Today's subject is an essay, an essay on how hypocritical mods have made it hard to find good material. Today we're talking about one of the biggest art repositories on the internet: DeviantArt.
Kids of all ages browse DeviantArt, and it is there where they find some of their first fanart. Websites like these are usually the first place someone would go to find art based off their favorite cartoons, aside from just checking out Google Images, but then, that site also shows art from DeviantArt on a regular basis. I think kids stumbling across fanart is a good thing; it expands the tools available to them and shows them that they're not limited by what the show offers them.
Now, DeviantArt used to be okay with naked little girls. Some of my first nude lolis I found over there, and they were just safe enough to be a good place to be. DeviantArt has this thing called a Mature Content Filter to block the worst results from kids, and in some cases they restrict art to people 18 and up. Therefore, sometimes nudity both innocent and gratuitous can be found behind one of these filters. They can hide a variety of things besides that, like graphic violence and swearing alongside "ideologically sensitive material" which includes suffering and Nazis, stuff like that.
However, some time in I think 2005 or 2006, DeviantArt changed their policy to ban depictions of the underage in the nude, and you may think that's just girls, but it also includes boys, too. The official policy is that the underage, that is, those under 18, cannot be depicted in the nude, even with implied nudity. For those who don't know, implied nudity is nudity that doesn't show the privates, so art on DeviantArt can't even get away with showing things that you can show on television every day. They even do stupid things like, for characters who've been mutliple ages, use the average of their age to determine how old they are, so someone who's been 18 and 14 at once is 16, thus underage even if the picture is of their 18-year-old version.
All this is in the name of protecting the kids, but here's the problem: DeviantArt is also home to a massive number of fetish content that is often produced with the specific purpose of arousing the person in question. It's content designed for sexual purposes, only of fat characters, or farting characters. It's just as disturbing as it sounds and gives the site a terrible reputation (well, that and you can and people have submitted low-quality art that stays for days on end).
So to examine just how stupid the loli ban is, I'm going to do a couple searches for art based on cartoons kids are likely to search for online. I'm going to turn off the Mature Content, so the only things they see are stuff the website/artist has determined to be kid friendly. Note the amount of problem content each one has:
We'll start with Teen Titans Go. For the first few pages, most content will be about the original show, which might confuse kids but is still worksafe. However, at some point there's a pic where Blackfire trespasses on Starfire with the boys recording, though the two are clothed. After some essays professing their hatred for the Go version, there's a pic of Terra which is drawn in such a way to make her look rather vavoom. Then there's some fat fetish art, a beach bikini pic, a baby fetish fanfiction that is explicitly stated to include sexual themes, a rather racy gay pic, a fanfiction containing adult language, a hypnosis fetish comic, and by the time you get to the pic where Lady Legasus is depicted with a big butt, any sane parent will have pulled the plug and banned the kid from the website. And all those horrible pics? All in plain view for a kid to see.
Let's try another search, this time Loud House. On page one, there's a fanfic whose description includes language that if you use more than once, your film gets rated R. Then a horror story that has nothing to do with the show but contains gore and vulgar language. Then a fanfic that explicitly identifies itself as a fart fetish fic, a genderswap transformation fetish fic, a second fart fetish fic that identifies itself as such, and once the pic of Lynn Loud in a string bikini with a big butt shows up, the poor kid browsing has developed a series of complexes that'll scar him into the future. All by art approved by the system as being "kid-friendly" when it clearly isn't.
Any given fetish has to start from somewhere. Enough big belly gags in cartoons can give someone a big belly fetish. Enough exposure to cartoon feet can make someone a foot guy. But pedophilia doesn't work that way. It's caused by brain abnormalities and is on a biological level as opposed to the way the child was raised. Any pedophile had to be born that way, or suffer explicit sexual abuse as a kid, so kids are not going to grow up on fanart of naked little girls and become one themselves.
That is what makes the ban on underage content so insidious. People make the art in most cases because they were curious as to what the character might look like naked, or for a funny gag, or just for artistic purposes. Any fetish art can only be created in the void of fetish art and only for arousal. It's also the reason it's stupid to censor little girls but leave the rest of the stuff: if we're so worried about naked little girl scenes catering to pedophiles or possibly creating them, why are cartoons still allowed to use inflation, transformation, or any other thing that's bound to accidentally make someone with that kind of fetish go gaga?
When your website can't do what the cartoons they do fanart of can do, then your website is broken and needs to be fixed. And DeviantArt is most certainly broken.
(Left as mature since this is heavy.)