Abel Sexual Abuse Prevention (ASAP), appears to be the latest wheeze of snake-oil salesman Gene Abel. It sees Abel and his colleagues, though that is too polite a word, touting for business among distressed Minor Attracted Persons (MAPs) who have “not been detected by the authorities”.
The not-so able outfit does not claim outright to “cure” paedophilia, but the website implies as much by saying it is a treatable disorder, when really the best that can be claimed honestly is that a good therapist might succeed in reconciling paedophiles to their sexuality.
Heretic TOC’s attention has been drawn to ASAP through a current thread on Sexnet, the academic forum recently introduced here. A Sexnet subscriber posted to say he had received correspondence from one of the founders of ASAP which included the following:
I know from personal experience that pedophiles can develop a sexual attraction to adults and be happily married in spite of an ongoing sexual attraction to children.
Develop an attraction to adults, or already have at least a “useful” level of such attraction? I found myself sceptical on the development point and I would be very interested to know what readers here think, especially based on insights from your own lives. I posted to Sexnet about my own knowledge of paedophiles trying to relate sexually to adults, including my own personal – and painful – experience long ago when I was a young adult. This is the post I sent, which began with the above quote from the ASAP co-founder:
Assuming the correspondent is talking about male paedophiles, I suspect this indicates confusion as to when any such sexual attraction to adults would have begun.
I have known plenty of successfully married male hebephiles (and a few paedophiles) but never one who developed a sexual attraction to adults in the course of a pre-marital relationship or during the marriage itself. Always there was some significant level of pre-existing attraction to women alongside the attraction to juveniles. I do not know any paedophiles in a male-male marriage.
In the case of paedophiles who have enjoyed a successful marriage, the happiness of the union has been attributable precisely to NOT having an active marital sex life. This can include an affectionate and loving but non-sexual relationship with the wife. Characteristically, it has been the wife’s second marriage, by which time she already had children from the first. Rather she values the husband for companionship and as a loving father to her children.
In the case of hebephiles who have enjoyed a successful marriage, the man has always had a significant level of attraction to women as well as to juveniles. In these instances marriage does not present a great sexual difficulty.
There are also, however, a great many paedophiles and hebephiles who are not so lucky. Either they have insufficient sexual attraction to adults to make a marriage work, or they cannot find a woman who is indifferent to sex AND is prepared to marry them despite their sexual attraction to children.
This of course raises the very big ethical and practical question of what a paedophile or hebephile is going to tell his intended wife. It was a question I wrestled with as a young man in my twenties, at a time when I would have dearly loved to marry, have a family and be a “good” father i.e. law-abiding both within and outside the family.
I was in fact engaged to be married, and made very earnest endeavours to “develop” a sexual attraction to my fiancee, for whom I had an affectionate and respectful but not an erotic attachment. I did not at first tell her about my feelings towards children. I suppose I hoped I would become “normal” and that all would be well. As I was able, with difficulty, to “perform” in bed (though it was as artificial as any theatrical performance) she seemed to have not the slightest suspicion anything was amiss.
But I couldn’t go through with it. It became increasingly clear to me, as the weeks and months passed, that I was deceiving her in what would always be a major matter, and that it would be desperately wrong to take that deceit into a marriage. I told her the wedding had to be called off and I told her why. She was shell-shocked, having suspected nothing, but was sad rather than angry: better, she said, to know the truth; she respected the fact that I had confronted the situation.
How is a “virtuous” paedophile supposed to behave virtuously in a situation like this, I wonder? Do those who make a virtue of paedophilic abstinence also feel morally obliged to be completely open with their fiancees? If not, why not? I’d have thought that in the present social climate it must be all but impossible for a paedophile to be honest about his sexual feelings and for the relationship to survive. Indeed, there must be many who feel that it would be irresponsible for a woman to marry a man knowing he had strong sexual feelings towards children, no matter how “virtuous” he promised to be.
I am not sure that those who attempt to nudge and cajole paedophiles towards adult relationships are very interested in thinking such things through. Like those who claim success for “reparative” gay therapy, they appear to go in for wishful thinking as to the degree of flexibility of adult male sexual orientation, with the consequence that attempts along such lines have the potential for some disastrous situations and bitter disillusion – sometimes with terrible outcomes to be expected for spouses and maybe for children too. I am thinking here of acrimonious divorce and its emotional fallout for children rather than sexual abuse – although false accusations of such abuse could well become a feature of contested custody hearings.
If I may quote from Bruce Rind’s “Hebephilia as a mental disorder”, to which I must refer anyone who doubts his evidence:
“The evidence indicates that male heterosexual hebephilic interest
is at the lower end of a functional range of erotically-based age
interests in females. Some such interest has been normative across
time and place.”
and
“the cross-cultural and historical evidence indicates that
most mature males have a capacity for MIMH [mature–immature male
homosexual] interest, which is concentrated in the hebephilic range.”
So while Heretic TOC has convincingly shown how he acted as conscientiously as possible in breaking off his engagement under his circumstances, for anyone whose natural preference for pubescents has not become so obsessive as to preclude him from being a sexually satisfactory husband, it is surely not only unnecessary but superfluous for him to bring such an ordinary preference to his prospective bride’s attention.
I agree copletely with Steve on this, but perhaps for reason that others here may not agree with. I think that our sexual desires are rooted very deeply in our psychies, and are not ours to manipulate at will. They draw us into exactly those kinds of relationships that we need in order to grow. These feelings have a kind of intelligence that goes beyond our conscious ideas about what we should feel, and are about something more than just getting a sexual climax. This is why I feel it is such a violation of a person to tell him or her that his/her sexual feelings are perverse. That is saying that one’s love is poluted at the source. When a baby is born it’s erotic desires contain a perfect knowledge of what it needs — a loving breast. As we get older the desires shift, but the eros that arised in us naturally is still the best indicator of what we need.
jedson
“Polymorphous Perverse”…
In times past, I have generally accepted the concept behind this terminology…up to the point, where we are talking about anything short of a complete change of sexual orientation.
It’s been my own orientation, and experience with it, which has caused me to question just how relevant it is…that one may very well be able to broaden their sexual horizons, by just trying different things.
So much of what I have tried, has been sad substitution…leaving me feeling that it just was not worth pursuing.
As you point out, there is also the weight of “pulling other people in”, and possibly hurting them…I’ve actually written about this very issue, a few times in the past. It’s a true concern, and you don’t want to do that to people who you care about. I’ve been confronted by the aggressive girlfriend, so I do understand this conflict.
It’s been my experience, that there is no changing of my base orientation. While I can physically function with a woman, I cannot honestly get into it, or have a satisfying experience for myself. Nothing I’ve ever experienced with a woman, has made me want to go back and try it again.
I fear you’ve described me almost perfectly, Marti–except that I’ve a strong sense of justice to bring into the mix as well.
How many (so-called) homosexual pedophiles are actually “normal” humans (with a wide assortment of “tastes”) who have now become fixated on their attraction to young boys simply because it is “forbidden fruit” in today’s world, but who would, under normal circumstances, have an occasional “fling” with a boy (which may or may not lead – yes – to a long-term/permanent loving relationship) and who then would never consider their identities confined to the little box with the horrific label, “pedophile”? (As for me, my tastes are very narrow, unfortunately… I guess I’m the “Real McCoy”…)
Thanks for your contribution, jedson303. It is far longer than I have said I will permit (see advice on About page) but I have let it pass as it is very interesting and is also your debut comment here – not the last, I hope. [ADDED LATER: Oops! Forgot your comment nearly a month ago, so that’s the debut bit out of the window. Oh well…]
R.I.P. “hebephilia”, you say. Amen to that. Or, rather, I feel the recently announced rejection of hebephilia as a proposed psychiatric disorder is very welcome, but as a descriptive term it is not without a certain proven validity at least in terms of male phallometric response to stimuli based on the physical characteristics of prepubescent compared with pubescent and adult bodily forms. The guy who introduced the term, Ray Blanchard, has actually done some elegant research which is presented in a user-friendly way in an executive summary of his (with colleagues) “alloerotic” paper. Actually, your term “pubesephilia” covers precisely the same ground as Blanchard’s “hebephilia” and your thoughts about a Money-style love map are mirrored quite well in Blanchard’s two-dimensional typology.
As regards your wife, I think your choice has been very fortunate – or wise!
Nobody ever accused me of being wise, so I guess I was just lucky. Was interested in the Blanchard study. More on that later. But before we get too deeply into hard science, let me remind us that number crunching and reductionistic approaches, as useful as they may be for some puposes, may miss what is most important. Here’s a love poem. (It looks long, but its not very many words).
My Amygdala Sighs For You
My frontal lobes worship your loveliness.
You titillate my sensory cortex
which craves the opportunity to
brush up against you
accidentally
more or less.
My superior colliculus scans the horizon in hope of glimpsing
you
your yellow shorts
no one else’s
walking by.
I do not mean to stare.
My optic tectum made me do it.
My amygdala sighs
trembles
as it rummages through my memory cortex
seeking the sustenance of past images
images of your bright eyes,
your slender legs
your shapely t-shirt.
My olfactory bulbs want to snuggle their nose in your arm pits.
The whole of my limbic system
gathers at the foot of your image
wanting nothing more
Than to sit in your general vicinity
while it awaits
synaptic mail
Suggesting to it
Possibilities
of love.
jedson
Wonderful poem, jedson, and I say that as a philistine who finds most poetry either baffling, embarrassing or a bit of a bore. You’re right about the limitations of reductionistic approaches but the strengths are not to be sniffed at either. Or maybe they are: many would be utterly staggered by the profundities to which investigation of the olfactory bulbs alone holds considerable promise of leading.
Good King Heretic TOC.
Surely the ever present inhuman ‘baddies’ are not so called ‘Sex Offenders’ or ‘Pedophiles’ per se. So broadly defined in vast extremes of power-imbalance. E.G. from, knife-wielding ‘Jack The Ripper’, to mere clumsy teen talking-sex to preteen.
As ever, the ever present ‘baddie is the very bent-misinforming mainstream itself stereotyping all ‘S.O.s’ inhumanly lumped into one amorphous ‘Baddie’.
As for the very personal point of ‘sexual attraction’, this is also done a diservice by academics stereotyping all career-pedophiles as sexually-attracted to all under-AOC’s.
One might just revisit the rare relief satire-noire of Brit TV C4(skin?) ‘Brass Eye’ by the great Chris Morris. Where a nice young boy is offered from a ‘pedo-filing cabinet’ to a good gay pedo saying, ” I just don’t fancy him.”
Perhaps it is right to suggest that hard lines are inhuman in any sphere of humanity. Or there would not be the very many AC/DC BI-sexuals. And that taste and attraction can vary greatly, and grow, wax or wane, with each individual’s life experience.
Specifically here with three also broad and interchangeable categories of so called ‘pedo-ephebo’:
1. Fixated (Peter Pan?).
2. Opportunist (War Zones?).
3 Regressive (Stressed?).
Sometimes the adult heterosexual relationship works well even on a sexual level because the MAP is ‘non-exclusive’. But I agree that promoting such relationships for those who have little or no adult heterosexual inclination is a bad idea.
Three quick points before getting to the interesting stuff — namely me and my thoughts. (This is looking like someone suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder to me — well what of it?) 1. I suspect that ABLE is selling snake oil. 2. Obviously one does not choose ones orientation, and no one knows how to change it. 3. I would not go to anyone — at least not in the U.S. — to get “therapy” for this “disorder.”
That out of the way, I’m afraid one other point needs to be made before we get to me. (I’ll bet you can hardly wait.) The whole taxonomy of sexual orientation sucks. Why? Several reasons. First, it is a taxonomy of disorders. To find a pubescent child sexually arousing is not a disorder. Second, the key cut off point between “pedophilia” and “hebephilia (may this term rest in peace) is puberty. Before P, your attraction is one thing, after P, it is another. Yet from my own experience, which has been confirmed to some extent by many people with whom I have talked, I would say it is precisely pubescent males (not before or after) that many men find most attractive. So I suggest we add another term “pubesephilia” to cover this matter. Well, that could be a problem. Some might take it to mean an attraction to pubic hairs. Still, maybe before the the next issue of the DSM it can be debated whether to include this disorder. Third, in the real world, sexual orientation is not so neat. Each person has a constellation of “object choices” that are found exciting to one degree or another. This can best be caught be the idea of the “bonding profile” which lays out the possible objects of attraction in a two by two table on two variables, minor vs adult and male vs female. In each of the boxes one can indicate on a scale of 1-10 how much attraction exists there. That or some similar model, like the “love map” of John Money.
So now we get to the good part. I am just going to describe some aspects of my own experience without any effort to fit them into a prearranged theory. Over-all I have been a late bloomer. Between delayed development and precocious senility, I have had to cram my intellectual efforts into a pretty narrow window of opportunity. Seriously, I was very slow to develop secondary sexual characteristics, I was small for my size, I was perhaps a bit timid, and my interests were rather androgynous. I was not your usual “sissy boy.” I liked rough and tumble wrestling (broke a boys shoulder blade once) and football, but also baking cookies and baby sitting. (Hmm. Babysitting. Sounds like a pervert to me. ) On Halloween I liked to dress as a girl. I was told I was quite pretty. What can I say? Its a fact. Up until 10 or 11, what sexual feelings I had were probably directed mainly at Tarzan (how I envied Boy) and at boys my own age, though I found girls very attractive to.
During my teen years I was intensely attracted to girls my own age or just a year or two younger. That was not my only attraction. I also found younger children of both sexes very attractive, and would have liked it if a man had shown some interest in me, had found me attractive, though at this point in my life I didn’t find them all that sexually attractive. But the strongest attraction I felt during those years was to girls who were a bit younger than I was. This means I was attracted to peers, because I was a slow developer and small for my age. I remember my sex fantasies quite well, so I have no doubts about what I found exciting. (The wet t-shirt one was my favorite.) I may have been behaviorally repressed (I was) but my fantasy life has always gone where it will. Then as I got into college I found that my attraction to boys (around 12, give or take a few years) began to be more powerful. (Physically girls were almost as attractive, but my emotional rapport with boys caused that attraction to be stronger.) But it wasn’t until I was about 23 that I came to realize that my attraction to boys was as strong as my attraction to women. And that has been true most of my adult life. Now as I am getting older, I am feeling more of a desire to lean toward the feminine side in my androgyny, and my feeling for boys is the strongest sexual attraction I have.
This leaves a whole lot out, but what do I conclude? First that the idea of “normal vs abnormal” is currently one of the biggest obstacles there is to understanding what is real. Judgment always stands in the way of understanding. Second, that we should discard all the taxonomies, though perhaps some of the terms could be retained as descriptive words for this or that aspect of a person’s experience. Third, that “orientation” is a very complex and somewhat fluid matter that is effected by an interplay of constitutional, physical, psychological, cultural factors as well as life experiences. And it is individual. No two people are alike. Forth, at least in my case, I found it to be something that did change, but not in response to my willing it. And in fact I find the idea that we should cram our feelings into a culturally approved mold quite distasteful, for reasons that are too complex to go into here.
Regarding my marriage, it was based on much more that just a denial. I wanted a wife and I wanted to have children. And I was attracted to women. My wife is my best friend. I was not indifferent to her feminine sexuality. During our first year of marriage I told her that I had a sort of confession to make. So we arranged for a time to sit down to discuss my concern. I told her that I found boys very attractive. She shrugged. “That’s it?” she said. I thought she might not be getting it. “I mean sexually too,” I said. She shrugged again. She couldn’t seem to see why I thought this was a big thing. She had thought that I had something really dreadful to confess — that I had murdered someone or something like that.
The desire for intimacy with a woman and the desire for intimacy with a boy are two very different things. One does not supplant the other.
Finally here is a poem I wrote just a few days ago. It may not be a great one, but it does seem relevant. Its a little crass. Not one of my lyrical poems. So leave it out of your blog, if you wish.
Dear Pundit
You have not asked me who I am.
You have told me.
You have not peered into the horse’s mouth
of my inner reality.
You make me up as you go along.
Let me return in kind.
You are a status seeking
money grubbing
siko
Phant who grooms the public
and
massages their prejudices
and insanities
For gain.
In short
you
are an asshole.
Only vultures stick their heads into assholes
for sustenance.
It’s their vulture nature that makes them do this.
They are not to be blamed.
But I would rather not.
Who are we
on the inside
to ourselves?
What is the mainspring of my agency and
of yours?
Perhaps we are both wrong for
I have not looked into your horse’s mouth
nor you
into mine.