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Reddit: No More Suggestive Content Featuring Minors
First time accepted submitter say_hwat writes "Today Reddit announced that it has banned subreddits dedicated to posting sexualized imagery of people under the age of 18. Last year, the site came under fire for r/jailbait, a subreddit dedicated to posting images of people under 18. The subreddit was shut down, but many others, such as r/gaolbait and r/bustybait, continued existing or sprung up afterwards. The policy change today came hours after a thread on Something Awful called for a public campaign against Reddit's lax attitude towards the sexualization of children. The Something Awful thread creator claims that Reddit's administrators know about child pornography being traded, but refuse to act. Among others, the thread creator cites r/preteen_girls as being particularly egregious."
But you have to admit, parents LET their kids dress and act like this, and the market caters to it, whether it is right or not, I will not enter into that debate right now.
http://www.torontosun.com/2011/05/09/nearly-onethird-of-childrens-clothes-sexy-study
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/apr/16/children-clothing-survey-bikini-heels
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/08/19/french-line-offers-lingerie-for-girls-as-young-as-four/
http://www.playpink.com/games-for-girls/sexy-dress-up.html
This was just 5 minutes with google.
Silence is a state of mime.
I'm one of the many who deleted their accounts at Reddit today, not just over the admins' lax "oh-noes-censorship!" policy, but due to the sheer number of Redditors there actively defending pedophiles and their crimes under the guise of "free speech". I had over 10,000 karma there, as well, which means really nothing other than to say I wasn't just a random lurker on the site.
The front page stories at the moment don't even begin to tell the story of the stuff that goes in in the nether regions of that site, and the fact that so many members there not just defend, but seemingly embrace, those who perpetrate it - look up a guy named violentacrez if you don't believe me - is beyond disgusting. The number of members there who seem to base their morals on whether something is legal or not (unless the matter relates to pot, prostitution, or any of the other activities they like) is disturbing, as well, and I'd finally had enough.
Reddit didn't care at all about any of this stuff until suddenly they were at risk of a major media campaign against them - organized by Something Awful - then suddenly they went into full defensive mode, not out of a sudden concern for the actual children being exploited, but for their own reputations for allowing it. A good move overall, but hardly noble. It's the same tactic they eventually were forced to use when the r/jailbait scandal hit the mainstream news.
The bottom line is that Reddit has been, and can be, an interesting site full of interesting content. But the willingness of the admins there to allow such abhorrent (and clearly illegal) content until publicity won't allow them to continue to do so is a glaring flaw in the organization of the site, and I'd rather not be associated with such a wild west approach to such things, especially when their morals seem to be dictated more on whether something will affect their reputation than whether or not it's right.
Picture it being your daughter, and some creepy motherfucker eyeing her up. Put yourself in someone else's shoes.
Males looking at my fully clothed daughters? The horror! This is why all my daughters must wear burkas in public until the day they reach 18. Once they're 18 though, it's fair game for pervs to check them out.
And if you are beating off to pictures of 14 year olds the definition is "fucking sick"
Uh.. what if you are 14?
"And if you are beating off to pictures of 14 year olds the definition is 'fucking sick'"
Not if you're in your teens, in which case I'd call it normal and healthy. In psychological terms pedophilia is sexual attraction by adults to those up to roughly 10 years of age, hebephilia for the 11-14 or so pubescents, and ephebophilia for late teens. That's a scale from abomination to legal but discouraged by society. I think we'd agree that when I was an 18 year old senior dating a 15 year old freshman that's one thing, but when the 70 year old former strip club owner I once had to work with drooled over the same that's another.
... If they can consent to having sex with another child around their own age, then why not with an adult? ...
Two words: mind games. The drama in high school is all prep for the adult mating dance: "how do I get his/her attention without coming off as clingy/desperate?", "is he/she really interested in me or just planning to use me as a status symbol?", "but he/she isn't mature/hot enough, if I settle for him/her it means I'm less of a person because Hollywood tells me so". Adolescence is the phase where we take all the crap society has crammed into our skulls about love/sex/romance and sort out fact from fiction.
Adults already know and play the mind games; whether we treat them as friendly Canasta or as winner-take-all Russian Roulette, we DO play them, constantly. For example, info-dumping your life's backstory on the first date is (a) narcissistic, (b) clingy/desperate, and (c) ammunition for a poorly chosen partner to shove a knife in your heart and manipulate you like a puppet in your future relationship. Therefore even the kindest, most genuine form of the adult mating dance involves concealing information and strategically revealing your cards at the right time, to protect yourself from awful people if nothing else. But teenagers don't have any practice with this; not knowing any better, they think it's romantic to trust someone fully and unconditionally, which lasts until they put that in practice precisely enough times to get burned. During this phase, it's important that the participants in the mating game be at roughly the same skill level (viz. xkcd.com/314), as it limits the potential for damage. A teenager is wide open to the manipulation of information that adults do 100% automatically and subconsciously.
Oh, and then there's the whole "adults are the authority, you must obey them" thing. Even rebellious teenagers still recognize adults as authority figures — if the adults were seen as equals, they wouldn't be seen as authority figures to rebel against.
(It probably doesn't hurt to mention that I was molested by my stepfather from ages 16 to 18, so I've got a fair bit of firsthand personal experience on the matter. It took me years to spot the web of manipulation that he laid in my mind and unwind past his lies. What were his lies? That I chose it of my own free will; that I should feel guilty for "making" him cheat on my mother; that he was doing me a favor by giving me "pity sex" because I was too shy to get laid in high school. Nevermind that he pinned me in a corner, bullied me into coming out gay to him when I didn't trust him with that information, brought up the idea of sex with him and wouldn't drop it, and made me feel too physically and emotionally threatened to defy his rage-laden authority. For the next two years, he had me wrapped around his little finger until I left for college, and I blamed myself the whole way.)
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