People Shouldn’t Go to Jail for Looking at Child Pornography

I enjoy masturbating to Cardi B music videos, cartoons about incest, and stories about men being sexually abused by their mothers on the website malesurvivor.org.

I also used to watch real porn, but six months ago I stopped.

I believe the financial incentives and pressures involved in porn make it so the performers can’t truly consent (I say this as someone who has been in front of the camera a few times myself). If we get UBI someday and I know the performers are not choosing between homelessness or anal sex, I’ll start watching real porn again.

My porn veganism is not entirely altruistic–I actually don’t enjoy it much anymore. Now that I’ve had my awakening, consuming porn requires that I rationalize away my guilt while I’m masturbating, which I find unpleasant.

I do wonder, though:

If I were a pedophile, would I look at child porn?

“Pedophile” is colloquially used not just to describe someone’s sexual attraction to children, but also their morality. When you call a political opponent a pedo, you’re not accusing them of having a shameful sexual disorder for which they are seeking treatment. You’re saying: “You want to fuck kids and you think that’s okay.”

The distinction is worth noting, as that which we abhor can still make our body parts stiffen and drool.

So the real question is, if I were a pedophile with my current belief that the age of consent should be 18 and that even adult porn is immoral–would that version of me look at child pornography?

Yup.

I’m not talking about videos of kids getting Sound of Freedomed in vans (I wouldn’t be that kind of pedophile), but images of naked children? Oh yeah. I wouldn’t be able to stop myself, partly because I’d have no other outlet for my sexual urges, but also because merely looking at child porn is ultimately a victimless crime.

As someone who is often accused of being a pedophile, I’ve been burned by your pedo hatred enough to know that, if I were a pedophile—if, if, if—I would not feel beholden to your masturbation policing whatsoever.

I mean, it’s already kind of a big favor to ask pedophiles to live their lives in miserable celibacy. To add ridicule and violent threats on top of that is just too much. It’s like kicking your dog because it’s thinking about shitting in the living room, and ultimately no different from feminists shaming men, conservatives shaming gay people, or progressives shaming straight white people. Sexually shaming people does not make them stop being sexual–it just makes them hate you.

Unless we are going to literally never let anyone be alone with a child for any reason, which is impossible, isn’t our position that we are basically just begging pedophiles not to molest kids?

Impotent revenge fantasies aside, there is no way to prevent all child sexual abuse, and the reality of trauma is that years of psychological safety can be erased in seconds with one finger.

Shouldn’t we uphold our end of the social contract if the pedophile’s end is that they don’t molest children? Why pour acid on this vitally important agreement? Because it feels good?

To this end, I ask my next question: Does it make sense to arrest people for looking at pictures?

Let’s say I secretly film a woman showering through her bathroom window. Then I upload the photo to my Substack, and you download it and jack off to it.

Do you think you should go to jail?

The main argument for prosecution is that viewing CSAM supports the commission of a crime–okay, if you buy child porn, then yes, you are directly incentivizing someone else to commit a crime. But not if you just look at it.

Another argument is to protect the privacy and safety of the children depicted in the images. To this end, CSAM should be sought, seized, and destroyed with no exceptions. My hope is that AI moderation tools will soon make it impossible to create or distribute CSAM.

That said, I don’t see how looking at a photo can be a criminal offense in a free society, and when considering the ease of access to child pornography, my skepticism only deepens.

Here’s a hypothetical question: Say you’re on a jury in a child porn case. The defendant was sent pictures of naked children by an acquaintance, and within a few minutes he deleted them and told the acquaintance never to do that again.

Should he go to jail? Of course not.

But wait, new evidence has come to light. The nanny cam footage shows that, in those few precious minutes before deleting the child porn, he jacked off to it.

Now he’s guilty, right?

Of what? Being a fucking pedo, that’s what.

Much like the misguided war on drugs, jailing people for looking at child porn puts the blame of an abusive industry on the deprived and depraved end users who can’t help themselves.