This is completely ridiculous.
An Australian judge convicted a defendant of possession of child pornography for having hard-core animated cartoons featuring child characters of The Simpsons.
I’m virulently anti-porn. One of the reasons I keep this blog up is that I get a fair amount of traffic for porn searches, and I redirect that traffic to an online, mentored bible study that helps people break free from pornography addiction. But child pornography does not mean pornography created for children’s use. It means pornography featuring children. The idea being that it is illegal to engage in sex acts with children, and consequently illegal to film it, sell the video or pictures, and in general enjoy anything having to do with sex acts involving children.
Seijin and seinen are forms of manga marketed for adult men (although others can obviously buy it) that consists of comic books of sex acts. Believe it or not, there thousands of internet searches every month for “Disney porn.” Go figure. I guess that’s why the breast size of Disney characters has been going up (and up, and up) for the last twenty years; Disney’s been doing some subtle marketing. But cartoon characters – not being real – can scarcely be victimized. The judge was wrong. Child pornography is a serious issue. Creating and owning it are serious crimes, and we should not allow that to be watered down by stretching the definition to fit other types of pornography that – while distasteful – victimize no one but the user.
