In the first part of this editorial, I discussed hentai, what parents can do to protect their children from hentai if they wish to do so, and what webmasters who run hentai sites should do to assist parents in making this choice.

In the conclusion of this editroial, I will discuss the one group that has taken hentai as a cause, as something to be eradicated from the Net.

As with all editorials, if you have comments, feel free to email me. Even if you disagree with me, I may post your comments so long as they are civil.

The group I am talking about of course, is Hentai Free.

To a lot of people, Hentai Free is simply a group of people who do not like hentai on the Internet. They feel hentai is in an environment that makes it easy for children to access the material, and they have taken it upon themselves to rectify the situation.

If Hentai Free was simply a collection of like-minded souls, I would not have a problem with them. If Hentai Free were a collection of like-minded souls that had come together under a set and clearly-defined purpose, I would not have a problem with that either. However, this has not happened.

Through various statements, that were culled from the Hentai Free mission statement, that was obtained by the people at hentaiFREEfree, one discovers that Hentai Free hides behind a curtain of statements that at the best, are not quite accurate. On the surface, they sound like an innocent group with a good cause. If you dig a bit however...

Hentai Free's mission statement says: "hentai FREE is a club for hentai HATERS - those of us with a sense of morality and decency, who don't want little kids stumbling on what we believe to be perverted, disgusting junk!"

Well, if one takes out the insult in the above statement, you have: "hentai FREE is a club for hentai HATERS who don't want little kids stumbling on what we believe to be perverted, disgusting junk!" Straight, and to the point. And honest! I can agree with this, in fact. I too don't want little kids stumbling onto hentai sites, and that's why I support the little-mentioned move of simply posting a content warning. I would suggest to you that 99% of the hentai or porn sites that I have visited have a warning somewhere on their front page that says that the site contains adult material and most fo them also provide a link out, just in case you accidently typed .com instead of .gov after www.whitehouse.

However, I can not get past the insult that Hentai Free puts in their mission statement. "those of us with a sense of morality and decency..." What gets me is that these people make a blanket value judgement about a group of people they do not know, namely those people who have hentai libraries, or have a hentai website, or simply enjoy looking at hentai. All of you have no morals or decency in these guys' books.

Until the time that I am convicted for raping fifteen four-year olds on a school playground as well as plowing into an old-folks home with a truck after consuming mass quantities of adult beverages, I consider myself to have the decency and morals of most normal people in this country. Not saying I would actually do any of the stuff I just said, but a friend of mine recently made the proposition that we all have a negative side, and it is resisting of the urges of that darker half of all of us that determines whether or not we are "decent people". Your morals are the motives why you don't give in to those impulses

So I say to you that Hentai Free is saying that people who are not in their cliche, people who like hentai are mired in debauchery, and are akin to people like Andrew Cunanan, John Wayne Gacey, Jeffrey Dahmer, Kip Kinkle, Eric Rudolph, Timothy McVey, Eric Harris, and Dylan Klebold. Hentai Free is saying that if you like pictures of anime women naked that you are guilty of a crime as serious in scale as the Oklahoma City bombing, or Columbine.

Does that make sense?

The hentaiFREEfree article then quotes the Hentai Free mission statement again: "The purpose of this site is simple. Kids (and unsuspecting adults!!!) can access hentai very easily on the Internet. *We don't like that.* We have clean websites, and we're proud of that, and we're out to encourage more people to stand up for what a lot of us wish in private: a cleaner, kid-safe Internet."

The hentaiFREEfree editor makes the point that the Internet never was, is not, and never will be safe for children, and I agree with this. Again, this is where the parents have responsibility, where they have control, where they have the choice to make. Do they allow their children onto hentai sites? If so, no amount of kid-proofing the Net, if such a thing could even be done at all, could protect children.

To continue, the mission statement: "This is a quiet protest to indecency and lack of morality in the world and on the Web."

This seems to fly in the face not only of some of the mission statement's own more demonstrative statements, "*We don't like that.*" as well as protests of every stripe and color. When was the last time you saw news footage of a "quiet protest". I don't think you can say you have because most protests involve large gatherings of lots of people marching up and down streets yelling protest slogans and carrying huge banners. Even hunger strikes are often covered by the press, thereby giving them much more noise than they otherwise might have.

I am not saying that protests are bad. However, characterizing anything as a "quiet protest" is ridiculous.

Which brings us to the final mission statement quote in the article. "There's no way to get all perversion off the Internet, but at least people can see our banners and know that OUR sites are safe!"

Safe according to whom? I consider NIN sites to be safe, but Kip Kinkle, the teen who killed his parents and then several kids at his school was influenced by the recent production of "Romeo and Juliet" and the NIN song "The Becoming". It appears that neither of those things were "safe" for Kip Kinkle, yet Romeo and Juliet is a Shakespeare classic, and millions of people are fans of NIN, and I submit to you that people like Kip Kinkle are a miniscule minority of those fans.

The Hentai Free mission statement also mentioned the Bible, and used it to back their case. However, perhaps these people are not familiar with the phrase knowing a person "in the biblical sense". Perhaps their Bible does not contain verses like Genesis 16:4, Genesis 19: 30-38, or 2 Samuel 11:2,3. Perhaps their Bibles are missing the entire book of Song of Solomon, or Matthew 1:18. The point I am making here is that the act of sex itself is neither immoral nor indecent. In fact, the act of sex is explicitly mentioned several times in the Bible. Should the Bible be banned as immoral or indecent?

However, as the hentaiFREEfree editor stated, Hentai Free will serve those people who believe that sex is bad, perhaps those people agree with the feminist who at one point claimed that all sex, even the sex within marriage is rape.

These people sound like they wish to intrude themselves into the domain of other people and make them do or say things that they ordinarily wouldn't. They want hentai sites to be banished or people who like hentai scorned as sexist or pedophiles.

All of this sounds like just another form of rape to me.

Artemis

(comments welcome - please email me at [email protected] and I will post your comments here as well.)