(tw: pedophilia, sexual abuse/assault)
Hi.
If you follow me on Twitter or elsewhere you probably know that I've been pretty outspoken on a specific topic recently, that being kids/cubs being drawn in fetish situations (specifically vore). While this as a discourse has been mostly replaced with the zoosadism ring, I felt like making a journal to outline my thoughts as I seem to be attacked by both sides on this.
I want to preface all of this by saying that this is an issue very close to me. Several of my friends are CSA survivors. My mother was sexually abused as a teenager. I have had a few traumatic experiences myself. Suffice it to say, pedophilia and sexual abuse affects a good portion of my family. But I am speaking for no one but myself when I talk about this. To see a community that I cherish and enjoy to the point of making it a full-time profession fail to recognize the danger of what it is allowing hurts me in a way I cannot describe.
In this country, child pornography and child sexual abuse are at very high levels currently. Multiple studies and federal officials have corroborated this. You can see it in our own community; the amount of people admiting that they have been sexually assaulted (such as in the twitter thread which curated stories of peoples' experiences with being groomed) is ludicrous. A quick click through WikiFur reveals a startling amount of furries have been charged with grooming minors in the past and present. Recent developments like with Zaush show that it is still a very real problem in this community. Many have pledged to fight against this gross aberration; but I still see a shocking amount of cub and otherwise underage content being posted.
Obviously, outright cub porn is banned on FurAffinity. And, again, obviously, fetish content of underage characters getting eaten is kind of difficult to use to groom people. But, first of all, it is still sexual; even if the artist doesn't gain sexual satisfaction from producing something like that, they are still putting it out in a place where people who DO feel arousal from those types of situations can access and proliferate it. I see the argument that "it's not sexual to me" used to justify creation of underage content, and while it's great if you don't enjoy it that way, it's still sexual to some. Vore is a fetish, and you can't cut it any other way. Just because you don't get arousal out of it doesn't mean that a majority of people won't either.
The problem with "fictional" kids is that this sort of art still normalizes the concepts of sexual abuse and pedophilia. Although it's a lot more difficult to groom someone with drawn underage content rather than straight up photographic CP, it's still doable; and outside of it, that kind of drawn content still contributes to an overall normalization that these kinds of things are okay, that they don't harm anyone, when in fact they are actively working towards breaking down the taboo against children being involved in any sort of sexual situation, whether "traditional" or not. Normally breaking down taboos is good, but in this case, breaking down that taboo will only lead to more people being hurt, traumatized, and changed forever, in the worst possible way.
Which brings me to Eka's Portal. A site that I begrudgingly post to despite the fact that nearly every unsavory person I've had to work with has come from there. Most people know that it's not the greatest site on the internet; and although I've tried to help improve the site in the past, I can only do so much. The site has an underage forum in the first place, which should have been a complete red flag that everything I would say would fall on deaf ears. But I'm becoming more and more convinced that the site's administration actively knows what they are doing is wrong, and refuses to do anything about it. Hosting content from people like Odinboy666, who freely admits that "Ever since I was a small boy I've always got a fun tingle deep inside when imagining what would happen if the monsters under the bed caught me. Now I'm all grown up, and I still get that tingle :-P", and who posts some of the worst content on the entire site (shota gore...), is simply indefensible. Although the thing that makes me the most frustrated is HOW they defend the indefensible.
Eka offers only one argument for them hosting these types of things: it's not TECHNICALLY illegal. And that abuse of loopholes and the slow progression of the legal system is the greatest admission of guilt I have seen in a while. Crying that what you're doing is not technically wrong is like somebody pulling the "i'm not touching you" game in sixth grade. You know what you're doing is wrong, and you're hiding behind the archaic legal system to avoid having to do anything about it. Sickening.
I hope we as a community can come together and realize that any type of underage sexual content, fictional or not, human or not, will only serve to continue the normalization of underage sexual conduct, and will only lead to more people being hurt and traumatized. I see the tides shifting every day, as more and more young people in the fandom who have these awful experiences in their past speak out against those that perpetrated them and those that helped, inadvertently or otherwise, trick them into thinking that underage contact is okay.
Thank you.
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Emeraldia-the-Kitty
Kids These Days... *Facepalm*