'Pedophilia Is a Sexual Orientation'?

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I’m not denying they are both orientations, I’m addressing the conclusion it seems the OP is drawing. It goes if homosexuality is an orientation and people can’t help being that way so we must accept them, then won’t we also be forced to accept pedophilia since they also argue that they have a condition which they can’t help? I take issue with two points. The constant linkage between homosexuality and pedophilia, I used Saudi Arabia as an example of a country that accepts one and condemns the other. Also, simply because a person has an orientation toward something doesn’t mean it should be acted on, but before anyone jumps on that point, it also doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be acted upon either. There are many reasons an orientation toward children should not be acted upon, the most essential one being MUTUALITY. There is no mutual consent between a child and an adult, there is an enormous power imbalance, it’s obviously an exploitative arrangement. Even if a child is manipulated into thinking he or she wants sex with an adult, there is no informed consent on the part of the child. A mutual homosexual relationship between two adults is completely different. People shouldn’t pretend they can’t see the difference.
Bria,

This discussion is “as if” homosexuality and pedophelia were exclusive and that is not true. Many pedophiles are homosexuals. I agree that the issue of consent is important and then the question is who defines the age of consent and why?
 
Bria,

This discussion is “as if” homosexuality and pedophelia were exclusive and that is not true. Many pedophiles are homosexuals. I agree that the issue of consent is important and then the question is who defines the age of consent and why?
 
Bria,

This discussion is “as if” homosexuality and pedophelia were exclusive and that is not true. Many pedophiles are homosexuals. I agree that the issue of consent is important and then the question is who defines the age of consent and why?
I would say most pedophiles are heterosexual men who prey on little girls. The majority of people I know who were molested are girls who were molested by straight men. This has occurred within my own extended family, and yet, it would be very unjust to besmirch all straight men because of this the way we unjustly do to homosexuals.
 
I would say most pedophiles are heterosexual men who prey on little girls. The majority of people I know who were molested are girls who were molested by straight men. This has occurred within my own extended family, and yet, it would be very unjust to besmirch all straight men because of this the way we unjustly do to homosexuals.
Bria,

You are an empiricist and not a rationalist. You are drawing conclusions based on experience that is not consistent with fact. Look here…

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17502450
Clin Pediatr (Phila). 2007 Oct;46(8):667-82. Epub 2007 May 14.
Review of medical reports on pedophilia.
Hughes JR.
SourceDepartment of Neurology, University of Illinois Medical Center, Chicago 60612, USA. jhughes@uic.edu
The present report is a review of all 554 papers published on Medline on pedophilia. The first discussion is the history of the disorder from ancient Greece to the present time, especially the influence of the liberal country of the Netherlands, the North American Man-Boy Love Association, and the sexual crisis in the Catholic Church.** One important question is the relationship between homosexual pedophilia and adult homosexuality**
.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19878444
J Sex Med. 2011 Jun;8(6):1650-9. doi: 10.1111/j.1743-6109.2009.01564.x. Epub 2009 Oct 29. Neurocognitive and personality factors in homo- and heterosexual pedophiles and controls. Kruger TH, Schiffer B.
Source Department of Psychiatry, Social Psychiatry, and Psychotherapy, Hannover Medical School, University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany. krueger.tillmann@mh-hannover.de
METHODS:
An extensive neurocognitive test battery (including a reduced version of the German Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the Wisconsin card-sorting test, d2 Attention-Deficit Test, and the Corsi block-tapping test) as well as two personality questionnaires (Minnessota Multiphasic Personality Inventory [MMPI-2] and the Multiphasic Sex Inventory [MSI]) were used to examine a consecutive sample of 20 psychiatrically assessed (SCID I and II) pedophile (name removed by moderator)atients (nine exclusively attracted to females and 11 to males) from two high security forensic hospitals and 28 healthy controls (14 heterosexual, 14 homosexual)./
Your experience and what you observe do not bear out with facts…
 
Here’s Judith Reisman’s Amazon listing for Kinsey, Sex & Fraud with her other books also listed, like Soft Porn Plays Hardball. Her Porn book is a decades-long study, soon to be revised, on “Playboy”-type soft porn rags featuring cartoons about sex with kids, grooming adults to accept or act out on child rape. Check out “The Lancet” review of her book quoted by a reviewer saying Kinsey & Fiends were essentially pedophile outlaws. The Brits get it.
amazon.com/Kinsey-Sex-Fraud-Indoctrination-People/product-reviews/091031120X/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt/186-8033336-8717652?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
Here’s the Department of Justice national sexual offender registry website. Check out your 'hood.
nsopw.gov/Core/Portal.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1
Studies are showing inordinate stress can cause the deposition of tau protein within neurofibrillary tangles in the brains of children and adults. In short, high stress can cause brain damage. Society must make heroic efforts to shield the particularly vulnerable child’s brain from permanent damage and attendant dysfunction. Impulse transmission defects in the brain may be linked to various behaviors. Here’s a study excerpt showing the prevalence of sexual predation by former victims of sexual predation:
Aims* To identify perpetrators of such abuse who had been victims of paedophilia and/or incest, in order to: ascertain whether subjects who had been victims become perpetrators of such abuse; compare characteristics of those who had and had not been victims; and review psychodynamic ideas thought to underlie the behaviour of perpetrators.*
Method* Retrospective clinical case note review of 843 subjects attending a specialist forensic psychotherapy centre.*
Results* Among 747 males the risk of being a perpetrator was positively correlated with reported sexual abuse victim experiences. The overall rate of having been a victim was 35% for perpetrators and 11% for non-perpetrators. Of the 96 females, 43% had been victims but only one was a perpetrator. A high percentage of male subjects abused in childhood by a female relative became perpetrators. Having been a victim was a strong predictor of becoming a perpetrator, as was an index of parental loss in childhood.*
Conclusions* The data support the notion of a victim-to-victimiser cycle in a minority of male perpetrators but not among the female victims studied. Sexual abuse by a female in childhood may be a risk factor for a cycle of abuse in males.*
bjp.rcpsych.org/content/179/6/482.full
Male sexual assault victims have a 24% increased representation as sex offenders over sexually victimized non-offender males. Male brains may generally be more at risk as having less compensatory opportunity for stimulation-induced plasticisity as having fewer inter-lobal connections via the Corpus Callosum as compared to females.

Here’s some Department of Justice stats from the '90’s:
  • Sixty-seven percent of all victims of sexual assault reported to law enforcement agencies were juveniles (under the age of 18); 34% of all victims were under age 12.
  • One of every seven victims of sexual assault reported to law enforcement agencies were under age 6.
  • Forty percent of the offenders who victimized children under age 6 were juveniles (under the age of 18).
 
I’m not denying they are both orientations, I’m addressing the conclusion it seems the OP is drawing. It goes if homosexuality is an orientation and people can’t help being that way so we must accept them, then won’t we also be forced to accept pedophilia since they also argue that they have a condition which they can’t help? I take issue with two points. The constant linkage between homosexuality and pedophilia, I used Saudi Arabia as an example of a country that accepts one and condemns the other. Also, simply because a person has an orientation toward something doesn’t mean it should be acted on, but before anyone jumps on that point, it also doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be acted upon either. There are many reasons an orientation toward children should not be acted upon, the most essential one being MUTUALITY. There is no mutual consent between a child and an adult, there is an enormous power imbalance, it’s obviously an exploitative arrangement. Even if a child is manipulated into thinking he or she wants sex with an adult, there is no informed consent on the part of the child. A mutual homosexual relationship between two adults is completely different. People shouldn’t pretend they can’t see the difference.
I think you are missing the point of the OP. IF the argument is that homosexuality must be accepted or at least tolerated because it is an orientation rather then a choice AND IF pedophilia also falls into the category of orientation THEN we have a psychological reality that some sexual orientations are disordered. Then to complicate things even more, we overlay the legal implications and the fact that these orientations are not mutually exclusive.

Just from a practical standpoint, I am sure you see the issue. Some cities or states have or have considered adding sexual orientation to the protected class list for discrimination. If pedophillia is an orientation as you have concurred, it would be protected under these laws. If you are ok with that, fine. I’m not.
 
I am old enough to remember Andrea Dworkin’s claim that because women in our society are not free and cannot consent, EVERY act of heterosexual sex is rape. One doesn’t hear that so much anymore, but it was much discussed in the '70s. (Another thing commonly heard then was that divorce had no serious negative impact on children. That’s heard less often now too.)

“Consent” isn’t as clear-cut a term as is often believed. To take a familiar example, some hold that the power-imbalance between an employer and employee (or college prof and student) is such that the latter cannot really consent. One used to hear this a lot, but then a lot of people started sleeping with their professors and bosses and thought it was no one else’s business and if someone had a problem with it, too bad for them.
 
I get this. This should be sufficient to end the argument that “God made me this way so it must be okay.” An orientation can be disordered.
I agree that the argument, “It must be healthy because that is the predilection I have,” is a bad argument.

I think a better way to judge predilections is by observing its effect and measuring that against our values. For example, we can observe that pedophilia can lead people to have sex with children, and can conclude that that violates our values because children aren’t able to consent to it. On the other hand, people of either sex are (generally) capable of consenting to sex as adults.
 
I am old enough to remember Andrea Dworkin’s claim that because women in our society are not free and cannot consent, EVERY act of heterosexual sex is rape.
Do you remember the corrections too?
Andrea Dworkin: No, I wasn’t saying that and I didn’t say that, then or ever. There is a long section in Right-Wing Women on intercourse in marriage. My point was that as long as the law allows statutory exemption for a husband from rape charges, no married woman has legal protection from rape. I also argued, based on a reading of our laws, that marriage mandated intercourse–it was compulsory, part of the marriage contract. Under the circumstances, I said, it was impossible to view sexual intercourse in marriage as the free act of a free woman. I said that when we look at sexual liberation and the law, we need to look not only at which sexual acts are forbidden, but which are compelled.
The whole issue of intercourse as this culture’s penultimate expression of male dominance became more and more interesting to me. In Intercourse I decided to approach the subject as a social practice, material reality. This may be my history, but I think the social explanation of the “all sex is rape” slander is different and probably simple. Most men and a good number of women experience sexual pleasure in inequality. Since the paradigm for sex has been one of conquest, possession, and violation, I think many men believe they need an unfair advantage, which at its extreme would be called rape. I don’t think they need it. I think both intercourse and sexual pleasure can and will survive equality.
It’s important to say, too, that the pornographers, especially Playboy, have published the “all sex is rape” slander repeatedly over the years, and it’s been taken up by others like Time who, when challenged, cannot cite a source in my work.
nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/MoorcockInterview.html

Sarah x 🙂
 
I agree that the argument, “It must be healthy because that is the predilection I have,” is a bad argument.

I think a better way to judge predilections is by observing its effect and measuring that against our values. For example, we can observe that pedophilia can lead people to have sex with children, and can conclude that that violates our values because children aren’t able to consent to it. On the other hand, people of either sex are (generally) capable of consenting to sex as adults.
Is consensual the only standard of morality or is your comment rather concerning whether it should be illegal?
 
Do you remember the corrections too?
From the correction: “Under the circumstances, I said, it was impossible to view sexual intercourse in marriage as the free act of a free woman.”
If it cannot be free, it must be coerced, right? (Is there a third option I’m overlooking?) And we’re talking about a sexual act, a sexual act in which the woman CANNOT freely participate. Okay, she denies that that means rape----what does SHE think it means? Un-free but not coerced? She finds it objectionable and if there is nothing wrong with it, what is her objection?
 
What it would take is people believing the age of consent is much less lower and thus younger and younger children would be able to consent to sex. 12 and 13 year old’s are already engaging in sex acts today and getting pregnant.
Ummm… you know that’s how it’s been for most of human history right? In ancient cultures women were married at that age and were considered adults around 12 years old. Same with boys. Mary would have been married and pregnant around 13 or 14, not through sex of course, but it was not unusual for this to occur. It was in fact completely normal. This is why the problem with her pregnancy wasn’t b/c people thought she had sexual relations at a young age but that she wasn’t married yet.

It is only in modern times that the age of consent has been raised, I suppose b/c our life spans have been raised as well along with everything else, like the average age of marriage and having kids. This puts a lot of things in a different light not just the age of consent. The average person would not have been expected to live through their twenties as a virgin before getting married, for instance.
 
Ummm… you know that’s how it’s been for most of human history right? In ancient cultures women were married at that age and were considered adults around 12 years old. Same with boys. Mary would have been married and pregnant around 13 or 14, not through sex of course, but it was not unusual for this to occur. It was in fact completely normal. This is why the problem with her pregnancy wasn’t b/c people thought she had sexual relations at a young age but that she wasn’t married yet.

It is only in modern times that the age of consent has been raised, I suppose b/c our life spans have been raised as well along with everything else, like the average age of marriage and having kids. This puts a lot of things in a different light not just the age of consent. The average person would not have been expected to live through their twenties as a virgin before getting married, for instance.
You know it is pretty odd. Even just 50 years ago things were different. My aunt got married when she was 15 to a man who I think was 22 at the time. At least one of my other aunts got married at a similar age to a man of similar age. This was back in the 1960s and both marriages have lasted 50 years and both are still very much in love.

BUT, if I had a sister or cousin that was 15 that started going out with a 22 year old now, I would certainly not be OK with it. It would be creepy now and I think that a guy in his 20’s going out with a 15 year old is a creep. But obviously my uncles aren’t creeps (and weren’t back then).

Now obviously 15 or 16 years old isn’t pedophile age, but it is certainly younger than most in western society would find acceptable.
 
I think you are missing the point of the OP. ** IF the argument is that homosexuality must be accepted or at least tolerated because it is an orientation rather then a choice **AND IF pedophilia also falls into the category of orientation THEN we have a psychological reality that some sexual orientations are disordered. Then to complicate things even more, we overlay the legal implications and the fact that these orientations are not mutually exclusive.

Just from a practical standpoint, I am sure you see the issue. Some cities or states have or have considered adding sexual orientation to the protected class list for discrimination. If pedophillia is an orientation as you have concurred, it would be protected under these laws. If you are ok with that, fine. I’m not.
Corki,

I refuse to accept that homosexuality is anything but a choice. I don’t accept it and I do not see it as an orientation. This quells the argument. Who says I have to change my opinion?
 
I agree that the argument, “It must be healthy because that is the predilection I have,” is a bad argument.

I think a better way to judge predilections is by observing its effect and measuring that against our **values. ** For example, we can observe that pedophilia can lead people to have sex with children, and can conclude that that violates our **values **because children aren’t able to consent to it. On the other hand, people of either sex are (generally) capable of consenting to sex as adults.
Bible,

Here is the rub. How do you define health? Who decides what those values are? How do we agree on what values are? Who is “our” in values? Do you believe that your postings and my postings in the past suggests shared values?

Your better way leads to the question as to who decides what is valuable.
 
You know it is pretty odd. Even just 50 years ago things were different. My aunt got married when she was 15 to a man who I think was 22 at the time. At least one of my other aunts got married at a similar age to a man of similar age. This was back in the 1960s and both marriages have lasted 50 years and both are still very much in love.

BUT, if I had a sister or cousin that was 15 that started going out with a 22 year old now, I would certainly not be OK with it. It would be creepy now and I think that a guy in his 20’s going out with a 15 year old is a creep. But obviously my uncles aren’t creeps (and weren’t back then).

Now obviously 15 or 16 years old isn’t pedophile age, but it is certainly younger than most in western society would find acceptable.
It just b/c things have changed in the way we think about it, and probably b/c we all are much more immature in general now days. But to think that just b/c your uncles got married in the 60’s that it’s somehow completely different is not logical at all. They were no more or less creepy than someone today just b/c they lived 45 years ago.
 
I’m going to have to disagree with you on this.

Catechism
Chastity and homosexuality
Read again. It says that they are intrinsically disordered, not that they are intrinsically evil.

Intrinsically disordered is not the same as intrinsically evil.

Disordered, evil, immoral and never justifiable are different things. You are mixing up very specific terms.

-Tim-
 
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