Yes, people unironically using \u201cMinors\u201d as a coherent category to identify with is weird, and there is category creep, I just saw a post like \u201cprotect girls in their early 20s from grooming by older men\u201d
Honestly you know the idea of \u201cchild pornography\u201d as some utterly beyond-the-pale thing this metastasized from didn\u2019t really come into coherence until the 80s and 90s. (People looking at ESR and being like \u201coh, I forgot libertarians actually did emphasize a pedophelia/ephebophilia distinction\u201d miss that\u2019s a very specifically 90s thing because it was still being hashed out then)
Legal regulation of pornography used to revolve around the category of \u201cobscenity\u201d, which was famously \u201cknow it when you see it\u201d hard to define in a legally robust way as people just stopped trusting The Man\u2019s judgement, they had to try to specify it.
\u201cRedeeming social value\u201d - basically, \u201cno, don\u2019t fucking ban Lady Chatterly\u2019s Lover and Tropic of Capricorn, that\u2019s worthy\u201d, but in effect it meant \u201cif you mix your porn with culture, that\u2019s fine\u201d, that\u2019s why those erotic pulp novels I compared to Salon headlines were framed as sociological investigations, that\u2019s why Playboy had articles, that\u2019s why 70s porn had plots like Hollywood
They tried \u201ccommunity standards\u201d but that was kind of unworkable, \u201cObscenity\u201d as a category was dead by the Clinton administration, the fact that the internet is regulated under something called the \u201cCommunications Decency Act\u201d was a last gasp, part of the hilarious thing about the Dubya administration was John Ashcroft and absolutely no one else cared
But at the same time the 70s \u201cgee it is great and healthy for everyone involved to sexualize teenagers\u201d really was going pretty far, I talk about Brooke Shields like, we very much did have a big mainstream star whose brand was \u201cfuckable 13 year old\u201d doing shoots in Playboy publications and doing movies where she was naked the whole time and doing famous ads for Calvin Klein seductively saying she wasn\u2019t wearing underwear
It\u2019s not til New York v. Ferber (1982) that the Supreme Court even suggests it\u2019s constitutional to ban child pornography, only Osborne v. Ohio (1990) that it\u2019s permissible to ban mere possession, as contrasted to actively producing and distributing. And the decisions are pure handwaving clearly to get some excuse to have some tool to push back on this.
In preventing more Brooke Shields, I suppose they also prevented more Traci Lords, who got a fake ID for her porn career and was reputed as one of the best dirty talkers in the industry
So like, this stuff as the master-concept of sexual morality is pretty fucking recent, the millennials are really the first ones to grow up with it enforced with heavy sanction.
Also makes sense why so many of them got off on the taboo nature of it, one of the reasons I\u2019m talking about \u201csexual media\u201d is to remind people that actually, there is a huge boom in teenagers openly identifying as sexual and even pornographic beings that\u2019s central to the coming culture wave, I first noticed this a few years ago where I searched on a tag that was apparently also used by the \u201ctc community\u201d, or \u201cteacher crush\u201d, which was students coming together to identify around really wanting their teachers to fuck them and being validated in that identity.
Also like, one thing in the last few years, a veil\u2019s come off and it\u2019s completely clear that \u201csexual access to teenagers for winners\u201d was an absolute load-bearing element of every part of society, and a vital interest of like every center of elite power that they would spend quite a bit of energy to defend! And the idea of them as off-limits was the facade all along, and when you separate a facade off its underlying structure it is not the facade that stays standing.
Like, the growing notion of the young as an off-limits class can\u2019t keep going on forever, and when something can\u2019t go on forever, it stops. If you\u2019re like \u201chaha what, the libertarian pedophile/ephebophile discourse is back\u201d, its means the idea of pushing a dividing line back to puberty is a live option again.