Theargent Thid Posted:

Sorry, yes. Just damn tired over here.

The fact that you can see their faces and identify them, plus the fact that the item description refers to kidnapping, I’m not entirely okay with that. One of the other images, the newspaper article, you couldn’t make out any distinctive features on the children. That would have been much better, imo.

See, I thought it was tasteless and crude, but I hadn’t really thought of it as skirting CP any more than the idea text automatically would. I can see how the combo might feed into the fantasies of a paedophile, but any number of innocent images can do that too, and I’m a little concerned that we, as a society, are starting to to automatically sexualize images of children out of fear that someone, somewhere, is going to sexualize them.

There’s nothing you can post to the net that some perv, somewhere, won’t fap to, and it’s a little disturbing to think that normal people should be required to think like a pervert when judging imagery. Paedophiles are disgusting, and I don’t want to get inside their heads.

Likewise, although the abstract sexualization of minors is damaging, CP laws were originally enacted to protect children from sexual abuse, not to prevent pedophiles from finding any pictures they can conceivably jerk off to. The idea was to defend children from the damage caused by being forced into sex and sexual activity, but the net just keeps widening.

Yeah, it’s skeevy to think that your kid’s picture is turning on some dirty old man, but if a proud poppa really wants to YouTube a cute video of his kid singing and splashing in the bath tab, I’d like to think the standards of a healthy mind should take precedence over those of a paedophile.

Yet, I know a proud pop who took a 15-second cellphone vid of his kid splashing in the tub, posted to YouTube as he had so many other vids of his kid, and found it taken down in minutes as a ToS violation, while he was left wondering if he’d been flagged as a paedo. That’s not healthy – it’s letting the life of normal people be dictated by disturbed people’s skewed perceptions.

It’s late, and I’m probably getting off-topic here. Feel free to mod-edit this down to the first paragraph if necessary.