Disclaimer: like most pedophiles, I have never approached a child with anything sexual or otherwise inapporpriate, and I don’t plan ever to do so. I recognize the harm in such actions, and I don’t want to hurt the very people I love. If you expect AMA with a child molester, this ain’t it.
The account is a throwaway, hope you’ll understand this decision given the sensitivity of the topic.
Edit: Thank you for keeping civil and genuine in your questions. I did envision hostility, yet here you are, amazing as always. Lemmy is a wonderful place to be, thanks to you all!
Edit 2: Apparently we have another brave pedophile here in the comments, and he came with a good note I should include in the post: if you find yourself attracted to minors, that’s okay. Acting on your desires is dangerous, but having them isn’t. If you’d like to have some support and/or community that would help you get your bearings or just listen without any prejudice (we’re all in the same boat), there are places that can help you. Visit VirPed (18+) or MAP Support Club (13+; scroll down for details), or refer to other resources through the MAP Resources website.
not OP, but also a pedophile. I don’t know that we experience “urges” per se. We have a sexuality, just like anyone else. If you would say that urges are a part of any (non-asexual) sexuality, then yes we experience urges in the same way. FSM (shota/loli) is legal in my country, and I do use that as a harmless outlet. (Harmless in the sense that no real person is harmed in the production of the material I use).
People have always sexualized children. Personally, I’m not a fan of sexualizing real children (I’m something of a cartoonophile, so I almost prefer cartoons anyway?) But, I will say that private thoughts and fantasies can’t hurt anyone, and as long as a person keeps those things between their own ears, there’s nothing wrong with it. I do think that commenting in spaces that a child may see what is said is harmful. I don’t think a child should ever know that a pedophile is attracted to them. I also don’t like people using AI to generate pictures of real children. AI as a whole is a big mess that I don’t like. I think that if it’s trained using actual CSEM images it’s pretty unethical, but if it’s extrapolating virtual CSAM based on what it knows porn looks like and what it knows kids look like maybe it’s okay? I think it’s gray, but dark.
What’s our endgame? Well, that’s a great question that we need society’s help untangling. When you say “if it were permissable” I’m assuming you mean adult-child sex? That’s not what I want, nor is it what any anti-contact pedophile wants. We believe the risk of harm to a child is too great, and we stand against it even in places where adult-child sex is legal or permissable. But back to our endgame: let’s say that everyone who is or will grow up to be a pedophile is killed or ceases to exist right now. In 13 to 20 years you will have a whole new crop of pedophiles. We are an unfortunate, but natural and kind of normal quirk of sexuality. I guarantee that you know at least 1 or 2 pedophiles who are not out to you or maybe even themselves. So what are we going to do with us if we aren’t going anywhere? Well. We need resources. We need therapy and mental healthcare. And we need it regardless of our income. If society wants to help us not offend we need to be able to be open about who we are, we need to be able to seek help, and we need to have access to sexual outlets that don’t cause harm (even if they’re “gross” to the rest of society). I believe the fictional sexual outlets cause no harm, adult-in-adult ageplay causes no harm, child dolls cause no harm, etc. Are those things unpalatable to society at large? Yes, probably. But better that we have access to ethical things that are kind of icky than have sexual frustration and tension build inside us.
How do we reconcile that kids will age out? Is it a Michael Jackson thing? Well… realizing that kids will age out isn’t a thing for me. I don’t pine after real kids so much. Cartoon children can be children forever. As far as just preferring children’s company… some of us are like that. Some of us mentally and/or emotionally feel much younger than we are chronologically. Some people may refer to themselves as trans-age or age regressors. But many of us are not like that. For myself, I wouldn’t mind having a 10-year-old body with my current adult brain. Not even for sexual reasons, I just find having a body that age appealing and true to how I want to exist in the world.
To your last point: getting therapy is a very tricky undertaking. Mandatory reporting laws make it a requirement that therapists report us if they even believe we are a danger, and for some therapists merely having this attraction makes us potentially dangerous and therefore reportable. I know some people who have had the police called on them from a doctor or therapist’s office when they asked for help. I know some people who have been outed to family members by a therapist. It’s not always safe for us to seek therapy even if it is affordable. As there is more research about us, I’m hopeful that that will change, and there are resources out there for us to seek safe therapists, but these therapists may not be in our network, further complicating things.
I can not imagine how it must feel to have fucking cops come at you because you seeked help…
This is actually a pretty interesting point.
We’ve been gradually starting as a society to reconsider the lines between concepts historically grouped together, like recognizing that a MtF trans person attracted to men isn’t homosexual but better seen as heterosexual with a different gender self-identification from the body they were born into.
The notion of age as attraction vs identity is an interesting one I’ve not considered before. That there’s a difference between an adult who sees themselves as an adult and is attracted to children vs an adult whose self-identity is more like a child themselves and attracted to similar aged people to how they self-identify.
I would also imagine that nuance and designation might be quite relevant to the issue of therapy and management.
If you were creating a virtual representation of yourself, what would that representation be in terms of age, gender, and other identity characteristics? And how long has that self-identify been apparent to you? Since you were actually that age, only years later, or even before it was that seen as the age you desired to be?
Hmmm… So, I agree with you to a point, but I want to be careful here. Regardless of how anyone with age dysphoria (yes, that’s a term we use) identifies, I want to be clear that I don’t think it’s acceptable for them to have any sort of sexual or romantic contact with a child. It might be appropriate for them to seek out another adult who feels the same way about their own age, or is interested in age play.
Additionally, not all of us experience age dysphoria. I believe it’s most common amongst those of us who are attracted to our own genders, but that’s purely anecdotal, I haven’t taken any survey, nor seen any research.
If I could inhabit a virtual representation of how I would want to look, it would be myself (male) around age 8 or 9 or 10. Or possibly some conglomerate of features that I liked about myself between between the ages of like… 4 and 16, but that sounds much more amorphous, doesn’t it?
This has been apparent to me since I was in my late teens. After watching the movie The Butterfly Effect I would often fantasize about sending my brain back into my childhood body and living my life again but with all my present knowledge and experience, and also not physically aging after a certain point. I’ve also imagined what it would be like to live like that species of immortal jellyfish that goes back to being a polyp and then grows into an adult jellyfish again. I also really liked the book The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August because the main character keeps getting born and living through his childhood. Disappointingly, the author mostly skips over Harry’s childhood and focuses on him being an adult in each life.