I agree, if you aren’t inclined to (serial rapist or something), it’s easy not to rape someone. There’s obvious harm done there. But what I imagine would take a great deal of strength would be to not do small things that are easily rationalized and overlooked.
You’re right, a look in and of itself isn’t harmful. I’m referring to interacting with children in a flirty or sexual way. Even a look or casual touch can qualify. If you’re interacting with the child solely because you find them sexually attractive, that’s going too far.
I imagine it’s so easy, given your age preferences, to think to yourself that they can’t pick up on it or they’re too young to understand what’s going on or that they won’t remember or some such. But any interaction that stems from your sexual attraction is going too far, even if you and the other people present don’t think it is recognizably so. The more you do something, the easier it becomes and the more likely you (not you specifically, I mean you in the general sense) are to push it a little further and then a little further because you’re likely to get away with it.
I don’t care that the parents and children you’ve interacted with/in front of thus far didn’t pick up on the sexual undertones, as far as you know. Your judgment is not perfect, your ability to conceal your attraction is not perfect. Some day you’ll slip up. And it may be a small small relatively harmless thing, but it’s still crossing a line.
Maybe you can keep from letting things slowly progress or maybe you really are that good at concealing it. I don’t know. But if you are genuinely concerned about the well being of the children you encounter, I don’t think you can afford to take the risk.
No, my every interaction with the gender (genders, in my case) of my choice is not exclusively about sexual attraction. But there often is a tinge of it, even if just casually checking someone out. The difference is, with me, the objects of my interest are adults and emotionally capable of recognizing and dealing with subtle sexual interest on my part. Kids aren’t. So I’m sorry, but you should probably stay away from kids altogether, just in case. Do you really think you’re so infallible that you can keep your every interaction with children from being even slightly tainted in some way by your sexual interest in them? Given that you’re human, to me, the only answer to that is no.
And before you mention it, yeah kids can deal with limited exposure to sex. But I contend that the difference is that they are not the target or one of the participants.
supergoose, I’m just wondering what you think Cesario ought to do to prevent this calamity. I mean, he certainly can’t change the way he’s wired. He seems to clearly understand the devastation wrought by child abuse. Short of shutting him up in a box so that he can never look at or talk to another child ever, I’m not really seeing a solution here. In my experience the people who do actually abuse children rationalize the hell out it. He’s rationalized nothing. I’m not saying I would blame a parent for keeping a close eye on him, but come on. I don’t think we could ask for a more ideal pedophile than Cesario. Maybe, just maybe, possibly, if more people opened up about this sort of thing, pedophiles could learn how to cope with their own attractions to children without actually abusing children. Just a thought.
Well, Shagnasty did say this and then Cesario pointed out that he would never act on any desire for kids and that pedophiles statistically don’t rape children as often. I think what supergoose is saying is that even though a pedophile may claim that they are in control and can be around kids, they really shouldn’t because it’s not just about not raping them. Pretty much any interaction is likely to be suspect.
I’m with olives and the whole innocent until proven guilty schtick. Otherwise, folks won’t be able to drive due to the possibility of speeding, people won’t be able to go into stores with alcohol because they my fall off the wagon, people won’t be able to hold hands cuz, heck, that’s the path to unintended pregnancy! (yeah, yeah, for the children.)
Bad things have happened to people. That doesn’t mean you lock someone else up because they’re capable of doing bad things. My kinks have changed over the years. I’m sure yours have too. And I’m glad I didn’t have you looking over my shoulder, ‘keeping my best interests in mind.’
I am not, nor ever have been attracted to the underage, but I’m taking exception to the statement that folks can’t hide from their ‘baser tendencies’. Sure doesn’t give people a whole lotta credit.
Yeah, but if you know you’re a pedophile, isn’t it tempting fate a bit to spend a lot of time around children? It’s very easy to say “Don’t rape anyone,” but I know that when I’m around someone I’m attracted to, I behave differently–flirtatious, etc.–without often realizing it until later. All well and good when we’re talking about adults, but that kind of behavior is probably going to skeeve out a kid.
So why do you assume it’s somehow different for me and my kind?
Like I said, if the concern is that I’ll blow my cover, I appreciate the concern, but I can look after myself.
What’s the maximum platnoic time? I’ve spent some fifteen minutes to a half an hour at a stretch carrying around my one-year-old nephew in my arms. Would this interaction be magically different if he’d been a she and thus the gender I’m attracted to? If so, how?
No. I don’t. Either some behavior is problematic or it is not. If it’s problematic, it’s problematic no matter who’s doing it, not just of a certain class of thought-criminal does it.
That’s a relief. Every time someone brings up that line of conversation, I worry a great deal for the people they interact with.
Not to mention things that are impossible to define, apparently.
I’ve had instances where a child smiled at me described as flirty. Do I need to start hitting any given child I run across so that they won’t be inclined to smile in my direction?
Again, do we have anything that would qualify as a definition?
So it has nothing to do with what I do, and everything to do with what I’m thinking while I do it?
Not really. I tend to think of them as intelligent, thoughtful human beings. Believing children to be inherently nonpersons incapable of understanding the world seems more common in my opponents in my experience. Something I find something of a pet peeve, actually.
Back to thought-crime, eh?
Ah, so a slippery slope fallacy, then.
Fact of the matter is, I’m arrogant enough as is. I already believe I could get away with just about anything I chose to do. I don’t restrict my behavior because I’m afraid of getting caught. I restrict my behavior because I believe it is rationally and morally the correct thing to do.
Any particular reason to think they’d be teasing me about having a new girlfriend if they did pick up on it?
Like I said, I can manage my own risks of exposure, though I do appreciate the concern.
So, someday I’ll do something harmless, and that will make me a monster. Interesting.
So why do you assume we’re different in this regard?
Please explain what is required to deal with the awesome responsibility of…people looking at you?
So again, you declare that I should suffer death by starvation, since I can’t so much as go to the grocery store without seeing a dozen kids or more.
Prove you will never inadvertently do something that someone could misinterpret as demonstrating sexual interest toward a child. That way I can find out what the standard of evidence I apparently need to meet is…
HA! I’m sorry, but you’re really quite naive about that one.
And now I prepare to suffer the consequences of correcting a misconception. I’m sure the response will have something to do with me “rationalizing” (something) through the use of these links.
Considering that nonpedophiles are more likely to molest children than pedophiles are, it seems like it’s the ones who aren’t into little kids that you ought to be nervous about hanging around them.
Pedophilia is the great bogeyman of this age. It’s rather difficult to hold a conversation on it with the implications and things left unsaid. Kinda like homosexuality…and race issues, and religious preferences…and, well, you know where I’m going with this.
It’s not an easy issue, it doesn’t have an easy solution, but demonizing part of the population out of hand isn’t the solution. Nor is isolation, or chemical castration, or…well, you know where I’m going with this.
I think we might have more luck with a completely open discussion about the subject. You’re right that leaving implications unsaid is going to cause trouble, so let’s say them. Let’s bring all the assumptions out in the open and deal with them there.
There’s no such thing as a pedophile. Everyone has different kinds, amounts, and times of attraction to children, in varying degrees of each, and with different respsonses, reactions, and behaviors. Where you draw the line at labeling someone is arbitrary. There’s no separate species of human homo pedophlian.
National Lampoon put it best in their Teenagers issue. They showed a map of the United States with the age of consent for each state. There was also a note about how probable it would be that you would end up in prison, where you would find yourself not giving consent – to big, hairy, muscular ruffians – probably ones with… teenage daughters! :eek:
You know what, though… straight men attracted to legal age women do all sorts of other things like woo, court, seduce, cajole, wheedle, negotiate, and manipulate in order to succeed in sexual relationships with the object of their affection. So if you’re going to draw that direct analogy and pretend like you exercise just as much restraint as any red-blooded male, do you feel it’s moral for an adult to engage in courting behavior to win sex with girls in the 0-10 age? Is bribery with candy OK? What sort of sexual contact with someone in that age range would not constitute rape, in your view?
I am really hoping you’re going to say that you’ve resigned yourself to a life of of looking but not touching. Please say that and mean it. Zero, for chrissakes. :smack:
I don’t think some of the behavior you’re describing is moral to engage in when you’re interested in adults. Why is this tolerated in the so called adult “dating game”?
What’s your general stance on prostitution?
Well, if you’re really interested:
Something I’ve provided on other boards before that should answer your question:
I have not found myself ever attracted to anyone in my family, to answer the OP’s question.
That out of the way, I do have something to contribute.
As a teenager I surrendered a child to adoption, a daughter.
Fast forward 28 yrs, she finds me, and we come into reunion. (Oh the joy!)
The reunion was facilitated by a social services agency of the province I reside in. It involved being a go between until everyone was comfortable, and providing access to counseling, etc.
It also included some literature that was sent to my house. Some of it was silly, (a list of questions to ask each other?) and some of it was quite eye opening.
There was two articles about sexual attraction. Apparently not unheard of in these circumstances. More an opposite sex thing, Mother/Son + Father/Daughter, it seems.
At the time, I discounted it as ‘it could never happen’, pffft. I was quite weirded out by the possibility that this could occur, mentioned it to several people who all felt the same as me.
Then the reunion progressed. My daughter and I fell in love. An awesome and deep and abiding, fulfilling kind of love that’s difficult to describe. No, I was not sexually attracted to her.
But the power, depth and beauty of the love we shared gave me pause and insight into how it could easily be possible for sexual attraction to arise in the opposite sex combos.
Then let’s limit the analogy to strictly moral courting behavior between adults. Do you feel that’s analogous to behavior with children?
I’m perfectly fine with it, provided all parties have reached the age of majority. At some point we expect people to have the maturity, knowledge, and experience to make their own choices. Zero to ten is not even in the ballpark of this age.
[quote]
Yet, I feel that better still would be an end to this social stigma that treats children as subhuman and punishes them for exercising their rights to free self-determination.[/quote
The social stigma is not on children. It is on people who pretend that children have the right to free self-determination for anything. We don’t let them fill containers with gasoline or mind the home alone for very good reasons… because they have not yet acquired the knowledge, maturity, and judgement to keep themselves safe.
As far as the battery of questions on sexual knowledge, that’s just pedophile wishful thinking. As if any child is going to agree to take this test, let alone pass it, without being thoroughly coached and groomed by the pedophile who stands to benefit from it. I will grant that there is some gray area with some teens who are unusually mature for their ages and who maybe might be able to take such a test under their own motive and ability. But the age range of zero to ten isn’t even remotely close to this, not even in your wildest dreams.
If you really love children then you ought to help the cause of child starvation, or clean drinking water, or literacy… not concoct some quiz that will make it easier for creeps to have sex with them.
I didn’t have sex til I was 21…and it still threw me for an emotional loop. The power imbalance isn’t because kids aren’t empowered, the power imbalance is because the child hasn’t developed to the point of having sexual relations. What age is that? It may be 18, or 16 or 14, but it’s probably not 10. For the exact same reason why they can’t vote, drink, or go to war before a certain maturity.
So on one hand, I’ll validate your feelings, your emotions and desires are at least as genuine and stirring as they are for anyone else on this forum. But you can’t expect a child to make these decisions, they just aren’t equipped to do so.
Which age of majority? That age changes when you walk a few feet and cross a border, after all. Or do people become less competent after taking a short stroll? (One of many reasons I despise arbitrary age lines.)
Why should either of our expectations matter? Seems to me that our expectations are both just going to be filtered through our own wishful thinking, and won’t really say anything objective either way.
If only that were true. If only. The fact of the matter is that kids who are sexually active are stigmatized. Never catch those court cases involving kids being arrested as child pornographers for taking pictures of themselves? Ever consider how it must feel to have someone you cared about and enjoyed spending time with dragged away to prison against your vocal protests and being told it was happening in your name? The virgin/whore, blame the victim mentality is quite alive and well and children are not immune to it.
Even if the event is never found out about, the messages the kids recieve in school, through the media, and all throughout society teach them to feel victimized and diminished regardless of how they felt about it beforehand. If they weren’t traumatized victims before all that, society makes damn sure that’s how they end up.
If they were immune, the only thing that society could threaten me with to avoid mutually desired sexual encounters with kids would be my own safety, and as I said before, I’m quite arrogant enough to believe I could avoid any consequences to myself. I’m not so cavileer with other people, however, particularly not people I care about (a prerequisite for someone I’d want to have sex with).
And it is those very justification which suggest the RMSC standard I’ve proposed. If the reason we don’t trust them with certain rights is that they lack knowledge, or critical thinking skills, then it stands to reason that by demonstrating that knowledge and those skills, they prove themselves trustworthy to make these decisions.
I don’t think you understood the proposal. This wasn’t written as some fancy new loophole for existing age of consent laws. This was written as a complete replacement. No matter what your age, if you can’t meet this standard, you are not treated as though you were able to consent.
Please explain to me how you can demonstrate the critical thinking skills of requirement 2, or really any of the requirements save requirement 1, without actually posessing the needed cognative development. These requirements aren’t rote memorization of facts.
As to facilitating the rote memorization of facts, isn’t that sort of “coaching” what we refer to as “teaching” and “studying” in any other subject?
Also, did you miss the section put in the proposal specifically addressing ensuring that people were there of their own free will? It was put in there specifically to address this objection (spurious as it is, since rape is still rape even if you’re allowed to consent).
Where in that proposal did it put any age category at all? Where did you get the insane idea that this was about my preferences instead of about (as you specifically asked) my moral view of the situation? If no one under the age of thirty can ever pass this, it’s still a major victory, since it’s a standard that means something, is internally justified unlike existing arbitrary age lines based on nothing, and it means a lot of people who shouldn’t be consenting to sex are protected by statutory rape laws that wouldn’t have under the old system.
I’m really not sure what your objection is in the context of actually reading the proposal.
I’m a youth rights advocate. I believe in amending the laws so that young people are treated as human beings, not chattel as they are currently regarded by existing law. Entitlements like you are describing are nice and maybe worthwhile, but they aren’t rights, which are imminently more important.
As to your insinuations about my priorities, I’ll remind you that you specifically asked me for this information. I’d love to spend some time debating the voting age, emancipation laws, property rights laws, and the like, but you asked for my view on this subject. If you don’t like what you got, there’s really nothing I can do to help you with that.
And are you arguing that people who aren’t ready like you weren’t ought to still be treated as though they are fair game because they crossed an arbitrary line in the sand?
How do you define “power imballance” if not one side not having as much power as the other?
Hense the RMSC proposal to determine if someone has reached that level of development.
There is no one age. What people continue to not grasp is that human beings are individuals, not automatons running a preprogrammed course. People mature at different rates, and become ready to take charge of their own decisions at radically different times from one another. Some are ready very young. Some people never reach that point. Any age we ever put it at will invariably put people on both sides of the arbitrary line in the sand on the wrong side, depriving some of their legitimately deserved rights, and exposing others to predations they aren’t ready to handle. Age lines just don’t work for this sort of thing.
The result of a whimsical dart toss? Seriously, have you read the history of these age lines? There is no internally consistent reasoning behind the placement of any of these ages.
While that’s nice of you to say so, I already knew this. I’ve long since gotten past the need for validation. I post here to dispel ignorance, not to make myself feel better (except in that warm fuzzy feeling you get when someone walks away knowing something they hadn’t before because you taught it to them).
What psychological equipment do they lack that adults have? Can you define these differences in a meaningful way?
Once when I asked that question, the woman I was debating with provided a series of answers about what we consider necessary for meaningful consent. Her answers, edited and refined over some years, are the entire basis of the RMSC. If you think she and I have missed something, please, let me know.
I don’t know if it could ever be reasonably appropriate to deem 10 year old people to have the authority to consent. IF such is possible, it should start with authorization to consent to sex with other 10 year olds, and let’s see how that works out before expanding that responsibility/priv/right to older people. If you had asked me as a 10 year old I would have said
• Eww that’s gross; and yet still just for the record
• I should not be barred from anything allowed to adults just because of my age
In light of the second, an attitude that I would also have extended to being spoken to by teachers and other adults ONLY as they’d dare to speak to each other, and the right to vote, and basically to steer my own course to whatever extend I had a notion of where to steer it, I do share Cesario’s hope for a world where the artificial curtailment of children’s self-determination has been eliminated. I say that as a children’s libber from way back when. (i.e., back when I was a child)
Sex and children, sex and children… I think there is an opposite force, so to speak, that sexual attraction has to work against, quite aside from culturally-induced stuff: the urge to privacy and a sense of boundaries. I’ve said earlier in this thread that when I was a kid (as young as 8, maybe 7 or 6) I had the hots for girls my own age. What did NOT happen was me acting on it, even so far as to explore the possibility that there was any trace of reciprocal interest. Uh uh. WAY too personal. Let’s be blunt: that’s where you pee from. I didn’t even want anyone to ever see me in my underwear. It was weird, kinky, and yet somehow OK for me to have such feelings but NO WAY was I under any circumstances EVER going to TELL anyone about them. Do we as adults forget the rather intense urge towards privacy and how very important it was to us? Or do we chalk it up to inexperience and naivetë and innocence and, having done so, forget about it? What happened was that our hormonal balance changed and our craving for sex got stronger than our urge to privacy and personal bodily secrecy, but really those other feelings didn’t just go away. They still make us self-conscious, don’t they? You know they do. Seriously, I don’t think most kids are ready for sex, not because they are not interested in sex or do not have sexual appetites but because they have, at that age, much stronger desires for privacy, separateness, and the sanctity of bodily boundaries.
I think for most people there are a handful of years in which there is a lot of ambivalence. I remember my neighbor when we were both in Junior High School telling me about being picked up by a 20s-ish woman who quickly winked at him and told him “I’ve got all day”. He said he stammered & uhh’ed and umm’ed and said he had to go to band practice or football practice or whatever it was… as he was telling me this, he was kicking himself for missing the opportunity, but it was the other side, that “shy” inclination to avoid invasive personal contact, that overrode other considerations. And that was 15 or 16ish.
The problem with sex with younger kids (even for the moment bracketing off social inequality which is a HUGE issue to bracket off) is that this interruption, this violation of personal private space, can be traumatic. People shoudl not be made ashamed of sex or sexual appetites but they should also not have to be ashamed of wanting apart-ness and inviolate personal space until they are ready to trade that off for sex, for the sake of sex and not for approval, not to make someone else happy, not because it is what someone else wants of them, and not to fit in and be popular, either.
I’ve run across this argument a good deal before too, and my response is generally this:
Same here. High five!
Actually, body shame is learned, not inate. That’s why you have to keep following kids around redressing them repeatedly the moment they gain the manual dexterity to take off their own clothes.
Maybe this article will help sort out what’s culturally dictated and what’s inate. I know it’s helped me.
Keeping in mind, always, that human beings are individuals, and their experiences necessarily varry considerably from person to person, and that you can’t go from generalizations and apply them to any given individual.
I agree with you completely. Doesn’t seem to me that goes against anything I’ve said here. Just because someone is legally empowered to consent does not mean that they must consent. Gaining the right to say “yes” does not mean losing the right to say “no”. Those individuals who don’t want sex for whatever reason they don’t want it, should have their desires respected just as much as we respect the desires of those who do want sex.
Cesario,
do you seriously believe that a person between the ages of 0-10 could pass the RMSC testing schema? I could see this being relevant for a 16-18 year old, but in someone under 15?
BTW, how old are you?
I understand that you are involuntarily attracted to children, but are you sure that the level of consent that you claim they are capable of isn’t just a fantasy of yours?