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By David Futrelle
Homophobes and transphobes do so love their slippery slope arguments.
If you give rights to gay people, or trans people, they claim, its only a few short steps to accepting pedophiles as a legitimate “lifestyle choice.” Then it’s on to cats marrying dogs and people marrying toasters.
Trouble is, more than a few of the “traditionalist” types who yell the loudest about the imaginary SJW push to normalize pedophilia also think that it’s perfectly normal — if not God’s will — for adult men to marry girls in their early teens.
In their minds, “real” pedophilia is a Satanic evil, but “hebephilia” and “ephebophilia” — sexual attraction to adolescents — is basically what God and nature intended.
Now some of these galaxy-brained “jailbait” obsessives have even begun to argue that the only way to fight “real” pedophilia is to set the age of consent at puberty and give men like them free reign.
In a thread on “Red Pill sexuality” on the Holla Forums, one jailbait theorist called Nathaniel Butler argues that age of consent laws should only protect pre-pubescent children.
“The true red pill is simple,” he writes.
Only heterosexuality should be legal and it should be full heterosexuality not the current restricted heterosexuality.
Nothing good could possibly follow an assertion like that.
That means it should be heterosexuality as God/nature intended so that the age of consent law should … simply be [that] pre-pubescent=illegal and people should not only be allowed to have sex from the start of puberty but they should also be allowed to get married then if they want too.
Later in the discussion, one Levi Torres (who sounds suspiciously like a socjkpuppet of Mr. Butler) went a bit further.
Agreeing with another commenter who suggested that “pedophilia [will be] the next big thing pushed by the left,” Torres suggested that age of consent laws set at age 16 or higher actually help pedophiles because they allegedly confuse the public into lumping the bad pephoophiles in with the (allegedly) good hebephiles and ephebophiles like him.
The left, Torres claims, has
already successfully blue-pilled … too many people into believing a false definition of paedophilia. The REAL SCIENTIFIC definition of paedophilia is sexual attraction to PRE-PUBESCENT CHILDREN, not sexual attraction to young adults under an unnatural government-created [Age of Consent].
Dude, as I’m sure you’re well aware, girls typically hit puberty between the ages of 11 and 14, if not younger. These are not “young adults.” They are still children.
The reason they’ve got people to believe the false definition is so that they can create so many repressed heterosexuals who believe that they’re actually paedophiles so will eventually support the legalisation of paedophilia.
I’ll let Leslie Jones respond for me here:
Torres continues:
The way to stop paedophilia being legalised is to change the [age of consent] to pre-pubescent=illegal and red-pill everyone on the FACT that only those attracted to pre-pubescent children are paedophiles and that all other heterosexuals are normal.
Being attracted to girls under 16 but not pre-pubescent is 100% normal and is the natural way of things and had been regarded as such since the first humans up until quite recently.
Dude, that’s enough computer for you today, you piece of shit.
If you need me I’ll be here quietly banging my head on my desk.
@ Lainy, I was also kinda hoping for a good troll to mock. I’ve read a bunch of old threads and some of the ones this site used to get are freakin’ hilaaaaarious!
I suspect he got scared off, though, so he probably wouldn’t have been all that fun to swat around anyways. (Unless David banned him, which I would understand; I feel like a couple people asked about that…)
But hey, he gave us the chance to get to know each other a bit better, so that’s nice!
@Dr. Thang
Sorry, not buying your “But what about the pedophiles?!” spiel.
@Luzbelitx
Yep. If someone admits to having sexual thoughts about kids, or is discovered having them, they need to be locked up and drugged down so they’re no longer a threat to others. At minimum.
@Paradoxical Intention
That sounds interesting. Do you recall the name so I can look it up?
Also, I imagine, this being Florida, that the whole town went for Trump on the election.
That’s sad about Luke Perry. I had a thing for him back in the early days of 90210 and it had been fun seeing him on Riverdale even though it made me feel old.
As a preface to my post, let me say that I’m not addressing pedophilia at all and I’m not trying to make any analogy between violent urges and pedophilic ones.
That said, I’ve had extremely violent urges for as long as I can remember, but I do in fact refrain from acting on them because I recognize them as both evil and irrational. I really don’t like the fact that I get them, but I’ve never been able to excise them from myself. The last time I actually acted on those urges was back in sixth grade.
These are not general urges to violence — I don’t feel the urge to attack everyone I see — instead they are very specific, context driven, and deeply disturbing. They usually show up when I or someone I care about has been hurt or wronged, but I would never label them as some sort of protective urge because they always constitute an extreme overreaction to whatever offence triggers the impulse. For example, rendering someone a quadriplegic because they kicked my sister in the stomach isn’t justified, but that’s the image/need that I got when I heard about that incident.
And my specificity here is literal and accurate: I wasn’t thinking “I’m going to break his neck”; I actually envisioned the process of twisting slowly so that I could control the resulting damage, to ensure that he would have to live without any control of his body for the rest of his life (which required envisioning how to incapacitate him first so that I could take the time necessary to sever the motor and sensory nerves in the spinal cord while leaving the autonomic nervous system intact). The fact that these urges are so very detailed has always been the clearest indication to me how abnormal they are, and it’s a big reason why they’re so disturbing to me.
I have spent most of my life trying to change those urges, but the only thing I’ve actually been able to control is my response to them. I don’t know if I can say that I don’t have a violent mindset, because no matter how long it may have been since my last violent ideation, I know the next one could happen at any time, but I certainly don’t have them all the time, nor do they color my thinking on a daily basis.
So I guess I have a question for the commentariat here, and I truly do mean this honestly with no sarcasm or snark intended; it’s a question I’ve been asking myself for as long as I can remember, and I’ve never been able to come up with a definitive answer:
Am I evil?
I’d say that more than half the times I’ve answered that, I would say yes, but everyone else I’ve ever asked has said no. Of course, they’ve all been people I know, like, and trust, so their opinions are biased.
[TW: Discussion of child sexual abuse, discussion of medical abuse]
I’m sorry, but I have to delurk. This is incredibly ableist–shockingly so, for a community that’s normally dedicated to avoiding ableism. You’re seriously advocating that anyone who has sexual or violent intrusive thoughts a) wants to act on them, b) is in immediate danger of acting on them, and c) must be involuntarily institutionalized and drugged?
As someone with OCD, I find this offensive and very disturbing. Intrusive thoughts are not a manifestation of someone’s hidden desires. For those of us with OCD, they’re our brain fixating on the possibility of harming others. I don’t have violent intrusive thoughts myself, sexually or otherwise, but I know from those who do that it’s terrifying.
Most people with these kinds of thoughts are thinking of precisely the things that they would find the most disgusting or evil. That’s how OCD works. We think of things that distress us, and we can’t stop, because the mechanism that allows others to walk away from or discard disturbing thoughts is chemically broken. People with violent and/or sexual intrusive thoughts are already profoundly suffering, and you want to put them in jail without a trial?
Let me be clear here. There is no excuse for child molestation or the consumption of child porn. Child abusers are absolute scum, the lowest of the low. And someone who actually advocates for child rape is clearly an abuser or an abuser’s cheerleader, not someone suffering from intrusive thoughts. But when you advocate involuntary institutionalization for having thoughts, you’re ensuring that suffering people have nowhere to turn.
I’m disappointed in you folks. I know Mammotheers can do better.
Not only Luke Perry but Keith Flint of the band Prodigy passed today as well. Now I must fire up Big Shiny Tunes 2 just to hear Breathe again.
@Gaebolga
My answer: People are neither evil nor good. Our actions can be evil, good, neither, or both, or some mix of those. Your actions are neutral in this example. You could choose to do an evil thing, but you choose not to. That’s the default and neutral response.
@bookworm in a hajib
He’s still here. And still dense it seems. Don’t tell anyone but I wore skin tight leggings today. Made me kind of chuckle at the idea of someone getting really angry at how good my backside looks in them.
Ugh.
Hi, I’m a survivor of both sexual and medical abuse during my childhood.
I do not support punitive medicine and the use of psychotropic drugs as punishment. This already destroys the lives of huge numbers of innocent people, and puts huge numbers of children in harm’s way.
I am in favor of isolating pedophiles, and killing them when necessary. I am not in favor of ableist medical-industrial shit that inevitably backfires on victims and those with disabilities – especially as child abusers tend to have charisma, clout, and respectability, things which children, survivors, and disabled people universally lack.
I am also very in favor of demolishing the institutions of patriarchy, and in general vastly reducing the concentrations of power in this society. Child abusers who aren’t themselves authority figures, IME have a way of kissing up to authority figures. This includes adolescent abusers of younger children. The entire game of most abusers is that they make themselves well liked and respected, the better to destroy their victims from a position of invulnerability and implicit trust.
Abusers hijack power structures to protect themselves, and to increase their power and ability to abuse. Abusers are people you love and trust. Abusers are people you cherish and consider beyond reproach. And creating more power structures to rain down vengeance upon them when and if they’re found guilty, however satisfying it looks, will do little or nothing to protect those they would chose as victims. Not when patriarchy still exists, not when class exists, not when racism exists, not when children have few rights and disabled people are second class citizens. Not when we don’t have the words to describe what we’re experiencing, and not when people refuse to believe us once we finally have them.
Sorry for being loud and shitty about this. Most of my life before age 12 is a fog of medication side effects, nausea, and my first rapist’s headgames, and I am extremely fucking tired of vengeance fantasies and “tough on crime” rhetoric passing as righteousness.
(And this thread is doing a number on me, so I’ma take a break for a while. Back later.)
@Gaebolga
It’s a matter of your philosophical viewpoint. Some people believe that simply having even thoughts is enough for a person to qualify as evil, while others believe that some kind of action is required. Personally, I’m in the latter camp.
These guys are just a bunch of jerkwads that refuse to see past the ends of their own noses. Then they try to gaslight the rest of the world (and
keep convincing themselves) into believing that everything that pleases their boners is actually good for the rest of us, as well.
Just for the record: It’s not. It’s bullshit.
Not only do they try to erase older/unattractive women, non-cisgendered, and non-hetero folks, (and I’ve probably left out some categories) they seem to forget the boys who are the same age as their targets. Who are they allowed to be interested in? The jerkwads forgot to tell them (and us) how, exactly, their toxic worldview benefits those adolescent boys. You know, the ones they pretend to be so concerned about until they’re as inconvenient as the rest of us.
Gaebolga – You are a human being with violent urges that you recognize as being inconsistent with the life you want to live (i.e. an accepted member of some human society) and you conduct yourself accordingly. IOW, not evil IMHO.
Gaebolga
Given that I have had the exact same thoughts, tendencies and violent urges as you I’m probably biased in saying “No”, but I’ll pitch in regardless.
First let me start off by saying I don’t know how old you are, and how long you’ve dealt with this issue. I don’t know what personally triggered this conditions in you, or if you’ve sought any sort of treatment.
In my specific case, all of these violent urges stem from repressed feelings over three long decades of abuse: physical, psychological, emotional, gas lighting, you name it.
I didn’t really pin it down until about 2 years ago in which I had a falling out with my mother, and we didn’t speak to each other in over a year. After that falling out I was able to realize that the anger stemmed from the fact that she had always been psychologically and emotionally abusive, and that not only would she engage in abuse but also deprive me of my right to be upset at said abuse by guilt tripping and gas lighting me.
Sort of a “how dare you be mad at your martyr of a mother, who had to endure abuse at the hands of her own mother, and now your father”.
And whilst it is true that my grandma, and later my dad, were indeed extremely abusive toward her, that did not give her excuse to engage in abuse of her own. Even if most of it wasn’t physical.
The fact is, this made me accumulate over 20 years worth of anger, which I wasn’t allowed to express in any way whatsoever. So I’d get angry out of the blue, and then I’d have these heated exchanges in my head between me and the version of my mother I’d come to know. Other times I would get violent fantasies, which do include rending someone paraplegic, or skinning them alive and dousing them in acid.
However, all of them always directed at abusers: either mine or someone else’s.
Way I figured it since I was little is pain teaches empathy, whilst privilege breeds apathy. I always fantasized about inflicting pain upon my abusers so that they might understand that what they were doing was less than pleasant, so to speak.
After a year or so of perseverance in the whole “not talking to your toxic ass until you apologize”, my mother finally broke, stopped her gas lighting bullshit, and agreed to listen to me. We met at a park and I walked her through all her abuses, and had her apologize.
After that I started going to therapy and I’ve made a lot of advance in getting healthy. Been going over a year and I don’t get these violent spasms or heated exchanges in my head, much often. Much of it lessened a lot after my mother sincerely apologized. The other part is still clinging onto something, but I have yet to figure out what it is; so my therapist is helping me figure out exactly what it is.
In the meantime I just vent that aggression onto any random abuser I might run into. Don’t worry, not rending them quadriplegic or skinning them alive and dousing them in acid, but a good ass kicking does discourage shitty behavior, because abusers only ever understand dynamics of power.
So no, you are not necessarily evil for having violent impulses.
TL;DR: violent impulses can happen as a result of severely repressed rage, and can be treated.
@kupo, Talonknife, Hambeast, and Diego Duarte
Thank you for your responses; I appreciate your perspectives.
@Diego
To answer your initial question, I’m 49, and I’ve been dealing with this since at least age 7. I can’t remember anything before then from my own perspective, but I do know some family stories about me when I was younger, so I’m fairly certain that I’ve had these impulses as far back as age 4.
I’ve gone to therapists, but not consistently; the longest unified stretch was about a year and a half back in 2004. That therapist diagnosed me with PTSD, but I don’t remember anything in my life that was severe enough to cause that. My wife is convinced — based on my lack of memories prior to age 7 as well as my other life-long memory issues and violent ideation — that something really bad happened to me as a young kid, but neither I nor my family know of anything that would fit the bill.
@Gaebolga
I’ve had incredibly violent urges all my life. Unlike Diego, there’s no abuse in my childhood to explain them or potentially give rise to them. It is simply one of the less pleasant aspects of me.
You’re human, that’s all. My tuppence, anyways.
@Gaebolga
Not many people remember things happening to them before that age, so it might not necessarily be something that happened to you during that age. It might be an event that happened afterwards, but was so traumatic that you blocked it off.
Then again, it might be absolutely nothing and it’s just human nature, like Shadowplay says.
@Gaebolga and @Diego
Survivor of 20+ year abusive relationship here. 6.5 years since he’s been out of the house, almost 2 years since he’s been out of our lives with no contact. Almost every day I visualize fatally harming him in a specific way, usually when I’m driving home from work. It’s always the same way. I agree that it likely comes from surpressed anger for all those years. I still feel like a coiled spring, there is so much anger underneath the surface that if anyone would scratch that open, it would be something I couldn’t control. I think I project that, and tend to keep my distance. No new relationships for me, either, I just can’t get to a place of allowing someone to see vulnerability.
Never have I been remotely tempted to actually harm him, because that would harm my children the most, by leaving them with no functional parents. And as my daughter is adopted, she has already lost birth parents and an adoptive father. The urge always dissipates if I think about the effect on the kids.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this, very helpful.
Poor Luke Perry. 🙁 I don’t know if he suffered the same kind of stroke I had nearly 3 years ago, but it does come with a 40% chance of dying, so I’m definitely thinking “There but for a roll of the dice” today.
@ Gaebolga
I believe thoughts can make a person bad, but yours don’t.
The world is unjust and violent and we live in societies built on it. We’re all kept in our place through violence or the threat of it. We’re all supposed to agree violence is evil and we’d never condone it, but at the same time pretend it isn’t there most of the time, not unlike things work with rape. The few cases when we see violence as violence are disproportionately instances of the oppressed fighting back.
Wanting to wield the power that runs everything for just causes is natural. It only means you know what’s what. Figuring out you’re not capable of using it to make there be more justice is exactly how you’re supposed to deal with the impulse.
It’s fine.
Hey, I submitted a comment on this thread and I just wanted to find out if it was in moderation or if it somehow didn’t send. Feel free to delete this post if asking about this is bad etiquette.
@S. P
This one? https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2019/03/03/fight-pedophilia-by-lowering-the-age-of-consent-to-11-galaxy-brained-creepazoids-argue/comment-page-2/#comment-2497892
Comments have been glitchy again – take ages to post sometimes.
@Shadowplay
Thanks!
@dust bunny
I’ve been making this argument for a while now, every time a liberal or progressive tells me that they disagree with “violence”.
The system our society is based off is inherently violent. It depends on violence exerted upon its most vulnerable members in order to fuel the privileges of the rich and/or powerful, as well as to preserve existing hierarchies.
However, the powerful have normalized this type of institutionalized violence as “natural”. Of course you are supposed to feel sorry for victims, but what are you going to do about it? You can’t control or prevent abusers from being violent, or poor people from making bad choices can you? See? It’s a way to externalize responsibility, and minimize our own behavior that supports the very system that disenfranchises the powerless.
On the other hand, subversive violence, violence aimed at subverting or abolishing such hierarchies, is always seen as abnormal and unacceptable. Why the double standard? Well, because what bothers people is not the violence per se, but the idea that the vulnerable are NOT beneath them by their own devices, but through systemic disenfranchisement and discrimination.
For fucks sake, Climate Change has gotten so bad that the scientists are increasingly warning of a possible sixth mass extinction event, the death of all of our species; yet liberals are sad because Nazis got punched and civility is getting thrown out the window.
What fucking good is a moral victory if the world ends up dead? And why is it always the victim that must refrain from violence, or else lose all legitimacy, whereas abusers can resort to any tactic they want?
Long story short: communism will win.
I’ve always got mixed emotions for these discussions. On the one hand, the research shows that it is better if people with pedo impulses feel that they can get help, so maybe the thoughts shouldn’t be quite so stigmatized. And I agree with S.P. (welcome, if you’re new!) in thinking people should not be dismissed as bad for intrusive thoughts.
On the other hand, it makes me really uncomfortable that every time there is discussion about child sexual abuse or apologetics for it, people have to come sweeping in to scold us about how we shouldn’t be too hard on pedophiles. Is it really necessary to have this derail all the time? It means we always end up discussing and thus prioritizing the well being of the abusers rather than the abused. It squicks me out.
Nothing important to add.
Just wanted to point out: this thread is an excellent example of why this blog/community is one of my favourites on the interwebs.
Y’all are great.
@Cyborgette and S.P.
Thank you for perfect posts.
I’m a life-long believer that:
A) thought-crime (no matter how terrible) is not grounds for punishment; and
B) Innocent until proven guilty is of the paramount importance (especially for oppressed peoples).
S.P.’s analysis of these issues through an ableist/anti-ableist lens was incredibly interesting and helpful.
@Diego Duarte
the dictatorship of the proletariat is still a dictatorship! Long Live Anarchy!