Jupiter551 said:
The reason I think some people (certainly myself) are uncomfortable with age-related role-playing going on is that not everyone accepts that these sorts of fantasies (specifically talking about ones where one party is acting "underage") purely take the place of real offending, but that rather they can normalize and validate behavior that isn't ever going to be acceptable in society.
Acting out and reinforcing urges to do something don't kill the urge. You don't see heroin addicts shooting up syringes of water thinking it will stop them wanting to score.
In regards to violent video games, it's different in that people who play video games generally don't do it because they enjoy violence, though a few might - most are interested in the action, the storyline, etc, and anyone who's been involved in or seen actual violence or gun play immediately knows a video game is nothing much like that.
I don't think there's anything wrong with the practice of age-play between two consenting adults, what I would have concerns about are some of the deeper fantasies this is fuelling.
For example I understand fully that some of this involves a desire to be validated by the other person, or to completely rely on the other person etc and that's fine, but can it be done in a fantasy setting that doesn't involve roleplaying sexual abuse? I understand for example the "daddies" wanting to give to a younger woman, but I can separate the desire to shower a woman (of any age) with gifts, and even maybe "look after them" if I felt like it, from calling them a little girl or my daughter. Ugh.
I can also understand wanting to be treated like that by an older person, especially a wealthy one, but that's YOUR side of the fantasy, what I don't get is the male side of the fantasy.
As I said I get all the taking-care-of-someone bit, and giving rather than receiving...but you can do all that with out a "daddy" and "little girl" theme, right?
Like most fetishes, I have no personal knowledge. If its not a turn on than I either I am just confused or in this case squeamish.
I also think Tegan is correct we simply can't know what evil lurks in the heart of men.
For the sake of argument let's assume the worse and say that substantial numbers of men involved in the age play activity are actually pedophiles. Is is really bad for society, that camgirl participate in their activity? I'd argue probably not.
Jupiter mentioned heroin addicts and video games, I think they are both interesting place to look for analogies. I have been peripherally involved in the computer/video game industry for more than 30 years. During that time, I've read dozens of studies on violence and video games. A bit of a history during the mid eighties there was growing concern that playing violent video games desensitized kids and especially males between 15-25 to violence and made them more likely to commit violent acts. This movement probably reached a peaked in 1999 with Columbine school massacre, where the killers played violent video games. There were many studies made none of them (after scrutiny) could show a causal relationship between playing violent video games and engaging in violent crimes. The ban violent video game movement finally mostly died in the 21st century for a couple of reasons. First almost everybody ended up playing the games so people said "I've played those games and I have no desire to go out and kill a cop, I don't believe the studies." Most importantly crime rates dropped tremendously over the last 20-30 years and the group that saw the highest reduction in crime rates was young males. This made it increasingly hard for the ban violent videogame advocates to argue that games were causing harm.
Some researchers started to looked at the opposite does playing violent video games acts as substitute for real life violence. Again there wasn't really conclusive evidence. Other researchers, notably the guys at Freakonomics started looking at the substitute effect. As we all know playing video games can be a huge time suck. Their theory and mine is that every hour a teenage boy spends killing things on Halo etc is one less hour that is he is on the streets hanging with his buds and looking for something to do. Many of which are illegal.
While heroin addicts don't inject water into their veins, we have found it very effective to replace heroin with methadone. By most accounts methadone produces a less intense/satisfying high as heroin. But is is good enough high that a large number heroin addicts can satisfy their craving with an inferior product that doesn't have the bad effects associated with heroin (e.g. jail time, overdoses)
I believe there are three hypothesis with camgirls age-play and pedophiles.
1. It acts as gateway drug and emboldens pedophiles to trying it in real life with children
2. It acts a replacement like methadone not as good as interacting with a child, but way better than being jailed as sex offender.
3. It acts as substitute. It is better to have the guy on MFC looking for models in MFC doing age play, than at the mall, schoolyard, or hanging around chatroom for boy bands looking for 12 year olds.
Yesterday I saw a guy in a couple of rooms asking models if they like to smell their ass. At first I thought he was troll, but I also think he may have been a guy with a strange ass smell fetish. I was thinking how time consuming it would be to have to go through the 1,000 odd models on MFC finding some girl willing to cater to your fetish. The same thing is true for age-play, it sounds like something most girls don't do at all, and the percentage of models who enjoy like in this thread is smaller than number of girls who will do it for a 1,000 tokens.
AFAIK there is no treatment for pedophilia so it is not like in the case of hypothesis 2 and 3, we are keeping pedophiles from getting treatment to cure their sickness.
So rather than leaping to conclusion I think we should wait for empirical evidence do we see more or lower incidents of child abuse.
Or many other things come to mind...
