"Pedophile Rights" tangent

[Marat]

Since the military forces of other countries, such as Germany, allow gays to serve openly and there don't seem to be any problems, I can't see what is so different about the U.S. Army that problems with gays would be inevitable. Also, since there are now women in the American military, it shouldn't be assumed that gays or lesbians being attracted to other men or women, respectively, would place inordinate strains on life in military service, since the same tensions must already be present among the much larger populations of straight males and females.

 

What is most interesting about the whole issue is how quickly homosexuality, which until about 30 years ago was criminal if acted upon, and was often very severely punished by state laws, now designates a legal category of persons who are protected not only against criminalization but also against discrimination. Can you imagine a future era in which a Pedophile Rights movement gets going and suddenly it becomes illegal to discriminate against pedophiles in the military, in teacher hiring practises, among church staff members, etc.? This was the ultimate sense of the questions raised by Justice Scalia in the homosexual rights Supreme Court cases: Is society allowed to declare certain types of person or the actions certain types of persons perform to be criminal simply because it doesn't approve of them, or does it have to prove first that those actions are objectively harmful? If the state can't prove that the actions which characterize the preferred behavior of a certain class of people are objectively harmful, must it then grant that group not only freedom from being punished by the criminal law, but also legal protection from discrimination?

[Moontanman]

Since the military forces of other countries, such as Germany, allow gays to serve openly and there don't seem to be any problems, I can't see what is so different about the U.S. Army that problems with gays would be inevitable. Also, since there are now women in the American military, it shouldn't be assumed that gays or lesbians being attracted to other men or women, respectively, would place inordinate strains on life in military service, since the same tensions must already be present among the much larger populations of straight males and females.

 

I do indeed agree, the idea that homosexuals would disrupt military life is not reasonable and is not based on the reality of the situation.

 

What is most interesting about the whole issue is how quickly homosexuality, which until about 30 years ago was criminal if acted upon, and was often very severely punished by state laws, now designates a legal category of persons who are protected not only against criminalization but also against discrimination. Can you imagine a future era in which a Pedophile Rights movement gets going and suddenly it becomes illegal to discriminate against pedophiles in the military, in teacher hiring practises, among church staff members, etc.? This was the ultimate sense of the questions raised by Justice Scalia in the homosexual rights Supreme Court cases: Is society allowed to declare certain types of person or the actions certain types of persons perform to be criminal simply because it doesn't approve of them, or does it have to prove first that those actions are objectively harmful? If the state can't prove that the actions which characterize the preferred behavior of a certain class of people are objectively harmful, must it then grant that group not only freedom from being punished by the criminal law, but also legal protection from discrimination?

 

I think it's necessary here to point out that pedophilia is shown to be harmful to the children, children do not have the same ability as adults to make the decision to give consent. The whole thing boils down to consenting adults, children cannot be said to consent. I think it's reasonable to give complete rights to people who are adults and whose actions are between consenting adults and who do not harm anyone. The problem is when you get into sexual conduct, the idea of appropriate sexual conduct is rooted deeply in religion, almost all laws against a particular sexual act is based in the idea that religion has the final say on what is right and wrong. Once we get past the idea that religion can define sexuality we will be much better off as a society.

[Marat]

Is pedophilia harmful to children? Cultural historians usually hail Ancient Greece in the Age of Pericles as the greatest culture the world has ever witnessed, yet there pedophilia was regularly practised, and love between older men and younger boys was praised as a social institution to promote the maturation of teenage boys. Since that didn't have disruptive effects on the rich artistic, philosophical, literary, and military achievements of that culture, I don't see how we can assume that pedophilia is a transcultural evil. It should be noted that the form of sex practised between men and young boys in Ancient Greece was not the sort that would cause any physical harm.

 

It seems reasonable to suppose that the 'harm' which can now be detected in young boys 'victimized' by sex with older men is probably the result of society's disapproval of this activity, which can then make those participating in it feel traumatized. The same thing used to happen with those who gave into homosexual inclinations in the days when society reacted with horror to homosexuality, assuming that it too must be harmful because it was morally disapproved of. Perhaps if we ceased to react with shock and horror at pedophilia, we would also find that its effects were just as neutral as they were when it was a commonly accepted cultural practise in Ancient Greece.

 

The fact that children 'cannot consent to sex' is not a biological or psychological fact, since children are legally allowed to consent to all sorts of things, like diving off a springboard into a swimming pool, which are far more likely to prove dangerous to their health than sex is. The inability of children to consent to sex is only a legal construct, much as the inability of anyone legally to consent to homosexual acts used to be.

 

I'm not gay or a pedophile, but just a liberal, so I wonder why I bother sticking my neck out on such a controversial topic! But I think if we take seriously the Socratic injunction to question everything until it either turns out to make sense or it logically fails to do so, then we can't shrink back even from testing such a delicate matter as this.

[padren]

Can you imagine a future era in which a Pedophile Rights movement gets going and suddenly it becomes illegal to discriminate against pedophiles in the military, in teacher hiring practises, among church staff members, etc.? This was the ultimate sense of the questions raised by Justice Scalia in the homosexual rights Supreme Court cases: Is society allowed to declare certain types of person or the actions certain types of persons perform to be criminal simply because it doesn't approve of them, or does it have to prove first that those actions are objectively harmful? If the state can't prove that the actions which characterize the preferred behavior of a certain class of people are objectively harmful, must it then grant that group not only freedom from being punished by the criminal law, but also legal protection from discrimination?

 

No more than Cannibal-Americans will get the right to hunt down and kill/eat people. On the Scalia note, I think that at the very least the spirit of "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" leans towards "does have to prove first that those actions are objectively harmful" because it is the only test that really works with our Constitution and founding principles. We could use religious morality, but that conflicts with separation of church and state and has no solid foundation as a test - religions change, and have no objective basis.

 

 

 

One of the things that bothers me the most about the concept that it will "disrupt cohesion" is that it only does so due to the presence of bigots. If someone is willing to beat another human being because they are gay I don't want them discerning civilians from combatants in my bloody name. They clearly demonstrate a double standard on the value of human life. I have no problem with people killing people for the reasons of war (which get messy of course) and I understand that a soldier's job may be to "protect these people, over consideration for those people" which create a necessity to deal with people differently, but it has to be dictated by the situation, not the bigotry and vileness of the soldier.

 

We also have a huge amount of under-reported rape of women in the military. This doesn't mean we shouldn't have women in the military (because boys will be boys) but that we shouldn't have bloody rapists. In principle I actually would have no problem with putting a bullet in the head of any soldiers caught raping or beating their own people in a combat situation. I hate war and violence, but it's an ultimate act of betrayal when you prey on others within the group you are a part of when that group is killing and fighting for their lives. That said, it's only "in principle" as there would be no way to police whether the enforcement was legitimate or contrived.

 

 

So why is it that we have to cater to these bigots? Why would our military fail without them where others do just fine? When is it ever a good idea to make a deal with those people whose principles you despise and find unforgivable so they can kill people in your name? Is that an American value we should be proud of?

 

Is pedophilia harmful to children?

Unilaterally Yes.

 

I would recommend a thread-split if this requires further debate, but that's just my opinion.

[Marat]

But the problem is that the laws of civilized societies forbid lots of activities which are not objectively harmful, but which are merely morally disapproved of. Thus marijuana use is much less dangerous and harmful than alcohol use, but while alcohol use is legal, marijuana use is illegal. Incest is illegal, but who is actually harmed by it? Perhaps it could be allowed and restricted, so that the couple would have to use birth control to prevent genetically defective offspring, but even this would probably be a small problem, since the rulers of Egypt were required to marry their brothers or sisters to maintain the purity of the royal bloodline and that didn't produce obvious genetic defects. What about bestiality? If performed with sufficiently large animals in heat, would that really be harmful to anyone? If it could spread disease, then just require condom use.

 

In all these cases we just have pure moral disapproval making harmless things illegal, so what would be wrong if we took Scalia's reminder seriously and made homosexuality illegal? I think that a liberal society should follow John Stewart Mill's 'harm principle,' and try to restrict itself to criminalizing only those activities which demonstrably harm other people, but no societies I know ever manage to do this, so where do we draw the line?

[padren]

In all these cases we just have pure moral disapproval making harmless things illegal, so what would be wrong if we took Scalia's reminder seriously and made homosexuality illegal? I think that a liberal society should follow John Stewart Mill's 'harm principle,' and try to restrict itself to criminalizing only those activities which demonstrably harm other people, but no societies I know ever manage to do this, so where do we draw the line?

 

The view on marijuana legality is pretty much changing in step with how people view marijuana itself regarding it's health risks as compared to alcohol. Just because people have measured the two substances and presented that, on a number of measured indexes, alcohol is more harmful than marijuana the real resistance to legalization comes from people who believe it's more dangerous regardless of what scientists measure.

A lot of people view THC as at least more psychologically harmful than alcohol - they may be totally wrong and base it on a sampling bias against "lazy stoners" but the difference in why one is illegal and the other is legal is due a genuine belief that THC is more harmful. Alcohol is seen as something than can ruin some people who are susceptible or weak willed, but that marijuana turns otherwise productive active people into lazy couch surfers. We are a good distance past the "gateway drug" scare but it takes people a while to come around.

 

 

However, regarding the "harm principle" I would have to say that the line is drawn by allowing laws to pass by popular support, regardless of whether they are unconstitutional... but they can be challenged for it. When a proposed law fails to get passed on the grounds it's not constitutional, that is basically saying it's not worth passing the bill because it would be quickly struck down - not that it couldn't be passed. People of course disagree about the constitution and it's still as fallible as any other human endeavor. Rulings do get reversed as the culture changes. But where the debate in passing a law usually revolves around whether it will solve a problem and if it's popular the debate when arguing before the SCOTUS in a challenge are not at all issues of popularity or effectiveness, but of specifically constitutional integrity. (Or technically if the law is legal, it could be considered illegal for other reasons than constitutional ones.)

 

So even though humans (and judges) do get biased by cultural pressures, the arguments from both proponents and opponents of a law are only framed by the context of whether it is constitutional. Even the pedophile who feels he can't have a normal healthy sexual relationship with a child solely due to prejudicial laws has a case. It's just a horribly weak case and would never survive the mountains of evidence that demonstrate his claim that "no one is harmed" is completely false. Maybe that mountain of evidence will somehow be discredited someday and it will turn out the Greeks of old were right and the pedophile will win his case. I doubt it, but the system is geared to follow that principle regardless of which way it goes.

 

It's imperfect and fallible, and sometimes the pressures of society do delay social change (over civil rights, slavery, property rights, abortion, women's suffrage, DADT, etc) for a long time but as long as people are subjected to discriminatory laws and have access to the means to challenge them it becomes almost inevitable that unconstitutional policies that cause undue discrimination will be struck down.

 

 

 

That's why you draw the line there in terms of harm: some laws that are unconstitutional may never be struck down - but only because no one is challenging them because no one is being adversely affected enough to do so. However, when we discuss things like DADT and gay marriage or any topic where people are bringing forth a strong case for discrimination it is a very false comparison to compare it to a hypothetical bestiality or pedophilia challenge, because no one (sane) is challenging those laws. The reason no one is, is the facts are against them. So even if anti-pedophilia laws are passed solely because of moral taboos, it's the evidence that pedophilia does causes harm that prevents those laws from being stuck down in constitutional challenges.

 

So back to DADT we have people of a sexual orientation that even proponents of DADT acknowledge are just as capable - the fact DADT exists is a testament to that. Proponents of DADT say that homophobic soldiers will cause a loss of cohesion, and since they don't want to address the homophobia problem they try to solve it by hiding homosexuals in plain sight by not asking or telling.

Just imagine for a moment if it was possible to hide your race, and we had a policy that black people could enter the military as long as they played along and let everyone assume they are white without ever giving away they were black. Would we really coddle the racists that get "disrupted" by openly black soldiers? It's an unfair burden to make a soldier live in the closet just to appease the prejudices of a few bad apples. At least that's how I feel the issue plays out.

Edited September 27, 2010 by padren

[Marat]

But if pedophilia really does cause harm in a transcultural, objective, necessary, and unavoidable sense, then why have there been so many successful societies, from the greatest of all societies, Ancient Greece in the Age of Pericles, to the Kalahari Bushmen of Southwest Africa, to the Polynesians of Pitcairn Island, who have practised it with apparently no negative consequences, either in the general psychological health of their citizens or in the cohesion of their society? I grant that pedophilia in modern, industrialized societies would be severely psychologically harmful, if only because the society regards it as harmful and that general view would have its influence on everyone affected by it, producing psychological trauma of all sorts. But my question is whether we can demonstrate that there is something about pedophilia beyond that which has to make it harmful in every possible human society?

 

Children are certainly sexual beings, though few societies in history have wanted to admit that. Children around the world spontaneously play naughty games like 'doctor' with each other, and they often resent the interference of adults with what they regard as their natural fun. At least that is what I remember from the group of five or six children I used to play with when I was age 4 to 10. If some attractive female teacher had 'abused' me when I was a child I would have been absolutely delighted, so I question the automatic characterization of such actions, at least when they proceed from adult females to young boys, as abusive. It would certainly be abusive if it involved some element of compulsion, such as the teacher requiring my participation against my will under threat of a bad grade, but sex under compulsion is an entirely different issue from sex per se, which is also illegal and assumed to be 'harmful.' What I did experience as painful and abusive when I was a child was the sexual starvation I was forced to endure by the adult world around me.

 

I don't understand the other argument usually made, which is that children are not ready for sex and so they cannot consent to it. As I said before, children can consent to many activities infinitely more risky than sex, like jumping off diving boards into pools, or swimming as far out into a pond as they can, and yet society hardly seems to take notice of these risks. Also, children are pushed into many activities which they do not want and which benefit only adults. Thus in my own case, I was forced from age 5 on to endure a hideously strict religious upbringing, which only imparted to me material suitable for developing nightmares and neuroses, and involved my being frequently physically harmed by insane nuns who delighted in beating the tender young flesh of children's fingers with their steel-edged rulers. Even though all of this was harmful and was done not only without my consent but even against it, society was perfectly prepared to permit it as part of my parents' inalienable right to determine my religious upbringing. This was objectively much more damaging than any sexual experience could have been, but the damage was invisible to society, since it was a morally approved damage, while sex is morally disapproved of.

 

But while I was certainly unprepared for religious instruction and discipline when I was forced into it, I was more than eager for sexual experimentation of all sorts, as were all my friends of the same age. So why is pedophilia automatically assumed to be harmful while religious education is praised?

 

I think this is just another case of society assuming that what it profoundly disapproves of must also just for that reason be objectively harmful, just as when Kinsey surveyed American medical students in 1959 and found that half of them were convinced that masturbation was physically harmful.

[Moontanman]

I honestly think that pedophilia needs to be discussed in another thread, homosexuals have suffered far too much already due to erroneously being connected with child molesters. I was sexually active from about 3 years old so i can also talk about this with some experience but still one instance does not a bell curve make. make a new thread if you want to discuss sexuality of children...

[Mr Skeptic]

His example is of pedophilia, not of child molesters. Like the difference between consensual sex and rape. And he is not connecting that to homosexuality, rather to social morality of sexuality, and pointing out that it changes across cultures and times.

[Moontanman]

His example is of pedophilia, not of child molesters. Like the difference between consensual sex and rape. And he is not connecting that to homosexuality, rather to social morality of sexuality, and pointing out that it changes across cultures and times.

 

 

I understand that but this thread was originally about homosexuality so i think the thread should be separated from the original thread. i do have some things to say but i do not wish the idea of pedophilia and homosexuality to be connected, even though I understand that is not what Marat is trying to do. Homosexuality is not something you choose to do, it's not the same as smoking cigarettes, it's not an addiction or learned behavior. It is part of you even if you choose not to engage in homosexual acts the fact that you are attracted to people of the same sex is not the same as choosing to seduce a child, a straight person can choose to have sex with someone of the same sex but that doesn't make you homosexual but preferring to have sex with children is a choice IMHO... For something sexual to be immoral it has to be something you have a choice about, not something that is part of you naturally. oral sex is something you choose to do, not a desire you are born with. i am fine with discussing sexual morality of any act or acts but i see no reason to add fuel to a fire that has raged so long, IE the assertion that homosexuals are child molesters, discussing the two things in this thread seems to give credence to that notion.

[Mr Skeptic]

Oh, I see. You can choose not to find 17-year-olds sexually attractive, but you can't choose not to find a certain gender attractive?

 

i am fine with discussing sexual morality of any act or acts but i see no reason to add fuel to a fire that has raged so long, IE the assertion that homosexuals are child molesters, discussing the two things in this thread seems to give credence to that notion.

 

What a strange notion.

 

Well, please report the post where you want the split, and maybe another mod will split the thread (I'd rather not do that in a thread I'm participating in).

[Moontanman]

I've given it some thought, i see no reason to push my own feelings on this on others, if no one else agrees with me then let it be, it is an emotionally charged idea that i may not be completely neutral about. BTW i disagree with the idea that a 17 year old is a child but is that another thread?

[padren]

Marat, I'll respond but I do hope this post and the whole pedophilia tangent are moved to it's own thread.

But if pedophilia really does cause harm in a transcultural, objective, necessary, and unavoidable sense, then why have there been so many successful societies, from the greatest of all societies, Ancient Greece in the Age of Pericles, to the Kalahari Bushmen of Southwest Africa, to the Polynesians of Pitcairn Island, who have practised it with apparently no negative consequences, either in the general psychological health of their citizens or in the cohesion of their society? I grant that pedophilia in modern, industrialized societies would be severely psychologically harmful, if only because the society regards it as harmful and that general view would have its influence on everyone affected by it, producing psychological trauma of all sorts. But my question is whether we can demonstrate that there is something about pedophilia beyond that which has to make it harmful in every possible human society?

1) These societies ran the gamut from employing slavery to cannibalism within an extremely hostile, violent, and by our current standards traumatic environment. Trying to spot the damage of sexual abuse would probably be about as difficult as spotting a candle in a campfire.

2) Even if Stockholm Syndrome finally set in and the child defends their abuser as someone they love, it set in as a survival mechanism - not a personal choice.

3) Sexual attention is one of the most intense forms of attention one human can pay another and the result can be absolutely jarring for a child. It is also completely outside the experience of a child, so a child would have no idea what they are consenting to even if they could. There's a huge difference between understanding a cell phone contract and understanding how entering a sexual relationship (even with an intellectual equal) can screw you up one side and down the other.

4) Lovers quarrel, and generally for good reasons. There is no way a child would have the life experience or skills to compete with an adult, and even adults often find inequity in this facet unhealthy.

 

Children are certainly sexual beings, though few societies in history have wanted to admit that. Children around the world spontaneously play naughty games like 'doctor' with each other, and they often resent the interference of adults with what they regard as their natural fun. At least that is what I remember from the group of five or six children I used to play with when I was age 4 to 10.

There is a big difference between games like doctor and adult sexuality.

 

If some attractive female teacher had 'abused' me when I was a child I would have been absolutely delighted, so I question the automatic characterization of such actions, at least when they proceed from adult females to young boys, as abusive.

That's why even consensual sex between and adult and a minor is considered statutory rape - "being delighted" does not equal "ends well for you." Would you still be delighted if that woman became pregnant by you when you were only 13? What if you caught Hep c? Do you really think your hormone addled brain was capable of giving informed consent?

 

It would certainly be abusive if it involved some element of compulsion, such as the teacher requiring my participation against my will under threat of a bad grade, but sex under compulsion is an entirely different issue from sex per se, which is also illegal and assumed to be 'harmful.' What I did experience as painful and abusive when I was a child was the sexual starvation I was forced to endure by the adult world around me.

That was your hormones, not adults. It may have been painful, but was it abusive? Do you wake up in cold sweats from nightmares of not-sex? If you say you were abused by being denied sex (not sure how that would work really) I'll agree to consider that a possibility, but it doesn't negate anything else. It's not like consensual sex with someone your age wouldn't have rectified that, so don't think it really applies to the pedophilia argument.

 

I don't understand the other argument usually made, which is that children are not ready for sex and so they cannot consent to it. As I said before, children can consent to many activities infinitely more risky than sex, like jumping off diving boards into pools, or swimming as far out into a pond as they can, and yet society hardly seems to take notice of these risks.

I think I covered this pretty well above, but I have no idea where you draw "infinitely more risky" from, as very few kids have ever committed suicide or endured years of therapy while battling through semi-functional relationships because they once jumped off a diving board. You seem to think the risks of sex are somehow limited to the mechanics - are you accounting for the intense emotional risks, the possibility of pregnancy and STDs?

 

Also, children are pushed into many activities which they do not want and which benefit only adults. Thus in my own case, I was forced from age 5 on to endure a hideously strict religious upbringing, which only imparted to me material suitable for developing nightmares and neuroses, and involved my being frequently physically harmed by insane nuns who delighted in beating the tender young flesh of children's fingers with their steel-edged rulers. Even though all of this was harmful and was done not only without my consent but even against it, society was perfectly prepared to permit it as part of my parents' inalienable right to determine my religious upbringing. This was objectively much more damaging than any sexual experience could have been, but the damage was invisible to society, since it was a morally approved damage, while sex is morally disapproved of.

Personally, I think we should move as a society away from physical abuse, rather than towards pedophilia to solve that particular hypocrisy. It's also worth noting that we have changed a lot in our thoughts on physical punishment and how far a parent's inalienable rights go. I think the hypocrisy you point out is a better at showing why nuns shouldn't be allowed to beat kids, rather than showing why adults should be able to have sex with children.

 

But while I was certainly unprepared for religious instruction and discipline when I was forced into it, I was more than eager for sexual experimentation of all sorts, as were all my friends of the same age. So why is pedophilia automatically assumed to be harmful while religious education is praised?

If I was to take a stab at the answer, I'd say it's because we are still rather screwed up in ways that only a few dozen of millennia of absolute barbarism can accomplish. We are getting better at the "how not to screw up absolutely everything" front but it takes time. It could have been the other way around, but religious zealots do tend to be better armed and more militant than pedophiles, so it kinda makes sense which died off first. I mean we did finally get them to stop burning crosses in people's yards for the most part, but there's a whole lot of crazy to deal with left over from the crazy ages. I'm sorry society didn't get to the nuns issue sooner, though I do believe at least in the US it's a lot different now than it was even a few decades ago.

I think this is just another case of society assuming that what it profoundly disapproves of must also just for that reason be objectively harmful, just as when Kinsey surveyed American medical students in 1959 and found that half of them were convinced that masturbation was physically harmful.

As I said in the previous post: that's enough to get a law passed - but to keep it when challenged means you have to defend it and to do that you need a lot of evidence. To a degree, you can skate entirely on the fact it's taboo and get away with it for a while, but it's an untenable position that is designed to be unstable. You could be right - but in my view (and reasons behind it at the top of this post) you are incorrect in that last assessment.

 

I've given it some thought, i see no reason to push my own feelings on this on others, if no one else agrees with me then let it be, it is an emotionally charged idea that i may not be completely neutral about. BTW i disagree with the idea that a 17 year old is a child but is that another thread?

 

I agree about the thread split and would prefer it. This thread was a good discussion on DADT and it kinda sucks when GLBT rights threads get sidetracked down the same usual suspects of slippery slope side topics.

[Mr Skeptic]

!

Moderator Note

Well, that definitely makes it a tangent. Splitting before this gets out of hand. Split from http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/51971-judge-orders-lesbian-nurse-back-into-military/

[Marat]

Padren: While I agree that many ancient societies had many barbaric forms, such as slavery, oppression of women, militarism, etc., my argument is essentially that if a society like Ancient Greece, where pedophilia was an approved social usage, was really psychologically damaging because of its objective, transcultural nature, then it is inconceivable that that society would have proved so resilient and brilliant in its achievements. Sculpture, architecture, philosophy, mathematics, science, and drama all experienced their greatest development ever at the hands of men who, as young boys, had all suffered what our society would regard as the most crippling psychological injury imaginable. If they had really been that damaged by their early sexual experience, they would hardly have been able to accomplish all the great feats of invention and creativity which they did, since such productivity is the surest measure we have of psychological health. Depressed people are inert; psychotic people are disordered; paranoic people are reclusive or combative -- and we see none of that in Ancient Athens when pedophilia flourished there.

 

When you complain that sex is outside the experience of children, it seems that that is the result of the design of a culture which constructs children artificially as asexual, rather than some transcultural necessity. Children are certainly not asexual if they can get away with their sex games. As it is, children are now made to do many things they are not ready for, and to accept many things that are outside their experience. Going from playing all day in the sandbox to having nuns scream at you about the eternal flames in Hell that were going to burn you up if you picked your nose was certainly something outside my experience at the time.

 

Almost every activity carries risks and has good and bad aspects. You can break your neck jumping off a diving board at the YMCA and spend the rest of your life paralyzed, just as you can get hep C or produce an unwanted pregnancy by having sex with your teacher when you're 12. But the fact that our culture chooses only to see the good in swimming lessons at the Y and only the bad in 12-year-olds having sex with their teacher says more about society's dislike of sex than it does about its special riskiness.

 

I know that Wilhelm Reich is not especially popular today, but most psychiatrists would agree that people can become neurotic from sexual repression. Just look at nuns! So to imagine that parents do not truly harm their children by forcing on them the extremely unnatural sexual perversion of denying them access to their own sexuality in any form of open expression of it with a partner would be naive, although this is what the unrealistic social construction of children as sexless requires.

 

I don't doubt that there is a lot of emotional pain, and perhaps even neurosis, that comes from children exposed to sex with adults in today's world, but that is just an artifact created by society's profound disapproval of it. When children feel this disapproval, and when they are clinically dissected by 'experts' as a result of their experience, this is no doubt extremely traumatizing. But that is a conventional social problem, not a problem essentially rooted in the human psyche.

 

Just imagine what happened before there were any sophisticated social mores in the time of early humans or 'cave men.' People must have always had sex with each other as soon as they could, say at about 12, and no doubt even before then they played sexual games with each other, much as young pups do now or as children spontaneously do in their sex games. But for your theory to be correct, all these people would have had to be traumatized by their sexual experience, which for everyone came in childhood. Yet then the question arises: Why would they have been traumatized? Why would the experience have seemed any different to a cave man at age 30 having sex with a 12-year-old than it would have seemed to him when he was 12 and a 30-year-old had sex with him? Since no mechanism is imaginable by which the experience could have been traumatizing, then we have to accept that the trauma of pedophilia is just an unnecessary side-effect of an arbitrary cultural construct.

 

You seem especially concerned about sex between older males and young males because of the tensions in any shared intimacy between someone with knowledge and experience and someone without it. But for the Ancient Greeks, the mentorship that went along with the social ritual of pedophilia was one of its major benefits. Even if you don't accept that, just consider other examples, where boys and men cooperatively set off on a common bonding experience, such as a 12-year-old and a 30-year-old going off together on a hunting trip. The same disparities of age and experience exist there, but no one would ever think it simply had to be traumatizing for that reason.

 

I think the whole pedophilia case highlights the difficulty of thinking of anything branded by strong cultural disapproval in a neutrally objective way. Our condemnatory values keep creeping in to our attempt to think of everything rationally.

[Moontanman]

Ok, first of all we need to define who is a child, do we go by what society says at this time? What society said 200 years ago? I think that once a human being passes puberty they naturally start seeking out sex, older males generally seek out younger females and younger females generally seek out older males. Young females can be quite aggressive about it in their own way, every bit as aggressive as males.

 

Now i can remember sexual feelings from 3 years old or so, and at least twice in my young life, well before puberty, an adult female had some sexual contact with me. only once did an adult male make seek out sexual contact with me when I was a child.

 

I also had sex many times with other children, as far as i can tell the only way it affected my life was by leaving me with a couple of minor sexual fetishes. i remember being very much interested in sex and i sought it out consistently.

 

 

However one persons experiences cannot be used to make genralizations...

[Mr Skeptic]

The word ephebophilia would denote a preference for post-pubescent teenagers (15-19), hebephilia for pubescent (~11-14), and pedophilia for pre-pubescent ( <14 ), although the specific age varies. Also to officially be a pedophile someone has to be 16 years old or older and interested in people at least 5 years younger. Also it has to be a preference for, not just attraction to or acts with. According to wikipedia, pedophilia is related to various mental issues, but also there seems to be a genetic component.

 

 

However what Marat is talking about seems to be pederasty:

Pederasty or paederasty (US: /ˈpɛdəræsti/, UK: /ˈpiːdəræsti/) is a (usually erotic) relationship between an older man and an adolescent boy outside his immediate family. The word pederasty derives from Greek (paiderastia) "love of children" or "love of boys",^[1] a compound derived from παῖς (pais) "child, boy" and ἐραστής (erastēs) "lover".

 

Historically, pederasty has existed as a variety of customs and practices within different cultures. The status of pederasty has changed over the course of history, at times considered an ideal and at other times a crime.

 

[Marat]

Okay, pederasty.

 

Consider this example to help clarify how much of the supposed 'harm' of childhood sexual experience with adult partners is just a cultural presupposition based on society's desire to find everything it disapproves of to be harmful:

 

A male child is born to a mother on a spacecraft who dies in childbirth. The only other person on the spacecraft is the operator, a 20-year-old male. By growing up on the spacecraft during its journey of many decades, the child is never socialized in a conventional way, since the operator of the craft is more scientifically than theologically or culturally interested. When the child is 10, the adult sprains his back and asks the child to massage his back to restore him to health. This is totally outside the child's experience or interest, and is exlusively in the interest of the adult, but the child complies. Now I assume that no one would assume that the child would be traumatized for life by this experience of physical intimacy the astronaut, even though the child was not really interested in it and was consenting only reluctantly.

 

But now suppose the adult astronaut asks for sex with the child, of the sort that Ancient Greek adult males practised with their young boyfriends, which did not involve any anatomically harmful penetration. Even if the child had no interest in this and complied only reluctantly, why would he respond to it any differently than he would to the massage? He has had no cultural training to teach him that sex is dirty, dangerous, or something that will drive other adults and authority figures into fits of hysteria if they hear that children are indulging in it, especially with adult partners. I cannot imagine how the child in this hypothetical case would find the sexual interaction as anything other than an usual sort of experience, much like giving his first back massage or learning about the planets by observing them out the porthole of the spacecraft.

 

But unless someone can explain how we would have to assume that the child in this example would immediately become traumatized for life by the experience, then we are forced to admit that all the supposed 'harm' of child sex 'abuse' is really just unnecessarily created by society's disapproval of it.

 

The problem with those who assume that underage sex must be traumatizing is that society has artificially made an ordinary biological pleasure into something magical, inextricably linked to vast romantic significance and great dangers, like the Ark of the Covenant. But in fact sex could be understood as a necessary biological drive analogous to eating. Sure, eating with someone you love is a better experience than having lunch with your teacher, but it's no big deal either way, and eating ham and eggs with someone much older than you, or in a meal to which you did not consent, or when you are inexperienced at eating such a diet, etc., will not traumatize you for life. But if we regarded food as sacred; if we ate only in the privacy of our bedrooms with the curtains drawn; if we required people when they were young adults to pick one single food as their favorite and eat nothng but that for the rest of their lives or be labelled adulterers; if we gasped in horror at finding that one of our neighbors had actually gone to the seedy section of town and paid money for food from a waitress he didn't even know, much less love; then the idea of children sharing their meals with older men would send us screaming to the police.

[padren]

Marat, I agree actually that the societal taboo facet does add to the harm done. I don't have the expertise to even say with conclusive empirical evidence that every possible scenario where an adult and a child engage in a sexual relationship necessitates harm - at the same time there are fringe cases where people balance meth habits successfully or people drive better drunk than other people legally drive sober. I also don't know the subtleties of Ancient Greek culture, or if certain taken-for-granted characteristics someone mitigated some of the harms that seem inevitable in today's society when adults and children enter sexual relationships.

 

As such, I am not in a position to argue from empirical evidence on every possible scenario. However, I do still feel that I trust those that claim to have such empirical evidence over those who say it's just taboo - it's a personal opinion. Your scenario about the Space Ship is somewhat like the argument that "if someone drives drunk on a public road when there is 100% chance no one else will be on that road, how can they harm others?" It's such a fringe case you mitigate a ton of real-world factors.

 

Just to give a few: what if there were two adults on the space ship and one child? The adults totally control the child's choice of which if either to be involved with, whereas if the child grew up and become an adult, they could make their own decisions. The simple fact is that child is relying on the adult(s) for guidance to grow as an individual, and the adult(s) have a bias preference towards shaping that child's emerging personality towards that which suits them in an exploitative manner.

 

It is my opinion that an adult has about the same chances of not exploiting a child in that position as a drunk has of being better at driving than the majority of legal sober drivers. The conditions are too precarious and too high risk to warrant a legal exception. I personally still believe that if the evidence was quantified well enough, that both the manner in which it is harmful to the child as well as the answers to the "but the greeks pulled it off okay" mystery would be solved, and pederasty would remain illegal. I don't have the evidence personally so I would be the wrong person to argue on behalf of the law to the SCOTUS, and I don't consider myself a bigot as I would genuinely in good faith review any evidence to the contrary, but I do acknowledge that my opinion leads me to believe (based on the arguments cited previously) that it is harmful.

[Moontanman]

I honestly cannot see any reason to allow pedophilia, it may very well be true that much of the harm has more to do with how society reacts to pedophilia but i can see no reason to allow it. Allowing behavior that might or might not be harmful but almost certainly has no positive side seems problematic at the very best. This article link hits briefly on how this has been seen as different by other societies...

 

 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=an-ode-to-the-many-evolved-virtues-2010-09-22&sc=WR_20100928

[padren]

I honestly cannot see any reason to allow pedophilia, it may very well be true that much of the harm has more to do with how society reacts to pedophilia but i can see no reason to allow it. Allowing behavior that might or might not be harmful but almost certainly has no positive side seems problematic at the very best.

I think the "harm" test case is necessary, though I think pedophilia falls on the "clearly causes harm" side of that test. Children aren't allowed to work in factories the way they did during the industrial revolution, and it could be argued that there are opportunities that would be beneficial "if done right" in factories today, and while itself is a tenuous case it also fails because the "if" is so abstract that a child would most certainly be put "at great risk" even if they do not come to harm in a single scenario due to the general uncertainty. (Again to reiterate, the uncertainty on my part is towards my own expertise to evaluate the massive evidence that demonstrates it's harmful, I personally (albeit lazily) still trust that evidence and believe the behavior is harmful.)

 

 

 

Interestingly enough, if I had to vote one way or another I'd still vote on banning pederasty even if the evidence in the case in support of the ban was too capricious to pass a standard constitutional challenge. I would have to consider myself both hypocritical and bigoted to take that stance (and again, it's such a strange hypothetical to consider) since I regularly browbeat moralists that employ that same standard. If the proponents of the challenge had a genuinely strong case it's conceivable I could be persuaded.

[JohnB]

Interesting that the conversation has almost exclusively considered male children. To be inclusive, one should discuss young girls as well, but that makes the "harm" a lot easier to see, doesn't it? The main reason for raising the marraige age was to reduce the appalling rate of childbirth deaths.

 

I also doubt the use of comparing ancient Greece with modern society. Pederasty as practiced there was simply one facet of an essentially brutal and violent culture surviving among other brutal societies. Cultures must be seen as a whole, and not as romanticised parts. The flip side of the "caring" pederasty was the practice of leaving sick or deformed babies in the woods as food for the animals.

 

As a society we separate children from adults on the grounds that a child cannot (due to lack of life experience) fully understand the consequences of their actions and therefore cannot give a truly informed consent. This is true in many areas, not just sex. It's the reason that we have juvenile courts as well. If a person is to argue that a child has the sexual rights of an adult, then it only follows that they should have the other adult rights as well.

 

Shall we lower the voting age to 8? Shall we abolish all childrens courts and prosecute a 6 year old as we would an adult?

 

The bottom line here is that we as a society are trying to find some sort of happy medium and as such frame our laws on the basis of the average. There are those who can have sex at 10 withoout emotional damage, but there are others who suffer damage at 25. The law is simply an answer that most people can live with. Similarly we have speed limits. Where the limit is 60 kph there are many who could safely drive at 70 kph, but there are some who are dangerous at 40 kph. 60 is what most people can live with.

 

We cannot draft laws for every individual, the best we can do is draft those that the majority will accept and live with. Be it sex or speed limits, it's all the same thing.

 

Marat. I'm sorry for you if the nuns beat you, but big deal. I grew up in the 70s and they did that here too. As to their repressing your sexuality, or whatever you think they did by denying your sexual expression, that's a laugh. The truth was then (and the young guns tell me it's still true) that the gauranteed lays were from the religious schools, the stricter the better. Young "Ladies" from very strict religious schools have never had any problem ditching the nuns and having some fun. In '78 I had a wonderful weekend with three young ladies from a very strict Catholic School at a "well supervised" camp.

 

Recently in West Australia some young "ladies" ditched the nuns long enough to make a lesbian sex film in their dorm which they then sold in quantity to the boys at the other religious school across the road.

 

The laws and rules of society apply to everybody but they were never meant to suit everybody.

[divagreen]

I don't understand the other argument usually made' date=' which is that children are not ready for sex and so they cannot consent to it.[/quote']

 

I think that one needs to consider that a power differential exists between an adult and a pre-pubescent child.

 

I also can't imagine that a reciprocal amount of pleasure is derived, as the child has not fully developed physically, mentally or emotionally. It seems pretty one-sided to me.

 

And I thought that consensual sex had to at least contain the possibility of mutual pleasure.

 

But perhaps I am being pedantically non-gender specific.

 

Children are certainly sexual beings' date=' though few societies in history have wanted to admit that.[/quote']

 

Are you perhaps mistaking imitation with genuine sexual desire?

Edited September 29, 2010 by divagreen

[Moontanman]

I think that one needs to consider that a power differential exists between an adult and a pubescent child.

 

 

I agree, it is far too likely the child will be taken advantage of for it to really be allowed.

 

I also can't imagine that a reciprocal amount of pleasure is derived, as the child has not fully developed physically, mentally or emotionally. It seems pretty one-sided to me.

 

I had sex as a child, pretty much continuously from the age of 6, i had some sexual contact from the age of three, i enjoyed it immensely, orgasms and all but I consider myself lucky in that i wasn't forced to do anything by a true predator type person.

 

 

And I thought that consensual sex had to at least contain the possibility of mutual pleasure.

 

But perhaps I am being pedantically non-gender specific.

 

There was very much mutual pleasure... and desire, very strong desire on my part...

 

Are you perhaps mistaking imitation with genuine sexual desire?

 

Nope the sexual desire was quite real....

[Marat]

The space ship example is not intended to be an exceptional empirical case, so it is not limited in significance by its rarity. Rather, it is just a thought experiment to exclude the influence of cultural disapproval in creating the psychiatric harm which is now associated with pederasty in modern western societies. To make the point that there is something about intimate, pleasurable, physical contact between older people and younger ones that inevitably traumatizes the younger person for life, driving them into instant insanity from the massive psychiatric devastation of this action, it has to be established that this act in itself is harmful. It seems difficult to understand why society would regard an intimate, physical pleasure such as a massage as totally harmless, while it would descend into a profound moral panic if this exact same action were to be turned a few degrees to the left or right to become a sexual pleasure. At what point on the continuum does traumatization for life inevitably set in in the child from a sufficiently sexualized massage, and at what point is the action absolutely trivial and harmless because it is just a mutually physically pleasurable massage? I really just cannot see how a pleasurable action, performed in a cultural vacuum, or in a culture which approved that action, could somehow necssitate lifelong psychiatric trauma. I wish someone could actually trace out for me the precise mechanism by which this instant and massive induction of insanity, unavoidable in any and every form of human culture imaginable, would be caused.

 

It seems to me that the presumption that sexual consent by children must be denied because sex is so massively risky simply reflects the cultural hatred and fear of sex rather than any risk so great that young people cannot consent to it. When I was 10 my figure skating teacher persuaded me, though she could see I was quite reluctant, to attempt a difficult jump, and when I landed I caught the pick of my skate on the ice and fell forward, being seriously injured. But despite this, no one in the society who knew about my taking such a significant risk of physical and psychiatric harm at the tender age of 10 for reasons more of interest to my parents and the skating teacher than to me felt that I was exploited, or that I should be stopped from ever taking that risk again, or that the police should be called, or that I must inevitably have been traumatized for life. Now why not? Obviously, because the risk I took and the harm I experienced was not sexual! Yet taking a much smaller sexual risk at that age would have sent the entire neighborhood into a frenezy of hysterical outrage. The difference can only be that the one activity was sexual and the other would not have been.

 

Conducting an inventory of my own memories, I would say that like Moontanman, I had a strong sexual interest at a very young age. But let us suppose for the sake of argument that he and I are exceptions and that most young people are not very interested in sex. But children are coerced by adults into all sorts of activities all the time which are either of much more interest to the adults than to the children, or of absolutely no interest to the children, or are even hated by the children, and yet society not only does not disapprove of these actions for that reason, but it even approves of them. Take for example religious education, which children find either boring or terrifying, depending on whether it consists in sitting on hard wooden benches listening to old people recite utterly meaningless rants about who begat whom and people being swallowed by whale, or whether it involves terrifying children with tales of eternal damnation, hellfire, sin, guilt, alienation from one's own natural biological drives, etc. Now all of this is clearly exploitative, since it uses children in support of the adults' interest in propagating the superstitions which imprison their own minds, and it has no interest whatsoever in whether the children are bored or terrified by the experience. So why, in a society where this happens all the time without complaint, do we go hysterical if we find that children are being exploited for adults' interests in pederasty? The latter case is especially strange, since in contrast to religion, children actually have a natural interest in sex, so the exploitation, if it exists at all, would be infinitely less than in religious education.