Pedobear, Portland, and another reason to go smashy smashy

[sam]

Have you heard of the pedobear? He's an ironic mascot for internet child rapists and he's a hot new internet meme. I'm not counter-culture cool enough to find out about these things until they appear on the I Can Has Cheezburger network.

http://www.urlesque .com/2009/11/06/pedobear/

A Beginner's Guide to Pedobear, the Internet's Favorite Pervert

Are you offended by the bear pictured here? You should be! He's Pedobear, an Internet mascot for pedophilia. Sort of. It's not like actual pedophiles go around IDing each other by little badges with a teddy on them. If they did that, they'd probably have a lot of awkward run-ins with preschool teachers. Pedobear is just a character made to mock pedophilia. And like anything interesting on the internet, he's often feared and grossly misunderstood.

No one knows who first drew Pedobear. According to Encyclopedia Dramaticca, the satirical NSFW version of Wikipedia, Pedobear came to the American forum fourchan from its Japanese counterpart 2chan, where he was just named "Bear." (In Japan, says the Encyclopedia, it would be redundant to put "pedo" in front of anything.) He's a bear (resembling a naked Paddington bear with a Grateful Dead neck fringe) who loves little girls. He has enemies, tastes, and methods. The brilliance of the Pedobear mythos is that none of it is apparent in the picture of this innocent picture of a teddy. That's why, as seen below, he ended up in ads for a children's costume store.

Pedobear is a shorthand for saying, "You're being creepy about a kid." If anyone on fourchan posts a picture of a questionably young looking girl in a sexy pose, someone will inevitably reply with a pic of Pedobear. Many times, Pedobear is added to a picture to point out real-world sexualization of presexual kids, but it's alternately shown as an acknowledgment of being inappropriately attracted to a child.

The ultimate coup for a fourchan meme is subversive or accidental use in the real world, and Pedobear's gotten it. To the initiated, any picture with a bear and a kid will look hauntingly like a Pedobear attack. But thanks to Pedobear's innocent appearance, the actual bear can show up in ads for businesses that didn't know better.

In a since-deleted news clip, a Portland costume store was interviewed after inadvertently printing Pedobear in a flyer. The news station interviewed I Can Has Cheezburger president Ben Huh, who explained that Pedobear is just an off-color joke, but the shopkeeper had to apologize for all who might be offended. Pedobear's like a curse word: A picture of a teddy bear is only as offensive as the meaning it's given.