Europe’s Erotic Panic
The European Union decided that the best way to protect children is to criminalize eroticism itself. Not just real child abuse material—that’s reasonable. But drawings of people who look young. Photographs of adults who happen to have boyish faces. Simulated sex acts. All of it banned now, and if you make it or look at it, you’re a criminal.
On its face it’s stupid. A child who’s being exploited isn’t helped by whether I can legally own a drawing of a fictional adult with youthful features. But the logic here isn’t really about children—it’s about control. The state gets to decide what sexuality is permissible by setting impossible standards for what counts as too young-looking,
then let enforcement wiggle according to whoever’s judging on any given day.
Who decides whether someone looks like a minor? A 30-year-old with a round face and no body hair can pass for younger. A 17-year-old can look 25. There’s no threshold. You’re handing judges and prosecutors a tool to criminalize whatever erotic material offends them, then dressing it up as child protection.
It’s worse in practice. Law enforcement gets buried in cases that don’t matter—prosecuting drawings, photographs of consenting adults—while actual child exploitation gets de-prioritized because the infrastructure is clogged. Abusers win. Everyone else loses.
It’s the move every generation of moral panic makes. Pretend you’re protecting the vulnerable. Use that as cover to narrow what adults are allowed to think about and desire and create. The arbitrary lines harden. Nothing actually changes for the people you claimed to protect.
If Germany and the rest of Europe go through with it, eroticism becomes a dark market again. Educational material gets buried. People get prosecuted for wanting and creating normal adult sexuality. And the actual harm—the children in real danger—stays untouched because the system’s too busy chasing drawings.