What do you think of this woman? Me, I'm confused.
<img src="http://features-temp.cgsociety.org/gallerycrits/8730/8730_120094828\ 2_medium.jpg" height="550" width="375"> http://tinyurl.com/397e4q The above "woman" is a from-scratch CGI construction. How real will we allow technology to become -- when is artifice so close to real that it must be treated as real? What didn't they allow the Star Trek folks to do in the hollodeck? Did Piccard program the holodeck such that he could have sex with CGI Deanna Troi? What if they invent a drug you can take that will give you a complete hallucination of being actually in the presence of God and getting all your questions answered? Should it be allowed? What are the limitations a culture should/should-not impose upon "helping people" with deviancies that commonly offend? Case in point: is it legitimate to compare legalization of CGI images of child pornography to the legalization of "hard" drugs? I'd say most folks here would like to decriminalize drugs, so going with that, I ask: Should society limit how much pedophiles may use completely realistic but artificial constructs that "feed" their "psychologically suspect" personalities by indulging in various dysfunctional dynamics such that the "fetish" is supported, maintained, and "grown more?" Freedom-privacy vs. harming oneself. It's one thing to say that drug users should be able to slowly kill themselves with harsh chemicals in the privacy of their own homes, but if a pedophile is allowed to "psychologically damage" his/her nervous system progressively with repeated exposures to offensive-to-others-but-not-real images, we could argue that that will increase the likelihood of that pedophile acting out with real children. It's a theory that I think is true. If we allow drug users the right to harm themselves and if we make the drugs cheaply available at any pharmacy, it seems we would hypocritically saying, "Yeah, get really as addicted and crazy as you want with your crack pipe, and we don't expect that you'll become criminal when the drugs finally rot your brain to a serious extent." If a man says that the "woman" above looks "desirable" -- "desirable" means "triggers processes in his nervous system that are normally triggered by the face of a real woman" -- most folks are not offended, but if the CGI woman was naked and 20 years younger, suddenly any man in possession of the image would be guilty of the crime of having forbidden material -- at least in certain states in the USA. See? It's easy to decide to decriminalize drugs, but I find that emotionally I cannot espouse letting CGI artists churn out the most vile of images for fetishists of every sort -- even though, RATS, logically, I cannot justify it. To me, I'm being prejudiced against "certain kinds of porn" while allowing other kinds, "because guys are like that" and "what's a little nudity for crissakes." So, we allow adult men to view photo after photo of real women being, say, bound and gagged and sexually objectified, and in doing so, we seem to be okay with them nurturing their desires to bind and gag a woman in real life -- perhaps without the woman's permission. If we allow "everything," then would it all just sort itself out eventually with a small percentage of the populations living in legal crack houses, another small percentage in holodecks having sex with kids, and another small percentage doing etc. etc. etc.? Where does it end? Given that we might be in Kali Yuga and things are going at light speed into the shitter, we may find that technology will out-pace our ability to get jaded to changes, and we'll all be shocked -- shocked I tell you -- like Sundayschoolmarms in 1910 being given an iPod with typical porn from today. Within 30 years there will be very realistic, high tech, sexual robots. Want one? But the robots will come in all ages-sexes-species-psychologies. What do you do if you see your next door neighbor give his kid a Hannibal Lecter doll that speaks endlessly about the thrill of the kill? I hope someone can cut to the chase on all this and set me straight -- otherwise, I'm afraid of what's just around the corner. Edg
