Liyowo wrote: Sat Aug 09, 2025 10:28 pm
I would call that me!
When it comes to little girls, I would say I find 1 out of 3 attractive, when it comes to adults it's more like 1 out of 1000. The adults I find myself attracted to are the ones that have kept their childhood spirits. They don't have to necessarily look like kids, but the few adults that haven't lost that spark, that still look at life with the same wonder, those shine just as beautiful in my eyes. By the time they reach adulthood, most people's spirit is beaten down by the challenges of life and reshaped by society, rare are the ones who manage to keep that spark alive.
I'm not a child person (I'm not socially competent with them or outwardly warm or caring) but children do generally have personalities that are more or less more attractive to me (not 'romantically,' just in terms of being likable people). One of the things that turns me off so much about adults is their inclination toward intentionally ambiguous hinting or innuendo and I do sometimes wonder if this is a psychologically neotenous trait on my part (on the other hand, you have to perceive ambiguity in order to have an aversion to it which implies cognitive maturation but an inclination toward intentionally ambiguous communication is surely a sign of higher cognition). I can't put into words how subjectively off-putting this is to me (upon reflection I think it mostly boils down to uncertainty-avoidance. The perception of multiple conflicting possibilities; which exist because none of the conceivable possibilities is self-evidently or clearly correct, is what enables the feeling of uncertainty itself; what we feel when we hold conflicting beliefs or desires simultaneously which is a negative emotion because it prevents us from acting/reacting and by extension inherently leads to the felt frustration of desire. There are other reasons though, it's like presenting a monologue about someone that they can hear but aren't able to participate in or address). In context (and again I'm speaking intuitively/subjectively, it's hard to articulate) it can seem 'dehumanizing' and makes reality 'unreal,' it is a completely undesirable and unattractive way to communicate with other human beings, in my perspective.
If it's something positive then the pleasurableness of the information itself can outweigh my aversion to how it's communicated but even aside from using it as a means to be passively-aggressive and the callousness that it might involve there's something fundamentally boring and impersonal about it to me. I am turned off by a lot of the over-the-top cruelty and harshness in women's personalities (callousness about death or extreme suffering, body shaming men who are attracted to them-not that that's the single harshest thing that they can do, it's not, but it makes them less 'sexual' in a way. One of the first things that makes you psychologically less attractive to people is telling them that you're not attracted to them so there's no 'point' in hoping for a connection or even fantasizing about you, etc. When you think of a sex symbol, you think of someone who's 'accessible' to everyone as a fantasy partner in some way) but I can overlook a lot that's directed toward me and not other people I care about with a woman who communicated unambiguously, I just can't have emotional intimacy with someone who communicates with me via hinting and innuendo that isn't "really real," to the extent that they do (and the gaslighting that comes with just flat-out pretending that they haven't communicated what they've communicated, I cannot begin to imagine how that kind of open insincerity could build intimacy between people). Again, it's not even a question of passive-aggressiveness or being callous, part of why I might find it boring and impersonal is because there's something fundamentally cerebral about having to decode and infer hinting/innuendo, to connect the dots in the kind of impersonal way that solving a math problem requires; in a way that prevents an immediate,visceral emotional response (I mean you do have an emotional response to the information that's being communicated but it 'takes you away from the moment' if that makes any sense at all, it's like listening to music and having a direct emotional response to it without cerebral analysis vs. thinking about the instruments that cause the music, how those instruments works, the science behind the sound, etc. instead of just responding emotionally. The rational and emotional minds are arguably at odds and, off topic, the dreaming mind seems to be more emotional and less rational; with the exception of lucid dreaming. I've often wondered if children and non-human animals feel emotion more easily than we do for this reason). I say all this to say that with the exception of maybe preteens children don't communicate through intentional ambiguity (I won't pretend to be well-read on this but apparently research suggests that the capacity to perceive ambiguity or ambiguity in communication; not what I have in mind specifically here, develops between 7 and 11, reaching adult levels typically by 10 or 11).
I also feel little-no social anxiety around small children and they can ask/make awkward questions or statements (that would be insensitive if they were adults) but you don't really have to worry about feeling self-conscious around them the way that you do with adults. I don't have specific people in mind but I have wondered if there might be some people who think of themselves as pedophiles not necessarily because of a raw physical preference for prepubescent children but because children are safer; less likely to harshly reject them, less judgmental in general, etc.
Another idea I've toyed with on some level is that children are more likely to be 'hedonistic,' or open to the hedonistic position, and I don't think that's necessarily true (especially if we're dealing with the older ones) but it has seemed to me at times that younger children would be more likely to agree with the statement that only suffering is inherently bad or that all/everyone's happiness is inherently good because happiness and suffering feel inherently good and bad (even if they don't understand all that this implies or some of the more detailed arguments that build or elaborate on that simple point it's a much simpler worldview than many other ethical theories and I could argue that people who are cognitively less developed are in less of a position to deny what's 'obvious' or clear in a way that people who are higher on abstract 'intelligence' are with their ability to rationalize and think in conceptual ways that aren't tied to concrete experience etc. which is where the idea of 'an idea so stupid that only an intellectual could ascribe to it' comes from. Adults are arguably in a better position to rationalize that pain isn't intrinsically bad even though it feels intrinsically bad and doesn't simulate something other than itself like sensory perception or memory which could misrepresent what they simulate, or to defend projecting value on to other things based on subjective criteria, on the other hand my position requires 'abstracting' the feeling of happiness or pain from the objects of our happiness or pain which is counter-intuitive). Maybe some people would agree with me and argue that it's common sense that the idea that only happiness/suffering matters is a 'childish' position.
I have a mild physical attraction to prepubescent girls 7 and older I guess (when I fantasize about them, which is 'rare,' the novelty or idea of a child partner is part of the appeal) but I prefer women (teens included) physically. We can play around with certain fantasy scenarios that might make real life less interesting. For example, an adult woman with the mind of a 7 year old (I could see that being off-putting to many feminists), or a precociously pubescent/post pubescent 8 year old with breasts and hips (I saw a picture of one or a girl in that age range from the 19th century once, it was removed from wikipedia I suspect to avoid 'sexualizing' children).