tw: nongraphic discussion of child sexual abuse. mentions of genital 'corrective' surgery and medical malpractice. minor discussion of discourse surrounding 'femboys' and 'BBC'.
Note: I use the terms young people and children in this post to refer to everyone under the age of 18.
A lot of thought goes into my art. I always want to treat sensitive subjects with the level of care and nuance they deserve while also creating something sexy. There's a fine line to walk: I never want to talk down to my audience or bog them down in disclaimers when they clicked on my comics to get off, and I always want to show my audience that pornography doesn't have to dehumanize or disrespect its characters to be sexy.
That's not to say I'm against depicting dark subject matter or that I think you suck if you enjoy porn where the characters are being dehumanized. In fact, I get off to some of those themes as well. But I also think it's genuinely difficult to find pornography where the characters are treated in a grounded, respectful, and human manner that is also sexy, and that's a shame.
The older I've gotten (which, to be fair, is not particularly old), the more I've realized that attraction is a psychological thing. The sexiest comics are those that endear you to the characters. This is usually achieved by appealing to sexual archetypes like the daddy, the femboy, the shota, etc., onto which the reader can project their own personal desires. People usually think of this projection in straightforward terms, that the reader wants to have sex with someone who embodies the archetype being sexualized.
But people also project themselves onto these sexual archetypes. They represent a version of the reader that is desirable enough to be worth depicting. They represent an archetype the reader can embody that others will want.
In my own personal experience, when I first started reading porn online, I always felt attracted to shotacon comics. Why? Because they depicted a sexual archetype that felt relatable to me as a young boy. They represented other people's desire for me and an acceptable archetype I could embody and explore my sexuality through.
However, these characters were often depicted doing things that were far more sexually extreme than what I was interested in exploring at that point in my life, and even when they were depicted in more vanilla scenarios, the depictions felt strangely dehumanising.
This made me feel like I had to reduce myself down to a list of porn tropes to be sexually appealing to others. As an adult, I can understand that the thing that makes a person most attractive is their personality, but as a young person with no positive sexual experiences with others, my impression of sexuality was based on what mainstream society and niche fetish pornography told me: people have a list of attributes they want to have sex with, and if you don't line up with those, you will not be wanted by others.
I am of course not the only person who has experienced this. I've seen this sentiment echoed by transfemme people when they talk about their relationship to archetypes like the femboy. On the one hand, it represented an acceptable, desirable way to express their sexuality at a vulnerable point in their journey to genuine sexual expression, and on the other hand, it was experienced as a shallow, dehumanizing label that facilitated others' exploitation of them. Many Black people with penises feel the same way about the whole BBC thing.
I'm not here to start a moral crusade. It's important to remember that porn comics are usually an amateur endeavor, that porn is not seen as being creatively important enough to warrant critical thought, and that pornography is a reflection of the society that creates it, not the other way around.
Shota porn is a sexualized reflection of the way society dehumanizes children. Shota porn usually riffs on cultural ideas of childhood innocence, the idea that children are inherently more moral, pure, and worthy of protection because of their ignorance on 'difficult subjects' like death, violence, and sexuality. The central erotic element of most shota stories is this innocence. Either the shota retains their “cuteness” and “purity” despite having sex by being oblivious while it happens (through hypnosis, not understanding what they've done, being unconscious), or they are tainted through their newfound knowledge of sexuality in some irreversible way.
I think the idea of childhood innocence is a harmful one because it stakes the moral character of children on their lack of knowledge and agency. I think children have inherent moral worth because they are human. No child owes anyone 'innocence' to be granted basic human respect, and yet this dehumanizing notion has become naturalized through psychological, educational, and legal institutions which stand to gain through denying young people agency.
Medical institutions conduct genital 'correction' surgeries and administer hormonal treatments to young people without their informed consent. At the same time, they withhold these treatments with impunity from young people who are old enough to comprehend the consequences of their decisions. Educational institutions leave sexual education up to the parents, enabling families to keep their children ignorant so they can sexually abuse them. Legal institutions are complicit in this, using obscenity laws to censor sex education materials. These policies are justified using the rhetoric of childhood innocence.
I was certainly never an innocent child, and I was ostracized for it. Parents avoided me and told their children to avoid me. Adults were offended and embarrassed by my behavior, not because it was harmful, but because it challenged their ideas about who young people were allowed to be.
I felt ashamed, corrupted, and lesser than other people my age. That feeling was strengthened by the porn I read. How backwards is that? When I was hurt, when I was sexually exploited, when my sexual health was neglected and my sexual identity compromised and degraded, these notions of childhood innocence framed the violence I had experienced as something that fundamentally corrupted me. I was a failed child first, a human being who had been violently abused second.
"The rhetoric of the loss or destruction of childhood is a powerful one, suggesting irreparable damage. The loss and destruction referred to in these examples are of course not real but metaphorical. At stake is not the physical harm done to children, as an element of physical harm is not even necessary to declare the end of childhood, but rather the infringement of defining characteristics of the concept of childhood."
I want to challenge that framing through my art. I want to depict my young characters with agency. I want them to be desirable beyond the fact that they are young. I want to show the reader that, yes, it is okay for young people to act in a sexual way, that it doesn't necessarily lead to harm, that their sexual expression doesn't have to be synonymous with abuse. I want to depict them exploring their sexuality safely, without exploitation. I want people to leave my comics feeling satisfied and uplifted. I want to show people something they haven't seen before. I want to make people rethink what they take for granted about stuff like shota and incest porn.
Challenging this rhetoric is important not just for the well-being of the children of today but for the children of yesterday. Many people seek out shota art because they feel a tension between their own experiences (whether that be their experiences as a young person who was not ‘innocent’ due to sexual abuse or to sexual shaming from those around them, or as someone who is or has been attracted to young people or depictions of young people) and the ideas surrounding childhood innocence. They want to explore the contradictions between their own reality and the most socially acceptable framing of reality. When they come to shota art looking for direction of a kind, I hope that the art I make inspires them to think of young people as human beings who, like all human beings, deserve to be given the space and support to develop their sexual identities free from shame and exploitation.
That's not to say I won't explore darker themes in the future. I think there is value in exploring how feelings of sexual arousal can arise alongside feelings of disgust, fear, or shame. I don’t think feeling sexual arousal in and of itself is an endorsement of whatever provoked that arousal. I also think people deserve art which recognises this tension. When I feel confident enough in my skills to write something like that with the care it deserves, I will. But when I do, I want to stay true to my goals. The world deserves better porn, and I want to be a part of that.