The Four Color Media Monitor

The Vice news site wrote up an article with quite a headline: they say Japan can't bring itself to ban manga featuring pornographic renditions of children:

The comics feature young girls engaged in explicit sexual acts, often with exaggerated body parts but facial features that look like those of children. A growing number of countries have banned them, considering such depictions as exploitation of minors even if they are fictitious.

But in Japan, home to a thriving manga industry, including the pornographic kind, calls to outlaw these cartoons have been met with fierce resistance.

“We oppose policies that infringe on our freedom of expression,” Taisei Sugiyama, a Japanese videographer, said.

Make no mistake—Sugiyama is no fan of the comics. He said he did not watch them, but would defend what he called the rights of those who did. He went so far as to compare people who like such manga with suppressed minority groups such as LGBTQ people in Japan, and blamed the “rise of feminism” in the country for the growing pressure to ban the content.

The free speech defense of porn manga depicting minors is a common refrain in Japan, a view largely endorsed by the ruling party. Though Japan prohibited the possession of child abuse material in 2014—the last of 38 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to do so—it stopped short of extending restrictions to manga and anime, two culturally symbolic illustrative media in Japan.

Anti-child abuse advocates warn that this reluctance to altogether ban sexualized images of children, real or illustrated, may leave room to normalize sexual violence against children.

I don't find "lolicon" appealing, but the way Vice's writers go about implying this should be a literal censorship crusade is insulting, mainly because of what the Federalist dicovered a few months ago, that the left-wing news site doesn't practice as they preach when it comes to these issues as viewed stateside:

In case you have the impression that this is an isolated incident, take a look at this mashup of Vice headlines, which in several instances attempt to generate sympathy for pedophiles, obfuscate the definition of pedophilia, and confer legitimacy to “non-offending” pedophiles, including one pseudonymously named Ian whose job “involved children directly” and another called Gary, a man who “developed feelings for a three-year-old girl” but calls himself a “virtuous” pedophile who supposedly doesn’t act on his attraction. Gary was also a foster parent to three children and was subsequently accused of sexually assaulting one of the young girls.

These articles offer some rather striking context for other articles from Vice, such as one in which they fawn over “Photos of the Fabulous Kids of RuPaul’s Drag Convention,” which the publication describes with a fire emoji. As mentioned earlier, one of these children danced on stage for money in a New York City gay bar for a crowd of adult men, which was caught in a video that I can’t link in good conscience.

Lest you believe that Vice is alone in their attempt to normalize pedophilia, turn your attention to the New York Times article “What’s the Best Way to Protect Sex Workers? Depends on Whom You Ask” which opens with the line “TS Candii first traded sex at age 13.” No, New York Times. That’s called pedophilia, not trading sex.

When I realized Vice was posting apologia for real life child abuse, it was so horrific, I couldn't link directly to their site this time. But this does present a chilling example of hypocrisy on their part, when they start advocating for censoring manga with lewd imagery, yet have none of the same concerns with real life exploitation of children. It also beggars the query whether they believe the animated products serve as competition to what they're normalizing back in the USA, in a terrible sign of the moral destruction the country's now experiencing, and based on that, they wish for it to be eliminated from competition so it won't discourage corrupted minds from turning to what they have in mind for real life and live action.

Vice must also be advocating censorship against manga's smuttiest ideas based on how Japan is largely a capitalist country, and in their socialist-influenced minds, this is not acceptable. If they really saw lolicon as a bad influence, they would've argued the Japanese government and education system should try to discourage crafting such smut, and if they did, it's possible lolicon manga would've lost popularity years before. Instead, Vice performed the height of hypocrisy by advocating censorship of a gross form of pornography, while simultaneously condoning live action horrors for children in the USA proper. That's not acceptable, and nobody should give an audience to Vice after this abominable double-standard.

I don't know if sadism influences sadism, but it can certainly appeal to it, and it's on those grounds objections could be raised to marketing such gross manga tales. But Vice is unfit for such a task, if they think it's okay to do in the USA what they supposedly don't think should be done overseas.

Labels: censorship issues, Europe and Asia, manga and anime, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, politics, violence