I promised (or threatened !) more about the Cambridge conference on DSM-5. Groan ye not, though, dear heretics, as this week’s despatch will be a tad less arcane.
Turning to the poster presentations, in particular, several of these were lively sessions, with subject matter of wider potential interest than the knotty diagnostic concerns that constituted the main business of the event. Three stand out: Noëmi Willemen, from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, speaking on “Liberating the paedophile: a discursive analysis”; Diederik Janssen, editor of Culture, Society & Masculinities, on “Specification of the perverted: anthropologizing bad sex”, and Philip Tromovitch, of Doshisha University, Japan, on “The prevalence of pedophilia: What little we know”.
Liberating the paedophile! Wow, we don’t hear that kind of talk much these days. Unfortunately, interesting though it was, Willemen’s poster was an analysis of the rhetoric of paedophile liberation in the Olden Days several decades ago, rather than a rousing call for liberation right now. Janssen’s work, by contrast, is far more radical than his use of expressions like “perverted” and “bad sex” might suggest. For colourful, provocative mischief, though, I must hand the palm on this occasion to Tromovitch, and thus will focus on his contribution.
But first, a fanfare is in order. Tromovitch will be revered by many here as part of a team, Rind, Tromovitch & Bauserman, whose valorous deeds set them among the immortals of heresy over a decade ago. Their work had the temerity to challenge the term “child sexual abuse” (CSA) as unscientific, and demonstrated through careful statistical analysis that the psychological harm thought to be caused by child-adult sexual contacts is instead far more strongly associated with non-sexual factors such a poor family background, including issues such as violence and neglect. Their meta-analysis published in the Psychological Bulletin in 1998 was so powerful, so high-profile, and so threatening to the entrenched interests of the abuse industry that it was condemned in a resolution passed by both house of the United States Congress – the first and only time any academic paper has been thus attacked in the nation’s history, in a move many have compared to the Pope having Galileo tried for heresy in the 17th century based on his “heretical” view that the earth orbits the sun.
After more than three hundred years the Catholic Church finally admitted that Galileo was right. While it is to be doubted that the US Congress will ever rescind its vote against Rind, Tromovitch & Bauserman, even in a thousand years, the tremendous trio, a veritable holy trinity of heresy, can at least take satisfaction from the fact that in the academic world, at least, their work has earned lasting respect and is widely cited.
There is a price to be paid for heresy, though. Work in cancer research, say, or particle physics, of a similar quality to Rind et al.’s contribution, might lead to a Nobel prize, or at the very least a top professorship in a world famous university. The careers of Rind, Tromovitch & Bauserman, by contrast, have all suffered, and getting further work published has been a struggle. So it should not have come as a surprise to me that Tromovitch’s role at Cambridge was relatively modest. Presenting a poster is a fairly humble task, whereas he might have been invited to give the keynote speech in more favourable political circumstances.
Never mind, the modest status of the presentation was more than made up for by the punch it packed: in its way, the claim put forward was just as shocking and sensational as the paper denounced by Congress. Put it this way: What proportion of the male population do you think are paedophiles? One percent? Five? Surely it has to be less than the number of adult-orientated gays, right, a figure variously estimated at between five and ten percent?
Well, no, it ain’t necessarily so. According to Tromovitch – and I quote directly from his poster – “the majority of men are probably pedophiles and hebephiles”. Of course, much depends on precisely how those terms are defined, but it has certainly long been known that when so-called normal men are used as control group subjects in laboratory research they will typically show arousal (usually measured by increase in penis volume) when exposed to sexual stimuli featuring children, such as erotic pictures or stories. Startlingly, as Tromovitch points out, “89% of community males exhibited some sexual arousal while viewing slides of female children” (Hall et al., 1995).
Whether a small degree of arousal to children is significant is open to doubt, but Tromovitch’s presentation brought together a range of research data which together introduced startling evidence that around 20-25% of men actually test as paedophiles, by which he appears to mean significantly or preferentially so, although this would need further elaboration. What is more, these figures are supported by self-report studies, of which Tromovitch cites a good few, including these: 22% of male students reported that they were sometimes attracted to little children (Briere et al., 1996); 19% of male students reported unwanted, personally unacceptable, sexually intrusive thoughts involving sexual acts with a child or minor (Byers et al., 1998). Perhaps most strikingly, based on a number of studies, Tromovitch reveals that “Approximately 10% of normal men report that they would have sex with a child if no one would know and there would be no punishment”.
All this, says Tromovitch, need not surprise us if we think about the characteristics of different age categories and their likelihood of either eliciting or inhibiting sexual arousal in adult men. Older children (pubescent, 8-12), he points out, and young biological adults (adolescent 11-15) are the only groups in seven age categories, from infants to the elderly, whose characteristics comprise no factors usually regarded as off-putting (such as sagging breasts and blemished skin) along with the positive presence of factors usually regarded as sexy (arousing body shape, high libido, not too hairy).
Is he right? Well, you can check out the details of his poster, Page 1 and Page 2, and decide for yourself. I would just note that in his authoritative book Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children, Michael Seto puts preferential or exclusive attraction to prepubescent children at around 4% or less. The most obvious reason for scepticism, though, seems to me to be this: If such a high proportion of men really are significantly or preferentially attracted to children, how come our political presence is so feeble? Why don’t we organise and fight the oppression against us far more powerfully, like the massively successful gay movement? Is it just fear of the majority’s ferocity? Or is it mainly, as I suspect, that most minor-attracted adults have fallen prey to all the moralistic propaganda that so besets our ears on a daily basis?
But, hey, enough of the heavy stuff. Who’s ready for some tittle tattle about personalities?
Phil Tromovitch and Diederik Janssen, I am pleased to say, both proved to be “up for it” when I suggested chatting over drinks in a riverside pub garden after the conference ended. Huge guys, both of them – black-clad, shaven-headed, muscleman Janssen, especially, would make a very credible night club bouncer, an image massively at odds with his subtly teasing academic prose – so it felt like I had a couple of body guards. Not that I needed any: the atmosphere in the ancient university city on a lovely English summer’s evening was very relaxed. So was the conversation, which flowed most agreeably, along with the drinks and the beautiful River Cam.
Unsurprisingly, after his defeat, Blanchard himself was not at the conference, but other big-name figures did attend, such as Richard Green, emeritus professor of psychiatry, UCLA, a leading figure behind the declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness thirty years ago, who courageously attempted to do the same with paedophilia early in the new millennium. As President of the International Academy of Sex Research (IASR) he even invited me to address that august body in a symposium on paedophilia.
I guess he had to take some flak for that, some of it quite probably coming from the far more conservative Ken Zucker. As IASR’s conference treasurer at the time, he found himself obliged to hand me a cheque to cover my speaker’s expenses – and judging by his cool demeanour he was none too happy about it. But Zucker, present in Cambridge having been chair of the DSM-5 work group on sexual and gender identity disorders, has had to take his share of flak too over the years. A psychologist working with children, he has long been under attack by activists for allegedly pushing transgender kids into accepting their biological gender. Transsexuals even demonstrated against him outside the conference building: they included a female-to-male trans guy dressed as a baby and holding a placard saying “Ken Zucker – hands off our kids!” And I learned in Cambridge that a recent journal article published under the auspices of the British Psychological Society was memorably titled “Zuck off!”
Wonderful! It was a rare few days when I could feel relatively popular!
That was fun, and even more so was the chance to chat to so many folks (including the demonstrators) on a one-to-one basis. Why, I was even able to pin Zucker to the wall over not answering my emails in recent years! He denied it was on account of personal animosity. I don’t believe him but I was too polite to say so. Well, he can read it here!
Approaching gay historian Jeff Weeks for the first time in decades, I was delighted he recognized me but saddened that his speech “Beyond the categories”, which closed the conference, was tired, bland and utterly devoid of the radical edge that characterized his exciting early work. Again, unfortunately, I was too nice to tell him so, although a question I raised from the floor was a pretty big hint. Was the current obsession with crushing paedophilia, I asked, harmfully also leading to the denial of children’s sexuality, and leading to sexually active children themselves being criminalized as sex offenders? His answer was evasive and vacuous. Very disappointing.
Shit! Every week I tell myself I must make these blogs shorter and snappier but I still haven’t delivered on saying I would tell you more about the interesting exchange when I was buttonholed by philosopher Patrick Singy, a conversation also joined to great effect by the delightful Noëmi Willemen. It would take too long to start on that now but I should add a couple of brief and hopefully useful points about my earlier Cambridge blog (11 July):
- I have added a paragraph to it (in square brackets and italics) in connection with Singy’s argument.
- Also in that same Cambridge blog I mentioned Blanchard’s fraternal birth order effect on sexual orientation in males. A brief, sharp, interview with Blanchard about this, Did having a big brother make me gay?, has just appeared in the Boston Globe online. Recommended.
“self-help groups of CSA survivors” are replacing scientists:
Maybe, self-help groups of MAPs must do the same?
there is a very interesting study (Turner-Moore & Waterman, 2022) showing that:
These findings undermine the DSM criteria of “sexual deviance”:
Good find, Cyril, well done.
However, “SO men were over-represented for thoughts involving children specifically”.
may be, they mean SO had been over-represented before this study?
[…] is certainly true, as H-TOC has reported previously, is that there has been a long-term campaign against Zucker, who is seen by some as a monster who […]
[…] that preferential hebephilia is quite prevalent. See “Tromovitch sets a poser on prevalence” here at Heretic TOC and also “Every fifth boy and man is pedophilic or hebephilic” (Schuster, 2014). […]
A late comment by a new reader of this blog…
Many readers of Heretic TOC seem aware of the study by Hall, Hirschman & Oliver in 1995, about the attraction to little girls among ordinary heterosexual men. I like two other ones:
H.E. Barbaree & W.L. Marshall: Erectile responses among heterosexual child molesters, father-daughter incest offenders, and matched non-offenders: Five distinct age preference profiles. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science 21(1) Jan. 1989, pp. 70-82, DOI: 10.1037/h0079791
Here 18% of the sample of ordinary heterosexual men respond equally to images of women, teenage girls or little girls, while a further 14% respond equally to women and girls in the age range 14-24.
O. Fedora & al., Sadism and other paraphilias in normal controls and aggressive and nonaggressive sex offenders, Archives of Sexual Behavior 21(1) Feb. 1992, pp. 1-15, DOI: 10.1007/BF01542713
They compare paedophilia with other “paraphilias” such as sadism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, etc. While the latter seem correlated, paedophilia is not. Also 18% (11/60) of the sample of ordinary men respond equally or more to images of young children of one gender (usually girls) than to adults.
Hence the greatest sexual minority is probably heterosexual hebephilia. But most will not “come out”, we see men thinking of themselves as ordinary heterosexuals, but who enjoy looking at 13 yo fashion models and fantasizing about “Lolitas”, or artists making cartoons such as Disney’s Tinkerbell, whose fairies are just 12 yo girls with wings on their backs.
I think that girl-love is much misunderstood, especially by those who seem destined to experience it.
Welcome to H-TOC, Christian, and thanks for your well informed comment!
It has occurred to me to try picking this up by the other end. Clearly, quite a lot of men who like women are also capable of arousal to little girls. Are quite a lot of men who like little girls also capable of arousal to women? Paul Wilson, in The Man They Called a Monster, mentions a survey of ninety-six PIE members which found that forty-eight percent of boy-lovers were exclusively attracted to children, while thirty-three percent of bisexual paedophiles and only seventeen percent of girl-lovers were ‘exclusives’. I have been an occasional reader of both BoyChat and GirlChat for some years now and my best guess is that at least a smallish majority of the bisexuals had a more or less strong preference for boys. So it does seem that whichever way you slice it there is a very large area of overlap between attraction to little girls and attraction to grown women, which makes perfect sense: physically, a little girl is much more like a grown woman than a little boy is like a grown man.
It is possible that paedophiles are simply those relatively few people you find at the intersection of statistical extremes: people, in this case, for whom smooth, hairless skin is very, very attractive — it is the specific physical trait most often cited as attractive in The Child Lovers: A Study of Paedophiles in Society — but for whom a curvy body is not important, or is even a turn-off. One GirlChat poster once explained that he was not attracted to girls over fourteen because once girls hit fifteen or so they develop a “HUGH JASS”, while another said he liked girls eleven and under, “either completely flat or just BARELY starting off”. The average guy, by contrast, probably has a moderate-to-strong preference for both a nice complexion and a curvy body.
Clearly, though, this can’t quite be the whole story. Let’s take another look at the exclusiveness statistics above. Of the fifty-two percent of boy-lovers who were not exclusively paedophilic, BoyChat suggests that a fair proportion were attracted to boys and men, not boys and women; and then there’s the fact that thirty-one percent more boy-lovers than girl-lovers are exclusive. For these men, the physical characteristics of women and children are not enough, by themselves — and in the case of men who like men and boys, not even required — to produce physical attraction. These men want something more, something specifically male — the penis, perhaps, or the whole psychological and social construct of boyhood, or a reconnection with boyhood memories of their own…I don’t know.
Finally, it occurs to me that there may be one very important thing which Tromovitch left off Poster 1: facial structure/proportions. A young girl’s face often remains quite childish for a while after her body is essentially that of an adult. There can be a big difference between, say, fourteen and sixteen in this regard. For a girl-loving paedohebephile who is unfazed by the development of secondary sexual characteristics, the facial change in this dividing-line period could be the cut-off point for attractiveness, while for a teleiophilic guy, it could be the beginning of attractiveness. One BoyChat poster once explained that for him, a boy’s attractiveness ends not when the boy grows body hair but when his facial structure becomes adult.
However, I did dig up this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#Attractive_women.27s_faces , which suggests that men tend to be attracted to baby-faced women. But not having actually read the paper, I don’t know how far this attraction is separable from the general tendency of pretty much everybody, including women and men who fancy lantern-jawed men, to find babyish faces cute. And if it’s mainly about large eyes, well, who doesn’t like large eyes in a prospective sexual partner?
The finding that Asian men particularly liked baby-faced women, and that this did not seem to be due to ethnocentrism, is very interesting given, for instance, the ‘Lolita’ fad in Japanese culture, the fashion for women to be ‘kawaii’ or ‘cute’, and the relative prevalence and acceptability of photos of ‘U-15’ (under fifteen years old) girl models posing in scanty clothing (not to mention all those manga about man-boy relationships which Japanese teenage girls so love — and Boys Air Choir was pitched at just that audience, after all, but I digress…). It suggests that there may be a certain cultural influence on sexual preference, after all.
One more thing. The authors of the second paper also have this to say:
I don’t have a penis, but I am reliably informed that you can, in fact, get a stiffy if you are feeling nervous and trying not to get one. There’s little that’s more anxiety-inducing these days than having your sexual arousal to photos of small girls measured by a bunch of scientists. Of course, of those guys who dropped out of the paedophilic-stimuli study on being told what was involved, presumably a lot were anxious about it, whereas the ones who stayed were presumably rather less anxious, or they wouldn’t have stayed. Still, anxiety may have skewed the results to some degree. I have a feeling that the effect cannot have been all that large, though.
OK, two more things. About that twenty-four percent of guys enjoying the gay sex videos: in some ways, the stigma against bisexuality is even heavier these days than the stigma against homosexuality, so if these men are bisexual, they have some excuse for keeping it dark. From what I’ve read it seems that in societies where bisexuality is acceptable or even considered more or less normative for males (females aren’t considered as sexual agents very often), quite a lot of men are actively bisexual. But the waters are very muddy, because in some of those societies the sexes are or were very rigidly segregated, so guys having sex with other guys may be a case of settling for what you can get, rather than acting out of real attraction; and then, in some others of these societies ‘acceptable’ homosexual sex is or was part of a ritual, rather than being a spontaneous thing. Also, in many, I would venture most, of those societies, the acceptable kind of homosexual pairing is or was not two men but rather a man, often a young man, and a teenaged or preteen boy — and preteen and even teenaged boys resemble women far more than grown men do. The relatively high number of men who are attracted to pubertal boys and also to grown women, but not at all to men, suggests that this is a pretty common variant of male sexuality and quite a different animal to teleophilic male homosexuality or bisexuality. Also, we don’t know when teenaged boys in, say, mediaeval Japan were going through the pubertal changes that made them look like men. It may well have been later than it happens in the modern West. The age of puberty has certainly been dropping recently. Stephen Beet’s ‘Better Land’ series of CDs showcases many boy singers of sixtyish years ago who were still trebles at age fifteen or sixteen. That’s almost unheard of now.
I think there is a different mechanism for that. The vagina lubricates and loosens from sexual arousal even if there is nothing put in it. It also will try to minimise tissue damage by lubricating around anything that is put in it when you are NOT aroused. This damage-minimising lubrication works just fine but all it feels is, well, wet. It doesn’t induce sexual arousal, either. It’s a separate thing.
I’ve just been reading this study: http://www.ipce.info/ipceweb/Library/97-048_article.html Sixteen out of eighty guys (20%) admitted at least some paedophilic interest on a questionnaire. When the men were hooked up to a penile plethysmograph and shown pictures of naked prepubertal girls and naked adult women, the men on average were only about half as aroused by the girls as by the women, but “twenty-six subjects [26.25%] exhibited sexual arousal to the child slides that equaled or exceeded their arousal to the adult slides.” That seems like a heck of a lot. (It will also have had a big effect on the average. Given that 26.25% of the guys were turned on by the photos of kids as much as or more than by the photos of women, in order to arrive at that ‘half as much’ average, a lot of the guys must have been much less than half as turned on by the kids as by the women, that is, they really weren’t attracted to prepubescents very much at all.)
However, “the hypothesis that sexual arousal to pedophilic stimuli is a function of general sexual arousability factors was supported by the positive correlation of pedophilic with adult heterosexual arousal, particularly in the physiological data. Subjects who were highly arousable, insofar as they were unable to voluntarily and completely inhibit their sexual arousal, were more sexually aroused by all stimuli than were subjects who were unable to inhibit their sexual arousal.” In other words, a lot of the guys getting really turned on by the photos of kids were not strongly attracted to kids in particular so much as really easy to turn on. They found little girls sexy, but they also found adult women sexy, and I bet you that, given the cultural climate, the great majority of them simply enjoyed sex with adult women and never sought out sex with a little girl, even though in more permissive cultures men like them may well have sex with little girls as well as with women.
In this famous study: http://my.psychologytoday.com/files/u47/Henry_et_al.pdf the hypothesis, which was confirmed, is that homophobic men who say they are straight are more likely to be aroused by videos of gay sex than are non-homophobic straight men. But even the non-homophobic straight men — men who had demonstrated their straightness by getting sizeable erections to videos of women having sex — had some penile reaction to the videos of gay sex. “In the homophobic group, 20% showed no significant tumescence, 26% showed moderate tumescence, and 54% showed definite tumescence to the homosexual video; the corresponding percentages in the non-homophobic group were 66%, 10%, and 24%, respectively.”
Is that roughly one-quarter of straight guys who are turned on by videos of gay sex the same as, or does it overlap significantly with, the roughly one-quarter of teleiophilic guys who are turned on by ‘paedophilic stimuli’? Is it just that about one-quarter of men are fairly sexually omnivorous?
If one-quarter of straight men show “definite tumescence” when looking at gay sex videos, and if this means (which it doesn’t necessarily) that they would like to have sex with other men given the opportunity — where are these men, given that a lot of the social stigma against homosexuality has lifted recently? Are they in relationships with women, but slipping out for a covert hook-up with a guy once in a while? It certainly seems that that happens a lot, and that a fair few men say that they are physically attracted to both sexes to some degree, but are only romantically drawn to women — so they plump for the women, because they feel more fulfilled that way.
On the other hand, looking at the graphs I see that the nonhomophobic straight men were on average about one-fifth as aroused by the gay sex videos as by the women-having-sex videos, as against the average in the other study of being about one-half as aroused by pics of naked prepubertal girls as by photos of naked adult women. It does seem very reasonable to assume that for a man oriented ‘normally’ to young women, a girl-child is much more attractive than a man, because she shares many more of the physical features of his sexual ideal. But that is a long way from assuming that one man in four is a paedophile.
Further thoughts on this argument, it’s logic and reasoning, and what conclusions might be drawn from it.
I started wondering whether arousal states among the clothed population differ markedly from those among the sky-clad population. By that I mean, to what extent does the simple novelty of viewing nudity and sexual arousal trigger arousal in others, as against routine and familiar intimacy?
And again, to what extent are children aroused by what are known as adult “primal scenes”? Are there correlations, clear correspondences, between adult paedophilia and childhood teleiophilia, especially in the same settings?
It follows, any way it goes, not that most adults are sexually paedophilic as I read Tromovich as arguing, readily aroused at the sight of child erotica and sexual activity, only that sexual arousal as such is highly contagious.
Unless anyone can demonstrate otherwise, it seems only a posteriori that the sample population of sexually aroused (or merely engorged) people is broken down into age cohorts, not a priori.
In short, it seems to me unrealistic, delusional, to suppose an entirely flaccid population before the fact.
Well, yes, of course, I have long put this particular conundrum to the WA legal system, arguing that for evidence that the accused exhibited arousal on viewing child erotica to be valid, you have to control for everybody in the court, including the judge, jury, prosecution and defence, and the entire public gallery.
The simple forensic test is not whether the accused person was aroused, only that the accused person was pathologically more aroused than everyone else in the court, as evidence of far higher criminal propensity or intent than normally encountered.
I mean, as far as I still gather, and last time I looked, we still have a common law system in place which refers not to absolutes but to normative standards assessed against the ‘ordinary man on the street’.
Well, I placed two comments. But the first one is lost apparently. I wanted to know the date of the Cambridge poster presentation, but I found it later on the jpg’s. I placed them here: http://www.brongersma.info/index.php?title=Poster_presentation_about_the_percentage_of_men_with_pedophile_feelings
[TOC adds: Ah, mystery solved! I’m glad the poster info is being noticed and distributed.]
I already have my answer, 4,5 July: the date is on the poster.
Thanks, Marthijn. It’s good to see you here. Your comment is a bit too cryptic for me, sadly, but I note you were recently quoted in the media as saying this: “almost everyone has pedophile feelings in them. Only the percentage is different, some have more than others.”
This quote is from an article in April: Dutch Court Says Pedophilia Advocacy Group Martijn Can Continue. Heretics are advised to check this out, as it brings from the Netherlands a rare item of good news. Congratulations on your victory!
Yes. Extremely interesting! Thank you for this.
jim
Is there a way to get a copy of Tromovitch’s paper?
There is no journal article as yet, so no “paper” in that sense. The only “paper” is the poster presentation, which was reproduced as a single double-sided A4 colour-printed sheet, handed out by the author in the course of his talk. There are links to this hand-out in the blog. See the para. that begins “Is he right? Well, you can check out the details of his poster, Page 1 and Page 2, and decide for yourself.”
Because of the description of the people Tom talked with, I felt the need for a more impressive image on this site. In my new icon you can see the real me.
I have been arguing what Tomovitch has been saying for years. See http://uryourstory.org/index.php/articles/138-interpreting-the-satanic-legend. I think he is not only right, (and courageous) but that he is making a politically important point. If most people — to one extent or another — feel this kind of attraction, that is a very different situation to be in than being a strange anomaly. We are not speaking to people who are incapable of understanding what we feel, but to people who are deathly afraid to admit, at times even to themselves, what they do feel. I am not saying that everybody is exactly the same. I think there are as many bonding profiles as their are people, and that the two things that stand in the way of a deeper understanding of who we are as sexual beings are the insistence on getting everyone crammed into a taxonomy, and the public hysteria. But intergenerational responsiveness is, to one degree or another, universal.
Jim’s satanic legend article, to which he has given a link above, is superb. Check it out.
As for what you really look like, Jim, I’m sure kids must be mightily impressed but based just on appearance I doubt parents would ever hire you as a child-minder!
Jim wrote:
>But intergenerational responsiveness is, to one degree or another, universal.
Including, I would think, for women. Consider this, from Zoe Williams:
“…women become aroused when they watch a film of two copulating bonobos (men don’t, by the way), and that they strongly deny this arousal when asked. The explanation, proffered tentatively by Bergner, is that female sexuality is as raw and bestial as male sexuality. But, unlike men, our animal urges are stoutly denied, by society and by ourselves, so that when they surface, it is not as a manageable stream, but as a rushing torrent that will sweep up everything it passes, even a pair of shagging primates.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jul/05/what-do-women-want-daniel-bergner). This relates to a new book by Daniel Bergner called ‘What do Women Want?’ which describes the results of testing women with a plethysmograph while they watched various kinds of erotica. There is no mention of any child erotica being used (perhaps not surprisingly), but if they can get turned on by bonobos, they surely couldn’t be very resistant to erotic images of human children.
Stephen
Another hypothesis on some female arousal is that it is not sexual interest but self-defense. It might suggest an environment of evolutionary adaptation where women were subject to coerced or forced sex and it’s a way to minimize tissue damage when “sex is in the air” and they aren’t sure what’s going to happen next. I haven’t seen that hypothesis addressed convincingly.
These results also might explain why pedophilia is less frequent among straight women — children differ comparatively more from their preferred adult men.
Surely, to properly compare prevalence of Anglo Adult Penile Plethiograph Paraphiles n’ Peds. There must be non-discriminatory Anglo Adult Clitorile Plethiograph Peds, plus Penile-Clitorile Plethiograph Anglo Adultos/Zoophiles/Necros et al ? Er, was there EVER a creature born, or pre-born, that DIDN’T like sex? With oneself, with inanimate object(s), or with animated mate(s) ? Yes, physiological Anglo-adult arousal at sight of pubertal young gels is quite natural. And, physical carousal WITH willing young gels is entirely acceptable. IF the young gel(s) is/are gentle with their chosen ped(s). ALL uncoerced fun-SEX is far more beneficial than harmless self-wanks in minor school bogs. “Orgiastic Child Sex activity with a minor?!!” “Correct, M’lud. While the colliery cat was with the minshafted canary.” Irrationally embarrassed Anglo Dad (Blanchard?) to young son; “Er, Ur nearly 13 now and I must talk to you about, er sex !” StreetWize Adulto-Son: “OK Dad. What don’t U understand ?” Survey Q; “Do U smoke after SEX ?” Survey A: Dunno, I never looked !” FactsArmed ThickSkin BrassNeck StreetPeds n’ Paraphiles Win Psycho Wars.
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I would suggest the logic in stephen6000’s argument can also be applied to explain another phenomenon. Evidence from the distant and recent past suggests that men being attracted to girls has generally been thought of as taken for granted and nearly universal. Attraction to boys, though ubiquitous in certain societies which fostered it for its social benefits, has not generally been anything like as prevalent.
So why is it that nowadays news items about sexual activity with children suggest there is about as much sexual interest in boys as girls and there seem to be many more websites devoted to the former?
Is this not because in a society deeply antagonistic to sex with children, almost all men interested in girls, especially pubescent girls, find it easy to transfer or restrict their interest to older females on account of the similarity? Though, as steven6000 says, boys resemble women more than men, they are still much more different from them than girls are. So though boylovers are more likely than gays to be able to transfer their interest to women, they are less likely than girllovers to be able to do so and are therefore more tenacious in their preference.
Edmund, author of Alexander’s Choice, an Eton boy’s love story, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice/dp/1481222112
Having read Tom’s post, I feel a hypothesis coming on! It’s this: as a group, men who feel some significant level of attraction to children are more likely to be also attracted to women than are men who are significantly attracted to other men. Prima facie, we would expect this to be the case, because pubescent and pre-pubescent children (of both genders) are physically more similar to fully developed women than than they are to fully developed men. This could be an additional reason (besides the social conditioning factor mentioned by Tom) why the support for ‘paedophile lib’ hasn’t been as strong as that for gay lib: true though it may be that there are more men than is commonly thought who have some attraction to children, most of these men (and I mean most, not all of course) have an alternative that is socially acceptable and so have less of a stake in such liberation.
It would be interesting to consider if there exists empirical evidence for this hypothesis. But even in the absence of hard evidence, we should, I think, mildly favour it owing to its biological plausibility.
Oh, dear! Well, I wish you a speedy recovery and I do hope you don’t sue 🙂 Seriously, though, I think you are absolutely right. What’s more, your idea is supported by Blanchard’s experimental work. See (with free download) Sexual attraction to others: a comparison of two models of alloerotic responding in men.
Tromovitch also contributed to debunking Blanchard: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-008-9426-x/fulltext.html as did Janssen and several others: http://link.springer.com/journal/10508/38/3/page/1
“Or is it mainly, as I suspect, that most minor-attracted adults have fallen prey to all the moralistic propaganda that so besets our ears on a daily basis?”
This is very much my view, and I think well supported by historical evidence, though I didn’t realise before either that you shared it or that there was so much modern evidence on which to base it, for which I am most grateful. I am not being facetious when I point out that being a heretic is a question of belief. I feel sure that my presence here owes far more to what I believe is good or refuse to believe is bad than to having been born different from most people.
Edmund, author of Alexander’s Choice, an Eton boy’s love story, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice/dp/1481222112
Edmund,
I like your response. The reliance on Neo-Eugenics like measuring the response of a person’s penis to a picture smacks of Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s. And, now sizes and compositions of parts of our brain are being used in modern psychology.
I much prefer relying on my own life experience when I compare it to what came before us going right back to the time the human was formed in the hundreds of thousands of years we spent as Peaceful Hunter-Gatherers.
“Alexander’s Choice” connected with me on every level.
Linca
http://boychat.org/messages/1355310.htm