It's not an "Anime" ban.

[Jin]

Edit: I apologize for this post in advance. If you want to focus more directly on the topic at hand, I suggest completely ignoring the following post (seriously). Though it isn't irrelevant, it's focused on the undercurrents when the topic at hand is about the surface.

I'm not sure if 'fake' is what it is, but I don't accept it as something that should, in an ideal world, exist. I suppose that sounds horrible, but, as I said, the child does not choose to be part of this relationship (for what else is it?). What if an adult was sexually attracted to your own (future) children? Would you be so accepting of such a person's sexual 'nature'?

Just to be clear, I'm not "accepting" of pedophilia. I think it's pretty, as you said, perverse and I'm certainly not trying to suggest that children are not abused or adversely affected when these desires are acted upon. However, I'm attempting to bypass my own personal and culturally derived morality to look at pedophilia for what it really is. I may be mistaken, and keep in mind I'm talking strictly about the desire, not the action, but what I see is a sexual preference no different from any other. As naturally occurring (by which I mean as innate to a particular person) as any other desire.

I think that's a bit of a cop-out. That's the same as saying that a laptop is a natural object. I suppose that it is logical, for humans are natural (self-occurring), and they developed laptops. However, without the input of humans (or something else equally sentient) a laptop would not exist. Without some type of conditioning, do you really think adults can be sexually attracted to children?

I choose to cop-out then as I do follow the train of thought in your laptop example. But I would argue that with the exception of the standard penis goes in vagina (as it's biologically derived), pedophilia is only based on conditioning as much as any other sexual desire. Again, I'm not a psychologist, so I can't say for sure that sexual desires (by which I don't necessarily mean that person X is attracted to person type Y, but rather that person X finds attribute, idea or action Z sexually enticing) beyond 'penis goes into vagina' are based on conditioning, but I believe they are. I can't see my sexual attraction to stockings to be biologically or genetically derived. I think pedophilia is just another fetish, albeit with more serious consequences than the average.

Control. Control by those who know better, over children. I'm happy with controlling such behavior to protect children.

That's not the kind of control I'm talking about. I'm talking about the control of one's thoughts and desire, not of one's actions. The law itself isn't the means of control - it's just the expression of control. I'm hesitant to use quotes from Foucault as they're probably harder to read than my own structureless blathering, but I think it's pertinent here. From The History of Sexuality:

...the new methods of power whose operation is not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control, methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its apparatus...It is this juridical representation that is still at work in recent analyses concerning the relationships of power to sex. But the problem is not to know whether desire is alien to power, whether it is prior to the law as is often thought to be the case, when it is not rather the law that is perceived as constituting it. This question is beside the point. Whether desire is this or that, in any case one continues to conceive of it in relation to a power that is always juridical and discursive, a power that has its central point in the enunciation of the law. One remains attached to a certain image of power-law, of power-sovereignty, which was traced out by the theoreticians of right and the monarchic institution. It is this image that we must break free of, that is, of the theoretical privilege of law and sovereignty, if we wish to analyze power within the concrete and historical framework of its operation. We must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code.

The power to marginalize a specific sexual preference as deviancy is carried out prior to law as part of the hegemonic sexual discourse. In a brief, tacked on way to directly connect this with the topic, one can view this ban on animated minor porn as an extension of this discursive power. Whether it's right or wrong is irrelevant. If the hegemonic sexual discourse calls pedophilia a deviancy, pedophilia will be wrong in society's eyes; if it does the opposite, it will be right (or at least acceptable). This is a fatalistic stance, so honestly I don't know where I'm going with this, but I just felt like typing it.

Yeesh, I apologize for this horrendously unstructured (and perhaps somewhat pretentious, haha) post. I'm tired.