Some Brief Thoughts On Aella's "Most Controversial Tweet"

You can stunt a man’s capacity for fatherhood without turning him into a child molester.

Hello everyone. Just a heads up: this is a response to a piece that has been doing the rounds on Substack about the potential upside of AI Child Porn. You can read it here if you like but just know that it is obviously a bizarre essay on a disturbing topic. I was not going to post anything about it, certainly not on this Substack, because a. I know that’s likely not the sort of content you all subscribed for and b. the piece itself did not strike me as a good-faith effort to defend what the author, Aella, describes as her “most controversial tweet.” More like a half-hearted attempt to recycle its viral potential for clicks. But I’ve found myself mulling one of her points and felt I had some thoughts worth adding to the discussion. Anyway, I do hope publishing this won’t prompt too many of you to unsubscribe, but I certainly won’t be offended if you have no interest in reading further.

---

I still (obviously) haven’t figured out my stance on AI art in general. But I feel pretty confident saying “AI child porn is bad.”

This is, to be clear, not an attempt at a comprehensive take-down of Aella’s defense of AI child porn. It is a reflection on the different ways people think about porn and its potential to negatively impact society. And I’m going to keep it as brief as possible. Her piece is clearly written from the standpoint of a person who thinks about the world as a sexual marketplace, in which you have human options and digital options for getting off. In that world, she maintains, porn and humans are essentially competitors, with porn reducing demand for sex with human women. Or, as she puts it, “generally, fake stuff seems to kill demand for real stuff, not enhance it. As an escort, porn is a competitor, not an ally. If all porn suddenly vanished tomorrow, I’d expect my bookings to increase.” You can see how someone would apply that thinking to the child porn question and arrive at: hey, AI child porn is actually good because it will reduce demand for sex with actual kids.

But a lot of people don’t think about the social impacts of porn in such narrow terms. If you read my recent piece about what I have come to call “Cyborgsexuality,” you know my thesis was not “porn is maybe bad because it reduces demand for real sex with real women,” though there is a case to be made that it does, but “porn (or, more broadly, digital media) is maybe bad because it seems capable of disrupting a man’s ability to maintain lifelong intimacy with a real woman.”

There’s a parallel set of concerns with respect to child porn. Even if Aella is correct in her belief that widely available AI child porn will not create more demand for sex with real children, it might nevertheless disrupt men’s capacity to maintain intimacy with children. This might sound like a strange statement if you think of intimacy as inherently sexual. But fatherhood, for example, involves a whole lot of intimacy with children that is non-sexual in nature.

According to Aella, there are “deep” and “shallow” fetishes. As she tells it, when someone has the sort of pedophilia that would lead them to actually molest a kid, then it is likely a “deep fetish,” which is to say “hardwired” or “innate.” It is therefore unlikely to be a byproduct of viewing CSAM and thus we don’t have to worry about widespread availability of AI child porn producing people who endanger real children. To the extent that AI child porn increases the number of people who get off on CSAM, she maintains they will end up with “shallow” fetishes for kids: that is, fetishes that aren’t so intense someone would risk jail time to act on them. To be clear, she doesn’t think this will happen very often anyway, based on what I would consider some very questionable assumptions. But the point here is that she is open to the idea that widespread access to AI child porn might actually stoke sexual interest in children in some unknown number of people—she just doesn’t think those people will actually molest kids. (Amazingly, she uses a quote from a Louis C.K. bit, about how he loves Mounds bars but would stop eating them if threatened with jail and intense social disapproval, to help illustrate her point. As we all know, Louis C.K. is a model of sexual restraint.) As such, according to Aella, we can distract the dangerous pedophiles with AI child porn and the only downside is that we’ve got more men with mild child porn fetishes that they won’t struggle to keep in check.

Okay, convenient if true. But let’s say it is. My follow-up question would be: Even if a man with a “shallow” fetish for child porn won’t molest a kid, can he maintain an intimate relationship with a child? Can a man with a mild fetish for child porn, say, bathe his 4-year-old daughter? Basically every night, my 6-year-old climbs into bed with me and my husband and snuggles with us. Can a man with a fetish for child porn snuggle with his 6-year-old? Can he help his children change into their bathing suits at the pool? What if his daughter is one of those toddlers who is always taking their clothes off and running around the house naked: will they have to keep their clothes on in order to help keep daddy’s child porn fetish in check? That is, will his CSAM fetish come to dictate the parameters of his relationship with his children? If you are capable of understanding the web of human relationships that make up a society as more than a sexual marketplace, then it becomes clear that these are important questions to answer. You can stunt a man’s capacity for fatherhood without turning him into a child molester.