Surprise, You Might Be Pro-Thought Police: The Uneasy Case For Loli Hentai

In this article:

• Loli hentai, or lolita hentai, is a genre of animated child pornography that is, for reasons I do not have to explain, is highly controversial.
• Since the genre doesn’t involve real human children, making or possessing it technically isn’t illegal. But it’s still not exactly illegal, either.
• Its very existence disgusts most people, including me (and you, probably), but the issue isn’t as black and white as you might think. And policing fictional child pornography may be a messy, ethically blurry form of thought policing.

Look, I know you’re probably angry.

Who wouldn’t be? An article that looks like it’s saying that making and watching child pornography should be legal doesn’t exactly inspire compassion or the desire to understand. For many of us, child pornography is evil. End of story.

It doesn’t matter whether the children in loli hentai porn videos are real or not. Just the idea that someone is jacking off to sexual depictions of minors is enough to get your blood pressure rising.

Honestly? Same.

When I first started thinking about this topic, the initial idea was to expose what loli hentai is and call it a depraved porn genre with no moral or legal gray areas to speak of. But the more I thought about it, the more I started to question why I, or we, have such a strong reaction against lolita hentai.

Let’s talk about it.

What Is Loli Hentai?

Loli hentai is shorthand for “lolita hentai.” It’s a kind of animated pornography that depicts fictional children getting down with fictional child diddlers.

Like DDLG — the kink/aesthetic that sexualizes the style and behavior of young girls, but on adults — it feels a little too close to actual pedophilia to sit right with many people, but doesn’t cross the line of involving actual acts of pedophilia on real human children.

I can hear the lynch mob from here but let’s keep going.

Lolitas can either be fictional underage girls or fictional women who look like minors. That’s why it’s a bit of a running joke among anime fans that many anime shows have a minor-looking character who later turns out to be hundreds, or even thousands, of years old.

It’s such a prevalent trope that it has its own dedicated section under “Older Than They Look” on TVTropes. Look no further than Rory Mercury from GATE for an example. The fantasy isekai anime features a scythe-wielding demigoddess who only looks like she’s 13 years old.

The anime makes a point of the discrepancy between her age and appearance during a courtroom scene where a human lawyer points out that she’s a minor before Rory makes it clear that she’s centuries older than her.

You see, when it comes to anime lolis, their actual age doesn’t really matter as much as their physical appearance does. Even if another character is technically younger, they still won’t fit the “loli” category if they look like sexually mature women.

The physical characteristics that fit the “loli” archetype are neotenous, that is, “child-like.” Big eyes, short height, and slight figures with nonexistent curvature are some of the checklist items for a lolita. Add a high-pitched voice and a cute aesthetic and you have a loli.

We’ve been talking about what makes a loli a loli, but despite the fact that lolita anime girls are intended to look dangerously young, one thing stays true about them in every version: they’re always fictional.

Loli Hentai Sounds Awful. Is It Illegal? Apparently Not.

It depends on where you are.

I won’t lie, I was lowkey afraid of having to dig through court cases and laws by state and by country, but apparently, a more credible source already did the heavy lifting.

Neil Shouse, a former Los Angeles prosecutor, is an attorney who graduated with honors from UC Berkley and Harvard Law School. In “Is lolicon illegal in the United States?”, he answers the greatest dilemma facing anime enjoyers and actual pedophiles alike: “Is lolita hentai illegal?”

According to Shouse, two conditions need to be met for the possession of loli hentai to become illegal.

First, you need a really obscene depiction of an underage person. The depiction can also be one “lacking serious value.” What constitutes “serious value” will likely depend on who’s making the decision and when it’s being made.

In a way, it prohibits Dead Dove: Do Not Eat sexually explicit depictions of fictional children. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” is a descriptor used to mark fictional work that features scenes that would be conventionally deemed morally reprehensible, but doesn’t explicitly condemn these elements.

The second condition? You have to send your loli hentai across state lines. You can do this the old-fashioned way with a quick exchange at a public park where you and the receiver can look sus, or do it 21st-century style by sending the loli hentai via the internet.

The condition can also be fulfilled if there’s a previous indication that the loli hentai on your PC (labeled “Work,” of course) was sent to you across state lines. A third way to fulfill the second condition is if there are signs that you intend to sell it.

So, what clues the FBI in that you want to sell fictional child porn? Generally, having a lot of it.

Just possessing a large amount of loli hentai can lead a prosecutor to conclude that you intended to distribute it. How the amount of loli hentai is quantified isn’t really specific. Are we measuring in bites or number of files? Or is it by video or photo?

That being said, the illegal nature of distributing loli hentai doesn’t necessarily mean loli hentai itself is illegal.

For that, we need to look at the PROTECT Act of 2003, a law that was passed with the noble intent of forbidding child pornography that “includes any obscene image that appears to depict an identifiable minor.”

So does that mean that if a loli hentai video has a character that looks like a minor, talks like a minor, and acts like a minor, it’s automatically illegal?

Apparently not. The PROTECT Act of 2003 actually came after the decision rendered in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition. Decided in 2002, the Ashcroft case struck down several portions of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 that prohibited “any visual depiction, including any photograph, film, video, picture, or computer-generated image or picture” that “is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.”

Why did the U.S. Supreme Court render these ineffective? Before you grab your pitchforks and start lynching the Justices, think about this for a second: the law was too broad to be constitutional.

By prohibiting all forms of child pornography, even loli hentai where there are no real children involved, the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 was, in a way, criminalizing free speech considering that it was dictating what can’t or can be depicted in fiction regardless of the context it was in.

One of the key arguments was that it was a First Amendment violation as it abridged freedom of speech.

Yet the Justices deciding on the case acknowledged that child porn was still pretty damn disgusting whether you’re watching fictional children or not. Disgust aside, it’s the Court’s duty to be impartial which is why they turned to examples in other fictional media, notably the 1996 film Romeo + Juliet.

Surprised? That makes two of us.

Before you cry out that Shakespeare is art and loli hentai isn’t, let’s consider for a moment that the lead female character of Juliet is canonically only thirteen. That’s a minor by today’s standards. As for Romeo? He has no canonical age but depictions of him range from as young as sixteen to as old as his early twenties.

The more they thought about it, the more it became clear that upholding the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 as it was originally written would make a lot of classic art illegal.

I know what you’re thinking: What if loli hentai becomes a means for supporting crime and grooming small children?

They thought of that, too. Video games, toys, candy, all of these can be used by child rapists to trick children so they can do the unspeakable. But that doesn’t mean it makes sense to make those items illegal just because of a slippery slope argument.

Basically, as long as it wasn’t a visual depiction of an actual child (looking at you, Netflix’s Cuties), it’s fair game. Loli hentai remains essentially legal because there’s really no victim involved.

If that still doesn’t sit well with you, sit down and buckle up because, whether you realize it or not, you might be a supporter of thought policing.

The Loli Hentai Issue: Non-Offending Pedophiles vs. Thought Crime

What’s a thought crime? Simple. It’s the concept, coined by George Orwell, of penalizing a person for simply thinking.

Imagine your neighbor thinks about raping or murdering you every time they see you outside your house. Are they actually committing murder or rape? No. Because they haven’t actually done anything.

Ask even your average layperson what a crime is and their answer is usually along the lines of: “Doing something illegal.”

Emphasis on doing.

A crime is, by definition, “an action or omission that constitutes an offense that may be prosecuted by the state and is punishable by law.” Aside from a few exceptions, which still don’t straight up punish you for just thinking about it, there hast to be a component of action or inaction involved in committing a crime.

Either you did something illegal or you didn’t do something that was legally your responsibility to do like, say, taking care of your own children.

Why are we even talking about George Orwell in an article about loli hentai? Because the issue is a real concern when you think about the gray area that non-offending pedophiles exist in.

Everyone hates pedophiles to the point that they’ve become the subjects of 21st-century moral witch hunts.

Look up the phrase “non-offending pedophiles” and you’ll find, along with neutral explorations of this controversial demographic, a river of vitriol that ranges from imprisoning to killing people who are attracted to minors for simply being attracted to them.

This desire to imprison or punish these people is often made without consideration of whether the pedophile has actually acted on these impulses. You know, regardless of whether they are actually committing a crime.

Monsters, to our conventional moral sensibilities, deserve to die and pedophiles fit the bill, non-offending or not.

“You’re 16. You’re a Pedophile. You Don’t Want to Hurt Anyone. What Do You Do Now?” is a piece by Luke Malone that sheds the impulse to be outraged in favor of understanding the mental disorder aspect of pedophilia.

Yes, pedophilia is a mental disorder and “Adam” from the Malone piece is too familiar with it. At the time the article was written, Adam was 20 and running a support group for other pedophiles who are aware of the real harm that their impulses can cause to other people.

After realizing that his addiction to child pornography was hurting real children, Adam began looking for a way to “break” the addiction.

Reactions to his cry for help were unsavory to say the least. I’m not excusing the consumption of actual child porn. That has real victims, unlike loli hentai.

But for someone like Adam looking for a way out before he ended up directly causing harm to children, the revulsion we feel at the idea of helping a self-confessed pedophile doesn’t help.

When he finally plucked up the courage to get treated, he recalls the therapy session as anything but conducive to getting him back on the straight and narrow.

“She just became extremely cold and harsh,” he said. “She even, a few times, almost got to the level of shouting.”

Though he eventually found a more level-headed psychologist to work with him, the potential repercussions of stigmatizing treatment are a looming shadow over Adam’s non-offending pedophile support group.

Again, I’m not saying acting on pedophilia should be legal. It is and should remain a severely punished crime due to the real harm it causes.

But loli hentai, which has no victims, and non-offending pedophiles, who have victimized no one, can’t be “held accountable” unless you’d like to go ahead and make it illegal to think.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to explain my search history to the FBI while I wait for the court of public opinion to lynch me for being guilty of not blindly condemning loli hentai viewers.

Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, I guess.