yes I agreed with your point that the environment (punishment) may suppress the will to act certain behaviours and think certain thoughts.

maybe not? Look at drug legalisation in portugal. Also morals exist without a law based upon it.

David,

It's just Nabokov, really. Given enough dispassion and judicial training, these topics can be explored.

Still and all, there are limits to psychological damage that mortals should endure.

Thanks.

Kristopher.

To many, yes. No personal offense, it's just a series of thought experiments. (Thanks, David.)

Development of mind has to be unhampered. Otherwise even the smallest hint of subjugation grows exponentially.

They're messed up because there is a vast commonality that considers pedophilia wrong simply because of the absence of choice. They either end up repeating the pattern across a wide range of antisocial methodologies. Psychopathic/sociopathic/guilt manifesting as reinforced violence which passes from generation to generation.

There's plenty of survivor material out there in public circulation, stories from residential school survivors.

And look, it's 2012. Humanity is nowhere near ready for this so if I don't make sense at times, I will later.

Thanks.

If we are comparing homosexual behaviors or repressed intrests to pedophilia, then why not just add in all the other taboos like brutal vilolent rape, beastiality, canibalism, incest, and good ole Necrophilia! WTF are we doing comparing homosexual sex to these downright sick other behaviors?? and BTW I am not gay or Bi trying to justify myself!

lol. Pretty dumb, ain't it?

Good luck with the Alabama end of things, sir. The honor was mine.

If you think about it, having a continuum of behaviours, where the further to the right represents less common sexual behaviours- heterosexuality would be at the start, homosexuality, beastiality, peadophillia ect would follow. There would be a correlation also with how strong a taboo it is. So it can be perceived that homosexuality/peadophillia/beastiality exist on the same continuum, with respect to sexual norms, and it canbe perceived a homosexual is closer to things that are further away from fully functional vaginas.... giving steretypical defintions along the scale of 'normal' 'weird' 'fetish' 'messed up' ' sick and evil',,,, through time it is appearing that things are moving closer to the left. It is only nowadays that homosexuality is defined along with heterosexuality as both being 'sexuality' - like male and female are 'human'

But this is not happening for the first time in human history. It's just that with expanding populations with stronger collective connections, it is inherently less risky to be more open about your sexuality.

Thing is though, there are no secrets, and consent is extremely important.

That said, to not approach sexuality in its entire range with dispassion condemns you to not understanding it at all.

Deterministic protective structures suck sometimes.

Really? I am not in any field that has anything to do with this sort of thing, but it's not difficult to imagine at all. Males who prefer healthier mates who can produce more offspring are selected for. Reproductively, youth is health, to a certain extent. Women have adapted to this youthful selection strategy by maintaining youthful features longer in their lives (less hair and more child-like faces http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny...omen.27s_faces). This leads to a sort of feedback loop where males have to be even more youth-selective to get the benefit of a healthy mate. Obviously this sort of selection can lead to pedophilia in individuals who are at the extreme end of youth-preference.

I'm talking out of my ass here, so if someone who is better educated in the field could correct me or explain how that's wrong, that'd be great. But it's easy to imagine how it can be selected for to an extent that it ends up quite common.

Defining paedophilia as attraction to prepubescent females makes this problematic. It becomes an attraction to an infertile mate; the opposite of advantageous, no? Sexual intercourse - particularly forcible intercourse - can also be damaging physically, which may hamper reproduction even when the child does become fertile.

The only path to a selection advantage I can then see is if paedophilia were the extreme end of a scale of preferences. But in that case I'd expect hebephilia and ephebephilia to be the norm, or at least far closer to the norm, than seems to be the case.

I too am talking out of my ass and could well be wrong, but those are some immediate problems I can see with the theory of paedophilia as reproductive strategy.

Edit: I meant to say also that the reproductive strategy theory may have difficulty explaining pederasty.

This is more or less what I was thinking. Except I spell it 'pedophilia.' The 'a' looks weird to me. What am I supposed to do with it? Try to pronounce it somehow?

It's actually a quite recent invention - we need to be able to smoke out hidden Americans in online discussions.

From now on I'll spell it pædophile, I think.

Titan indeed.

I wonder. Is menarche the standard of consent? It used to be in early civilization and before that. That didn't mean prehistoric man didn't rape.

And these acts, despite being a part of human nature, warrant a categorization of rape.

I don't know. Heinlein and Stross have certainly explored the issue in specfic, so...

The Lolita phenomenon is very common, and it is not a gender issue. Female pedos exist too.

Essentially I am of the opinion it boils down to a violation of innocence. As far as criminology profiling goes, they don't come any more adept, and while I do understand that instigators don't always distinguish right from wrong because it is very much a generational legacy, especially in familial and institutional abuse (i.e. Plumadore, residential school survivors, et al...)

It is a form of slavery and really is not permissible in the early 21st century. Clarke was right when he wrote in 3001 about there being a Orwellian superclass even in a just and equitable society. If only because with every generation, there are intellectual giants who forge new paths.

In terms of sexuality, I have known many people personally who have survived the horrors of this phenomenon, and while dispassion is my natural state, the very idea that such subjugation exists induces a type of fury within my personal manner that is inherently dangerous to society.

So I try to remain within my ivory towers and suggest precedent to the new generation of legislators and law enforcement officers. It's safer for everybody really.

Americans can be pretty awesome people, but in two and a half centuries the drift of morality from the principles of your founding fathers... I am optimistic, and so is my family, but...

<shakes head> Frustrating.

I like science, so I'm going to volunteer and maybe we can all learn something from each other.

I am a pedophile. I was molested by my father and brother who is older than me and my only sibling. No not simultaneously. I am also bisexual and into beastiality. I'm open to answering some questions if anyone thinks it would be worth it to the thread.

I'm not sure ephebophilia isn't the norm. That such pairings aren't socially or in some cases legally acceptable does not mean that's not what men want, and it makes it pretty hard to test without delving into it. My guess would be that it is extremely common, and my somewhat weaker guess is that it's the norm.

^ and the corollary to that is that it's easy to imagine that genuine pedophilia, anti-reproductive though it is, could be the (relatively extreme) expression of genes that are selected for because in most cases they produce ephebophilia. A certain prevalence of pedophiles could be resulting from natural selection.

Moreover, the mere fact that pedophilia exists suggests that those genes are being selected for in some way; to me this is the easiest (though pretty much unprovable) explanation.