I wasn’t planning to post to this thread, but I’m constituionally incapable of letting math mistakes slide. It’s not correct to calculate the relative likelihood as shown above. You actually need to know the prevalence of child molesters in the overall population. The answer above is correct as a limiting case, as the fraction of molesters approaches zero, which I sincerely hope is a good approximation. (Please?) If you model it, you find that as molesters become more common in the population, then the relative likelihoods that a given non-pedophile and a given pedophile are molesters become less divergent.
That’s given these assumptions; it’s not clear that these numbers are appropriate to combine in one calculation. The 90% situational vs. 10% preference on molesters is not sourced to any methodology, and I’d suspect that it’s self-reported based on interviews conducted by investigators with convicted offenders. This is almost undoubtedly less reliable than the measures of sexual arousal that were used to acquire this data from the experimental subjects; given our society’s mores, I have to imagine that even a convicted child molester will be reluctant to admit to being a pedophile. The nice round number implies a rough estimate rather than a count, as well. And it doesn’t take much of a slip in this number to start reversing the relationship …
Honestly, I don’t think there’s really data to say one way or the other how dangerous pedophiles are. This sort of information is awfully hard to gather, and most people who do it have a strong preconception of what the results ‘ought’ to be. In the absence of strong results, I’d have to side with the parents who are leery of letting their children associate with admitted pedophiles; there’s no question this is a ‘better safe than sorry’ situation. Which may be something of a catch-22; until there’s sufficient data to support the ‘safe pedophile’ theory, that particular paraphilia will likely remain reviled enough to make it tough to gather reliable data. But I think you may have to live with the things you can’t change, Cesario.
I’m afraid you’re going to need to do better than that. I’m open to having my math corrected. That’s half the reason I provided the full break-down, after all, but your specific criticism doesn’t hold water.
The fact of the matter is that we don’t need to know the fraction of molesters in the general population for this math to be accurate. However many molesters there are out there, their breakdown relative to one another is 10-90 in terms of pedophiles to nonpedophiles. Since nonpedophiles are molesting children out of proportion to the ammount of nonpedophiles in the general population (as my math does clearly demonstrate), the exact numbers of either are irrelevent.
The numbers neither converge nor diverge depending on the total number of molesters in the population. (Though if you’d care to either provide that number or stick a variable in the equations to show me how it changes things, be my guest.)
The only place they might be said to converge is at zero molesters, but that’s trivial.
Is there any reason to believe that reality is self-consistent?
All signs indicate that the 90-10 figure was taken from the Kinsey Report, which is specifically cited in the second link. (And incidentally, the figures there indicate that it could be anywhere from 90-10 to 98-2. I used the least pedo-friendly numbers for my calculations.)
As for the “data from the experimental subjects”, while that number did turn out to be 33%, the figure I actually used was 20% in my calculations, which actually came from a self-report study.
And do you have reason to believe that a convicted child molesters will be more reluctant to admit to having a mental disorder (which per the DSM IV, pedophilia qualifies) than someone in the general population? Remember that the 20% figure was also a self-report study.
Actually, it’s a matter of me doing some rounding for my calculations. As I said, it’s likely that the figures Lanning quoted might be anywhere from 90-98, and the 20% figure I used was actually 21% in the original study.
Can you provide any studies that suggest the oposite of what I’ve provided? These are the absolute least flattering figures I have been able to find in the years I’ve been researching the subjects. A 2-1 difference is the lowest margin by which I’ve been able to calculate that nonpedophiles are more likely to molest children than pedophiles. Some of the numbers I’ve seen (if I were to try to stack this in my favor rather than stack it against myself) come out to as high as 54-1.
Is “nonpedophiles are more than twice as likely to molest children than pedophiles are” not strong enough, or do you just question the accuracy of that statement?
And I will continue to argue as I have here that they’re doing a great disservice to their children by utterly ignoring the people who are more than twice as likely to molest children in their paranoid fear of me and mine.
This board is about fighting ignorance and a perspective like yours is something that most of us certainly don’t see every day. Just please, please, please never act upon it. It will screw up a person for life and likely end up with you in prison if you ever did and nobody wants that.
Cesario, thank you for your contributions to this thread.
As for me, it is an objective fact that my brother is hot. There’s no getting around it. I even used to have occasional sex dreams about him. I always felt skeeved out for a couple days after waking up from one of those, and thankfully they haven’t come back for some years now. There’s a kind of wall in my conscious mind that prevents me from feeling sexually attracted to him, regardless of how attractive he is, or what my dream-brain thinks about the matter. My conscious mind knows that he’s really, really off-limits, and keeps me from having any sexual thoughts about him.
A family member? When I was younger, I realized, in an intellectual/aesthetic sense, that some of my female cousins were attractive, but it pretty much stopped there.
Underage? If a girl is old enough to have breasts/hips, translating into an hourglass-type figure, I will definitely notice her, at least to some degree. However, if her face looks too “young/childish”, that will certainly short-circuit any attraction that I might have towards her. Otherwise, it is fun to enjoy beautiful girls, no matter what the age! You don’t have to get creepy about it; most guys – pretty much every guy that I have ever known – have a very good “filter” which lets us understand what is appropriate (enjoying the beauty of the female form), and what is not (leering at, or even propositioning young girls).
The context of my post or the thread itself? Because the obviousness of it my post eludes me and rape isn’t specifically what I was referring to. I left it general because I didn’t really have anything specific in mind. If it doesn’t read that way, I apologize.
So…how underage is a problem if you didn’t act on it? The last time I was attracted to a seventeen-year-old boy was when I was twenty-three. He was a volunteer once a week for a summer program we ran, and I know I wasn’t the only one for felt guilty for finding him incredibly hot. We all left him be, though: we were a year out of college, and he was going to be a senior in high school.
I’m not sure if I’ve been attracted to someone of an inappropriate age. There are a very select few teenage boys I find attractive (I’m 27), but is it SEXUALLY attractive? I’m not sure. I only think of it as, “In a few years…” but maybe that’s just my appropriateness filter and deep down I do find them sexually attractive in a way. I know one of the reasons I like to watch the show Everybody Hates Chris is because this boy is just so damn cute! http://www.zimbio.com/Tequan+Richmond
I’m not even sure how old he is, but I do know that in 10 years I would like to marry him.
Sometimes rape is about power, sometimes it isn’t. You can’t generalize and say it’s one way all of the time. Some drunken male college student who has sex with a drunken female college student and then is charged with rape because the female did not give consent, in that situation, was not raping anyone because of power. He was satisfying a sexual urge.
Not at all. If you demonstrate in any way that you are sexually interested in the girl, even unconsciously, you are “acting on it.” Even if you’re just staring at her in a particular way, the girl will realize on some level that something is going on, and that will affect her. It will certainly affect her if you have more interaction with her than that, even if you never touch her genitals.
The creepy uncle who asks inappropriate questions is acting on it. The guy sitting on a park bench eyeing little girls with bad intent is acting on it. The guy looking at kiddie porn on the internet is acting on it.
The painting teacher who would go around and “correct our posture” was acting on it, even though he never did anything that he could be specifically charged wtih. I told him to stop touching me. And then I told my mom why I wanted to stop going to that painting school, and she let me quit. My friend’s mom wouldn’t let her. She just pooh-poohed her daughter’s assessment of this man’s behavior. No tragic ending or anything, but the point is that we totally knew what that old lech was doing. (We were 13 or so at the time, BTW, so it’s not a perfect example, but I thought it might be apropos anyway.)
I’d like to believe that you keep your attractions totally under wraps, but I doubt that you really do. Just because you haven’t raped a little girl doesn’t mean that you haven’t acted on your attractions.
And doing the whole “oh, you’re so unenlightened” thing? Gimme a break.
I found myself having to be around a 17 year old girl for awhile earlier this year. I was 27 at the time, a full decade older than her. She was really, really unconventionally just gorgeous - really unique and beautiful face but at the same time I felt like I knew her the first time I saw her. And she very obviously liked me. I am married and she is way too young so I would never touch her in a million years, but I did imagine myself having sex with her like I do with pretty much every remotely attractive girl I meet, and it felt wrong. So I realized that there is a difference between being attracted to someone (I was very attracted to her), and being sexually attracted to them (I was not sexually attracted to her at all.)
I have never been attracted to a family member, though my sister and my female cousins are all very pretty.
I think I was attracted to my aunt for like half a day once when I saw her getting out of the shower, but she was my aunt by marriage and in fact was already divorced from my uncle at that point so I don’t think that counts.
FWIW I liked girls who were at least 18 going all the way back to when I was 13 or 14. If I could build the perfect woman from scratch right now she’d be about 22 to 24.
Just about 100 posts in and I’d like to go back to GAUDERE’S initial mod that edited my OP to read 'underage". I meant “inappropriat age” to include people many years your senior. And once again, Thanks all for sharing.
That’s how I read it, but if that wasn’t what you mean, what was it that you were referring to?
That’s why I provided statistics that had a number other than 100%. Just because it’s sometimes about sexual gratification doesn’t change the fact that 90% of the time, it isn’t.
You’re worried about me blowing my cover? Well, I appreciate the concern, but I can look after my own interests, thank you.
Wait. Looking at people now represents a horrific trauma? Under that logic, I’d have no choice but to starve myself to death, because I’ve yet to manage a trip to the grocery store where I didn’t see kids.
Well, let’s see. I’ve talked to attractive girls, pushed them on swings in parks, and made funny faces to entertain them. Yes, they’ve been affected, but hardly in a negative way (and always with their parents looking on and smiling at these interactions).
Does every interaction you have with your preffered gender have a massive subtext of sexuality to it?
Creepy? Inappropriate? What do you think I’m going to do? Ask how much she masturbates?
Bad intent? Can you define that? I’ve sat down and watched kids play after a workout on occasion, but what “intent” are you talking about, and how does it manefest? I do love how having my eyes open at certain times renders me criminal by your standards when my actions (including having my eyes open) are no different than yours would be in the situation.
For a certain value of “acting”, but I’ll certainly agree that financially supporting child rapists is a moral wrong that should be avoided (as though there were any genuine debate about that).
So this isn’t about people with good intentions unconsciously sending signals too subtle for them to notice themselves that they’re sending them. It’s about people with bad intentions actively, consciously choosing to ignore a person’s sovereignty over their own bodies and parents who utterly fail in their duties to listen to their children and act as their voice and advocate.
And I doubt you really have any specific “action” in mind when you say things like that. Looks more like an excuse for accusing me of the crime of continuing to breathe. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems most consistent with what I’ve read so far.
Would you call your treatment of Lumpy enlightened?
Maybe not every glance is necessarily sexual. But I was talking about this with a friend of mine recently–like could a pedophile in theory ever be around kids? And it just seemed like maybe they would give themselves away. Like hug a kid a little too long or something. There are definitely innocuous things that adults can do to kids that can seem creepy when a certain adult does them, you know?
It’s not correct to calculate the relative likelihood as shown above. You actually need to know the prevalence of child molesters in the overall population. The answer above is correct as a limiting case, as the fraction of molesters approaches zero, which I sincerely hope is a good approximation. (Please?) If you model it, you find that as molesters become more common in the population, then the relative likelihoods that a given non-pedophile and a given pedophile are molesters become less divergent.