NOTE: This video is in reference to Iowa native Christopher Handley's recent sentencing after pleading guilty to charges of obscenity. You can read more details about the case here.

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone!

Hey, how old were those stick figures?  *runs*
 
(Nice video.  Maybe people will understand things better from it.)

Even though I am against Loli, I still have to agree with most of the points that you brought up.

@sunflower: Well, according to Simon from hentai publisher Icarus (often NSFW), they're all underage and naked to boot. 
 
I'm pretty sure the one that stands around talking a lot is me, though, so I'm pretty sure THAT one is older than dirt and clothed.

@gia: I thought I saw hints of curves in the talky figure. ;P  But beware, with that flat chest the video would still be banned in Australia. ^^;

Amen, sistah.
The law really is completely ridiculous.  The "average person?"  Who IS the average person?  I rather think the "average person" should be someone who is knowledgeable of the subject in question.  Like, instead of some soccer moms in Iowa deciding if loli manga is "obscene," other manga fans should decide.  Just like you're supposed to have a jury of your "peers" in court.  
I think there was a movie where people were preemptively arrested for crimes...Minority Report.  That wasn't a very pleasant society, if I recall.....

Great video, except for one false, yet constantly repeated phrase.  
 
It has been shown repeatedly in rape and molestation that those people who commit those crimes do, in fact, escalate from fantasy to reality. Most serial rapists start by thinking about (which includes reading and watching ,)  then writing about, then "trying out" stalking behavior before escalating to an actual rape.    This makes every step a small, incremental shifting of the lines in the rapist's head, rather than one big, "Hey I think I'll go out and rape a kid!" leap.   I trained to be a rape counselor and it was almost universal among rapists that they start out with fantasies fueled by media depictions of the acts they will eventually commit.
 
I'm not arguing that every lolicon fan in the world is guaranteed to molest a kid,  and despite my personal desire to discuss the matter with them accompanied my friends Mr. Knife and Mr. Hot Tar, I agree that people should have the right to read whatever they want.   I would just like the "people who read this stuff don't become molesters" nonsense to stop. The reality is that molesters very very often start by reading stuff. It's not a commutative rule, I get that, but it is a reality that rapists and molesters start by fantasizing, then start acting on it.  
  
Cheers, 
 
Erica Friedman

@yuricon: Yes but don't the people who escalate from comics to actual crimes have a predisposition that  causes that. It's like saying that the entire reason that someone rapes is because they looked at porn or that the only reason that someone shoots another person is because they played GTA. To say that the only reason that someone becomes a rapist solely because of the media they are exposed to and not their lifestyle personality or any other psychological irregularities, or worse, blaming these things on the media, is just a lazy means of diagnosis. What if we diagnosed other medical predispositions in this manner? People who eat at McDonald's will have heart attacks so give the over 9 billion served massive amounts of blood thinners. People who smoke will have cancer so start pumping them full of radiation. I always imagined   counselors had to actually try and help people based on information they collect and through the analysis of that information, but if there's safety in assumption...
 
Even if we were to say that Mr. Handley's tastes were to lead him to being a pedophile, pedophilia is classified as a psychological disorder. It doesn't make sense to send him to jail. As Gia alludes to, the institutional system in this country is more likely to turn non criminals into criminals than it is to turn criminals away from crime. If he actually were to be a pedophile, logic dictates that psychological help would be the best answer; hopefully from someone who won't paint him as a sexual deviant for life based on his media consumption. 

@yuricon: I think that is exactly the difference: people who rape and molest children may read those materials, but people who read those materials may not rape and molest children. Is it a problem with the material themselves, or with the psychological makeup of the people in question? I would argue that with the information currently at my disposal, it's entirely the latter-- if there's any strong evidence or proof that those rapists and molesters would NOT have harmed people had it not been for that material, I would be interested to hear it.
 
Let's say a man who was exposed to, say, the novel Lolita as a teenager, went out and started reading lolicon manga, eventually escalated to writing his own erotic stories and eventually escalated to molesting a girl who was easily accessible to him (family member, student, neighbor, etc). No one facet of the man's life "caused" him to act out that way, it was a bunch of pieces that came together in one horrific puzzle. Lolita and lolicon have a similar level of "blame" as the victim-- that is to say, they were around the wrong person. And there's no real legal capacity to determine who is "safe" or "not safe" to have such material. A huge part of this country's legal system is supposed to be based on the idea that everyone is innocent until proven guilty-- so it seems to me that for something like this, we should be considered OK as adults to read the books we choose to read until PROVEN otherwise.
 
On a related note, while I would obviously be a fool to suggest that the media doesn't heavily influence our mindsets, of course, I DO think that by blaming a specific media or even a media genre for a specific act, all we do is absolve the actual responsible parties-- the people who actually commit those acts. I cannot in any good faith approve of the banning of any media unless it absolutely, 100%, undeniably "caused" someone to go out and do something (e.g. real live kiddie porn-- because in order to create it and make money off of it someone had to DO something).