We live in ever more hateful times. This ongoing prosecution, in which a suspended policeman is charged with the newly invented crime of reading erotic short stories, pushes the envelope of feminist sex-hostility another notch forward and inspired the following essay from me.

When words are criminal, so are thoughts. Whether thoughts are written down or not makes no moral difference, and any words that sexualize a minor are criminal. My opinions on "child" sexuality (referring to anyone under 18) are fundamentally criminal, and only technical and resource limitations (mind reading technology is not there yet) prevents the state from convicting and imprisoning me. Notice that the law covers every medium of thought currently accessible to the police, and if they could read our thoughts directly, they would surely do so and base their prosecution on it.

This is the feeling the Norwegian child porn law gives rise to. I fundamentally do not fit in. I seethe with roiling hatred against the state, and the hatred is mutual, because the spirit of the law means I belong in prison and not in society. This conflict cannot be resolved, because it is fundamental, unequivocal, mutual hatred. When all is said and done, we hate each other, society and I.

Let us meditate on what this means, and face the horror of the law. Whether you have any interest in breaking it or not, the atmosphere it creates is true horror. I don't particularly care about the specific short stories that incriminated this policeman, but I care very much about freedom of speech and thought. The Norwegian legislature has decided that your mind is meant to exist in a prison of criminality, shuddering in fear of thinking unclean thoughts, reading or hearing unclean words or, horror of horrors, seeing unclean images. The scumbags in law enforcement will even target their own for perceiving unclean information, for that is how fucking seriously this society takes mind control. This society has decided that not even thoughts are free, with all the horrifying consequences that entails, because we worship the mythical innocence of the child above all other considerations. An innocence which is entirely specious, but that doesn't matter, because it is the idea of childish innocence that these laws are meant to protect, and explicitly so since they also apply to fiction.

This society is incapable of being rational about "child" sexuality, because as soon as a sexual reference is made to anyone under 18, or even according to the law someone who merely appears to be under 18 (as in acting), and even a fictional one, all expression is forbidden and the only possible response is state-enforced violence. If the law is to be taken seriously, we must burn most books and imprison all men and throw our cultural heritage out the window. If a man keeps as much as a diary or a scrap sheet of paper where anyone under 18 is sexualized in any form, he must be surveillanced, hunted down and imprisoned. It is surreal that I am damn near the only one who hasn't internalized the charade, who speaks up against it, who feels seething hatred in the opposite direction than everyone else, whose hatred is directed squarely at me and anyone who transgresses their moronic taboos. Usually the transgressor will himself have internalized the taboos, so the most he will do is claim he "didn't do it" while obsequiously parroting the same sex-hostility.

There are very few living people I respect. It is almost impossible to find a person whose mind has not been captured by these taboos. Nearly everyone supports or at least condones child porn laws, probably more than 99 people out of 100, and if you are one of them I disrespect your puny intellect and hate your guts. You gullible fool who don't understand the monstrosity you enable, at best, or odious creep who has actually internalized the sex-hostility! I know some of you have thought these matters through as carefully as I have, and chosen the other side. In that case I have no illusions of convincing you otherwise, because I know we fundamentally hate each other and it is not based on any misunderstanding.

I ponder the law and realize that my soul is criminal. My country fundamentally wants to imprison me for who I am, a normal man, and other men don't want to stand up against it even though they are just as much targeted themselves. I do not fit in, and don't want to fit into this sick society. I had to pinch myself to check that I am not having a nightmare, because this is so batshit crazy that I didn't seriously expect it to be enforced, even though I knew the law has been intending it for years. As far as I can tell, the dystopia is real. I am literally living in a country where the police can and will persecute you for reading or writing fictional stories. And worse, I am just about the only one who sees anything wrong with it. It is deeply disturbing, and breaks down certain barriers that I thought would protect us. I have never been so scared of the government as I am now, because this is not only hateful, it is absurd. When I was arrested and accused of incitement, there was at least some logic to the prosecution's case, some potentially real evil they were investigating, but this is entirely unaccountable. When the government is capable of persecuting you for the content of your library and personal records/drafts -- including fiction, for God's sake! -- is there any refuge left? Is there any limit to what they might decide next? And when they even target one of their own for such an absurdly victimless reason, what makes you think you are safe?