Did people always have an irrational hatred towards pedophiles?

[pedo233]

I notice that most people have an irrational hatred towards MAPs, especially pedophiles. If a person, especially a man, admits that they're attracted to children, they'll most likely be threatened or assaulted or told to commit suicide. At the very least, most people will refuse to talk to them or associate with them. People also casually make death threats towards pedophiles, the most famous ones i've seen are "feed pedophiles into a woodchipper" or "the only cure to pedophilia is a bullet" etc.

Did people always react this way towards pedophiles throughout history or is it just a recent thing?

[nicholas_weeks]

Generally speaking, no. It was different, which doesn't mean that there's was no hate or disgust at all, but the way society understood the things was organized in a different way. Adults today see children naked in a film and feel uncomfortable, in old days they were in galleries, and photographers and painters made a living from it.
There's nothing natural in pedophobia.

[PurpleHouse]

People have always had "in" and "out" groups. Human nature seems to be to make groups want to "other" people. But often people don't know they are doing it. Even little social "rules" could be a form of this as they help us to identify "us" people.

In many western societies we have laws against racism and homophobia and so on. So a lot of people have learned not to "other" certain groups at least in obvious ways. This "squeezes" the range of people who can be the "other". Because there are people who do bad things to children, and MAPs would often not disagree with this, it is easy to group MAPs with those people as an outsider group.

It would be nice if people were genuine in valuing other people whether or not there are protections for that group.

[weird.organisms]

I notice that most people have an irrational hatred towards MAPs, especially pedophiles. If a person, especially a man, admits that they're attracted to children, they'll most likely be threatened or assaulted or told to commit suicide. At the very least, most people will refuse to talk to them or associate with them. People also casually make death threats towards pedophiles, the most famous ones i've seen are "feed pedophiles into a woodchipper" or "the only cure to pedophilia is a bullet" etc.

Did people always react this way towards pedophiles throughout history or is it just a recent thing?

I think it's because of the easy access to media. Before then, like in pre-agricultural societies it was commonplace to teach kids early about sex. The Greeks had pederasty. Hunter/gatherer societies would commonly marry very young girls, and in some societies the young boys were taught by their same sex elders about sex then went to live with the women. Sex wasn't seen as a shameful disgusting act and kids had plenty of exposure.

It seems that in modern times, people who are opposed to sexually, another's happiness over their own, and freedom of expression are in panic over kids being idolized and seen as autonomous. If a child is sexual that takes the focus way from the parents, who, if they are toxic/selfishly minded, only want that nice public image for themselves. If their kids are sexual their kids will get the attention instead of them so they repress them to show us what "good moral" people they are.

And they'll lose their source of control, kids-especially their own. They also use kids as their trophies or pawns to show off and brag about their parenting, once the kid grows up, they lose that status and that pawn. SO the only way to keep them that way? infantilize them. Since we live in small isolated communities (nuclear families), there's no one on the outside such as the neighborhood villager or shaman to keep order.

Parents don't equally take of each other's kids. We don't live in small, multifamily communal villages anymore where everyone takes care of another's child, thus the child also never gets much-if any-outside information-maintaining the control their parents have over them. We live in a sex negative society compared to how humans used to live for the most part, and that is because antis took power.

Once they raged and raved over the suppression/empowerment of people of color, women, then homosexuals. It's these people with that mindset of high discrimination and entitlement/lack of empathy that once persecuted these minorities, but now they need a new target...and they've found one. US.

MAps are the new PoC. Maps are the new women. Maps are the new...well you get the idea.

[Meiwaku_Mailing_Girl]

No. Anti pedophilia sentiment is a Victorian WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) invention

[RoosterDance]

I read a rather enlightening article on this topic. I will quote it there.
TL;DR: No. In American and European cultures, the stigma against pedophiles came along with the popularization of the innocent child stereotype. And that became a thing around the mid 1700s. So about 250 years old.

[...]
However, even in our Western civilization, people have not always felt that way. Indeed, the very notion of childhood as a "pure", protected period of life is only a few hundred years old. In ancient and medieval Europe, children were not treated very differently from adults and shared in most of their activities. They did the same work, played the same games, sang the same songs, and wore the same kind of clothes. Medieval painters portrayed boys and girls as miniature adults with sinewy bodies and serious faces. Medieval poets and writers took no special notice of children and mentioned them only in connection with adult experiences and concerns. There was no special children's literature. If they could read at all, children read the classical Greek and Latin authors in the original language. As a matter of fact, there were no special schools for children. Most children had no formal schooling of any kind, but simply worked for their parents, became apprentices to some artisan, or lived as pages with a noble family. Some exceptional children had private tutors, and others attended classes for students of all ages. It was not until the 16th century that certain religious orders founded exclusive schools for the young.


The sexuality of children was not considered a problem. In general, sex was equated with reproduction, and thus people paid little attention to sexual behavior before puberty. As long as boys and girls were unable to reproduce, they remained free of sexual restrictions. It also has to be remembered that nobody made any effort to determine a person's exact age. Children often did not know how old they were, and neither did their parents. In any case, as soon as a girl had her first menstruation, she was believed ready for marriage.

[...]

In the 18th century, physicians suddenly claimed to have discovered a horrible new danger to physical and mental health—childhood masturbation. According to many popular medical books of the time, masturbation was at the root of nearly all human disabilities and diseases, and it could actually prove fatal. Parents endangered the lives of their children by ignoring the practice.

[...]

The crusade against masturbation, which lasted more than 200 years, led to many bizarre educational practices. Their goal, however, was always the same: protecting children against their own sexuality by denying its very existence. Children had to be kept ignorant about sexual matters, and they had to be isolated from all "bad" influences. In fact, they had to be watched and controlled at all times, lest their "purity" became contaminated with "filth." (At the same time, adults saw nothing wrong with child labor. Even in Victorian England, poor children were forced to work more than 12 hours every day in coal mines and factories.) Eventually, childhood masturbation was no longer openly mentioned. Parents and teachers began to act on the assumption that it was nothing but an "unnatural" habit of evil or sick children, and that "normal" boys and girls had no taste for it. By the end of the 19th century, most adults had persuaded themselves that childhood was indeed the one period of life in which the individual was totally free from any sexual urges.

Source.

[Scorchingwilde]

I read a rather enlightening article on this topic. I will quote it there.
TL;DR: No. In American and European cultures, the stigma against pedophiles came along with the popularization of the innocent child stereotype. And that became a thing around the mid 1700s. So about 250 years old.

[...]
The crusade against masturbation, which lasted more than 200 years, led to many bizarre educational practices. Their goal, however, was always the same: protecting children against their own sexuality by denying its very existence. Children had to be kept ignorant about sexual matters, and they had to be isolated from all "bad" influences. In fact, they had to be watched and controlled at all times, lest their "purity" became contaminated with "filth." (At the same time, adults saw nothing wrong with child labor. Even in Victorian England, poor children were forced to work more than 12 hours every day in coal mines and factories.) Eventually, childhood masturbation was no longer openly mentioned. Parents and teachers began to act on the assumption that it was nothing but an "unnatural" habit of evil or sick children, and that "normal" boys and girls had no taste for it. By the end of the 19th century, most adults had persuaded themselves that childhood was indeed the one period of life in which the individual was totally free from any sexual urges.

Source.

Fascinating. I was raised by non-MAPs in a relatively anti household, but they were aware of and supported the idea of private masturbation for people of all ages. One of my parents has a bit of a special interest (they seem somewhat neurodivergent) in medicine and knew about unborn fetuses in the third trimester engaging in sexual self-stimulation. I had no idea that so much of the purity culture antis espouse is derived from something so harmful and absurd as anti-masturbation, or that its origins ran as far back as times when child industrial labor (in a time when said labor was killing healthy adults) was seen as perfectly fine.