. Cartoons, I guess, or some such. Some of those feature film cartoons are pretty life-like, you have to admit!

So, as much sense as it makes to want to protect children from nasty people forcing them to fuck on camera, I don't think that's the whole dynamic of what's going on here. It looks like a lot of what's driving this is some people wanting to prevent other people from jacking off. The "children" angle is just a convenient way to get the job done. It will keep on being convenient until some other people start noticing and blow the whistle. Like me. And maybe you too, I hope.

This real vs. unreal distinction is likely to become more and more important as time goes on. It's just a matter of time before the convergence of robotics and materials science and artificial intelligence makes it possible to produce androids that are so lifelike that they can't be discerned from the real thing without an invasive medical examination.

So now what happens when some company starts turning out child-like androids that fuck? There's not a shadow of a doubt in my mind that the same people who now want to destroy the lives of people who jack off to kiddie porn will see to it that it's illegal to make and own these androids.

They'll say, "It encourages people to try it with real children." And of course they won't be able to produce a shred of evidence to back this up, but nobody will probably demand that they do so either. Unless between now and then us whistleblowers stop giving them a free ride and make them put up or shut up.

If the goal is to protect children from predators who whisk them away to tawdry rooms and force them to fuck on camera, let's start by explaining the process to children so they won't be such easy prey for the predators. Of course, to do that would require that we start being honest with children about sex, which is certainly light years from happening for some parents.

Then again, why is it that you hear so few of these children reporting the crime? Is it out of a sense of shame? Gee, and who instilled this sense of sex-shame in them, anyway? Kids don't usually refrain from reporting being assaulted in other ways. If an adult stranger started pummeling a child, it's hard to imagine the child not quickly reporting: "Mama, a man came up and hit me today in front of the grocery store!" No shame, no secrecy, the matter gets immediately investigated.

Or are there cases where the children don't report the crime because they actually enjoy doing it? We're talking about a really broad range of ages and circumstances here, and I don't want to impute anything to situations that don't apply -- such as that thing they had on the news the other day about the guy who had a friend who tortured babies so he could watch. No one argues about the horrific nature there. But I think honesty demands that we all think back to our own childhoods and try to remember what our attitudes were.

Myself, I can pretty clearly remember when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old. I was really, really interested in how good it felt to stroke my wee-wee, and I was also really, really interested in how this all worked with respect to girls, who apparently had a hole where you could stick your thing. This never happened, but honesty compels me to admit that if an adult woman had approached me in a friendly way and had offered to let me feel her tits and stroke her pussy and even stick my cock in her pussy, I would have been all, "Hell, yeah!"

Or, to make it completely relevant to this discussion, if she had brought her 7-year-old daughter along and had suggested that the two of us play sex games with each other while she filmed us, and if her daughter had also been up for the idea, there's no way I wouldn't have done this! Again and again, as often as possible!

Would I have reported this to anyone, knowing that if I did everyone would go to jail and I wouldn't get to keep on fucking this girl? Heh, heh, what do you think!

And would I have been harmed by this? Again, honesty compels me to admit that I don't think I would have. I think I was much, much more harmed by all the body shame and sexual repression I was exposed to.

But that's just me.