Something seems wrong with that clicky.

Because different cultures are different cultures, and us telling a different culture what they should and should not be doing based on our rules is incredibly arrogant?

Yep they moved the article to the News Magazine, so the link stopped working. I'll update it.

In general terms I agree, but portraying children (or child like characters) in sexual acts is beyond the pale. I admit, I am biased because I've always found the cutesy/sexy cartoon character fascination creepy, to say the least; nevermind the subject matter the article is focussing on.

To You. And to me as well, to be fair. But those are the standards of our culture. While I agree that the stuff mentioned the article that is effectively the sexualisation of actual children (i.e. the stuff that's video or photographs) is very disturbing and really not acceptable anywhere any when, to apply our social standards to cultural mores we simply don't have - because we have no real equivalent of manga and anime in general - is I think not something we should be doing. Anything that seems to involve the exploitation of or bring harm to real children, fine, I think we do have the moral authority to tell anyone to stop that but as the article says, where do we get off telling other people what they should think, and since when do we censor art even in our own culture, let alone someone else's?


Absolutely agree. I've always found that stuff creepy and also I've never understood the whole 'adult women dressed as schoolgirls is sexy' thing either. But it just strikes me as us telling someone who isn't us that they should be like us, which is not something I can go with.

Human sexuality starts in the early teenage years, when most people are still at school. The schoolgirl fantasy originates from here IIRC.

I've watched anime and hentai in the past, mainly out of curiosity. It was weird how someone would find it arousing to see several women being penetrated by tentacles of a monster. But as above, we cannot imprint our own moral and ethical rules unless human life is in danger. One could argue that photoshopped child porn is harmless, given that only the voyeur is exposed to anything. The problem is that this often leads on to the next step - genuine child pornography.

Does anyone know the rates of things like child porn and child abuse in Japan? I daren't google it!

What's the age of consent in Japan? (I've no idea.) Do the manga/anime ages match up with that? Anything younger is certainly creepy, but this is coming from a nation that used civilian women as sex slaves during WW2 without blinking an eye. Their moral standards are different to western ones.
I've always thought it strange here that you can have sex at 16 but can't take/view photos of it until 18. (Maybe our consent age needs increasing to 18 like it is for everything else.)

That's one part of the recent UK porn ban that I actually agree with. The rest of it seems like censorship based on personal taste.

Legally 13 but a lot of by-laws and state laws raise it to 18