You are an AI assistant.
system
Is it ethically coherent for Germany to criminalize cartoon depictions of childlike characters in sexual contexts while allowing actual 16-year-olds to appear in mainstream pornography?
user
The deeper incoherence is not in the age cut-offs the German state chooses, but in the fact that the state pretends to protect “youth” while preserving a market in which human bodies—however old the law labels them—are bought and sold as commodities.  

1. The commodity is what matters under capitalism, not the human. Whether the image is a drawing or a photograph, once it is merchandised the juridical system treats it as property whose exchange must be regulated. The moment a sixteen-year-old can sign a modeling release and be paid, the act is legal; the drawing, which bypasses wage labor and cannot be taxed as easily, is banned. The morality invoked is only the morality that keeps the circuits of profitable sex-capital running smoothly.

2. Age-of-consent rules have never been about “maturity” in the abstract. They track the boundary where the ruling class believes it can still extract surplus-value from adolescent labor-power without risking open political backlash. Sixteen is the compromise German capital struck: old enough to be legally exploitable in factories, call centers, and on OnlyFans; young enough that the illusion of protection can still be marketed to anxious parents.

3. Both the cartoon ban and the 16-year-old porn clause serve the same repressive function: they individualize a social pathology. By hunting for “obscene” drawings or blaming “groomers,” the state deflects attention from the structural truth—that every commodity society converts human attributes (labor, sexuality, creativity) into things that can be owned. The scandal is not which images are prohibited; it is that sexuality itself is mediated through the cash nexus.

4. A workers’ state would not busy itself moralizing over images while leaving the productive relations untouched. It would:  
   - Abolish the commercial sex industry outright, ending the buying and selling of any sexual performance, photographic or live.  
   - Guarantee material security to every adolescent—food, housing, education, cultural facilities—so that no one must sell images of her body to survive.  
   - Replace bourgeois “consent” law with social safeguards decided collectively by youth organizations, women’s leagues, and worker councils, anchored in the principle that no one can contract away bodily integrity when the alternative is poverty.

So the apparent contradiction dissolves once you see that capitalist law is not failing its own ethical standard; it is faithfully applying the standard of capital. Ethics becomes coherent only when the social order no longer needs a porn market—when people are no longer forced to rent out skin, pixels, or muscle power to live.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Is it ethically coherent for Germany to criminalize cartoon depictions of childlike characters in sexual contexts while allowing actual 16-year-olds to appear in mainstream pornography?
user