Theory that pedophilia is far more common than most realize

[TheOtherKindofPride]

I've had this idea floating around my head for awhile that pedophilia isn't just a hyper-niche subset of extreme people, but is a very common desire that pervades most, if not basically all, humanity to varying degrees, but most either don't realize it, don't acknowledged it or otherwise intensely suppress and hide it. So on the surface, so long as no large-scale in-depth testing is done, like a penile plethysmography exam on a large enough set of random men, or especially men who claim to be strongly agaisnt pedophilia, people can pretend they have literally and absolutely zero sexual attraction to what their culture considered to be a "child", even just one day before they become an "adult". But I think there are various "tells" in the way people think, behave and the things they create that make it pretty obvious that pedophilic feelings, desires and sentiments are actually not just more common than most people realize, but are actually very common in general. Some are pretty obvious once you go looking with this mind set, but some might be more conspiratorial.

One way that I think society gives away the game is that sexual interest between adults tends to lean more towards acting along the lines of an adult/child relationship than truly being an adult/adult relations. The most obvious tells are women calling their male partners "Daddy" and enjoying being picked up and carried, and men tending to prefer women who are smaller than them, more demure and shy and who will act in more silly and child-like ways. Basically women who indicate they are more dependent, helpless and immature than a truly equal fellow adult would be. Almost like the average man wants to see their female partner as a child in some ways. But it's similar for women, where they tend to enjoy having a male partner that is bigger than her, more powerful, more responsible and who is not just able but willing to manhandle her to some degree, like picking her up to take her somewhere or moving her around on the bed like she was a lightweight doll, or a child. Basically, a man who reminds her of an idealized father figure, specifically from the standpoint of her childhood self. In other words, many/most women want to feel like a child with her father again, but with the inclusion of sex. I don't think this is something that just suddenly happens when she reaches adulthood, I think this is a continuation and refinement of her feelings from when she was actually a child, she just didn't have the mental/emotional understanding of it that she has later on in life, likely more due to a lack of early education/training about this than some innate genetic limitation. I find it hard to imagine that this phenomena, among some others, would have become so ubiquitous and mainstream in various cultures around the world, at least English speaking ones, without it having some at least correlative, if not causative, connection with at least incest (which is suspiciously commonly considered to be on the same level as pedophilia if not directly related to it, no pun intended), if not pedophilia directly. It would be like looking at Palworld and genuinely believing that it has literally nothing to do with Pokemon. (inb4 controversy drama. I think both should exist and should not hamper each other in any direct way. let artists do art.)

Another angle to this is the art and media people tend to create. Not even including drawn/animated art, but even live action art tends to lean more towards younger ages, especially when sex is involved. In the context of older folk, like mid-30's to 50's, sex between them is more like an afterthought, a technicality of them being in a relationship, like the creators of these works are obligated to acknowledge that people these ages have sex in order to relate to real life but dont particularly carer to detail it, unless its plot-relevant or a joke. But where the actual, wild, passionate sex is intricately detailed, it's usually people more in their mid-early 20's, or even actual minor-aged characters (often not directly depicted and only if the actors are adults pretending to be high schoolers). Exceptions to this are movies like cuties that depicts actual minors, who are minors in real life not just pretending to be on screen), which causes a major backlash. But I suspect that this backlash is more because it forced people, who have denied the truth to themselves for so long, to directly confront their hidden feelings, and that terrified them existentially, so they hid their eyes and tried to ban what makes them feel ways that they refuse to understand. It's like someone in a cult who has denied themselves the right to enjoy something that is completely fine and natural to enjoy, so they have to aggressively force themselves to performatively hate it in a desperate attempt to not give in to temptation and to prove to their social circles that they don't secretly like it, like religious folk aggressively claiming to hate homosexuality turning out to be secretly gay.
Rev Says Desu had a common segment on his channel called "your likes are public" that helped further hammer this idea home for me. basically he'd discover someone bashing lolicon, and go through their liked posts on Twitter and find them hypocritically liking art and posts that they claimed to be against) I think the intense hatred towards anything to do with pedophilia is more indicative of internal shame or performatively distancing themselves from the idea of them having these feelings than a genuine disgust response over something they honestly hate in their heart-of-hearts.

If you include animated art, especially anime, it gets even more suspect. The relatively extreme prevalence of anime, and the almost normalization of lolis, at least less sexualized lolis like Vtuber models, makes it seem like those who are exposed to at least subtly sexualized child-like images are more likely to accept it and even embrace it than when they are exposed to the more extreme version of it, like intense loli porn. It's not so much people genuinely dislike it, but that coming into contact with something so much closer to pedophilia than they currently are makes them react like they would if they were still learning to swim and someone was trying to push them into a lake. It's not that swimming in a lake is inherently bad, or that they'll never enjoy swimming in a lake under any circumstances, but more that they are not yet ready to swim in a lake, so the idea of doing so is scary and any attempt to make them do so will be met with fear and even aggression. More of a self-preservation mechanism than a true disgust/hate response. lolicon is "safe pedophilia" for those who have not yet grown accustomed to their true feelings and desires. I think that's part of why it's so popular, because it lets people safely express their real feelings and eases people into what they truly want to be: a pedophile who acknowledges and accepts what they are. With just a few tweaks, a pedophile can feel safe and among trusted company if they just keep there desires honed more on lolis instead of real children. I'm pretty confident that most men, and probably many women, are like this. These drawings allow both men and women to vicariously experience what it would be like to be sexual with a minor (mostly for men), or what it could have been like to be sexual with an adult as a minor (mostly for women)

If the average person was really that much against pedophilia, they would not engage in various behaviors that are almost obviously "pedo-coded", like dressing their kids in outfits that are clearly attractive while acting like its "just cute", or so openly expressing sexual behaviors that are deeply steeped in child/adult dynamics, like man being bigger and stronger than the woman, or the use of the term "Daddy".
Once I started shifting from the mindset that pedophilia is a niche but potentially harmless behavior that shouldn't be so demonized, to thinking that society is secretly expressing pedophilic desires and most people are just doing a combination of lying and self-denial about it, I've found it harder and harder to not see things form this perspective. It's like when you notice that the towers in the artwork for Aladdin look like dicks or how the clouds in that one scene of the Lion King spell out the word "sex". Once you notice it, it's hard to stop noticing it. And when you keep noticing it over and over, it starts to make you wonder if the surface layer of what people put out there is actually all there is, or if their is a deeper layer to it. After all, isn't that the basis of science and psychology, that our initial surface-level understanding of things is just the tip of the iceberg?
It might seem a bit conspiratorial, but then again, Epstein's island would have been a conspiracy theory until it turned out to be true. Declassified government experiments were conspiracy theories until they were confirmed. Is it so much a stretch to assume that what people tell you their sexual desires are might not be what they really are, or might not be all they have going on deeper inside?

what are some hypocritical and seemingly paradoxical ideas that you've noticed from anti-pedophiles, and general society, relating to pedophilia? The one about people suggesting that they can be attracted to an 18 year old on their birthday and that's fine, but they'd never be attracted to a 17 year old one day away from their 18th birthday, is a wild one for me, but one they absolutely must claim is true in order to not completely throw the idea of the age of consent into chaos.

[CantChainTheSpirit]

I 100% agree and have always expressed the same view.

I think the ancient Greek view is more accurate. They didn't really follow the idea of sexualities, you were either sexual or you weren't. Whether your partner was a man, woman, older, younger, any mix, it was fine, it was you being sexual. In the modern world of science we feel this need to categorise everything, and this creates false partitions that don't really exist in nature.

Take age for example, age is real, but bioilogically and intellectually, not all 10 year olds are equal, we all develop differently and form different views, needs, wants, tastes.

The idea of kids are not sexual is wrong, it just is. When we had kids we were shocked that our kids started to masturbate so young but we were told by experts and other parents that it's normal, most kids do. When I was a kid I was very sexual, I was horny more as a kid than as an adult and yes, I had experiences with adults as a kid and enjoyed theym, but I was aware of sex and touching myself long before that happened.

The idea that adults attracted to kids is a small minority or just men is wrong, I'm sure. Most porn gravitates towards younger females, that's why in the industry it's mostly young women making their fortunes while they have their youth. The same for escorts. Now people say "yer well that's true for young adults and teens but guys might like a 15 year old girl but not a preteen of 8". Sorry, I don't believe that either because young girls are often employed to add glamour to adverts, it's no secret that plenty of guys had a thing for Hermione even in her early films and moms cover their preteen daughters up because they know guys look and desire.

We've created a fantasy world where pedophiles are an unusual minority, kids are innocent, men are all predators but it's nonsense. And there are plenty of female maps, I know several personally and believe that the reason there's less awareness of female maps is because female maps act exactly like women are expected to. They nurture young girls and boys, enjoy their compay, love to hold them, a friendly kiss, even a hug with touches but that's fine, it's a woman thing. And when women are caught having sex with young guys it's often met by guys saying "lucky lad, I never had teachers like that" and women shaking their head as if they've never had their head turned by an attractive boy or girl.

[Not Forever]

Recently I saw a woman who deals with video games make a video about an event where some upcoming games were presented. One of them featured a very young girl accompanied by… I don’t remember, an adult, a robot, an animal, or something like that. I wasn’t interested. She made a very brief comment, with a sort of small, not-too-exaggerated gesture about what would happen to that character with rule 34. She didn’t say it explicitly, maybe only a few people noticed, but somehow I understood we were on the same wavelength.

I tend to think of her as an “anti”, even though she’s always been soft on the subject—just brief hints, but always with a negative tone.

But I wonder, is it possible that an anti thinks about this stuff more often than I do? I even frequent a forum of that kind. I don’t want to attribute anything to her. But it’s kind of funny.

[John_Doe]

what are some hypocritical and seemingly paradoxical ideas that you've noticed from anti-pedophiles, and general society, relating to pedophilia? The one about people suggesting that they can be attracted to an 18 year old on their birthday and that's fine, but they'd never be attracted to a 17 year old one day away from their 18th birthday, is a wild one for me, but one they absolutely must claim is true in order to not completely throw the idea of the age of consent into chaos.

I read this awhile ago, but I think a lot of it is very insightful. 'Hypocritical and seemingly paradoxical ideas' seems to be a different topic/thread, in my view, than 'tells' that indicate pedophilic interest that people try to beat out of themselves through repression and moralizing or simply hide from the rest of the world. The most basically inconsistent idea, the one that I ultimately care about, is that adults who want children to be asexual on principle still value their own sexual pleasure, or the distinction that we might make between doing x in the service of a child's happiness (buying them a gift, playing with them, taking them to the fair, throwing a birthday party for them, ) and allowing them to experience pleasurable sexual or erotic intimacy with an adult in some hypothetical scenario where that would not lead to any long-term trauma (i.e. the fundamental distinction between sexual and non-sexual happiness).

I've heard this a lot, the idea that sex with a 17-year-old a day away from 18 is deeply taboo but suddenly becomes fine when they hit 18, but I don't think that's a common attitude. I think most people; or at the very least many, many people (but no, honestly, I think most people are against this), deeply frown on middle-aged men dating 18-year-olds. The ones who frown on men in their 20s, 30s, 40s, etc. dating 17-year-olds generally also frown on them dating 18-year-olds. Just because people don't want a 40-year-old dating a 20-year-old to be illegal (I'm sure some people do) doesn't mean that they don't deeply oppose it on a moral level (which, I've mentioned this before, is one thing to consider with the ultimately libertarian approach to MAP issues. Ideologically consistent libertarians can despise minor attraction and age gap relationships, they just have to tolerate a minor's right to engage in sex with who they want to. In an anarchist society, parents could be the ones to enforce an age of consent; i.e. 'as long as you're living under my roof, no dating older people'). The idea should be that adulthood is developed by 18 but many people treat 18 as the age when adulthood begins to develop.

I suspect that it is normal for men to be at least mildly attracted to prepubescent girls but I'm not as confident about that as I am about their being attracted to young teens. Men (maybe especially) seem wired to look for youth in a partner but there are limits to that, in the same way that a woman might want a tall man but not necessarily one who's 10ft and the average straight man might like a woman with large breasts but at some point it would become a caricature. If we logic this from an evolutionary point of view, youth to the point where one isn't capable of reproducing might be too far (and even when a girl has her first period, it apparently takes around 2 years for them to become regular/for her reproductive system to fully mature. Apparently, around 80% of a girl's menstrual cycles in the first year after menarche are anovulatory. Barring medical abnormalities, 12 is as young as a girl can be while still being sexually mature but, in the absence of any medical abnormalities, a girl might not reach sexual maturity until 16. I've been thinking about starting a thread asking people whether or not they think adulthood should be determined by the ability to reproduce, or at least the standard age when all 'medically normal' people are capable of reproducing, or full-blown sexual maturity).

Telling people to repress their attraction to people (to anyone) in terms of fantasy at least is one of the harshest things in the world to me. I honestly don't understand how people rationalize shaming adults for being attracted to prepubescent children, never mind younger adults, even if they shouldn't act on that attraction. How damaging would that have to be that every time you see someone you're insanely attracted to, that you instinctively want to be with so badly, you have to mentally discipline yourself against fantasizing about them and view that source of pleasure as something that's shameful. I absolutely would die on the hill that stigmatizing pedophilia itself, and the idea that child-adult sex is intrinsically bad, is immoral.

People have preferences when it comes to hair color, gender, etc. It shouldn't be surprising that they will have age preferences too.

[Curson]

Whatever. I'm tired of people trying to be holier-than-thou speaking about this matter.

Bottom line, pedophilia and "pedophilia" are two different things that people lump together like dumb idiots