The other day, I was doing my daily Fark geek headline read. And I came across the following Fark headline: “Ever buy manga? Congrats, you’re a pedophile, and you’re going to prison”. Even so I am not a comic fan per say, I do love the artwork. So I click on the link to read the full article. I have been trying to come up with some intelligent way to describe my thoughts around this whole insane thing and I have come up very short. It is hard to come up with intelligent thought when the situation itself is rather quite absurd.
As a mother, I can see the concern regarding the child porn aspect of it. However, the manga in question is not advocating child porn, the guy that may be facing up the 15 years in prison because of his comic collection does not collect child porn. It would be completely different if it were one of those erotic novels where the only purpose for them is for some sicko to whack off to stories and descriptions of sexual acts with children. That is not the case with manga (even so some may use it for such). Now even so some may use it to get off, where do you draw the line? Are you going to ban all the painting of naked baby angels (cherubs), ban photography such as photographs by Anne Geddes and the list can go on. Sure there is no violent context to cherubs or pictures of your children, however, that is not going to stop some pervert from rubbing himself with peanut butter and calling the dog over while he looks at them.
This is a very scary thing indeed.
julia sherred
