Honest question:

Why are works of #fiction (books, comic, animation, film) depicting #rape or #pedophilia more offensive to more people and cause more calls to boycott or censorship than fiction depicting extreme #violence or #murder, when killing someone is universally regarded as worse than raping someone (morally worse) and criminal systems everywhere punish murderers more harshly than rapists (legally worse)?

@tripu Good question.

If i had to speculate I think it has a lot to do with some unspoken subconscious stuff... my thinking goes like this.

While rape and pedophilia is deplorable, it is still sexual in nature. This has the potential to arouse and imagery associated with arousal is likely far more likely to be appealing to a person and perhaps tempt them to do the bad deed than simply watching someone kill, which in and of itself isnt something that, by watching it, is likely to have any element of pleasure and thus likely wont do as good a job at enticing someone to carry it out.

@freemo

That's a good explanation.

But something is missing: although it's true the vast majority of us have a sexual drive, arousal happens almost exclusively when there's a match with our own tendencies. The most basic example is: strict heterosexuals would rarely find “inspiration” in realistic depictions of gay sex, and vice versa. Similarly, is a “normal” person enticed to sex with children by watching paedophilia? I can't speak for others, but my intuition (and my own experience) is: [definitely not](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2948747914). Ditto about rape.

There might be a narrow slice of people with latent or ambiguous tendencies who might get something out of it, but I doubt it's more than that.

In contrast, we've been hearing for decades that dramatised violence (eg, games, film) does alter the behaviour of consumers, and yet murder and violence are ubiquitous in our cultural products, and we don't seem to give that a second thought.