Postby mortaine » Wed Jun 08, 2005 10:45 pm
I haven't read the whole thread here, but:
text is not the same as sex.
I'll repeat that: text is not the same as sex.
In a porn film, if one of the actors is 13, the film is illegal (in the US) as being child porn. This is because the actor is underage. It does not matter if the kid is playing someone who is 18 or 40 or 13. The kid is underage, and the law that is being broken is the one which protects minors from having sex with adults, and the one which protects them from being filmed doing it.
Nowadays, in a porn film, you also won't see a 30 year old actor pretending to be 16, though older classic ones (like Debbie Does Dallas) can and do portray them as such (they've been grandfathered into that particular obscenity law). The law in question, however, is not about minors having sex with adults, but about obscenity-- totally different ball of wax, and a lot harder to prove in court.
However: a porn film is not a book or website. It is not text. The law that requires the porn industry to meticulously document the ages of all actors in their movies does not apply to, say, cartoons, because cartoons are not human beings having sex. A voice actor isn't (necessarily) having sex on the set. The law protecting a child from having sex with an adult or being filmed doing so does not apply, since no children are having sex on such a set.
Meanwhile, Lolita and many many many young adult novels, and all of the VC Andrews books have descriptions of underaged people having sex, often with people who are "of the age of consent." These books may run into private censorship, but they are not illegal. Not solely because of freedom of the press, but because, again, no child is having sex.
Please remember: a textual description of sex is not the act of sex. It isn't even close.
Now, I personally think it's in poor taste to RP explicit sex in Cantr, because that's not really what I come to Cantr for. I'm sure there are those who do, and that's fine as long as they don't force their ways on me.
If I were a parent of a teenager playing Cantr and I'd done my job right, I could trust that kid to make their own choices. I expect any teen of mine would already have burned their way through most of the raunchier novels on my own bookshelf, anyway, and to have illicitly played Strip Poker on my computer, as I did when I was a teenager (and man, were those graphics terrible!). Aside from the real-time interaction with another player, how is Cantr much different?
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mortaine.