Ten kinds of wrong.

Japan and China have been in a war of words recently over perceptions of the Second World War. It involves Japanese textbooks that do not admit atrocities committed in China. It involves war memorials that honor all of Japan’s war dead, including war criminals. Mostly I think it involves posturing and saber rattling by China to counter Japans influence in the region both politically and economically.

Well, a posting to a newsgroup has tried to defuse the situation. The posting was a photograph of a pouting 11-year old girl saying "Please stop these anti-Japanese hijinks. If you don't, I won't like you anymore."

It’s a clever personal appeal. Well, actually it’s somewhat contrived because the girl, model Saaya Irie, didn’t actually say what she’s quoted as saying. Even so, suddenly, the discussion groups went from China-bashing and Japan-bashing to conversations about how cute this girl is. But, what made it really work and what makes this so wrong is that this particular 11-year old girl wears an F-cup. Yea, the little child is completely stacked.



I recently saw an anime called Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan (which roughly translates and “Beat-to-death Angel Dokuro-chan). A time traveling angel lives with a middle-school boy and regularly knocks the top of his head off with a big spiked bat. That’s pretty messed up but what really makes it wrong is the reason. It seems that the buy is destined to discover the secret to immortality. The side effect however is that girls will not mature beyond age 10 and the angel has been sent back in time to murder him and prevent this pedophile’s paradise.

And if the school girl fetish wasn’t disturbing enough, I found a copy of a Japanese print that is the precursor to the tentacle porn genre. It’s titled "Octopi and the Maiden" by Katsushika Hokusai (c. 1814) and portrays a woman being molested by an octopus.

I’m sure it is a cultural egotism and our nation’s puritanical roots that have me believing that the Japanese are messed up beyond all reason. Evidence shows that these disturbing behaviors occur in all cultures and have probably always been going on. In fact, evidence shows that even animals engage in what would be considered deviant behavior so maybe these sorts of things are really deviant at all. What we consider "normal" is merely an arbitrary central point in a broad spectrum of behaviors. That central point moves back and forth from time to time but the full spectrum remains.

This is not to excuse pedophiles for their criminal behavior but perhaps we need to clearly understand the foundations of what’s going on. It is normal behavior for males to seek out the best females. In nature, the best females are typically young and healthy. In early humans, these females would be "claimed" as soon as they became reproductively viable. Perhaps, even earlier to guarantee that the alpha male had first dibs. Puberty in modern humans begins at around age 8 or 9.

As society has gotten more complex, so too has the time necessary to
develop the ability to make decisions in that society increased. For a primitive human girl concerned with subsistence survival on the African savanna and might not expect to live past the age of 30, hitching up with a male at the age of 8 would be an easy and wholly appropriate decision. But to a modern girl in elementary school who is a decade away from entering the workforce and could expect to live into her 80’s, it’s far too early to be making those decisions for the rest of her life. And it’s always too early for an older male to be making that decision for her.

Does it sound like I’m defending these guys? It shouldn’t. Pedophiles are some of the worst kind of human filth I can think of. But it’s not because they are sexually attracted to young girls because we are all genetically programmed for some level of that. It’s because they prey on their youth and inexperience for their own selfish desires in violation of all the rules of modern society.