With how much I go to FA...

[wolfwings]

...I have to say this.

If you're going to leave that archive because they chose the road both of least administrative work for a free site, but more importantly the road of least censorship, please ask yourselves why you were even there in the first place in a place that allows art depicting drug-use, openly sexual art at all, violence, robbery, or any number of other equally-illegal crimes, some of which carry higher penalties than being convicted of being a pedophile.

The "slippery slope" may be as overused as "It's to protect the children!" to my ears, but it doesn't make the former quote any less valid a way to refute the latter quote. If you support censorship of artwork at any level, you are still supporting censorship of artwork. Any 'moral' arguments you make to the contrary are still arguments supporting censorship. And at the same time, you can already opt out of seeing adult artwork at all, and FA is adding support for much higher-granularity blocking of artwork you don't want to see. Don't like it? Guess what, like LJ, you aren't being forced to view everyone's journal entries. Don't argue for a ban when a simple 'Ignore' will function just as well.

And if the above makes you want off my friends list, lemme know. This is just about the only time I'll ever actually remove someone from my actual friends list instead of just my default view, is over issues like censorship, and by request to boot. My outlook is that it is not for myself, or anyone else, to judge another's choices of artwork to draw or share. The risk is entirely their own, and they can and will be judged properly in their own time. But not by me. I may choose not to associate with them, but I have no right to make outright judgements on them.

Comments

Well stated.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

We know each other disagrees, but I have to applaud you for stating your stance so clearly and understandably. I'll have to mentally chew over the points you bring up that I hadn't fully considered for a'while, vis lowering the fandom as a whole, so please don't think I ignored this comment maliciously or otherwise. It's one that's warrenting much more thought.

Re: Well stated.

[ruggels.livejournal.com]

Oh by noemeans to I consider it being ingored. I often comment days after a post, because of how distracted/busy I might be. and interesting quote conincidentally I ran across a few hours later on an SF Weekly article about "Yaoi-con".

In the U.S., there have been a few legal cases regarding manga, but none yet specifically concerning yaoi. In 2000, a comic store owner in Houston, Texas, sold two sexual manga comics to an undercover police officer, and was promptly arrested on the charge of disseminating obscenity. The New York-based Comic Book Legal Defense Fund rushed in to help on behalf of the store owner, arguing in court that he had sold the comics to an adult, and that the books were properly shrink-wrapped and labeled to keep kids from getting into them. The Texas jury was not convinced. "The prosecution closed by saying, 'Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we appeal to your common sense,'" recalls Charles Brownstein, the defense fund's executive director. "They said, 'Comics are for kids, they put this filth in this media that appeals to kids, and we can't allow them to get away with this.'" The jury delivered a guilty verdict within a few hours.

Brownstein says he's relieved that there haven't been any cases related to yaoi, but that it may just be a matter of time. The genre's characters are often high school boys, which in the U.S. makes the work subject to obscenity and child pornography laws. "It may be that prosecutors just aren't aware of it yet," he says.

The federal government got tangled up in the debate in 2003, when Congress passed the PROTECT Act ("PROTECT" stands for "Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today"). "It's a frustrating law, because half of the law makes good sense," Brownstein says. It increases prison sentences for child molesters and establishes a national coordinator for the Amber Alert system used to broadcast information about abducted children. But it also outlaws computer-generated images, drawings, and sculptures that show a minor in an obscene position or engaged in a sex act.

"I think the law goes too far when it criminalizes lines on paper," says Brownstein. "Child pornography is an indefensible, inexcusable crime that is evidence of the sexual exploitation of children. Anime, comics, and manga are ideas that exist nowhere except [in] the minds of the reader and the author." While it's natural for people to respond strongly to images they find disturbing, he says, "to a certain degree, it becomes a battle between the legitimate protection of minors and thought crime."

But some child advocates say the images themselves can be dangerous. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has a tip line that receives almost 2,000 reports each week about online evidence of the sexual exploitation of minors, which includes reports about manga and anime.

"Any time you're depicting children engaged in deviant sexual acts — drawings or stories about those acts — that's a concern," says Adam Palmer, who directs the center's legal office. "Many times people make the same arguments about Internet stories or fantasy chats, but the sad reality is that some of those fantasy chats lead into the temptation to go after an actual victim, or they perpetuate an idea that it's OK to engage in those acts." In addition, Palmer says, the pictures can be used to groom potential victims. "It's trying to normalize something that is not normal, it's criminal," he says.

So what happens now if someone drops a dime on FA?

Scott