Can you support de-stigmatizaing pedophilia without supporting the de-stigmatizion of actual child-adult sex?

[John_Doe]

Do you think that, in practice, the argument against the stigmatization of pedophilia requires rejecting the idea that child-adult sex is intrinsically bad? I've always been of the view that a physical attraction to prepubescent children has nothing to do with cognitive development or ethical ideas about sex with cognitively less developed partners who supposedly cannot meaningfully consent (i.e. one can fantasize about people who never hit puberty and look as though they are children despite being 20+ years old with full adult cognition). In practice, most people are probably not going to separate someone from what they look like (unless maybe we're talking about a fictional character in a movie or tv show but even then, maybe only because you haven't met the actors or actresses who play them). This is still what I lean toward; imagine identical twins, one of them was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth or for whatever reason has some developmental disorder that makes attaining adult cognition impossible but the other is completely normal. An attraction to the normal one, as an adult, logically implies an attraction to the one with childlike cognition if they are physically indistinguishable but no one would criticize a man for being physically attracted to the normal one which would imply being attracted to the underdeveloped one (although that might be because most people won't necessarily be honest about the fact that attraction to one would imply attraction to the other, there seems to be this general socially acceptable pretense where the attitude is that you have some direct control over who you're attracted to and should fit that to match ethical considerations), if they would criticize him for being openly attracted to both. I don't doubt that my position works logically but maybe you could argue that, practically, it's somewhat besides the point since the majority of people a pedophile will fantasize about will be actual real-life children or even fantasy children with child minds (many people will prefer psychologically childish partners), there might be some fictional adult-in-a-child's-body characters or s/he might use their imagination to create such a person but maybe it's unrealistic to expect him or her to not fantasize about actual real-life children.

I don't know what I'm looking for, to be honest I think my view makes sense (even if the point about it being unrealistic to expect them to not fantasize about real-life children is true and I think it is, there are adults people are expected to not be attracted to even though they share the same features with adults whom it is acceptable to be attracted to. AI might also make fantasy adult-in-a-child's-body characters more common), I'm just curious about what your thoughts are.

[Kierkegaard]

I think the anti-MAP people actually have a valid point when they say that even anti-C maps simply cannot ever be trusted. If someone claims to be strongly and exclusively sexually attracted to children, and you happen to believe that sex between an adult and a child is one of the most fucked up and evil things a person can do, will you ever trust the person who wants to fuck your kids just because they swear they know it's wrong and won't do it? Of course not.

If someone I knew admitted to me that they have consistent reoccurring fantasies about wanting to do something I consider to be deeply evil/psychotic like torturing and killing small puppies or whatever, and this is a stable and lifelong aspect of their identities that will always be with them, but they know this is wrong and don't really want to hurt any animals, I might wish them well and advise them to get therapy, but I'm certainly not gonna just casually accept this and carry on being friends with them and letting them visit my house with my pets in the room. I'm gonna be weirded the fuck out at best. If they claimed society needs to normalize people having animal masochist serial killer fantasies I would view this with a great deal of suspicion.

This is basically how normal people see "non-offending" pedophiles. They might sympathize with them in the sense they think their situation is tragic and unenviable, but a tragic villain is still a villain. No amount of performing self-hatred and promising never ever to act on their desires is going to really be convincing. Hell, I don't even buy it when anti-c pedos claim to be totally non-offending including child porn. There's just no way these people aren't occasionally looking up nudist photos or shota/loli at the very least. Any pedophile who claims to have never once done a single illegal thing on the internet is probably lying. I just flat out do not believe them.

And even one "offense" is enough for these sympathetic, open-minded normies to go from "get this poor soul therapy!" to "woodchipper, NOW!". Every single social media post from a normie sympathizing with non-offending peds and supporting therapy over criminalization always includes the mandatory disclaimer "...unless they actually hurt a child, of course, then they're irredeemably evil and subhuman and we should throw the book at them". A single act of looking up child erotica counts as "hurting a child" in most people's eyes. Ergo, vir-Peds who definitely have secretly looked up child erotica once or twice before live in a constant state of denial and anxiety that others will discover they're not actually the pure and innocent "non-offending" pedo they claim to be.

Anti-contact pedos who think touching kids is fundamentally evil but still want to be accepted by society despite having desires they themselves acknowledge to be evil are walking contradictions. Their critics are essentially correct that we simply can't have normalization of the desire without normalization of the act itself.

This is also why I think activism based around the idea of pretending to be anti-contact at first and slowing working our way up to pro-contact activism is flawed. It's backwards. We should be de-stigmatizing the sex act from the get go. Normalization of sex in general is the most important first step. The more sex-friendly and less puritan society becomes, the less special of a category sex occupies in our psyches, the less outrageous it will seem to begin including children in the realm of sexual play. All of the arguments around children "not being able to consent/understand sex" rely on sex being attributed with a special, puritan mystique, a categorical difference and naughtiness. Get rid of this special metaphysical significance attributed to sex and you get rid of 99% of the justification for ostracizing deviant sexual behaviors.

[Not Forever]

I believe that sexuality is a very complex subject, and that the motivations behind an attraction are specific to each individual. It can be directed toward a body, a way of behaving, a certain personality, a certain scenario, and so on. Love can also be platonic and not sexual in nature, and so on.

From this point of view, I believe that the destigmatization of attraction—and not of the act—is possible, when the focus is on romanticism, on a kind of love similar to parental love but with different nuances.

This makes me think of other attractions, usually labeled as negative but, I believe, more socially accepted: incest and rape.

Incest is a situation, a scenario, that many people like, even if they have no real sexual desire toward their relatives. Something that, if represented in a video game or a movie, some might find extremely romantic or even erotic. But it in no way implies a real-life action.

Rape, on the other hand, is more about simulation.
There are many fantasies about experiencing it or performing it, but those who have fantasies about experiencing it would rarely want to experience a real rape, and when this fantasy is enacted, it's often through roleplay, simulation, acting, and so on… you read about it; there are many stories dealing with this theme that lead people to fantasize about it. But I don’t see much stigma around these fantasies, or at least not excessively (perhaps some feminist movements problematize it, or there are concerns regarding adolescents’ use of pornography as being considered miseducational, but nothing more).

So, in my opinion, it is possible to destigmatize it.
For me, it should be destigmatized as a whole, though I accept the idea that perhaps this is an excessively utopian view at the moment.