EvilMAP wrote: Mon Jun 15, 2026 3:32 am
You can watch videos and images of babies being murdered but a 17 year old girl masturbating could send you to prison.
And also many people think cp is worse than gore of children.
Saving pictures from a swimwear website of teens can put you away for life too. A dozen pics of swimwear catalog and the US law then activates its situational CSAM curation rule. Where any legal minor media can be situationally illegal if curated in a collection intended for sexual gratification. 5-20 years per image.
But if you really want to know the nature of this behavior, why curated swimwear and gymnastic web page media is illegal as opposed to gore - it largely has to do with evolutionary psychology that interacts with cultural norms and cultural structures. Let's compare reaction to sexual norm violations to reactions to extreme violence and what part of our brains get evoked.
While almost everyone opposes extreme violence it doesn't trigger a moral purity violation
Jonathan Haidt's research on Moral Foundations collaborated with Paul Rozin in 1999 discusses this.
Let's pull up Paul Rozin and Jonathan Haidt's 1999 collab paper on how cultural moral violations dubbed "purity violations" trigger intense disgust.
The best way to look at it is the acronym CAD
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-10970-005
C=Contempt
A=Anger
D=Disgust
Contempt to community (violation of communal codes, including hierarchy) - This means humans tend to view societal rule breakers as worth less
Anger to autonomy (individual rights violations) - This means humans tend to view violent and theft based crimes with anger
Disgust to divinity (violations of purity-sanctity). - This means humans tend to view purity norm violations with disgust
And please note, nothing is simple as just disgust or just outrage alone. What I'm saying is it can be many emotions with both disgust and outrage too, its just that disgust is the dominate emotion. Non sexual violence alone is more likely to trigger outrage and are for the harmed victim without overwhelming disgust.
Of course all three emotions can overlap. A rapist can trigger contempt, anger and disgust all three. There are many more moral factors at place like sadness, empathy caring for those harmed, vengeance ect ...
Explained simply, DISGUST is triggered mostly at what researchers in the paper called "divinity violations" like the cultural concept of childhood purity being perceived as being under threat.
Where as anger is mostly triggered by crimes like theft and violence, and of course extreme violence that lead to goring. So in those cases normies and law can reason GTA is just a violent video game, or gore is morally bankrupt but legally protected media. But they will NOT reason at Non Nude, dance videos and swimwear shops. Knee Jerk disgust reflexes shut down the conversation because divinity violations/purity is involved.
Now let's look at this study
https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/p ... -us-apart/
Human's associate and or distance themselves from people based on "divinity morals/violations"
Divinity violations are triggered by SEX CRIMES and SEXUAL IMMORALITY
Co-author Jesse Graham, assistant professor of psychology, said that purity is a value that can dramatically divide people based on their political and religious convictions.
The study, led by USC Dornsife researchers, combined computer science, moral psychology and sociology of networks research techniques to determine how five basic moral concerns — care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and purity/degradation — may widen or narrow the social distance between people.
The degree to which people expressed moral purity concerns could predict how close they were to each other on the Twitter social network. This affected whether they were direct followers or stayed away from each other — and each other’s friends.
Surprisingly, this wasn’t just a matter of politics. The researchers found that when they broke the Twitter social network into two distinct political clusters, purity predicted social distance within the liberal and conservative clusters.
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As Robert Sapolsky said
Disgust isn't just an emotion, its our brain's categorization tool to divide the world into us vs them
and as Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Gram pointed out above sexual norm violations are the quickest way to end up as a "purity violator" and in the outsider "them" category.
https://rootedindecency.com/chapter-8-us-vs-them.html#5
Focusing on who is better, more trustworthy, or more deserving of empathy and respect—that means we’re into moral territory because we’re judging based on virtues like trustworthiness and respect. Now let’s bring the brain back into it. When we see a Them as morally offensive, the same part of our brain activates as when we’re smelling rancid food.[6] Yes, you read that right. It’s called the gustatory response, and it’s that automatic sense of disgust that pulls us back and away in order to protect us from things that would cause us harm, like eating spoiled food or picking up germs from garbage. Moral disgust toward a Them affects our brain in the same way as things that cause physical disgust. Neurology researcher Sapolsky explains:
The insula activates when we eat a cockroach or imagine doing so. And the insula and amygdala activate when we think of the neighboring tribe as loathsome cockroaches. As we’ll see, this is central to how our brains process “us and them.”[7]
He goes on to note that the amount the brain is activated for moral disgust toward a Them “predicts how much outrage you feel and how much revenge you take.”[8] This biological response reinforces our sense that thems whom we feel morally offended by are an actual threat to our well-being, just like rancid food would be, even if there’s no real-world evidence to support it.
I think I made my case. I showed empirical evidence to help explain why gore media is legal but softcore CP is not. The simple answer is because according to Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundation Theory, Disgust and purity threats is much more likely to happen with sexual norm violations, this triggers a response in normies to make them want to purge the threat and or distance themself from it. Extreme violence evokes the need to escape or engage the attacker, but does not have this contagion/disgust/distancing property.