“Aging up doesn’t work, they’re not over 18 just because you say they are!!!” that is, in fact, exactly how fiction works. they are things because we say they are that thing. you can just make it up. look, they work at a coffee shop and one of them’s a cat now. isn’t fiction incredible
yeah but why are you weirdos imagining kids as adults for the sole purpose of sexualizing them? how is that different than real people who are like “wow I can’t wait until you’re legal!” at actual children bc they see a Potential for sexuality with them??? 🤔
Because people are interested in exploring a relationship dynamic but uncomfortable with doing so based on the character’s current / canonical age, for example. They’re doing it because they’re actually uncomfortable with portraying minors sexually. If they wanted to portray a minor sexually they’d leave them…a minor.
You didn’t answer the latter question. How is that different than adults who wait for children to be legal or talk about how they would treat them if they were legal?
Writing about a character who is canonically a child at a later stage in their life to explore whatever narrative is one thing, but doing so with the sole reason of putting them in sexual situations is creepy, especially when they’re only aged up to be like 18.
The obsession adults have with youth and innocence and placing young people in sexual situations is a problem. I don’t understand how y’all can’t look st that critically.
Why are adults inclined to pretend children are adults so they can feel more comfortable sexualizing them?
I’m a grown woman and while I can acknowledge when someone younger than me is attractive, I have no interest in playing the waiting game or actively indulging what-ifs about pursuing romance or sex with them once they’re older. Making the decision to do so, even when engaging with that on a fictional level, needs to be addressed.
Ok I’ll answer
It’s different because in one scenario the children involved are fictional and literally no one is getting hurt. In the other scenario, a child is being groomed by an adult and that’s abuse.
Get it? One is fictional, the other isn’t. And most people can tell the difference between fiction and reality. Just because you like something in fiction does not mean you condone it in reality.
Does liking horror stories that romanticize murder make you a serial killer? No, just like being interested in the potential relationship between two fictional minors or a fictional minor and a fictional adult doesn’t make you a pedophile.
Just because it makes you uncomfortable doesn’t mean that others can’t enjoy it.
It gets so tiring dealing with these superficial conversation points. It’s not true that fiction doesn’t impact reality or that reality doesn’t impact fiction. Art and media are so important to our societies because they do have a symbiotic relationship with how we function, how we think, how we express ourselves, etc. We wouldn’t have interest in fiction if it didn’t have a real effect on us as people.
In a 2010 study examining the affects of “define realness” on people’s responses to photographs, researchers found that when people are told that photographs are “real”, they have stronger emotional responses, but when they’re told the photographs are “fake” or depicting actors or etc., they become more cognitively engaged with the content. That is, they start looking for deeper meanings and trying to make connections or interpretations of the photos, which also leads to longer-term attention being paid to things they are told are fictional. They correlated this to people’s interest in “reality” TV shows, which mix fiction and reality in a way that gives people both the emotional and cognitive fulfillment from both factors.
In 2006, a study in Spain showed that participants who read words with strong odor associations while being observed under an MRI reacted as if they were smelling the odors associated with the words (such as perfume) via the activity in their primary olfactory cortex. A 2012 study performed at Emory University concluded that people experience sensory stimulation when presented with metaphorical language. This follows another study that showed metaphors with texture prompted the sensory experience of those textures in participants.
As Fritz Gaenslen said in 1982, the study of fiction and reality through social science is scarce, but what scholarship does exist shows that people may understand cognitively the difference between “real” and “fake”, but we still respond viscerally to content whether it is real or fake, and we can be moved to experience things physically in a “real” way even when they are “fake” or fictional.
Every culture globally has some body of fiction, whether it be folklore or visual art, and fiction has always had impacts on society and vice versa. To say that just because people can “tell the difference” between fiction and reality means it doesn’t affect us is garbage. It’s not empirically founded and just socially speaking it doesn’t make any sense—no one would get invested in fiction if it didn’t fulfill some part of us as real people.
The research on the effects of viewing child pornography, including fictional or “simulated”, is scarce but there is scholarship that points towards the consumption of such content leading to re-offending or increasing the risk of someone moving from consuming content to actually offending with real children.
People enjoy horror and thrillers because they provide a visceral experience—we get scared, we get paranoid, we feel like we are being affected by what’s happening in the movies despite knowing it’s all “fake”. While violent video games don’t create aggression in players, playing violent video games does change the way that people respond to real-life violence or are capable of interpreting real life violence, and while we’re playing them it does, again, create visceral responses. If someone enjoys media that is explicitly racist or bigoted while being uncritical of the racist or bigoted nature of it, we have reason to suspect they hold those beliefs. And so on, and so forth, because our relationships to fiction are contextualized by our reality.
The children may be fictional, but the people creating this content and consuming it are not. Fiction does not and has never existed in a vacuum, and y’all are choosing to vastly overestimate people’s abilities to completely compartmentalize their consumption of fiction from their “real” feelings, desires, and actions. There’s no empirical evidence that supports the idea that fiction has 0 impact on us as people.
So again I do not understand why people are so unable to think critically about the way that children are portrayed, and specifically sexualized, in media, and particularly fan-created media. We should be thinking critically about the way adults interact with children, whether they’re real or not. Why does an adult feel inclined to sexualize a child just because they’re not “real”? Why does an adult feel validated in being attracted to a child just because they’re not “real”? Why are we accepting of adults specifically “aging up” children in media in order to write them in sexual situations?
“Fiction isn’t real” is not an adequate answer to any of those questions.
Alright, these points seem to be resonating with people, so I want to address them (although this post is…. definitely just a silly one-off. A lot of these points are being pulled from points I’ve already made.)
Nobody’s arguing that there’s NO relationship between fiction and reality; they’re arguing that you can’t make solid inferences about a person based purely on the fiction that they consume, and that people’s real-world tastes, desires, and morals react in highly personal ways to fiction. (A slightly more verbose way of saying “Just because you like it in fiction doesn’t mean you condone it in reality”; I’ll go a step further and say “just because you like it in fiction doesn’t mean you like it in reality.”)
Our brain responds in MAJORLY different ways to situations we perceive as fictional vs real. Sure, you can evoke baseline senses, but emotions like fear, concepts like self-projection, even desire and attraction are warped on the screen and become more so the farther from “real” we get.
Our brains clearly and visibly distinguish between reaction to real vs imagined situations. Specifically, the amPFC and PCC are active when discussing real people, but not activated when discussing fictional characters. Our empathy for and experience of fictional characters and situations is visibly distinguishable from our reactions to real people under an MRI. “Most people react differently to fictional harm vs real harm” is an empirically observable fact.
Incidentally, violent video games don’t decrease empathetic responses to real-life pain.
So: our brain can clearly distinguish between fictional and real situations, does not treat fictional people like real people, does not become desensitized to real situations because of fictional depictions. Let’s get back to your question: “What’s the difference between an adult speaking sexually about a fictional minor and a real one?”
Well, actual harm committed aside – a healthy person sees one as an object and the other as a human.
“How adults interact with children, whether they’re real or not” is a dishonest statement when there’s so much evidence that how we interact with fictional people is fundamentally different from how we interact with real people. Sure, how we interact with real children may influence our interactions with fictional….. or it may not. The correlation just isn’t that strong and certainly isn’t causative. You can’t make a judgement on any one person based on it.
How they interact with that object is highly personal and not highly indicative of their morals with regard to real people. I’ve discussed before that there’s nothing wrong with people writing horrific things and that it can frequently be therapeutic. The idea that people writing trauma fantasies are somehow broken fell out of favor decades ago.
In truth, though, the biggest issue with this is that any one person’s individual taste isn’t up for your judgement and evaluation. You don’t know whether someone has thought critically about it, unless you’re equating “think critically” with “come to the same conclusions as I have and stopped doing the thing I want them to stop”. You don’t know whether they’re doing it as a reflection of trauma or just because they see this fictional character as fully malleable, worthy of no more respect or consideration than a lump of clay, or if they’re actually a predator who thinks these things about real children. You don’t know these things. You cannot know them unless you ask (or hook them up to a brain scan), and you have little choice but to take them at their word.
To answer your last 3 questions:
“Why does an adult feel inclined to sexualize a child because they’re not real?” You already had this answered – because they like some other aspect of the character, and chose to remove that and put it in an adult. This sort of segmentation is a hallmark of our interactions with fiction, it’s the basis of all AU’s.
“Why does an adult feel validated being attracted to a child because they’re not real?” Probably a variety of reasons? Putting aside that we’re discussing aging up and so any attraction is necessarily towards adult characters, a lot of fiction is done of characters you are not attracted to. See, all the lesbians writing m/m porn. Or all the people writing porn of monsters or robots or rocks. Finding an abstract object of an idea attractive (if they are indeed even attracted to the character as a child) is a whole different ballgame from being sexually attracted to a real person.
“Why are we accepting of adults aging up minors specifically to writing them in sexual situations?” Because they’re not. Minors. They don’t and will never have any ability to consent, any ability to feel the trauma or betrayal or pain of a real minor being treated as a sexual object by a real adult, and any halfway decent person recognizes the differences between those things. Being openly sexualized is a traumatizing experience for minors; if an adult feels no more empathy for them than for a fictional character, then something is wrong.
Be critical about how children are portrayed in media, by all means. Be especially critical of how they’re portrayed in popularized, commercialized media; I’m not saying no media ever has an impact. I’m saying that impact is relatively slight, unreliable, generalized but not specific. I love media theory, but it’s a tool to examine broad social trends, not condemn certain people for their enjoyment of specific fictions. Stop psychoanalyzing people’s enjoyment of fiction to determine their actual pathologies, its not a good look.
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