One Case For Pure Intolerance

Photo by Flickr user greenwithevil. Used under a Creative Commons license.

In comments to an earlier lolicon post Cassandra of Cassandra Says said

I keep running into people who insist that there's nothing weird or wrong about lolicon or shota because after all it doesn't feature real kids, and the ink is not being harmed...and yet the problem remains that, even if it's never acted upon, why would an adult be attracted to children? Within my online circles it seems to be considered judgemental and in poor taste to suggest that such an attraction may indicate that something has gone wrong with the wiring of the person with that attraction, and that far from being sex-positive, supporting such things may actually be rather sex negative, for all the reasons you've outlined.

Eh, I'm frustrated and just glad to see someone else who I trust as being smart and certifiably not a prude raising the same issues I have with this stuff.

Here's a link to her comment in that post.

First of all, not to disappoint but I'll go one step further along the tolerance line and confidently that, even if somehow they couldn't figure it out in advance, 99.9% of all aficionados of Japanese-style pedophile porn would be bitterly disappointed should they ever attempt to fulfill their fantasies with actual children because, you know, children aren't just fully-functional miniature adults who are only "less inhibited and judgmental" than grownups.

Location on the sexual-tolerance line is all beside the point, though, since the question isn't whether there's something wrong with the child-attracted grown ups or not, but that when grown ups have sex with kids it tends to really fuck up the kid's sex lives when they grow up. Therefore even if "lolicon" sex *cured cancer* it would *still* be problematic the way cannibalism is problematic: it involves consuming one person to gratify another.

So here's the tricky part: *if* one is tolerant enough to be cool with destructive consumption of others then... well, then by definition one is also cool enough in turn to tolerate ruination of a consumer's sex life in exchange for future gratification of his or her victims! And whenever coolness/tolerance balances out? well, then other considerations such as, oh, I dunno, Pareto optimization come into play. In which case consumptive destructives such as pedophiles, rapists, serial killers, sexual cannibals, and (sorry Anne Rice fans) vampires fall short. Way short.

Fun to have something about sex that, for once, both sexually tolerant and intolerant people can agree is disagreeable this shouldn't be seen as a camel's nose under the tent. When I was in college one of my math professors gave a too-brief introduction to a fairly esoteric field of math he called fixed-point approximation theory. I don't recall much more than the gist, since by the end of that year my brain was way past full, but fixed-point theory evidently explains things like why on any given number line there will be one point that's equivalent to zero, how if you find a hairy billiard ball there will always be a "crown" on it somewhere, and how if you take two pieces of paper, crumple one no matter how tightly, and lay the crumpled one on top of the flat one there will be at least one point on the crumpled piece that's directly over the corresponding flat one.

Did I say esoteric? Why yes I did! But in each case that fixed-point approximation examines (sez my old professor) logic dictates there always exists a single point of stability. A fairly common conservative criticism of tolerances (and an even more common flaw of proponents of tolerance) is the point that if one was *really* tolerant then one would also tolerate those who oppose toleration. I think fixed-point approximation theory, both metaphorically and, I'm going to guess, logically, lets us call bullshit on that: just as a number line is going to have a zero on it somewhere -- and you know how zero breaks parts of arithmetic like division without at all invalidating it -- then there can be a "zero point" in tolerance that doesn't just permit but to be logically consistent *requires* intolerant defense of the system. Well, so too with sexual tolerance: one can be as intolerant of destructive sexual consumption as a former Missouri Attorney General without ever agreeing with one on any other point.