My hairy legs scared my niece and made her cry and do the hide behind mommy thing. Which made me feel… bad. It was summer and everyone had shorts on.
Didn’t know that, thanks.
You should probably try to avoid her – in this country it is easy to get life in prison on a false suspicion.
Really! My friends kid was so touchy feely one summer that he earned the name ‘fleshman’. He was all into groping - no other word for it - the flesh on your upper arm. He was about 7 and he’d been getting away with it all summer, came home, tried it on me. I nearly punched him! Get the fuck off! 
It wierds you out, right JohnClay? Tell the little buggers not to try that shit on you, they’re just testing boundaries and they’ll find out we’ve all got different ones.
You can just say, “That really bugs me, kiddo. Can you knock it off, please?”
My 7yo nephew and 4yo niece were running naked around Mom’s last Christmas Day. They were eventually told to put some clothes on, not on account of “nudity is bad”, but on account of “we’re going to eat lunch and you don’t sit on chairs naked”. Most of their parents’ friends are less uptight about nudity that Bro and his wife are; those two have had to learn to relax because they were the only parents with kids their age who insisted that the kids be “butt-covered” at all times while at the pool. The general rule (and it has been so at least since I was a child, so back in the 1970s) is “you start covering up at all times once you start getting body hair, except at nudist locations”.
Sometimes you have to be more blunt/direct/forceful.
My oldest nephew is 30. He told everyone at Xmas about how, when he was 5 or 6, Uncle Kayaker set him straight. Apparently (I do not remember it) he wanted to touch my new camera. His mom (my sister) scolded him repeatedly, but he kept trying to get his hands on it.
He distinctly remembers me leaning over, glaring at him, and whispering, “touch it again and I’ll break your fucking fingers”. He insists it happened, I agree it could have.
This is a late, but very strong, contender for the coveted “Most Bizarre SDMB Thread of 2012” award. Utterly bonkers. OP: you have issues.
Dutch, English, French, Norway. IME, anyway. I agree with Nava, as far as I can tell this nudity thing is a US hang-up.
No, he has realistic fears. Go read this thread again and pay close attention to robert_columbia and WhyNot.
We were in the furniture store the other day, and I overheard the kid say to his stepdad:
“I know, I know. If I touch it again you’ll tell my mom and she’ll end me.” 
If her behavior seemed inappropriate to you because you only associate nudity and touching solely with sex, then relax. They won’t even be aware of such things until they are much older. Puberty is not just the body’s transition from an asexual being to a sexual being; it’s the mind’s transition as well. Young children are a joy to be around in large part because they’re curious, friendly, and completely uninhibited… all without being sexual.
One of the reasons people accept young children being naked, but get more uncomfortable as the child ages, is that we as a society want to avoid ambiguity. It’s also a major reason why so many people detest child pageants. Parading children around in age-inappropriate costumes, hairdos, and make-up is inviting misinterpretation. And that’s not good.
If you’re feeling aroused when she touches you, and that is making you feel uncomfortable, then that is something you need to deal with, especially if you equated her touching you with her coming on to you sexually. Touching, kissing, snuggling, even wriggling on your lap – all of these behaviors are perfectly normal for young kids to do, and they are all 100% non-sexual. It’s as normal, and non-sexual, as a dog sniffing your ass.
A standard business management formula for the seriousness of risk is that your concern level should be equal to the chance that the risk will occur times the seriousness of damage that would occur if the risk occurred. In San Francisco, the chance of a serious earthquake is high and the potential damage is high. In Boston, the chance of a serious earthquake is low but the potential damage if an earthquake were to somehow happen is still high. The San Francisco manager is probably spending more on earthquake mitigation than the Boston manager.
The chance that you, me, or your nephew will be accused of inappropriate sexual contact with a child this year is low, maybe less than the chance that one of us will be charged with theft. But even such a small risk when multiplied by the seriousness of damage that would be done to us if a charge were to be made, let alone sustained, is so large that it cries out to some extent to be mitigated. Just being accused is a terrible blow.
Take a look at the sex offender registry some day. Lots of men are there for one single offense that took place 15 years ago and many will probably be on there for the rest of their life. Think about how we as a society treat these people. How many of those people do you think are innocent in fact? One percent? Five percent? If a friend, fellow church member, co-worker, or family member got a DUI in 1998 but has kept clean since, how much less do we think of them now? Not very much you say? Does it even matter if they were in fact guilty? To some extent, a DUI might even be a positive if it shocked the person into getting their life straightened out and pushed them to get off drugs and stop drinking so much so that they could go back to college, finish their degree, and get a well paying job.
Also, take a look at the “sex offender treatment” that convicts often have to go through to get parole or stay on probation or parole. One of the most basic requirements is admitting guilt and admitting that you have a sexual problem. If you become one of the 1% (or whatever the number is) of innocent people who were found guilty after a show trial, what do you do now? Your life as you knew it is pretty much over.
I agree it’s a very realistic fear for men (unfortunately), but I don’t know if that’s his issue here or just that it makes him feel uncomfortable on a personal level, EVEN not being aroused by it. As a woman, I’m not worried about being thought of as a pedophile, and I sure wouldn’t be aroused, but…I’d still feel very uncomfortable.
Realistic fears? This is the guy’s niece. Family. Presumably the girl’s parents know what she is like (young, curious, finds hairy legs funny), and presumably are also comfortable having their own brother/brother-in-law (the OP) over. So what in the world is the problem with having a little girl pulling the hair on your legs? I might find it annoying and I might tell her to cut it out, but I would never make the gigantic leap towards paedophilia. Has the entire world gone totally bonkers? Should I not let my one-year-old daughter sit on my lap in case some passing busybody thinks I’ve snatched some random child and am getting some kind of sick thrill out of it?
We’re talking about a five-year-old girl, a blood relative, doing something totally innocent. What the hell is wrong with everyone? American morals must be truly fucked up if a five-year-old being naked INSIDE THE HOUSE is considered somehow unhealthy. If she was fully clothed but carrying a gun, I’m sure that would be ok. :rolleyes:
Blood relative means NOTHING as far as that goes.
Agreed. But we’re all a product of our environment. I didn’t even let my own kid or kids I babysat go around naked in the house with just me. Diaper or underwear and undershirt, totally fine. Totally naked, no. Just seemed indecent to me even though I know it’s not really.
No, that would be legitimately fucked up, not just fucked up because society attacked us with these issues.
Not unhealthy, but it doesn’t mean that anyone but their parent would necessarily be just fine looking at a naked kid, relative or not. My husband and I have friends who would have their kids naked around us at times (backyard swimming pool, naked running after bathtime, etc.) and we would feel uncomfortable seeing naked kids, so we’d make an extra effort to look at the parents, look elsewhere in general, etc., when the kids were enjoying their naked time.
(Personally, I had the same aversion to looking at anyone when we ended up walking through a nude beach in Hawaii. Most of the time, naked bodies are not pretty.)
Has the OP returned to this thread to confirm whether or not he developed these “pedophile” worries due to the fact that he was sexually aroused by the girl’s actions (both the touching and nudity)? There seems to be a lot of assuming going on here when he hasn’t even answered this important aspect of the story. For the life of me, I can’t understand why he would feel like a pedophile for any reason other than feeling aroused by the little girl touching his legs and running around nude. But before I assume this to be the case, I’d like to hear from the OP.
sexual abuse of children carries very high penalties in the US. It’s not a hang up, it’s mortal fear of the hint of such an accusation. We live in an age of zero tolerance where the mere pointing of a finger by a child as a pretend gun can get them expelled. When I was a kid I use to carry around a foot long knife in school while I worked on it in shop class. Times have changed.
Being uncomfortable with it is an understatement.
Well, unless he’s Cesario, even if he did feel aroused by it, he would be very unlikely to admit it. So I’m just going to assume he wasn’t, and that that was a poor choice of phrasing, but he really meant that he felt like he might look like a pedophile.