[adjective][species] on cub porn
Posted by Bastett Cheetah on Fri 20 Jul 2012 - 00:27 — Edited by mwalimu as of Thu 9 Jan 2014 - 11:30
[adjective][species] has an interesting article on cub porn and its impact on the furry community. Controversial topic but worth a read.
On sites where it is allowed (and even sometimes when it is not), it’s ubiquitous. A full 3% (out of 200,000) of posts on e621.net are tagged “cub”. Yet attraction to underage characters is discussed as if it existed in the extreme margins of furry.
The prevalence of cub porn suggests that a significant minority of furries are paedophiles. Or, to use a less inflammatory phrase, many furries are sexually attracted to underage characters.
About the author
Bastett Cheetah — read stories — contact (login required)a Cheetah from London, United Kingdom
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It is an interesting, however, what is worth noting is the exact quote you polled.
While I admire [a][s] for their verbosity as I am a roo of words myself, this basis is a very rickety one. Not saying the psychological part doesn't have its merits. It's just saying "Since 3% of e621.net's art is cub porn it shows that there is a significant minority".
The percentage of art content is a very poor way to poll the fandom on what is of interest. As far as I know anyone can post any art to e621. It could all be one person posting 3% of the art. Would that one person then be a "significant minority"?
I mean that also assumes e621 is a "neutral" site where all fandom and fetishes are given equal ground. I mean, why not Inkbunny? Oh, we know why because that shows the flaw of the premise and how rediculus it is:
"On Inkbunny There is 18013 art works tagged as cub, there is 8694 art works tagged as penis. This clearly shows that furries like cub twice as much as they like penis."
Now yes, one is e621 and the other is inkbunny. But why should it be considered more scientific to use this type of sampling on one website then another? Isn't it just as bogus in both?
That's an example where linked keywords could help. It seems half the submitters like penis, and the other half like cock.
e621 has just over 200,000 posts. If 6000 are marked "cub", I'd say that's a significant number, regardless of poster.
You do have to be careful with keywords. If you know a site is preferred by a particular community, all bets are off. For example, it would be silly to sample Fur Affinity or Inkbunny for the proportion of furry characters in artwork generally.
An Imaginary Story: "If GreenReaper ran the FBI like he runs WikiFur"
(It is a busy afternoon at FBI headquarters.)
Mr GreenReaper, sir? There are two calls for you, they both say it's urgent.
Put them through to my speakerphone channel... Alright, this is GreenReaper speaking, what is it you want?
Hello there, Mr GreenReaper. This is Army veteran L[REDACTED] A[REDACTED] and I --
The FBI knows perfectly well who you are, Mister, and you're no veteran of this country's armed forces! You're a fraudster and con artist with a record of repeated embezzlement going back years. The nerve of you to call me! Now, what about you on line #2?
Praise the Lord! My name's C[REDACTED] C[REDACTED] and I just want to say --
Enough of that, miscreant! I'm familiar with your file and it makes clear you're a recidivist hatemonger and domestic extremist whose inflammatory, eliminationist rhetoric would be outright illegal in various European countries!
Well, Mr GreenReaper, that's just it. We're calling you to --
Yes, we'd both like to ask you something about our files and criminal records you're in possession of.
And what is that exactly? Make it quick you two, and be grateful I don't charge you with wasting police time. I'm a very busy man who has no patience with your nonsense!
We were wondering, could you delete the contents of our files for us?
You want me to what?! You're even crazier than our psychological profiler said you were!
But Mr GreenReaper, we wouldn't want anybody reading our files to unfairly get any wrong ideas about us. They don't have to mention that I've advocated mass extermination of homosexuals, really now, do they?
Yes, and what about me? I mean, it's not like I spend my every single waking moment making fallacious appeals designed to trick the gullible out of their money, is it? Don't let anyone tell you different.
Yes, really, it's not like you need to put this information, even if it is all verifiably true, out there in the public domain, is it? Think about it from our perspective, Mr. GreenReaper!
(GreenReaper thinks for a minute or two...)
Well, you two, that sounds fine with me! As far as the information provided by this agency goes, you're both blameless blank slates!
THE END (of any semblance of sense, consistency or decency)
So, I can go and dig up a bunch of cub porn and spam e621 with it and then make the number 6%? Does that mean suddenly cub porn is suddenly more popular? Nope.
Now if you have the number of views instead of submissions that would work to prove some correlation of popularity. The number of times someone put something in somewhere doesn't tell anything. Otherwise, text slide shows with crummy free to use pop are things that a significant portion of Youtubers like to watch (hint, they don't).
If you can dig up another 6000-odd original pieces of cub porn (especially those which wouldn't be deleted by moderators on quality grounds), that suggests to me that it is at least of some popularity. Of course, if you added them all at once, you might get some complaints (and a lower proportion of views than otherwise).
But there's no reason to believe that anyone has a motive to do such a thing. Can you think of any reason why someone would deliberately be trying to inflate the number of cub pieces? Or how one person could possibly accomplish that?
Text slides aren't that common on Youtube either. Did you skip over my article on LOLCats that mentioned the Google artificial brain that found cats from randomly sampling Youtube videos?
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Well that means cat videos are an actual majority, which isn't surprising. We're talking about "Significant minorities". I wouldn't be too surprised if at least 2% are these videos. I just tend to see text hear bad music see massive dislikes and move on.
I don't understand why that particular passage was chosen either. I would have gone with the following:
I elided the biological basis passage, since I don't think it's actually relevant to the argument and is at best a distracting correlation.
The story came without a quote. I pulled that text because it was in the lede, outlined part of the central argument (that artwork featuring underage characters is prevalent, indicating a significant level of attraction) and was short.
You approved a one line story...? Shouldn't editors reject that, especially when there's a newsbytes specifically for short newsbytes/links and [adjective][species] is already linked?
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
No, I approved a story with one line after adding a pull quote which provides some context for the link, just as I have been approving stories with one line and a video.
Your position is not unreasonable, and perhaps the submitter will consider that option in the future. In this case, I figured we might get a fair amount of discussion on the topic, and it looks like we have, so I don't see it as a problem. Note that plenty of our readers are syndicated and may not visit the front page regularly.
You're quite correct. I was really only bringing something I thought newsworthy to your attention, to bring to the front page, rather than posting it to the frontpage myself. This probably shows my unfamiliarity with Flayrah as a poster (long time reader).
Next time I'll look to flesh out the post, if posting without doing so provokes dissent from commenters.
I think e621 was taken because it is more neutral than any of the other sites. Inkbunny is obviously biased because a large number of the initial users came there because it allowed cub porn and FA had just banned it. Similarly FA is then out because they don't allow the content so it's a pointless place to measure. SoFurry might have been a good site to use as a test (14223/303637 = 4,68%) but it's also biased according to what people create. Not all furs actually produce content so what you will actually be measuring is how productive cub artists/writers are. If you use a site like e621, which pulls content created by other users, you will probably get a better impression of what the fandom as a whole consumes.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
"underage characters"
characters
It would be more healthy if they were attracted to characters their own age, like Bugs Bunny.
Leprechauns appear child-sized, but they're actually hundreds of years old. So it's OK to be attracted to them too.
In 1986, some whackos teamed up to attack porn. There were radical feminists (the kind that think all heterosexual sex degrades women,) and "Moral Majority" conservative christians, partners at the Meese commission. Their conceit was to protect women from violence by banning porn. As Robin Morgan said, "pornography is the theory, rape is the practice."
A few years later, sticky fingered computer geeks made porn more widely available than ever before. Now here we are, and crime rates have been on a decades long downward trend. HMMM.
I'm proud to live in an era where, as the 1585 said, the internet is the Chicxulub Asteroid for anti-porn extremists. I have a thing against absurd moralistic bullshit.
My own age? Bugs Bunny is old enough to be my grandfather. ;) The agèd Granny Smith of MLP:FiM is less than two years old. Wait... do we count character age as given in depictions, or as in how long the character has actually existed?
Smile! The world could use another happy person.
There's no way we could possibly find this out on our own. Maybe one of our moral guardians did it for us to protect innocent characters from being degraded. Let's ask a lawyer!
The age of an animal character is determined by context. If the context shows that Bugs is old enough to get married and have children, we know he's not under age.
In some of our more modern Furry characters, you can actually tell by how mature the artist draws them. But this is by no means a constant. Particularly with the characters in my own stories, I deliberately made it part of the concept that they are mature, but they show none of the physical attributes you'd look for in a human to determine maturity.
So, basically, if the other characters regard a character as being younger, needing more sheltering, living at home under the care of parents, we can safely assume this is an underage character.
But, with animal characters, it is never safe to assume a character is under age just because it is small or cute. In the animal world it's possible for some animals to be small and cute, even when they are nearing the end of their natural lifespan.
The most effective way of determining the age of a character is, of course, to ask the author or the artist. If anyone is ever unsure of the age of my characters, I have a sheet that lists various factors for each character, including their equivalent human age, even if the character ages in animal years.
I figure animal years to be approximately 10 to 1 for most animal characters. Thus, an animal of 2 years and 1 month should be considered an equivalent 21. Though of course such estimates may vary from author to author.
When it comes right down to it, we're talking about fictional characters that don't exist and are not relative to real human beings. The question of how they relate to human beings is nothing that should enter into any kind of legal decision. Yet, for some reason, people will do so on the assumption of what some people might do with the art. While the very same people would never even consider asking equivalent questions about what somebody might do with a gun.
Apparently we have a constitutional right to the means to shoot children dead, but our right to draw parodies of children in off color poses is more worth questioning. This is why I prefer to work with Furry characters. Humans make no sense to me. I could not write such nonsensical, wacked out creatures believably.
" If the context shows that Bugs is old enough to get married and have children, we know he's not under age."
Well not only did he get married, he married another dude in Rabbit of Seville.
"living at home under the care of parents, we can safely assume this is an underage character."
Not necessarily in the modern times, a lot of people lived with their parents past the age of 18 because of the recession.
Yes, families often stay together. But there is a difference in relationship when the child becomes an adult. "Under the care" means a character that is still being taught most of the time, is extensively looked out for, is still in elementary or high school, is not married, is holding down a serious adult job, has mature relationships, exhibits the experience of someone who has lived longer than a child.
In other words, if this character lives at home, but is still able to live an adult lifestyle, you know it's not a child.
Actually, one way of determining the age of a character is sexual maturity. Generally, if the character is old enough to be having sex on a regular basis in a context of normality, this tends to indicate a mature character. So the very thing that prompts the controversy can be used to dispel it.
If under aged Furry characters are having sex, there must be something in the story or the image to indicate a sense of naughtiness. You have to show some fear of getting caught doing something they’re not supposed to be doing.
This is especially true of characters in Chibi art. The characters may have child sized bodies and childlike cuteness, but their bodies are often fully developed, and you can tell from their social situations what stage of life they are in.
But there are more tricky and deceptive situations. I’m reminded of the Monchichi cartoons from the early 80’s. At full maturity, the characters looked totally childlike, and they were also childish of mind, because they weren’t supposed to be an extremely intelligent species. They also had the physical nature of animals (as my characters do) not showing any indication of sexual organs when naked. Theoretically, you’d have to show such a character in arousal or being pregnant for any naughty bits to show. The way they demonstrated the age of the main characters was to put a child character in the series for contrast so you could see, this is a child Monchichi, and these are adult Monchichis. There was also a wizard character to show this is a really old Monchichi, but he was still small and cute.
This is one of the things I like about writing Furry. There are sciences and methods to our madness that only Furry fans care enough about to get familiar with, which allow us to create total brain twisters for the uninitiated. But this becomes a detriment to us in a courtroom of shallow minded people whose brains totally shut down when presented with any kind of logic puzzle.
http://media.photobucket.com/image/recent/StephanieMango/myspace/Monchichi.jpg
Look at the 2013 "Polar Bear's/Shirokuma Café" in anime on Japanese TV; 50 episodes. Panda is established in the first episode as a lazy older adolescent loafing and munching bamboo at his parents' home, while exasperated Mrs. Panda is urging him to go out and get a job. (He finally finds one at a children's petting zoo, where he can get paid for loafing around, munching bamboo, and just looking cute. There are 49 more episodes ...)
Fred Patten
I don't think the use of the 'cub' tag is all that meaningful as relates to cub porn. A lot of people will tag works with 'cub' because they have, you know, cubs in them, even the totally non-sexual, G-rated ones.
Why post nothing more than a link as an article? Especially when Flayrah is already providing links to all [adjective][species] stories.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
What this is really saying is, among furs who prefer porn, are cool with art theft and know about this less publicized site, there's 3% that enjoy cub. This hardly justifies the [adjective][species] tendency to say a lot of furs do this or that. What the numbers actually show is that so few furs are into cub that it hardly warrants the discussion.
I've said it many times over the years. The fandom most guilty of encouraging a sexual interest in under age characters is Anime. Anyone who was seriously worried about this issue would be coming down on all the Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura porn. (And God knows what else they've done since I left to get away from all that)
But Anime Fandom doesn't get bugged about the subject anywhere near as much as we do. We're the only fandom in the world that is expected to bow its head in everlasting shame because of a lousy 3% of the submissions on a massive porn art piracy sight that none of us have any control over.
These people who project the illusion of Furry being overly infested with pedophiles have no interest in protecting children at all. They have interest in either making Furries feel degraded, or insuring that we develop a real problem with it.
It's Furry politics, not reality. It's people who want us to have a problem, tempting us to create a problem by putting undue focus on that 3%, which they hope will divide the fandom and get half of us standing up for cub porn, fanning that 3% into 50%.
But this will only work if they're really good at political manipulation, and if we are as dumb as they think we are.
For what it's worth, back when FA did a vote on the topic in 2006 on their now-defunct old forums, it actually did come out half and half (with several hundred voters, as I recall). A later, much smaller vote came out equal parts Yes/No/Don't care, but is probably too small to make judgements on.
My impression is that some people (probably more than 3%) like some cub work to an extent, and some (again more than 3%) don't like it. Others - probably the majority - don't particularly care either way but if pushed would take a position based on other factors, such as concern over external impressions of the fandom, or freedom of speech.
My Impression is that people who obviously have no clue about statistics are pulling numbers out of their arses to rationalize their political agenda while in reality it's most likely a case of severe confirmation bias.
Kind of hard to define cub porn; my opinion on defining it is the same as with any child pornography: you know it when you see it.
Defining cub porn is just like defining child porn in Anime/Hentai. Both artistic mediums use a lot of the same techniques. And with both a quick look and a snap decision may not be the best way to go.
Actually, I don't like the term "Cub Porn" for the issue. "Cub Porn" suggests small children of toddler age. Legally the issue is about all characters under the age of consensual sex.
In a photograph you can sometimes tell the age of a person at a glance, but this is not so with art that contains cartoonish exaggerations and/or fantasy concepts. You really can't bust in on the middle of an ongoing story and assume at a glance you know what's going on.
If one is going to sit in judgment of art, one had better be artistically literate, know what they're doing, and be willing to digest the project as a whole before condemning it as having no socially redeeming value.
Of course. I don't mean to say that any old shmuck should just be able to determine it, particularly where the law is involved. Obviously it will need to be someone who knows what they are doing.
> you know it when you see it.
That's not a definition. That's an opinion.
Smile! The world could use another happy person.
See my response to the other fellow above.
It's interesting how the 3% of furries who like "cub" (which, as Mwamilu notes, may or may not be porn) constitutes a "prevalence" and "many", but the 97% who aren't interested don't matter at all.
"MOST furries AREN'T sexually attracted to underage characters" isn't a sensationalist enough newsbite, I guess.
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