Either way, I don't see the harm of forbidding it. The web doesn't lack regular pornography alternatives, free or paid.
I mean, this seems to be a pattern people have seen in many cases?
I seem to recall something about people in the military developing scat fetishes after repeatedly masturbating in restrooms that smell of feces, due to a lack of other private places?
The phrase “fetish fuel” is a fairly standard phrase I think.
Generally, it’s pretty clear that some fetishes come from somewhere. Like, the “woman turns into a giant blueberry” one seems to pretty clearly trace back to someone’s experience with the scene in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”.
And, like, if someone starts out looking at/for breast expansion porn, they’re probably going to be exposed to a far bit of lactation porn as well, and I think there’s a fair chance that they’ll start seeking that out as well? For example.
Why would we expect this pattern to not apply in the case of CP/CSAM?
End of page 3, the author does a litterature review and finds that current studies show that exposure to CSAM increases probability of offending for those with predispositions.
If that's the case, then all these studies were observational studies, which lack the ability to infer causality. They can at best hint at directions to pursue for studies that can infer causality.
As a concrete example of the way that observational studies can go wrong despite good intentions: It was believed for a long time that paedophiles have lower average IQs than the general population. This was based on the observation that a larger fraction than would be expected of those caught and sentenced for sexual crimes involving children were of low IQ. Of course, a better explanation of this observation is that paedophiles with higher IQs are better at covering their tracks and evading suspicion.
By your logic, CSAM consumers would be "magically" unaffected by viewing this porn subcategory.
How convienient.
Until genuine evidence is available, either outcome seems plausible. It could be that consuming CSAM pushes people towards committing sex crimes, or it could be that it "magically" doesn't, the same way people playing violent video games are "magically" unaffected by doing so.
ETA: An example of the inability of porn to influence sexual behavior is the plight of gay Western men in the 1950s-1980s. During this time homosexuality was absolutely demonised across essentially all of Western society, so there was ample interest from gay men in "correcting" their "errant" desires (this is not to say that all gay men felt this way). At the same time, heterosexual porn was widespread and easily available, though admittedly to a lesser extent than it is today. Given these forces at play, if it were possible for a gay man to develop an interest in having sex with women merely by looking at heterosexual porn, it does seem like there would have been large numbers of gay men who successfully "converted" to straight men. But AFAIK it is disputed that any such genuine conversion has ever taken place.
>SEM) and psychological outcomes: sexual satisfaction, body satisfaction, sexist attitudes and mental well-being. Participants were 252 adults recruited from universities and online who were asked how often in the last three months they had intentionally looked at (1) pictures with clearly exposed genitals, (2) videos with clearly exposed genitals, (3) pictures in which people were having sex, (4) video clips in which people were having sex. They also included some of the items used by Hald (2006) but these were not specified. There results indicated no significant indirect or direct relationships between online SEM use and any of the psychosocial outcomes and appeared to have a negligible role in current sexual functioning and mental well-being. Similarly, Landripet et al. (20191) in a longitudinal study of 248 male adolescents found that a preference for violent/coercive pornography decreased over time and was unrelated to latent growth in pornography use. The authors noted limitations in this study, but still argued for the importance of sexual education and media literacy programs aimed at a more critical evaluation of sexual media content and its potential adverse outcomes.
The first is that you're banning free expression, and banning free expression is inherently harmful.
There's also the displacement theory - with the legal content being much more accessible and regulated to ensure minors aren't involved in production, it displaces illegal content that does harm minors.
This seems to suggest that broad sexual preferences are remarkably stable.
When a river had carved a canyon, it is hard to redirect it. That doesn’t mean the canyon was always there.
As for violence, that's because such acts on film were illegal. Pornography was tightly regulated before this era of free speech. Even now the UK, is constantly trying to maintain BDSM porn as criminal [1] and Australia has similar tight restrictions [2]. This is to say nothing of the countries where pornography is completely banned: China, North Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iceland, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Malta, Myanmar, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Yemen.
So if the question is why do you see more of Y in XXX, it's because it is now allowed so content is created to satisfy needs that were already there.
[1] https://reason.com/2014/12/02/uk-bans-fetish-porn/ [2] https://www.kptlegal.com.au/resources/knowledge/pornography-...