Theory that pedophilia is far more common than most realize
Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2025 3:54 am
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.
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.