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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I have a feeling that the sort of "psychological damage" they're worrying about is precisely the fact that "exposure to genitalia" makes kids more likely to violate the social taboo and show their own genitalia, and that makes the anti-pedophile groups (and others of prudish nature) horrified.

The reason that kids are building dongs is because they know it's a taboo. If the reaction of others upon seeing it was not shock but a mere "Oh, a penis. So what?", I doubt they would be doing it.

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> the fact that "exposure to genitalia" makes kids more likely to violate the social taboo and show their own genitalia

How is that a fact? Is there evidence to support it? Looking at less prudish countries, it doesn't seem to be the case.

She/He never said it was. It is being suggested that, er, enthusiastic anti pedophile groups think that. I think that its implied that its a dubious argument at best. None of us can answer for the flawed logic of campaigners with tunnel vision.

Funny thing us that I bet the kids probably wouldn't really comprehend what they were seeing in most Lego-dong cases. I remember walking past some fairly prominent "8===D" style graffitti each day in my school when I was a kid (I was <10yrs) and thinking it was someone's hasty attempt at a "flipping the bird" gesture :D

Great, now you've posted that Lego will have to ban any text messaging features.

They won't ban it, they'll have to hire more people to form Second Penis Prevention Brigade to monitor and censor all the messages in real-time.

Surely this is a solvable AI/computer vision problem. And in text, just search for the regular expression "8=+D".

Your regular expression catches very few penises. A very simple case:

    8------>

But you can easily solve that one. A much harder case would be catching stuff like this:

     _
    / \_________
                |\
                | |
       _________|/
    \_/

And even if you could do some image recognition, I think you'd have a hard time differentiating between stuff like this:

    O
   -|-
    |
   / \

And this:

    O
   -|-
    |_
   / \

...because what makes it a penis is not the shape, but the context, which is very hard to recognize.

Don't underestimate the difficulty of filtering human-generated data.

Also, I can't believe I just spent 5 minutes making ASCII penises.

>The reason that kids are building dongs is because they know it's a taboo. If the reaction of others upon seeing it was not shock but a mere "Oh, a penis. So what?", I doubt they would be doing it. //

To posit an alternate hypothesis children find squirting water innately amusing; hence the whole activity of urinating, particularly with the apparent extra control a boy has over direction, is a point of fascination and so too the organ of this action. Beyond that children realise the differences between themselves and others. A primary difference that is noticeable between boys and girls is genitalia and so they become more fascinating still.

One thing that tends away from your perspective is the apparent Roman fascination with dicks [eg the Greek's Priapus / Roman Mutinus; the fascinus (from which our word fascinate comes)] in a comparatively sexually liberal society.

I guess data from anthropological studies would help to flesh this out; are children brought up in societies where genitals are often displayed less fascinated with them?

A further thought:

>'But the penis grants man "immortality." [...] It is the perpetuator of human existence.' (A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, by David M. Friedman, p.70)

Conflating opposition to child abuse with mere prudishness is very wrong.

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