Oh, I'm not sure about the irrelevance to US politics, given that it's the sort of thing that brain poisons gender relations, leads to things like troonism, and other associated societal ills, but yeah I just wanted to make sure I understood your point correctly.
You're right there too, and the more I thought about it the more inclined I became to launch into a screed about it here.
So hey! I guess it's screed time. Rev up those autism stickers! (also, archive.ph is still down... will attempt to supplement with
reliable archives once it's back up)
First, because it feels pretty germane,
the father of anime was a huge furfag. In anime, the idea of
BESM, or Big Eyes and Small Mouth, is a meme to the point where it has spawned its own TTRPG system.
Large eyes relative to face size are both a factor in 'cuteness' and an indicator of the age of a depicted individual. This is because
your eyes stay more or less the same size from birth to death. Juveniles have
'standard' bodily proportions that can be identified, which while useful for the screening of abnormalities is also a demonstration of the fact that kids and adults are demonstrably physically different. Juvenile ears are also
disproportionately large relative to head size when compared to adult ears.
Anime takes all these tropes and dials them up to 11. It relies on a concept known as
hypernormal stimuli wherein arousing (psychologically speaking, meaning 'things that activate your brain') stimuli are cranked up beyond their typical maximum for the purposes of capturing your attention-- this is also how Skinner Box games function.
With enough exposure, your mind undergoes
habituation and you stop thinking of certain stimuli as 'novel' and start treating them as mundane. I don't think I need to post pictures of dozens of anime girls for people to see where I'm going with this. As these exaggerated, child-coded concepts are ingrained into the psyche through repeated exposure, they start to become 'the norm'. Combine this with anime's tendency to hypersexualize (as in the above example of Aisha Clan-clan, who is child-coded but has huge fuckin' titties), and you have a recipe for disaster.
I could go on, but I think that's at least enough to demonstrate my point. Anime seems designed from the top-down to normalize the sexualization of children. When paired with the brutal unfeeling machine of internet pornography, the conclusion of where that leads seems inescapable.
