Liking it cannot be helped. Doing it can.
Well, the OP addressed this in his very first paragraph. You may not be able to help that you have the sexual impulse towards children, but that doesn’t relieve you of responsibility for controlling it and not acting on it. It’s the same as having a horrible temper, or a predisposition to alcoholism.
Not exactly. He did say the above stuff, but my point is being attracted to underage children is a learned response, if that is a learned response why can’t homosexuality be as well?
Just so you all know, I’m playing Devils Advocate here.
Agreed. I expect that the majority of people unfortunate enough to have sexual desires for children either ignore it, or sublimate it ( by having their adult partners dress and act up like schoolgirls, say ). An actual pedophile is someone who both desires children and is either amoral enough or compulsive enough to indulge that desire; the combination appears to be rare, fortunately.
Gah! I don’t need details!
That logic isn’t getting very far with me. Liking the same gender can’t be helped, but having sex with them can.
Correct. So?
I’m showing attraction can be learned, thereby can be assumed to have not been there in the beginning, thereby being a choice…and thereby constructing an argument against the OP. The actions one chooses to undertake are irrelevant to my point.
I’m still not following you. I said that liking something cannot be helped, but your actions can be. You said that that logic doesn’t go very far with you because the same goes for homosexuality. I agree with you, it does go for homosexuality too, but I don’t see how that invalidates the logic, shows that attraction is learned or shows that attraction is a choice.
These are my thoughts exactly. I’ve made a conscious choice to alter my sexual responses. So have many other people I’ve known. But it wasn’t until I started thinking about the original post in this thread that I realized that almost everybody makes such a choice.
Consider that almost every heterosexual male goes through a phase during the teenage years when he’s turned on by any decently attractive woman and therefore has an erection, regardless of how inconvenient it is. As he grows older, he remains equally attracted to good-looking women, but is able to reduce the level to which he’s turned on, and to avoid ill-timed erections. An erection is an involuntary sexual response, or at least that’s how most of us would think about it. But nonetheless determined effort over a long time can allow a man to control his erections. In a similar way, all of a person’s sexual responses can be brought under control, or even completely stopped if necessary.
This isn’t what I meant at all. I have no control over my erections (beyond trying to increase or decrease them with my thoughts), and the fact that older men rarely get them spontaneously probably has more to do with age than with increased control.
You’re saying ‘liking something cannot be helped’, and on that point we disagree. I firmly believe deep down homosexuals are born that way, but it is not the case the all child molestors are born that way showing a hole in the OP’s origional statement ‘NO sexual response is chosen’. Not in that an unborn child chooses to molest children later in life, simply that it must be learned in the first place.
If that is true then you’d be forced to point out Homosexuality may also be chosen in at least some cases…which I think most here would disagree with, as well as the OP.
Okay. So do you have any evidence to support this feeling?
Is “not born that way” the same as “chose to be that way”? I wasn’t born with moles (freckles). But I have them nonetheless and I didn’t choose to grow them. I can’t make them go away (well, without surgery) even if I don’t like them.
(I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m saying that “feelings” need to be backed with science to be debatable.)
Here’s what I know to be true: All blanket statements that leave no gray hues between the 100% black vs. 100% white are incorrect, including the OP’s thesis, “Nothing about sexual response is a choice.”
Here’s what I think to be true regarding the above blanket statement: There are a lot of lesbians out there who themselves believe chose their gay lifestyle. I’m not saying that - they are. It’s such a difficult thing to find a cite for. What someone’s told in conversation doesn’t easily translate to Google hits.
When a woman says,
Sexual behavior is how one chooses to act. Since sexual behavior is a choice, I often say that I choose to be a lesbian and that it’s a valid lifestyle choice,"
-or-
‘I’ve been so abused by men my entire life, I’m terrified of them and will only engage in sexual relationships with other women’
Who is anyone to say nothing about their sexual responses is a choice?
False dichotomy. Not choosing it doesn’t equate being born with it. Believing not only that one can choose to want to molest children but that someone would make such a choice is even stranger than similar beliefs about homosexuality. You’re also talking about child molesters, a group whose distinguishing characteristic is a behaviour, something I’m saying is chosen.
For the record, I don’t think sexuality is inborn, just that it isn’t chosen.
Almost impossible, I’d say. Suppose I set out right now to acquire some new liking, and I succeed - it could (and I suspect would) be argued that it was there all along, just latent, otherwise I’d never have been able to bring myself to do it.
So I agree with you - nothing is ever as black and white as this. If everything else we do, desire, feel, etc. is to some extent mutable, why the hell wouldn’t it be the case with sexuality?
To call someone a child molester requires the action yes. But to even want to do it is in my mind nearly as bad and that attraction, the desire, was learned. It makes no difference if you’ve never used Integral Calculus, learning it is a choice.
Do you believe one can be raised gay? That’s the distinction I am drawing.
My feeling about this isn’t important to the debate, I just don’t want to get labeled a hatemonogering homophobe, which can be a knee jerk reaction to someone posting as the Devils Advocate.
Yeah, learning calculus is a choice. Learning to lust after children? Not a choice.
Yes, sitting down and learning calculus is a choice. You have to work for it. Whatever environmental factors turn someone into a pedophile are not something you sit down and consciously absorb, hence no choice. “Learning” doesn’t mean the same thing in these two cases. If I wanted to become a pedophile or a foot fetishist or a necrophile or whatever you’d like to name, I wouldn’t know where to start “learning” that. Got any tips?
Did you choose to learn to like whatever you like sexually? I sure didn’t.
Yes I do.