Salon Provides Platform for "Non-Practicing" Pedophile

[tapitsbo]

People like to introduce themselves with descriptions of their identity, it's a reflection of politics.

[backtoiam]

like when you have a blog about transgender stuff you want your audience to know where you are coming from right?

[tapitsbo]

I get the impression that it's very much especially important for people who do things like that, yes.

[backtoiam]

I feel so stupid I am getting off the computer and going outside. Sorry for asking stupid questions. I never knew all this. All my gay or whatever friends were whatever they were and we didn't have to know all this. Damn i'm old........

[Project Willow]

Could we start a new thread on political correctness, transmisogyny, and autogynephilia, lest any casual reader think one of us is supporting a pedophile?

Yes! I've actually been working on a somewhat long article about it. Don't know when I'll be at a point to post it though.

[Luther Blissett]

While it is a trend, more often than not I see it maligned by other LGBT people as hokey or immature.

When people do feel the need to label themselves it can function as a declarative means of empowerment or expression that those of us with privilege don't really have to take the time to understand. I think it's all just a matter of comfort or individual need.

[guruilla]

After I read this thread last night, I couldn’t sleep and instead I wrote a bunch of notes for a response. By this morning, it had taken a different turn. Since the turn was away from the OP, I’m going to ignore all the recent posts and go back to the main topic, that of pedophilia-apology, etc. Sorry about that, but at least no one call say I hijacked the thread, right?

I am pretty sure some of what I write will be disturbing, maybe offensive, to some people, so I’ll say first off that none of it is intended to be. Also, further disclaimer, I am not a parent. I don’t have kids, which gives me a lot more emotional distance, some would say disconnect, from the subject matter than someone who does have children. On the other hand, I was once someone else’s kid, and my own psyche is like a map of scars that seems to point to a buried trauma of CSA. So, in another sense, I don’t have any distance at all; or at least, a lot less than I would like.

I didn’t find the OP article disgusting. I didn’t find it very convincing (i.e., moving) either, and since I am already convinced there’s a move towards normalization of child-adult sex, I’m inclined to see it as part of that “program.”

One thing I am sure of, however, is that emotional reactions to pedophilia, while understandable, aren’t going to get us anywhere. It’s not a question to be approached emotionally.

With all due respect to Wombat, rabid, irrational vigilance, in my view, is a contradiction in terms: there is no such thing. How can a rabid and irrational person be vigilant? Put differently, vigilance doesn’t count for much if you don’t know what to be vigilant against (or for).

When it comes to pedophilia there seems to be a massive blind spot, at this thread, in the world, in all of us. It is this: The vast majority of pedophiles are that way because they were sexually molested as children. And, seen from the other side of the circle, it’s likely that the vast majority of children who are sexually molested grow up to suffer from at least some degree of pedophiliac desire, however suppressed, contained, or denied. That fact is central to the harm that is being done here, and inseparable from it.

Pedophilia is not a lifestyle choice, but nor is it a disease, mental or otherwise. It is the result of trauma and psychic fragmentation, of having psychic poisons put in one’s body by other people who had those poisons put in them, by other people, and so on, ad nauseum and all the way back to the original perp. Based on my own experience, which I am not going to get into, those poisons fester away in the unconscious and drive a person to compulsively reenact the original trauma in new, disguised ways, in an unconscious attempt to bring about a resolution. This is so whether they wind up in the role of the abuser or abused (or both). By the same token, the trauma drives a person to seek and find containers to put these poisons into, and so get rid of them, to pass on that psychic charge to someone else, anyone else, but generally someone smaller and weaker, and relieve the hideous pressure in themselves.

So, if we are going to talk about a “No Mercy” policy with pedophiles, why not be really ruthless (and thorough) about it, and lock up all the kids being abused, forever? Better safe than sorry, and all that. No? Well, that’s what I mean by “blind spot.”

Put more gently, what becomes of all the “rabid” concern for children once they have grown up and become adults with neurotic drives that they can’t understand or get free of? At what point do they become undeserving of compassion and understanding?

Most of what I’m saying here is based on self-examination, a gradual healing through identifying and owning my own “pathologies,” and on following them back to their root cause in my still-forgotten past. Roughly. So apologies to anyone if my expression seems blunt or coarse.

I would say that it is as easy (and as difficult) for me to identify with an adult who sexually abuses a child as with the child who is abused. Both positions are equally unpleasant, but for very different reasons. The correspondence is more than just in my own psyche, because one of the ways that a child psychically survives being abused is by identifying with his or her abuser. This isn’t a choice, it just happens. They allow themselves to be “possessed,” in ways both physical and psychic, literal and figurative.

The other problem with violent emotional opposition to, and moral judgment of, pedophiles is that it may actually strengthen the argument for normalizing pedophilia. If the social phenomenon of pedophilia is following roughly the same pattern as the social phenomenon of homosexuality (in the 20th century western world at least), if it’s even a kind of continuation of the same social program, then it pays to think about how homophobia helped accentuate just how “wrong” it was to pathologize homosexuality, how it proved how ignorant and backward anyone was who believed that homosexuality was “unnatural” or unhealthy.

In just a few decades, homosexuality has gone from being a social and moral aberration to being, not just socially acceptable but tacitly, or even openly, encouraged. And acceptance of homosexuality is now enforced, because even to suggest, for example, that homosexual tendencies might be related to psychological trauma (i.e., pathologies) is to be branded a homophobe, which makes you a (hate) criminal.

It’s easy to forget how fast things change, because part of the way things change is that we are discouraged from even thinking in ways that are considered “backward” (i.e., the way our parents or grandparents thought). We are coerced, pressured, even threatened, to forget all “wrong” interpretations and make room for the right ones.

Another thing that struck me, while I was going over this thread in my mind for several hours last night, was that what many people are talking about here, or railing against, is not pedophilia but sadism. There are forms of sexual child abuse that are not sadistic, and there are forms of sadism that don’t involve children, and the two shouldn’t be linked together, any more than “regular” (consensual) sex and sadism should be linked (another overlap with homosexuality, in that it was linked with S & M in the early days of emergence?).

Sadism spans the entire spectrum of human sexuality: it can inform all human relations, whether heterosexual, homosexual, pedophiliac, bestial, or whatever.

IMO, the problem being addressed here, or rather not addressed, is not so much pedophilia as sadistic pedophilia, which is part of a larger problem of sadism, per se, and, as PW pointed out, of the more destructive kind of narcissism/solipsism. I’d suggest going deeper still, into the idea of traumatized sexuality, that is, a libido that’s been polluted and distorted by sexual trauma of one sort or another. It could even include birth trauma and emotional incest, which could be so common in western families as to be the rule (even without Lloyd de Mause’s crazy-making statistics of 45-60% of all children being sexually abused in the West).

Really, the point is that anyone who has had their psyche infiltrated by the poisons of others—i.e., everyone—is going to be using sex to one degree or another to try and get rid of those poisons. This would be regardless of what kind of sex they have and how apparently “functional” they may be, socially speaking. If we want to find a solution to pedophilia, then, here it is: let’s all practice celibacy for the next seven generations! Yay! I guarantee that will solve the problem of pedophilia.

What I think I can also guarantee is not going to happen is that the problem gets sorted out by irrational vigilantes with baseball bats.

Compassionate vigilance of our own internal reactions and patterns of behavior, and the behavior of others, including or especially our children if we have them, would presumably be the place to start.

I get the feeling I may get attacked for this post, because if I am right, this is an area very few of us can think rationally about at all, and chances are that includes me. So I am getting ready to duck if I trigger Wombat’s rabid alter! I’m trusting that people who have read any of my previous posts know I’m not anyone’s apologist, and have a pretty firm stance when it comes to the detrimental effects of sexual abuse.

It’s just that it’s neither a moral nor a social kind of stance, since I see such stances as very much endemic to “the problem.”

[Wombaticus Rex]

With all due respect to Wombat, rabid, irrational vigilance, in my view, is a contradiction in terms: there is no such thing. How can a rabid and irrational person be vigilant?

Aye, it's almost like I was kidding. Perhaps more respect due than I deserved, that.

Anyways, per your observation that the OP wasn't "convincing," let's revisit a small detail.

I was no predator, but that mattered not one iota to these guys; they lumped me together with the child rapists and internet creeps just the same. As I was already out of the closet as a pedo, I was an easy target, becoming one of the first people they profiled on their Wikisposure page, a site devoted to outing online pedos whether they’d broken any laws or not. It has since changed hands but still exists online, buried in a dark corner of the internet, and yep, I’m still on it.

Yeah, and it's pretty instructive: https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Evil-u ... om/Markaba
*note: Encyclopedia Dramatica contains every species of triggering material known to mankind, here be dragons*

They've been keeping tabs on Todd, and his written record offers a much more accurate glimpse at who he actually is. I offer a curated selection below.

Believe whatever you like. I have three little girl friends in my life right now that I see semi-regularly. That's plenty for me. I wish I got to see them more often, but such is life. In addition, I get to see the smiling, happy faces of little girls at work almost every day. Most days that's all I need to feel happy.

...

I am out of the toybox, as I'm sure you're aware, and I look at little girls all the time--every day I say a little cutie or five at work, except today for some reason , but that's okay. Most of my community knows about me, certainly everyone at work, and yet they don't seem to mind too much. I have yet to be attacked or even insulted, and most people seem to like me pretty well.

...

Without me, a 1st grade class would not have had an art teacher one year. It was cut from the budget and the teacher, whom I knew, asked me to volunteer, which I did. What an amazing experience. And, of course, dozens of children would not have had me in their lives to squeeze them and kiss them and love them unconditionally. They would've lacked my help with homework and learning to read and kissing their owies when they got hurt. They would've lacked a great friend and playmate.

The smirk is almost audible.

[guruilla]

Aye, it's almost like I was kidding. Perhaps more respect due than I deserved, that.

I tend to err on that side, esp with rap-star moderators.

Anyways, per your observation that the OP wasn't "convincing," let's revisit a small detail.

To clarify, what I felt was unconvincing was the article itself, i.e., the guy's version of himself. It left me cold and I think if someone was genuinely suffering from unexpressed pedophilia urges, as a victim of abuse, then a piece of that sort would be genuinely disturbing, even heart-breaking. It should be those things.

It occurred to me that no one would write something like that for publication, however. What could there possibly be to gain by doing so? No one wants to feel compassion for a pedophile, and I'm not sure that publicly owning up to such urges is a viable way to purge them, either. If on the other hand you are going for the Grand Prize -- a practicing pedophile angling for acceptance by playing the pity card -- it's worth the risk.

Good find, BTW.

[backtoiam]

I'm not skilled enough to do it. Might not be enough links scattered across enough domains to get a sample. I have no idea. If I had the skills to do the forensics I would try to ferrit out the IP's of Todd's internet posts and see where they map to. May be unproductive, but if it hits, it might sniff something worthy of mention.

[Project Willow]

When it comes to pedophilia there seems to be a massive blind spot, at this thread, in the world, in all of us. It is this: The vast majority of pedophiles are that way because they were sexually molested as children. And, seen from the other side of the circle, it’s likely that the vast majority of children who are sexually molested grow up to suffer from at least some degree of pedophiliac desire, however suppressed, contained, or denied. That fact is central to the harm that is being done here, and inseparable from it.

That contention is not borne out by either the extensive research on the subject, nor my personal experience as a CSA activist for nearly 30 years. The vast majority of survivors do not develop pedophilia tendencies, even to a slight degree, quite the opposite. They develop an idiosyncratic range of sexual expressions depending upon myriad factors including their sex role indoctrination, sex in relationship to perpetrator(s), sex of perpetrator(s), ability to disclose, familial and community response to disclosure, capacity for dissociation, level of identification with perpetrator(s), capacity for resilience, environmental support for resilience, etc., etc. Seriously, there is no scientific basis for your assertion.

I've written about this very subject on this board a few times, and I think that eventually we will be able to pinpoint certain predictable contributing factors. I think the major deciding factor in whether an abused child grows up to be an abuser is a combination of innate and environmental factors that contribute to an internal capacity for handling threats or deficits in attachment. If the capacity is too small, the abused child identifies with the actions of the abuser as part of system of compensation that wards off the pain, which is itself a signal of a life threatening breaches of attachment.

Pedophilia is not a lifestyle choice, but nor is it a disease, mental or otherwise. It is the result of trauma and psychic fragmentation, of having psychic poisons put in one’s body by other people who had those poisons put in them, by other people, and so on, ad nauseum and all the way back to the original perp.

Again, the science on the issue does not bear out your assertion, even though you go on to deftly describe the internal processes by which an abused child may develop the paraphilia. Not all pedophiles were sexually abused as children, although there are studies that show a correlation with other forms of abuse, and attachment disorders. This has always perplexed me because I approached the subject with the same presumptions you've outlined in your post. They make the most sense on many levels, especially to a lot of survivors. However, as the commenter who spoke to narcissism pointed out, the capacity for empathy and how it gets wrapped up in sexual expression is the issue, and sexual abuse is not the only experience or factor that impacts empathy.

The perennial question for me has always been, if pedophilia, or more accurately, child sexual abuse, is as widespread and persistent as it seems to be, what possible functional role could it serve in our species' survival? An idea came to me only recently. Sexual selection is an ongoing battle within every species, with spectacular biological and behavioral outcomes in many cases. Pedophilia impacts mate selection, it arguably lowers female agency in the majority of cases. So it is not out of the realm of possibility that it is a (relatively in behavioral terms) naturally occurring behavior that generally aids the male sex in the war to control mate selection. Well, that's my shallowly informed theory on the matter. Would love to hear what others think.

[tapitsbo]

how would this work to help the men? what would the role played by female child abusers be?

[coffin_dodger]

Desperately trying to find any positives here, whilst trapped in a society that is wheeling towards becoming so desperate and confused that it is literally on the edge of 'anything goes'.

Maybe this highly volatile issue will finally force us to confront what we have collectively and coercively allowed our society to become.

[brainpanhandler]

I've written about this very subject on this board a few times, and I think that eventually we will be able to pinpoint certain predictable contributing factors.

We're soaking in it. I am convinced that Judeo/christian suppression of the natural expression of the libido is the root cause of much of the world's sorrows. We don't teach our kids about their bodies and their desires. We don't even acknowledge our kids' desires. Or if we do, we directly or indirectly make it clear that their desires are 'wrong' and that they should hide their desires and by implication be ashamed. We don't like to acknowledge as individuals how much of our desires, perceptual biases and behaviors are formed by early childhood imprints. What this deep seated anti-nature cultural moralizing produces in the absence of rigid, vigorously enforced and unambiguous rules and taboos is just the opposite of what it claims to create and on the surface seemingly intends. I have the feeling that pedophilia would disappear if we all attended church in the buff. Glib as that sounds, I'm only half joking. Transgression heightens arousal and desire in a culture such as ours. Remove the surface level rules and the transgression disappears along with it's accompanying arousal.

Research question:

Are their or have their been other cultures where pedophilia was much less prevalent or maybe even non-existent? If yes, Why?

The perennial question for me has always been, if pedophilia, or more accurately, child sexual abuse, is as widespread and persistent as it seems to be, what possible functional role could it serve in our species' survival? An idea came to me only recently. Sexual selection is an ongoing battle within every species, with spectacular biological and behavioral outcomes in many cases. Pedophilia impacts mate selection, it arguably lowers female agency in the majority of cases. So it is not out of the realm of possibility that it is a (relatively in behavioral terms) naturally occurring behavior that generally aids the male sex in the war to control mate selection. Well, that's my shallowly informed theory on the matter. Would love to hear what others think.

How much did Reich have right?

A brief overview of some of Reich's thoughts:

http://www.wilhelmreichtrust.org/sexual ... _03_21.pdf

edited to add:

I've not read this. Might need to get a copy.


CHILDREN
OF THE
FUTURE
On the Prevention of
Sexual Pathology

http://www.wilhelmreichtrust.org/childr ... future.pdf

[Elvis]

as the commenter who spoke to narcissism pointed out, the capacity for empathy and how it gets wrapped up in sexual expression is the issue

The pedophilia connection with narcissism is illuminating; I was going to say, "it's difficult to have compassion for something that has no compassion," and in my experience -- and study bears this out -- it's ultimately impossible to really get through to a 'clinical' narcissist. Even the more self-aware ones who can say, "I know I'm like this, an unfeeling jerk. sorry." -- they just can't help it.

I noticed, and agree, that the Salon contributor expressed zero concern for children.


Along these lines of questioning, we all know that among upper class (at least, that we know of) men of Classical Greece it was common and generally accepted for boys, age 15 or so, to be "befriended" by an older male aquaintance who would have his way with the boy, right? Once the boys started to grow pubic hair they were considered no longer attractive. It's clear in the surviving literature that any pleasure (however unlikely) experienced by the boy was unintended and even discouraged. Later as a older man, many would go on to do the same to another boy. Our society has inherited so much from the Greeks -- democracy, money (coins), "philosophy"; the System encourages reverence for Plato, but didn't Plato advocate a caste system ruled by a landed oligarchy (comprising the smartest guys only of course)? so wtf? Is that the real they worship Plato? License to lead? So (my point), I wonder to what extent elite pedophilia has descended, directly, from the broader and oftimes odious 'Greek heritage' so precious and vital to, and deeply ingrained in the Establishment?

Sorry for rambling, but I've been thinking about that, and this thread kind of struck a chord (and again, it's very illuminating).