Hey, I heard it was illegal to write porn depicting underage sex in the US. How is it that AO3 is able to host this stuff and not get censured? Thanks!
Hey anon! In light of some recent Discourseā¢ I have been seeing the last few days, Iām going to take a short break from silly tags to talk about censorship!
Ok. It is illegal in the United States (and in most other countries I think) to produce, distribute, or possess pornographic images of minors. A thing that is not illegal: writing.
Why is that, you may ask? Why would we want it to be legal to write about adults having sex with children or children having sex with each other? Well, a variety of reasons. First of all, if we treated writing about children having sex the way we treat images/video of that, a large percentage of YA literature would suddenly be illegal. So would writing about adolescent sexuality in other ways, including potentially educational literature or even studies about adolescent sexual health. That would be really bad.
But what about writing about full-on sexual abuse, statutory rape, pedophilia? Shouldnāt that be illegal? No. Banning such writing would risk censoring research and education about sexual abuse. It would also prevent survivors from writing about their own experiences. And it would ban works of real literary merit, like, say, Lolita, which deconstruct and address the psychology of sexual abuse in a literary setting.
Fundamentally, the reason that society bans images of child pornography is that, in order to make them, you have to put children in a sexual context and take pictures/video of them. In other words, to make child pornography, you have to harm children. Thatās why itās illegal. Writing, on the other hand, harms no one in its creation. The only harm it can do is to those who read it, which literally no one has to do. Freedom of speech means we have the freedom to say what we want, so does everyone else, and we donāt have to listen to them if we donāt want to.
So no, AO3 isnāt breaking any laws. And if they were, it would be because the law was wrong.
If you have comments, complaints, or want to scream at me, you can find me at my personal @boytranscending. I wonāt be addressing this subject any further on this blog.
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