The accusation is that I am a pedophile and child groomer. The reason why people say this is because of what I did before I turned 18.
As a teen, I lied about my age to get on the NSFW portion of DeviantArt, back when it was capitalized as “deviantART”. Some of my friends will know that I have a thing for erotic hypnosis, and that was why I did that.
On there, I encountered a roleplay partner who, upon meeting on Skype, turned out to also be lying about her age. We then moved to Discord as that app was gaining traction. I will decline to name her personally to protect her privacy.
She was abused by her mother, including physically, and wanted nothing more than to have a friend to confide in. I played Bedwars with her, I did some more innocent roleplay with her on Discord and do occasional voice calls.
I was in high school while she was in middle school, which is indeed an age gap, but in the grand scheme of things, nothing unusual.
After I turned 18, one day during a voice call, she said that her mother was apparently hunting her down with a knife. I heard her screams and the yells of her mother in the background. I stayed on the line to comfort her, but I’d be lying if I pretended I weren’t scared shitless too.
As a dying plea, she asked me to be her boyfriend. (Now I realize that my gender prevents me from being a boyfriend, but that’s another story.) Despite myself having little interest in dating someone that much younger than me, I said yes to comfort her.
She survived that, fortunately, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I wasn’t really into the relationship as anything but a friendship.
I also ran a Puyo Puyo Discord server focused on lore and casual play as opposed to competitive play. One day, against my better judgment, I posted a teasing message on that server and shortly deleted it. Everyone lost their pants and immediately assumed the worst.
Later, she confessed that she didn’t like the kinds of topics I liked that she had been doing with me as she broke up with me, so nothing ends well in this story.
The accusation is that I am a pedophile because I defend the creation of lolicon and shotacon.
I come from Japan, where these topics are taboo, but ultimately seen as benign unless the individual author or consumer expresses pedophilic urges, that is, to commit child sexual abuse.
Child porn is illegal because it requires child abuse and exploitation to create. It’s not illegal because it’s gross, though you could very well have that opinion.
Lolicon is a liking or preference for a type of character known commonly as “lolis”, a type of anime girls who are especially petite, childish, or cute. The male equivalent of a loli is “shota”, and the liking for them is “shotacon”.
It is important to note that lolis don't necessarily have to be under 18, or even children. Examples of lolis who are adults include Tatsumaki from One-Punch Man, who is 28 but commonly mistaken for a child; Rebecca from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, who is officially in her 20s and the “loli” in the quote “No, the loli must stay!”; and Dorothy Haze from VA-11 HALL-A, a chipper, sentient android sex worker who declined to age up her body when she qualified for it in the maturity test—in equal parts a loli and a parody of lolicon.
“Loli” is most prominently about body type, and real life women have that body type, so equating lolis with children is body-shaming.
It is well known that the word “loli” derives from the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, in which a grown man called Humbert Humbert is infatuated by, then is protective of, a young girl called Dolores Haze. Even that original novel is not an erotic novel; it is a modernist and surrealist story with an unreliable narrator, and his actions and motivations are expressly intended to be condemned. Nabokov wrote a whole fictional foreword for it for that exact purpose. Therefore, it’s hardly logical to think that “loli” has a sexual meaning.
In addition, “loli” and “lolicon” are not always used with a sexual meaning today. Pixiv Dictionary, a community-maintained wiki for terms related to Japanese otaku and artist culture, maintains that “in its original meaning, lolita complex has only a thin sexual undertone” (本来ロリータ・コンプレックスとは性的な意味合いは薄く). The Japanese word ロリコン (rorikon) is understood to be completely different from ペド (pedo), a loanword from English, or 小児性愛 (shouni seiai), literally meaning “sexual attraction [for] children”. The MyAnimeList user Aiko_Hiroshi explained it best here when she discussed the inconsistent mistranslation of Kono Bijutsubu ni wa Mondai ga Aru!.
It is a common sentiment among otakus that “2D is better than 3D”. The sentiment that the straightforward simplicity of an experience created to be enjoyed is much more pleasant than the smell, the bother, the wishy-washiness of real life people is center to The World God Only Knows, where a superhuman visual novel player must exorcize escaped souls from his female classmates by wooing them in real life.
Though, as part of “Image & Narrative”, Patrick W. Galbraith points out the disconnect between fiction and reality in his paper, and that “even the relation between fiction and reality is not at all straightforward”. It is neither correct to say that lolicon is pedophilia, nor that lolicon has no relation whatsoever to pedophilia. It is a sad fact that there are some pedophiles that hide among lolicons, but as soon as they are found out, the lolicons expose them and cast them out.
The biggest evidence that lolicons are not pedophiles (at least, the vast majority) lies in the VTuber community. Many VTubers do not hesitate to describe themselves as lolicons, and play their alleged association with pedophiles as a sarcastic joke.
Last but not least, the VTuber original song with the most YouTube views is Shukusei!! Loli Kami Requiem (a.k.a. “Loli God Requiem”), which is a sarcastic parody of lolicon tropes, including the loli threatening to call the cops teasingly, and the loli degrading the crowd in jail (to the inmates’ enthusiastic delight).
No. Erotic or not, lolicon material is kept out of reach of children. If it is not, then it is a grave misstep of whomever showed it to them or allowed them to find it.
What does normalize child sexualization is the American localization industry. When Netflix localized the French movie Mignonnes about girls twerking, which condemns it as the child sexual exploitation that it is, they spun it as a “sex-positive” “girl power” movie called Cuties, to much dismay and condemnation from the public.
In fact, there’s a pervasive pattern of people who rage against lolicon and later get found out to be a pedophile trying to muddy the waters and throw people off their scent. I’ll spare you the details, but that’s exactly what happened to:
As of 2024, federal law only considers erotic material with a photorealistic image of a minor, or with a non-photorealistic image of a specific identifiable minor, illegal. Other material is generally legal, but may be considered illegal on the grounds of obscenity law, which is separate from child protection.
The PROTECT Act of 2003 was nerfed in 2008 for unduly and unconstitutionally violating freedom of expression. The illegality of lolicon depends on which state you’re in, and whether your state has the wisdom to tell fiction apart from child abuse.
Yes. Lolis are the canary in the coal mine in terms of censorship. There is no guarantee that the leopards will never eat your face. Once they come for the lolis, they will come for the darkfics, and then they will come for the political dissent. You have no moral obligation to like lolicon, but you have the moral obligation to turn the other way and accept that imagination and creativity are a core part of the human experience, and people deserve the right to express them in ways like these that harm nobody.
The document accuses me of being a transphobe over finding “neopronouns” ridiculous. They are ridiculous, and I’m tired of pretending that society at large doesn’t think so either.
A neopronoun is a coined word that is intended to be used as a pronoun.
A relatively successful neopronoun is the Swedish pronoun hen and its derivations.
However, acceptance of it naturally varies, since pronouns are closed-class words in Swedish as it is in English. “Closed class” means that new words can’t be coined easily and recognized as pronouns by native speakers.
The accusation deals with English third-person singular animate epicene pronouns. Let’s break that jargon logorrhea down:
Proponents of neopronouns say that:
Click on these arguments to jump to my rebuttal.
In summary, neopronouns are dead on arrival because of the singular they.
“Neopronouns are needed to refer to nonbinary people.”
English third-person singular (3PS) pronouns are categorized first by animacy and then by the perceived gender of the referrent by the speaker:
We can see that English already has a way to refer to nonbinary people, and most nonbinary people go by “they” already and are completely happy with them.
Neopronouns are nothing new, either. An English professor at the University of Illinois, Dennis Baron, has chronicled over than 200 gender-neutral pronouns proposed between 1800 and the 1970s, none of which caught on, obviously.
The Trevor Project had a survey in 2019 to 2020 and found that only 4% self-identified as a neopronoun at all.
The idea that neopronouns are needed to refer to nonbinary people is refuted completely by the singular they’s popularity and acceptance.
↑ jump to list of arguments“Neopronouns allow people to engage with their gender better.”
Pronouns don’t exist in a vacuum unrelated to gender. The third-person pronouns that people use to refer to others are an unspoken deal: I present myself as a woman to implicitly request everyone to refer to me as the pronouns corresponding to the female gender, and others will—hopefully, but not necessarily—call me a she.
That is to say, pronouns aren’t directly about someone’s gender identity; it’s about how the speaker perceives someone’s gender to be.
Nowhere in that social contract can neopronouns appear. The purpose of pronouns is to facilitate communication, not to let others advertise their own little personal brand every time someone mentions them, like a sponsorship segment in a YouTube video.
↑ jump to list of arguments“Neopronouns are better for neurodivergent people who do not connect with gender the same way as neurotypical people.”
Don’t use us as your shield.
I say this as someone who was diagnosed with autism as a child: I’ve yet to hear from anyone with autism that neopronouns help them understand gender, including myself.
Gender is pretty easy to understand, actually, as it is. On the other hand, nobody understands neopronouns. In fact, I’ve heard from others who share my experience that neopronouns hamper communication and make it harder for us to understand and follow conversations and written texts.
Us neurodivergent people have and want nothing to do with neopronouns.
↑ jump to list of argumentsNeopronouns express people’s identity.
Sure, maybe it does for some people. But that is not what pronouns are for. That is what nicknames are for.
I used to type in that cringy MySpace text quirk. But everyone on Discord complained that it was hard to read, so I quit because I’m not a baby.
↑ jump to list of argumentsNeopronouns are made up just like literally every word.
Words exist to convey an idea from one brain to another. In order to do that, words must be:
When words have all these properties, we call them real words. Casual Scrabble players often complain that AA, CH, EE, JO, QI, SH, ST, XI, and ZA are “not real words”, but we Scrabble players would consider them real words, since we know that it’s in the Collins Scrabble Words dictionary, which explains what they mean: “’a’ā” is a type of lava, “ch” means the pronoun “I”, “ee” means the organ “eye”, “jo“ means “darling”, “qi“ (pronounced chee) is vital force in Chinese philosophy, “sh” is used to hush someone, “st” is also used to hush someone, “xi” (pronounced like the “xy” in “xylophone”) is the Greek letter “Ξ/ξ”, and “za” means “pizza”.
Sure, the average native speaker may not encounter them in the wild, but since they’re valuable words to know and use in a word game, we agree that these are real words with real meanings and real users (even if those users are all in the past, in the case of “ch”, for example, which is archaic).
The problem with neopronouns is that they don’t fulfill at least one of the requirements.
Nounself pronouns, as they’re called, are pronounceable and recognizable as real words, but are used in a part of speech that is not agreed upon. The typical native speaker can bend parts of speech from nouns and proper nouns to verbs—cf. “Jailbreaking might brick your phone (i.e. render it unresponsive)” and “Hoover the floor (i.e. clean it with a vacuum cleaner)”, but not from nouns and proper nouns to pronouns.
Regular old neopronouns are not recognizable as real words and/or not pronounceable. While proposals like “ze” and “co” have obvious pronunciations from their spellings, others like “xe” and “hir” do not. And since pronouns are closed-class in English, the reader/listener cannot adapt to these coinages without significant effort and cognitive dissonance.
Emoji-based neopronouns, what I consider the epitome of the self-indulgent idiotic sin even within the neopronoun realm, violate the first rule, as they are unpronounceable. Do people write to communicate? Or do people write to express themselves? How do you expect to be able to express yourself, if others are not able to receive, understand, and relate to what you are expressing?
↑ jump to list of argumentsNo. Neopronouns do not function as pronouns, and are not part of someone’s gender identity. Dismissing them as the silly teen phase that they are does not make you discriminatory towards transgender people or nonbinary people.