I know a guy who thinks women should weigh at least 250 lbs. I don’t get it but there are lots of guys who like fat women. Some are attracted to young boys. Some like young girls. There must be some who like old women too.
There is lots of permutations possible for people. The combination of background, DNA, chemistry and experiences create a variety of human beings.
So I believe there are people who are attracted to young girls and that is who they are. That must be a very difficult life. It has to be a terrible life with your desires at odds with the laws. How do they resolve it?
Act on it and they go to jail. That is bad. Repressing it for a lifetime must have its consequences too.
They must know the harm they would do to a child if they acted out. It sounds like an ugly place to be.
?!??? Where on earth would you get the idea that I thought anything of the sort?
When I was a child I was attracted to girls my own age: children. Adults were dumpy looking. I didn’t find adults attractive until I grew older myself.
I don’t know. It’s sexist of you.
I think it is wrong to have sexual relations with someone you have power over. Children are a pretty powerless group.
So you think it is equally traumatic for a young boy to have a sexual encounter as it is for a girl? From my experience, that isn’t the case.
Look at the media attention we give to female child molesters. We don’t treat them nearly the same way.
This doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t just as traumatic. Just that we are inculcated to believe that there is something particularly tender or special about female sexuality.
It beggars the question: Is sex between an adult and a young girl inherently different than sex between an adult and a young boy? Or is the level of trauma perceived by the victim a function of societal mores and cultural norms? If a 12-year-old boy gets caught having sex with his teacher, will all the “attaboys” cushion any negative emotional outfall he has from the experience? Does the crisis approach taken with young girls cause them to take on an identity of a traumatized victim, thus perpetuating the whole idea that females are especially sensitive to sexual exploitation?
It’s a chicken-egg question.
Because you can imagine yourself being a molestation victim while you can’t imagine yourself being a murder victim.
I was molested as a child by a child. A fellow classmate squeezed my private part. If it matters, we were both boys. Other than remembering after all these years, nothing came of it. I became friends with him. He was in advanced math and science classes, I laughed with him in a library study group during lunch, and he graduated at the top of the class. I’m glad I didn’t “tell on him”. It probably would have gone on his permanent record. At the high school reunion, I’ll have a laugh with him and see if he remembers, i.e. “That was some hand shake you gave me..”
Growing up, I knew what a child molester was. My grandmother warned me about them. I also learned about them from popular culture, such as the film Clifford, Saturday morning PSAs, and school education programs. However, I did not know what a pedophile was. The difference, I think, was abstract versus concrete, because I understood that strangers might want to touch my “special place” maybe because they were weird, maybe because they were angry, maybe because they didn’t know better, maybe because they had nothing better to do. That “grown ups” could like “kids” - that - I couldn’t even imagine that.
Do kids know that some grown ups are pedophiles? Did you know growing up that there was such a thing as pedophilia?
That’s the fundamental slut/stud thing again. A young guy who makes an older hot woman make a move on him – he may as well be the Fonz. But if a woman has lots of sexual partners she’s thought of as contaminated somehow.
BTW, not all the boys are “lucky.” Even if they’re old enough to appreciate it they may be physically abused or anally raped with a foreign object. The news usually covers the more lovey dovey ones though.
But that’s just it- you assume a boy is actively participating, girls are seen commonly as simply ‘victims’, and ‘forced into it’- however it played out in reality, people still assume ‘male = instigator of sex’, so less culpability attatches to the older woman. Rape is seen as ‘something men do’- and really, you don’t understand it is less easy to physically force a male to have sex than a female? It even holds to the extent that it’s considered OK to joke about women forcibly raping men, and men get laughed at if they try to take it seriously.
Even if no physical force is involved, that is the association the word ‘rape’ has- men forcing sex. Even if statutary rape can involve willing cooperation (if not legally valid consent) on the part of the one being legally raped.
Please note, I don’t think that makes it OK, regardless of the gender of the underage kid, and I’m unsure most men would be unwilling to admit feelings of trauma about underage sex with a woman. They’d be ridiculed.
It’s really only the Western World that demands we don’t find children attractive, alluring, or sexual until they hit 16 [ or age of consent ].
What a huge sigh of relief was heard when The Olsen Twins hit the legal age, unclean thoughts about the girls that were harboured in many a man’s deeper recesses a month previous are now OK to ponder with a clear conscience eh lads ?
Many Cultures in Africa and Asia don’t have these hang-ups, girls are married and having babies at 12 and 13.
Many cultures in Africa and Asia generally suck. Not least because girls having babies at 12 or 13 have a much higher risk of ending up dead, on account that their bodies are no yet fully developed and ready to give birth.
This is misleading. Of course we find youth attractive in the Western World; consider our beauty standards. Thin figures, rosy cheeks, big eyes, and puffy lips are the collective ideal, and we go to great lengths to market cosmetics which achieve the effect of emulating youthful beauty.
The Western World demands that we do not act inappropriately on these desires, and that adults must be accountable for choosing suitable (read mature) partners. Simply finding younger people sexually appealing isn’t the crime; our lines are drawn against committing acts of coercion and sexual abuse. Designating an arbitrary age of adulthood is generally accepted for issues of driving, drinking, and serving in the military. Desire and consent may be a morally gray area, but laws are designed to protect the inexperienced, undeveloped and the naive. Adults do not need to be protected from children; but in many cases, children need protection from adults. Hence our age of consent laws.
Man, this specific topic comes up a lot.
First of all, you hardly ever hear anyone talking about any female’s sexual experiences as “conquests.” Female sexuality is seen as something that yields, gives in, etc - it’s the male sexuality that is associated with “hunting” and “conquest.” Whether this is due to sheer genetics or societal factors, I don’t know; it’s probably a little of both.
But I have a hard time thinking of any young teenager’s sexual encounters with an older adult as being a “conquest.” Unless a teenaged boy actively and aggressively pursued an older woman and wound up seducing her - which is quite unlikely - it is really the older partner who is probably doing the conquering. A man might indeed brag about this happening to him, but it’s like bragging about a trophy buck walking up to you and deliberately impaling itself on your arrow. No matter how you try to spin it, in all likelihood it was the woman doing the “hunting.”
This one comes up a lot too. And seemingly no matter what you say about it, you piss people off. Here’s my take on it: it just might have something to do with the fact that women so often manifest their deep-seated emotional problems, insecurity, and “daddy issues”, by giving themselves sexually to many different men. Yeah, of course a woman can be promiscuous just because she enjoys the variety, but it seems so common for women to sleep with lots of men (who often treat them like shit) because of a bunch of psychological baggage, and therefore female promiscuity is logically linked by a lot of people to self-esteem issues.
Whereas, if a man is sleeping with dozens of different women, he’s either a super-confident and put-together dude with a high degree of self-esteem and security in his own identity, or he’s a millionaire, rock star, athlete or otherwise capable of attracting women to him through his wealth and social status. In other words, positive connotations all-around. Even if the promiscuous guy does, in fact, have deep psychological problems down underneath it, the image he’s giving off is one of success.
I think you probably haven’t spent a lot of time around women talking candidly about sex post, say, 1970s. We do it differently, but a woman who doesn’t actively seek out the kind of sex she wants is not going to have a great sex life, and we have no problems bragging about our successes.
I don’t doubt that they do this privately in talking with each other, but It doesn’t seem to really in the public discourse…I hardly ever see that term used in literature or journalism in reference to women, though I see it all the time when talking about men.
That a subculture of the internet counts the days until a girl they’d never be able to touch anyway becomes a woman isn’t really an indictment on mainstream culture. There is a subculture out there that wants to transform into cyborg dragons with multiple robotic dicks, I don’t think it’s fair that you try to shoehorn any stupid shit you find online to fit the opinions and beliefs of the majority of the world.
I think the phenomenon he describes is a pretty accurate reflection of American society at large. The fault lies with the media and entertainment industry, which blatantly sexualizes pre-pubescent girls. I can’t believe anyone would even debate this. Ridiculously revealing clothes with words like “JUICY” printed across the ass are marketed towards 11 and 12 year old girls.
I believe it is much deeper then that. For some is a correction for the harm that was done to them in the past, when they were the helpless and abused child. By climbing into the ‘power seat’ of such a relationship they are overcoming the abuse by allowing another to suffer it.
And I believe that is the core of most, if not all, let someone else suffer what you have suffered, and a child seems to be the most defenseless target.
In that child they may see themselves and want to inflict as much damage as was inflicted to them.
Sticking again to pedophilia per se (*) I would imagine it probably runs a spectrum from a “hardware” neurochemical glitch that inverts the triggers of arousal from postpubescent/nubile to prepubescent, through to an either neurological or psychological degradation of the inner “brake” that normally prevents the affectionate reaction to neoteny from progressing to sexual desire, to the “payback” delusion that kanicbird mentions, to mere power-tripping upon the weak just because.
No simple answer – and no simple solution to prevent whatever part of it may be preventable. Some abusees become abusers, yet others don’t. Some otherwise monstrous psychopaths do not do child molestation even if they could get away with it. Some pervs keep making repeat visits to Chris Hansen’s kitchen counter stakeouts, showing an irresisitble compulsion or serious stupidity at work. It is an Article of Faith that the pedophile will molest and *will *reoffend yet stats show a respectable faction of NON-recidivists. So it seems a whole damn lot of work is still to be done to truly figure it out and come up with a way to handle this phenomenon.
(* as opposed to attraction to nubile teens - in which case, if consummated the offence may be to laws depending on location, and if there’s a power imbalance involved to ethics; and if unconsummated then merely to public sensibilities; but it’s not a sexual deviancy to be aroused by the postpubescent. Heck, that’s why the age of consent is mostly 16)
Except some of us don’t even notice that . I only think about it when someone points it out. Otherwise I am unaware .
I do get a bit disgusted at the kids in pageants. The mothers pretend it was the kids choice, but are fooling no one. The kids look ridiculous and the mothers act horribly. That whole thing bugs me because I think it is damaging to the family, a waste of money and likely damaging to the kid.
People keep mentioning that they don’t know why they are more comfortable with the idea of an adolescent boy with a woman than they are with an adolescent girl with a man.
I think the reason for that is that the boy is pretty much guaranteed an orgasm while the girl is pretty much guaranteed not to have one. People assume that the boy who is the victim of statutory rape is receiving pleasure. People assume that the girl who’s the victim of the same crime is not.
Absolutely, and which sounds remarkable like what people say of the parallel case of the pair that decided to raise their adopted boy as a girl – helped by wonders of modern chemistry. The child’s choice, fools no one.