…Wrong.

Actually, the majority of child sexual abusers are not pedophilic at all, they are mainly attracted to adults. Several studies put that majority between 60-80% (here and here), as do other advocacy organizations. Likewise, not all who view child sexual exploitation material are pedophilic: 40% or so are attracted to adults. Research also solidly supports the idea of non-offending pedophiles: People who have a sexual attraction to children but refuse to act on it via sexually exploitative imagery or by molesting/raping a child.

Given the available numbers, it would likewise appear that most pedophiles do not harm children. So, before we continue, I need to bring up another point: Help. Yes, get help. That is what pedophiles should do, right?

What Does Help Look Like?

…nothing like what you might think. There are two main schools of thought around helping pedophiles. One is based in sex positivity, research, and an acknowledgment of the facts around these issues. The other is based in what we would call wishful thinking that has limited, if any, scientific basis. For those that may not know, I am a pedophile, and yes, I got help already. So, let me give you the nutshell version of what properly researched help looks like for pedophiles.

Wishful Thinking

Wishful thinking goes something like this: Sexual fantasy involving anything that would be illegal if acted on is bad for you. Why? Because everyone knows that it is practice for acting on it, plain and simple. If someone has a sexual interest in children, for example, they should work hard to suppress that interest. Sexual interest, after all, is a choice.

Fact-Based Approach

The fact-based approach goes something like this: Sexual fantasy is just that, fantasy. It is not the same as reality, and if someone acknowledges that distinction, there is no problem. Also, there is growing evidence that pedophilia functions as a sexual orientation in that it cannot change and persists over time. In other words, there is no way to “pray the pedophilia away,” pedophilia is something that has no cure. Conversion therapy has been scientifically proven to do more harm than good, and suppressing sexual thought can actually backfire.

The therapeutic approach, then, is to work with pedophiles in understanding that pedophilia has no way of changing, accepting that one has pedophilia and all that comes with it – sexual fantasies included – and not attempting to change that which cannot change. In other words, rather than resisting having sexual fantasies, going with the flow and not shaming oneself afterward.

Why Acceptance Is The Only Solution

Many have speculated that, given enough time and research, we might come up with a way of changing sexuality for those who might seek it. In other words, just because there is no way of changing pedophilia now does not mean there never will be a way of changing pedophilia. This “solution” is not in the immediate foreseeable future, and it is unclear if that will ever be a reality. Only time will tell.

So, let me explain what cognitive dissonance is: A psychological phenomena in which our mind is in conflict with something in a way that causes us distress. The simplest example of cognitive dissonance is the caricature of someone trying to make a moral decision, and a red devil is on one shoulder and an angel on the other shoulder. A practical application might be that you got passed up for a promotion at work, and you refuse to accept that your performance was not good enough to get the promotion, blaming it on favoritism, sexism, racism, or a boss that hates you (not to say those do not happen, obviously, but leave those aside for now).

If a pedophile – or society – is constantly holding out hope that we might have a world in which there is no pedophilia, no sexual attraction to children… then that creates distress and cognitive dissonance. It creates turmoil, which can cause any number of negative effects: Isolation, depression, anxiety, shame, worthlessness… the list is very long indeed. If a pedophile is holding the false hope that they can somehow change their attractions, and that consistently does not happen, or worse, they fool themselves into thinking that it has happened, then they are creating their own distress.

The only way to solve that distress is acceptance: Acceptance of the facts, acceptance of reality. That is the only way for pedophiles to be happy, and for society to peacefully coexist alongside pedophiles.

We have seen the results that distress and cognitive dissonance brings and how this puts children at risk by driving pedophiles away from help and support. We have seen already how difficult it is . The better alternative is to keep children safe by not asking pedophiles to do the impossible.

Society Will Accept Pedophiles

Whether you want to admit it or not, there is no reason why pedophiles will not gain just as much acceptance as other minorities in the near future. No one chooses their attractions, that much is obvious to anyone. They can choose their behaviors, which is what pedophiles should do… carefully. For most pedophiles, this is easy. Some need support in making that choice. However, the acceptance of pedophiles as human beings will happen within my lifetime.

The question is… are you going to opt for that, or for cognitive dissonance?

The post Acceptance Is The Only Answer To Pedophilia appeared first on Pedophiles About Pedophilia.

Right now, there are places in the world where a certain type of children are being bought and sold like common commodities. They are shipped from place to place, in secret, often internationally. They are exploited and used without any regard to their feelings or well being. They are provided for the sole purpose of servicing adults sexually. Their little bodies subject to any and all manner of unspeakable acts, used as if they are nothing more than toys.

Okay, full disclosure, these particular children are toys, but what right does that give anyone to sexualize and defile them? Sure, they may be made entirely out of plastic, or latex, or silicone, or whatever the hell they make sex dolls out of these days, but they are still children. Children who are being provided to satisfy the sick desires of the most evil, subhuman, filthy creatures on the face of the planet, pedophiles.

Fortunately this tragic and atrocious phenomenon has not gone unnoticed by the governments of some of the more compassionate and enlightened nations of the world. The artificial child sex trade is a scourge that people are waking up to everywhere, and people are demanding action. It is because of this awareness that countless artificial children will not be made to suffer the artificial trauma that might have been their lot in life. Because of this, they will no doubt be saved years of artificial therapy with artificial therapists to recover from their artificial pain, and the world will be a kinder place.

If you haven’t picked up on my sarcasm by now, stop reading immediately. This is not the blog for you.

I’m pretty sure anyone with half a functioning brain will agree that child sexual abuse is bad. Even many pedophiles understand and believe that children should never be interfered with sexually by adults and that age consent laws serve a legitimate purpose in protecting children from people who would take advantage of them. (Shout out to my fellow Virpeds.) However, the degree to which modern society has taken it’s zealousness to protect children from sexual harm has begun to lead us far beyond common sense solutions and off into the real of the hysterical and the insane. This hysteria includes but is not limited to arresting and prosecuting people for sex with inanimate objects, as well as possession of drawn and computed generated images.

There have been a number of cases recently of people around the world being arrested for such “crimes” when the items (child-like sex dolls) they purchased were discovered entering the country. Normally these people have resided in either Europe, Australia or North America. The country the dolls seem to all be coming from is Japan, where apparently they have slightly more tolerant, dare I say sane, attitudes towards behaviors such as sex with inanimate objects that may or may not look like children.

Sadly, whenever I’ve seen an article about what I’ll call the child doll sex trade, the comments at the bottom of those articles have typically been overwhelmingly in favor of prosecuting the purchasers of said dolls. Not to mention in favor of doing cruel and unusual things to to said purchasers. Who would have thought that making love to a lifeless piece of latex would be an act deserving of a slow and painful death?

As one might expect, a lot of the comments I saw associated with these articles didn’t even make any sense at all, and made comparisons between pedophilia and other phenomena that not only missed the mark, but sounded silly doing it. One such comparison I heard more than once was that of pedophiles to serial killers. The thought more or less being, “What’s next? Providing serial killers with dolls they can act out their fantasies on?”

Now, anyone who knows what they’re talking about, including experts who study pedophilia, will tell you that pedophilia and the things that motivate homicidal manics are not even in the same psychological ballpark. Not even close. It’s like comparing apples to giraffes. (Apples to oranges isn’t different enough.) Still, let’s work with the example anyway, shall we?

If someone were inclined to stalk and murder other human beings, and that person wanted to act out the fantasy with a non-human surrogate victim, what would prevent them from obtaining an ordinary department store mannequin, taking that mannequin home, and stabbing the shit out of it? To be honest, if someone were inclined towards such things, I’d prefer that they resorted to using the mannequin as an outlet as opposed to say, my sister or my mom, but that’s just me, I guess.

Continuing with this example of the homicidal person and his unfortunate department store mannequin, if this scenario were to play out in real life, and someone were to catch the “offender”, can anyone imagine anything being done about it from a legal standpoint? Can you imagine a 911 call?

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“Yes, you have to help! I can’t believe what I’ve just seen! My neighbor….. my neighbor came home today with what appears to be a female mannequin.”

“Ummmm…… what? What’s your emergency?”

“No, no… you don’t understand! That’s not all! Just now, I was looking over there and, well, I didn’t mean to, I mean… I wasn’t trying to be nosy or anything, but for a moment, I could see through his living room window, and well, he had the mannequin and he was….. STABBING IT WITH A KNIFE!!!!!”

“My god! Ma’am, stay calm and lock your doors! I’m sending the SWAT team immediately!”

Does anyone really think that’s how such a call would play out? I’m going to say no. I’m going to say that the operator would probably laugh you off the phone. If they did send anyone, the cops at most would ask the mannequin slasher a couple of questions. Then, they’d roll their eyes and walk away thinking, “what a weirdo”, and that would be it. That’s even in a case where the mannequin being stabbed was a childlike one. Stab that same childlike mannequin with your dick though, and you could be in some serious legal hot water.

Is the absurdity of the criminalization of child sex dolls coming through any clearer now?

The criminalization of victimless acts which simulate child sex haven’t been limited to life-like dolls either. In many places around the world, people have been arrested and prosecuted for drawn and computer-generated images which portray children in a sexual light or engaging in sexual activity. No children have been harmed, and there is no evidence that the people viewing such media have or will harm children, but they have been made criminals anyway, for what amounts to essentially nothing at all.

Some may say the the people who are found to be in passion of such material are deserving of punishment simply because “it’s sick”. Ok, fair enough. Let’s accept that it’s “sick”. The fact of the matter is, lots of people do things in private that, while harmless to anyone else, most others would consider icky, or creepy, or sick, and they do not have to worry about the police knocking on their door, arresting them, putting them in jail, then adding them to a registry that marks them as social pariahs for the rest of their lives.

Also, much like the example with the mannequin, there are artificial things that could be worse and that would be unquestioningly protected by free speech and/or privacy rights. If someone drew or created computer generated images of a bunch of murdered and mutilated children, would they also be going to jail? I certainly don’t think so. Especially not if the creator were to claim the that images were supposed to represent something about the cruelty of a bleak and uncaring society or some such thing. Then, it’s just art. Controversial art perhaps, but art. However, put the illustrations of the mutilated children side by side with computer generated CP, and which would portray the greater atrocity? Why then, could someone be imprisoned for the latter images and not the former?

At the end of the day, the most compelling argument people in the camp who support the criminalization of all forms of artificial child sex have is that it encourages actual child abuse and that people who resort to any form of artificial child sex will eventually decide that’s not enough and go on to abuse real children. The problem is that there is not so much as a single shred of even anecdotal evidence to support that assumption. That’s all it is, an assumption. A baseless, knee-jerk supposition made mostly by people who have little to no understanding of the issue and certainly not of pedophilia itself.

Speaking as someone who is a pedophile himself and therefore has a pretty deep understanding of the issue, if anything, it’s the opposite. To me, common sense would dictate that it would be better for pedophiles to have as many harmless and victimless outlets as possible to discharge sexual energy. People who are sexually attracted to children are going be sexually attracted to children one way or the other, until the day they die. Providing or denying them sexual outlets is not going to change that, one way or the other.

If I were a teleiophile and a parent, I’d think I’d want pedophiles to have child sex dolls and artificial CP. The more the better. Hell, not only do I think I’d want to to be legal, but mandatory. I can see the government program now…. “If you’re a pedophile or are in any way sexually inclined towards children, come to you local department of health and pick up your free child sex doll! We can provide child sex dolls of all shapes and sizes! Take it home! Fuck it all you want! Just stay away from real children!”

To be honest though, the availability of such sexual outlets probably makes little difference either way. Pedophiles who have a mindset that inclines them towards actually abusing children are a already a danger to children. I really don’t think that fucking a doll is going to magically make them any more or less dangerous. Pedophiles who already have or already do abuse children probably aren’t going to be satisfied with a doll. Pedophiles who are committed to not acting out and not abusing children aren’t going to make love to a child doll, then snap and decide to betray everything they believe in and willfully harm a child they care about.

With all of that having been taken into account, this is really just another issue of personal freedoms and individual liberties. In a truly free society, any person who is inclined to should be able to purchase any sexual aids they chose, including lifelike dolls, of any shape and size, made to the likeness of any age group, for any reason. Would the availability of a childlike love doll keep me from abusing a child real life? No, because I wouldn’t and won’t abuse a child in real life anyway, with or without a doll to live out my fantasies with. The reason I should be allowed to purchase such a doll, without fear, is that it’s a victimless act, and it’s none of anyone else’s goddamn business what I do when I’m completely alone, in the privacy of my own bedroom.

Not that I’d buy one if I thought I could. I mean, how good could a lifeless piece of silicone or latex or whatever really be? Also, storage and cleaning would probably be a pain in the ass. Although I suppose I could probably find somewhere to keep it, but I’m not sure it would be worth the hassle. Not to mention they are pretty expensive, from what I’ve heard. Although everyone takes MasterCard these days, don’t they? What is my credit limit again? I’m not close to maxed out……

Ok, I’d totally buy one.

The post The Tragedy of Child Sex Dolls and Artificial CP appeared first on Pedophiles About Pedophilia.

As many of you who already know my story are aware, when I was about 13 and a half, I started developing an attraction to younger boys that came seemingly out of nowhere. Before that, I was only turned on by women and same-aged girls. Not only turned on by, but sexually obsessed with. Most of the molestation and sexual bullying I endured at the hands of older kids as a boy had been done by females, and it led to a hypersexuality that I’m certain isn’t healthy for a preteenage boy. However, up to that point, not once had my premature obsession with sex and pornography been directed towards males at all. As the 13.5 year old me rapidly discovered his attraction to younger boys, he found his attraction to females disappear completely and almost immediately.

I remember sitting on the floor of my bedroom in the late summer of 1988, looking at pictures of boys in the Sears catalog. (Yes, kids, this is before the internet.) Why did my mind and my heart suddenly race at the thought of what those boys might look like if you took off all those clothes they were advertising? Then, the more overtly sexual thoughts crept in. I tried to repel those thoughts and wish them away but they just kept coming back stronger. It was as if the attraction had started out as a babbling brook but very rapidly turned into a raging river that I could no longer swim upstream against, no matter how hard I tried. It was futile to resist, and before to long I surrendered and let that torrent of raging water take me where it would.

As I rifled through the boys section of that big, thick catalog, I remember asking myself in my head, “Am I gay? Why am I turning gay?” However, it didn’t take me very long to realize that I was not turning gay in any normal sense. I was well into puberty at that point, and the boys who I began finding attractive were all younger and prepubescent. I had no idea what it all meant though. I had no frame of reference. I was totally lost and confused. I hoped that maybe it was a phase and that it would go away, but the more the weeks and months wore on, the more this new found attraction hard-wired itself into my being.

Keep in mind now, that in the late 80’s, the word “pedophile” was not nearly as much a part of the public vernacular as it is today. At 13, I had never even heard the word. Sure, I knew there were people out there who molested children but I didn’t have any concept of the fact that there existed adults who were primarily sexually interested in children. I had been warned all throughout my childhood of molesters, but didn’t really have much of a handle on who they were exactly either. To me, child molesters were dark, shadowy, creepy strangers who wore trench coats and sat in windowless vans outside of schoolyards, with a bag of candy and a perpetual erection. They were people who abducted children, chained them up in their basements, did unspeakable things to them, and finally left them in shallow graves somewhere. Surely I wasn’t becoming one of those, right? I couldn’t be. I knew I was a nice person and I didn’t want to hurt anyone.

Then, in the early months of 1989, there came the day when I found out. The day I found out what I was, or, at least was given a label to apply to myself and my new sexual identity. They say labels aren’t important, but they can be, especially when you’re trying to categorize something for the sake of making sense of it.

It was right around my fourteenth birthday, give or take a month or two. I was sitting in my living room, watching MTV, when the Madonna video for the the song “Open Your Heart” came on. Now, I’m not much of a Madonna fan and wasn’t even back then, but I was a bored teenage kid who would watch whatever crappy video came on MTV. At the time, I was probably waiting patiently for the next Guns n Roses or Motley Crue video. This was long before on-demand, mind you, and to see a rock video, you often had to wade through half a dozen or more teeny-bop videos and just enjoy the rock ones when MTV decided to air them. Though not a fan of Madonna, this video grabbed my attention and held it, because this video featured a stunningly gorgeous boy who appeared to be about 10 or 11.

So, I watched this video and was absolutely transfixed by the beauty of this boy. My heart skipped a beat every time he was shown on camera. Then, at the end of the video, Madonna bends down and kisses this little boy on the lips. It was all I could do not to excuse myself to the restroom for a fap right then and there. How badly I wished I could have kissed those lips like she did.

Towards the end of the video, my mother had come into room and witnessed the on-screen kiss. When Madonna’s lips pulled away from the boy’s, my mother became visibly perturbed and exclaimed, “Oh my god! What the hell is wrong with Madonna? Is she a pedophile or something?”

What had my mom just said? “A pedophile?” Having never heard this peculiar P word before, I hesitantly asked her, “What is a pedophile?” It was immediately clear she was made uncomfortable by my question and didn’t want to answer me, but I persisted. I wouldn’t let her off the hook, even though I could see that my steadfast inquiry was making her squirm. After a minute or two of pestering, she relented and reluctantly explained to me that a pedophile was an adult who was sexually attracted to children.

The second that explanation finished leaving her mouth, I knew it. I knew that’s what I was and what I was becoming. Now I had word for it though. A “pedophile”. I was a fucking pedophile! Sure, I had only just turned 14 myself, but that didn’t matter. That is what I was and that was suddenly my new reality.

As an aside, I know that the clinical definition of pedophile states that, to be a pedophile, one must be at least 16 years old and at least 5 years older than the children they are attracted to but I don’t completely agree with those criteria. Sure, I understand the need to apply those specifications to the definition from a clinical standpoint but, in reality, that clinical, textbook definition of pedophilia is far from infallible. I was every bit as much a pedophile the day I sat watching that Madonna video with my mother as I am today. Not from a clinical standpoint, but from a reality standpoint.

It’s hard for me to believe that day, that epiphany, that moment of clarity I had at 14 happened over 25 years ago. Christ, a quarter of a fucking century! How I’ve survived this long with all this is anybody’s guess, but how I survived the first few years of it is nothing short of a bloody fucking miracle.

From that day forward, I had a word to give some frame of reference to what I was, but it didn’t make me feel any less alone. Alone, confused, bewildered and lost. I only wonder what my life might have been like had 14 year old kids like me, in 1989, known they had places to turn for help and support for such things.

That’s why I do what I do, by the way. That’s why this discussion and this issue is so important. That’s why the topic of pedophilia needs to be wrestled out of the shadows and brought into the light, in a realistic sense. This is why we need to break through all the hysteria and dispel the myths. This, above all else, is why my fellow Virpeds and I will not be silenced and will not go away, no matter how uncomfortable the message we have may make some people.

If kids who came of age dealing with what I had to deal with did so in an environment where they did not have to feel ashamed and afraid to open up and reach out for help, how much better would things be for them and possibly lots of people around them? Sadly, I still don’t think we foster such an environment in our society, but I think we’re getting closer to a time and a place where we will, and I’m proud to be one of the people leading the charge to make that happen.

Brett

The post And On That Day, I Knew What I Was appeared first on Pedophiles About Pedophilia.

So, I’ve decided I might as well start a little blog of my own. Not sure I’m going to do much with it, but we’ll see. In my first blog post, I’m going to tell a little bit of my story. This is kind of long, but it obviously has huge chunks of things left out that I’d like to have left in. To tell the whole story, I’d need to write a book. A very long and fucked-up book. We’ll call this, the ultra, ultra abridged version.

Anyway, about me. I am a pedophile in my early 40’s and my life has not been easy. I understand that most people’s lives aren’t easy, but then most people aren’t cursed with the least desirable form of sexuality imaginable. The good news is, I have never acted on my pedophilic attractions. Specifically, I am primarily attracted both emotionally and sexually to preteen boys but also to girls in the same age range, although not quite as much. I see my pedophilia as a burden and a curse and every single day is a struggle.

I come from a background of childhood sexual abuse and bullying. I won’t get into the details of that too much, because then this would get too long. I will say that I was never the victim of an adult pedophile offender though. Most of the molestation and abuse I was subject to came at the hands of older kids in my neighborhood. To this day, I am sometimes hesitant to call what happened sexual abuse, and instead find myself more comfortable with the term “sexual bullying”. However, when I’ve used that term with other CSA survivors, some have been quick to point out that bullying is abuse, therefore sexual bullying is sexual abuse. Either way, I know the experiences I had as a child were sexually traumatic, and had a profound impact on my sexual and emotional development.

Because of a lot of the things that had gone on, I spent my preteen years obsessed with sex and pornography, and the sexual frustration, confusion, and shame this created ate at me. If only I’d at least known how to masturbate to orgasm, perhaps this would have lessened the frustration a little but I didn’t know how. I only knew how to “play with myself”, and I did that a lot, but didn’t find it all that satisfying. I felt like I needed release, but I didn’t know how to achieve it and it drove me crazy. Through all of the sexual teasing, tormenting, bullying and abuse I experienced as a child, I never once had been brought to orgasm. I don’t think I even truly knew or understood what one was until the day I actually achieved one.

Finally, when I was very close to my 13th birthday, I figured it out. After that I began masturbating every day. Sometimes to pictures in lingerie catalogs. Sometimes to fantasies of pretty girls at school. I would have masturbated to pornography but I generally only had access to that when other kids were around and didn’t want to jerk off in front of them.

This habit of jerking off to lingerie catalogs and fantasies of girls I knew went on for about a year. Then, in my 8th grade year, a few months before my 14th birthday, something changed. I don’t know what the fuck happened. I don’t know how or why the switch was suddenly flipped in my mind. All of the sudden, out of the blue, boys started to look good to me. At first, it was just a little, but within probably a month of having my first sexual thought of a boy, they were all I thought about or masturbated to.

It didn’t make any sense. I had never been attracted to other boys at all before. Not even a little, tiny bit. At first I thought I was becoming gay, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that wasn’t it. I was nearly 14 and now well into puberty. The boys that suddenly looked good to me were all younger. Only ones with prepubescent features. After that, I grew up….. my attraction did not.

So, on into my teen years I went with this horrible new affliction ripping me apart inside. I had no frame of reference for the things I thought and felt, other than the horrible things you’d hear on the news about child molesters. I thought I knew shame and self-hate before then but this brought those to a whole new level. I had been dealing with suicidal thoughts since I was in the fourth grade, but now my suicide ideation became almost more of an obsession. What had I become? How could I be this sick and this hopeless? I was a pedophile. I had become a true creature of evil. The worst possible form of life. What had I done to deserve this fate and this level of torment?

For the first year or so of knowing and understanding that I was a pedophile, I was terrified that I was doomed to become a child molester. Surely prison awaited me some day. Surely everyone who had these types of thoughts and attractions acted on them eventually, right? There was no denying to myself what I was, and there was only one way I thought that could end.

However, by my mid teens, I had resolved to myself that I would never become one of those dirty, creepy men you hear about on the news molesting little boys. I knew I wasn’t like that and I didn’t want to be that. At the time, I still figured probably everyone else on the planet who was afflicted with the types of attractions I had must act on them. I was going to be the one who didn’t though. I was going to break the mold. I was going to be the one who beat this thing, and the one who wouldn’t let it make me become a child molester, even if I was the only one in the world.

At 18, I disclosed to a friend of mine about my childhood sexual abuse and about my pedophilia, all in the same conversation. I had decided to kill myself that night and I intended to. I don’t know what convinced me to call him that night and disclose before I went through with it but I did. I couldn’t believe I was telling someone but the words just started flowing out of me, as did the tears. I remember sitting in a fetal position with the phone to my ear, tearing at my hair and sobbing while I told him everything. He convinced me to come to his house that night and sleep over to keep me safe. He also told me he could hook me up with his family’s therapist.

I visited the therapist he hooked me up with for about a year and a half. If it hadn’t been for my sessions with him, I don’t know if I’d be here today. He really helped me sort some things out, put some things in perspective and get some things off my chest. However, I went to him with the false hope that therapy could fix me. That it could cure my pedophilia. Of course it couldn’t. Nothing can cure it.

Since then, not much about my sexuality has changed. I am more or less exclusively attracted to preteen boys. Preteen girls are attractive to me as well, only not quite as much as boys. I have no sexual attraction to adult women at all. I am not necessarily sexually turned off by them but I’m not interested either. Besides, being in sexual situations with them is extremely uncomfortable and triggering. I can’t handle it, and I want to run for the hills. Also, I am completely sexually turned off by men and even boys past puberty. Once they are pubescent, any and all attraction disappears.

As an aside, how strange is it that my sexual attraction to children just happens to be only to children who are in the age range where my own childhood sexual trauma took place? When they are about 7 or 8, they suddenly become sexually attractive to me. (In rare cases, children of either sex as young as six may trigger an attraction but never younger than that.) Before that, they just look like babies to me. I will say that I absolutely LOVE younger children but only kind of on the same level that I love puppies and kittens. It’s just that specific age, about the same time they loose their baby teeth and start growing their first primary teeth, the attraction starts. Then, at puberty, it ends completely. Starts at 7 or 8, ends at 12 or 13. The same age-range my abuse occurred at. Fucked huh?

My attraction to children isn’t just sexual though. It’s deeply emotional too. I can’t stand to see a little kid who’s hurt, or who looks scared or sad. I can’t stand to see them cry. When I do, all I want in the world is to swoop in, take them in my arms, hold them and make their pain go away. I can’t even watch a movie that has a sad scene involving a little kid without going to pieces and crying all over myself.

Fortunately, when it comes to the sexual aspect of my attraction, I have been blessed with a solid core belief that it is always wrong and harmful for an adult to be sexual with a child under any circumstances. I actually spent quite a few years posting in “boylove” forums and was not shy about expressing this opinion even there. Needless to say, that did not make me popular in those circles. Guys who will have sex with 10 year olds and try to claim the relationship is “mutual” do not like it when one of their own walks in and tries to shatter their delusions. In fact, they tend to get really fucking pissed.

The good news is, a couple of years ago, I found the forums over at Virped (Virtuous Pedophiles.) Since then, the Virped community has become my life, and I have never been so dedicated to a cause as I am to ours. A support group run for pedophiles, by pedophiles, and one in which the members are all committed to not acting on their attractions is something I would not have dared hope for just a few short years ago. I wish I could go back in time and tell the 15 year old me that this community would exist someday, and that he was not alone in the world. If only there had been a Virped when I was younger man. I’ll never know what kind of a difference that might have made in my life , but I do know that it will make a difference the lives of young pedophiles going forward. Better late than never.

We all know you can not cure pedophilia. Even therapists who’ve been treating pedos for years will tell you that. You can not cure it, you can only hope to contain it. I already contain it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t torment me on a daily basis. Sexual attraction to children is a curse of the worst order. It drives me to drink, it drives me to hate my life, and it has nearly driven me to suicide more times than I can count. There is no hope. It will torment me until the day I die. If there was a magic pill I could swallow that would make me stop being attracted to kids, I’d claw my way through hell to get a hold of it. Unfortunately, the only way to remove it from the brain is to put a gun in your mouth and pull the fucking trigger. How I haven’t done that over all these years is anyone’s guess. Sorry if that’s morbid but it’s true.

In closing, I want to say this. I do struggle with my pedophilia, and I am tormented by it, but the not abusing children part is easy for me. I’ve been alone with kids I was attracted to hundreds of times, (perhaps thousands), and while I’ve had sexual thoughts in those situations, acting on them has never been something I’ve actually been tempted to do. I’ve never really even considered it. The very thought seems not only wrong, but also unrealistic and stupid, for a variety of reasons that I probably shouldn’t have to spell out.

So, that’s my story in a nutshell. It’s certainly no fairy tale, but it’s far from the worst of the stories I’ve heard from some of my friends who also carry this burden. My life has not been great to this point, and I’m far from being what anyone would consider a successful adult, but my hope is that I can use my experiences and the insight they have given me to affect the world around me in positive ways. Through my participation in Virped, and my efforts to be a voice in the wilderness on the topics of pedophilia and CSA, I hope that I can have an impact on others who’ve had their lives affected by these things. In doing so, my ultimate hope is that I/we can affect the world in such a way that fewer people have their lives affected by these things in the first place. Perhaps that’s hoping for a lot, but either way I’m all in, and will continue to be so until the day death mercifully takes me.

Brett

The post I Am Brett. I Am A Pedophile. Here Is My Story appeared first on Pedophiles About Pedophilia.

The Musings of a Non-Offending, Female Pedophile

This is terrifying. Even to write this anonymously makes my heart beat faster. What I’m talking about right now is very difficult for me, because everyone who loves me has told me never to talk about it.

You may call me Emma. I am a woman, approximately 30 years old, and I am a pedophile. Yes, really.

Let’s get a few things out of the way, first. I don’t have POCD, this isn’t a phase, and I’m not saying this in order to get attention. I am not physically repulsive, or socially inept, and I am not a man masquerading as a woman online for kicks. While I feel I shouldn’t have to say any of this, apparently I do, because I have been accused of all these things at one point or another in my life. I should also point out that I am not a child molester, do not look at child pornography, and do not drool or act otherwise inappropriately when a child enters the room. It is not part of my nature to be predatory. The word ‘pedophile’ does not equal ‘child molester’. So, please, get that notion out of your head immediately. The two are not synonymous; one does not necessarily indicate the other, and if this were a mathematical equation, the sum of both would not equally come to ‘42’. A pedophile is a person, either teenage or adult, whose primary or exclusive sexual attraction is toward prepubescent children (usually under the age of twelve). While — psychiatrically speaking — a person must be at least 16 years old to be considered a pedophile, many of us, myself included, are aware of our attractions before that age. Whereas a child molester is a person who molests children. It’s really quite simple; but I digress. This is information you can find anywhere, if you are so inclined to do the research. I am trying to paint my own unique picture here, to give you a glimpse into my own fun little life. Starting with this:

I was never sexually abused as a child. I was not abused as a child, period. My childhood was really quite nice, aside from the constant, all-consuming anxiety that plagued me for much of my young life. I had social anxiety, separation anxiety, bathroom anxiety, and abandonment anxiety. I was terrified of blindness and brain injuries. I would compulsively wash my hands until they bled, and pick my skin raw. But, I was never abused. When I’ve revealed my pedophilia to others in the past, it was common for them to tell me that there must have been abuse in my childhood — must have been — and that I just couldn’t remember it. I spent a long time wracking my brain, trying to remember something that I’m now convinced was never there. I spent an even longer time searching through books, on the web, trying to learn everything I could about my condition, to learn WHY my brain worked the way it did. I found no solid answers, because there are none. No one knows what combination of factors cause the many variations of human sexuality, and I’d bet it’s a complicated meld of nature and nurture. While a seemingly disproportionate number of pedophiles report having been abused as children, and feel that abuse may have contributed to their psycho-sexual development, I personally am not one of them. After years of research and soul-searching, I have come to accept that mine may just be a case of ‘faulty wiring’.

For the most part, mine is the same sad old story as the majority of pedophiles whose coming-of-age tales I’ve read (and, by this point, I’ve read quite a few). That is to say, as a child I was attracted to other children my own age, or slightly younger. I grew up, but my attractions did not. Textbook, really. During childhood, there were always one or two girls in gymnastics class, at camp, or in school, who inexplicably drew my eye. The forms of their bodies intrigued and excited me, and I wanted to get to know them, even though I was far too shy to do so. At first, I did not understand why this was, but by the time I was eleven, it occurred to me that these ‘fascinations’ with particular girls might be crushes, and that I was probably a lesbian. I wrestled with that idea until I was fourteen, which is when it started to really dawn on me that the girls I was drawn to were significantly younger than myself. My friends all gushed about high school boys and hunky, 20-something heart throbs, while I found myself hopelessly attracted to the younger sister of one of my classmates. When I was 11, the girl I had a crush on was 11. When I was in Girl Scout camp at the age of 13, the girl I had a crush on was 11. When I was 14, also at summer camp, the girl I had a crush on was… you guessed it, 11. And, that’s only because 11 was the youngest age one could be in order to attend said summer camps. Eleven is actually at the very top of the age bracket I find myself attracted to. Seven through ten are the optimal ages, and I admit I am drawn to girls as young as four. Over twelve, and they simply cease to catch my eye or stir my imagination. Why? No fucking clue. It wasn’t until I was 15 that I learned that mine was an actual sexuality with a name, and that it was not particularly smiled upon by… well, by anyone.

This is not a nice sexuality to have. As the late, great Terry Pratchett would have put it, when God was handing out the sexualities, I must have been at the back of the line; or maybe out taking a whiz. First and foremost, being a pedophile means that if you want to live your life as a law-abiding, morally decent person, you must never even so much as flirt with someone you find sexually attractive. Don’t flirt, don’t kiss, don’t touch, and mostly definitely don’t fuck. There is enough evidence to indicate that, while adult/child sexual relations are not always harmful, the risk of causing serious damage to a child’s psyche is just too great a thing to ignore. It is because of this undeniable risk that I feel those pedophiles who strive to abolish age of consent laws are speaking from a place of selfishness; but again, I digress. For someone like me, who is pretty much exclusively attracted to children, romantic and sexual relationships with acceptable partners can be quite difficult. And, yes; I have tried it. I have had sexual relations with both men and women, and my responses have ranged from “Ok, but not that much fun” to “this is revolting and I want to scrub myself with bleach”. I confess that I envy people who can have fun, happy sex with consenting partners. But, sexual frustration is only part of it. Tons of people are sexually frustrated. After all, no one is entitled to sex with those they find attractive, regardless of orientation. For us though, there is also the crippling stigma to contend with. See, being a pedophile means that you spend your life from adolescence onward constantly, and from every direction, absorbing the message that “people like you are bad”. You absorb it from the news, from the media, from your friends and family, from people who call themselves progressive, and champion the expression of sexual diversity. You begin to feel that if the people you love and respect really KNEW you, they would abandon you in an instant. You begin to project the message “you are bad” onto yourself, until you start agreeing with everyone else: that you are the scum of the earth, subhuman, unworthy, and worst of all, doomed to become the monster you’re accused of being from the very start.

While it is extremely isolating to be a pedophile of either sex, being a woman with this sexuality adds a whole other layer of isolation that is seldom explored. I’ve been Google-searching ‘female pedophiles’ ever since I first started realizing I was one, and very, very little turns up on the subject. In fact, most of what turns up is people speculating on whether or not we actually exist. Even the experts tend to ignore the existence of pedophilia in women. Not so long ago, I listened to an interview with renowned clinical psychologist and sexologist Dr. James Cantor, who has made the research of the pedophilic brain the main focus of his work (and, for this, I respect him immensely, even though to my knowledge his research has thus far not extended to non-offenders). He and his interviewers began discussing which methods are most effective in distinguishing those who are truly pedophiles from those who are not. Dr. Cantor spoke of phallometry — the measurement of blood flow to the penis as a means of measuring sexual arousal — as a very effective method for diagnosis. I kept waiting for someone to bring up the inevitable follow-up response: “well, obviously this is not an effective method for detecting pedophilia in women. How do you diagnose female pedophiles?” At least, I thought it was the inevitable follow-up question. But no one, neither the doctor nor the interviewers, even brought it up. The unspoken message resonated loud and clear with me: that I, and the presumably few women out there like myself, are so invisible that not even the leading researchers in the field feel it necessary to address our existence.

There are many examples of this. In both scientific and lay narratives discussing pedophilia, the language generally excludes women with the condition, or briefly mentions us as an afterthought. In Germany, there is a rather revolutionary program entitled Prevention Project Dunkelfeld (which translates literally as ‘Dark Fields’, because I guess that’s where pedophiles lurk?) The purpose of the program is to evaluate and treat minor attracted folks, both pedo and hebe, who have not offended but fear they might, in order to help equip them with the mental tools to live an offense-free life. They run public advertisements making people aware of the program, so that those who are struggling with pedophilic attractions know where to go. Which sounds like a pretty fantastic and altogether logical approach, from where I stand. In this context, go Germany! Anyway, the first time I went on their website, I checked out their FAQ, on which was posed the question of how many of their patients are female. The words originally used to answer this question were these: “pedophilia in women is irrelevantly rare”. Not just rare, but irrelevantly rare. I’ll be perfectly honest with you: that one hurt. To be told that, in the context of research and treatment, you are irrelevant, is very disheartening indeed. Now, since first time I read the FAQ, the language has changed, and I can only imagine it is because more female patients have been accepted into their program. I hope so. I certainly wouldn’t want to think that women who come to them for help might be turned away due to a lack of familiarity with how pedophilia in women presents. Which is a question unto itself; are we really any different from our male counterparts? Why is this paraphilia (and paraphilia in general) so much more common in men than in women? I would really, truly like to know. If researchers ever decide to conduct a study on the etiology of pedophilia in women specifically, I will gladly participate in the interest of better understanding the mystery that is my own mind. Just give me the opportunity: I’ll pimp my brain for science in a heartbeat.

On the flip side, our seeming rarity, coupled with society’s desire to see women as nonthreatening individuals, protects us. When a woman shows interest or affection for children, she is likely to be perceived as motherly, whereas a man who does the same is likely to be perceived as a sexual predator. When a woman comes across a lost child and tries to help, she doesn’t need to fear being misread as a nefarious person, while a man does. Hey, if tomorrow I decided to go loitering around playgrounds and schoolyards, I could probably do so without raising much suspicion. By the way, I would never do such a thing. It strongly violates my internal guidebook, “Don’t Be a Creep: 101”. The point is, I probably could. I feel this idea of women as maternal, faultless figures not only protects us from being perceived or believed as pedophiles, but makes the stigma upon us far less severe than that which befalls our male counterparts. The female pedophile is thought of as a rare, unfathomable creature, like some strange and terrible unicorn. While a great many pedophiles are not sexual predators, and studies show the majority of child sex abusers are not, in fact, pedophiles (look it up if you don’t believe me) there ARE female pedophiles who are predatory, and it is dangerous to act like they don’t exist. While it is psychologically traumatic for a child to be pulled away from her father and interrogated by police because they mistakenly think he is molesting her simply by daring to appear with her in public without a mother figure present, it is also traumatic for a child to feel his or her abuse is not being taken seriously because the perpetrator happens to be female. The two scenarios are flip sides of the same coin when it comes to how gender affects perceptions of child abuse. I’m sure there are many who exploit the public perception of women as harmless motherly types, and get away with terrible things. In any case, my speculations about the perceptions of pedophilia in relation to gender is just that — speculations. I cannot speak for the experiences of a male pedophile, a trans pedophile of either gender, or anyone, in fact, who isn’t me. Personally, I’d guess it’s easier to be invisible than to be villainized: but, neither are fantastic.

You may read this and immediately perceive me as sick in the head. That’s OK. I have a lot of glitches in my brain besides this one, and to describe my mind as ‘disordered’ is not inaccurate, nor does it offend me. There is a lot of speculation over whether pedophilia is best described as a sexual orientation or a mental illness, but I personally don’t understand why the two have to be mutually exclusive. I mean, it behaves like a sexual orientation in every way. It is my sexual orientation. I don’t have another one hiding somewhere underneath that can be coaxed out through careful training and self-inflicted conversion therapy; although, believe me, I’ve tried. However, at the same time, it isn’t functional. It is not a sexuality that can lead to equally satisfying and beneficial partnerships, and therefore it is flawed: a dead-end sexuality. A great many pedophiles are unhappy people, and it’s not just the social stigma that makes us that way, but also the knowledge that such a fundamental chunk of our personhood is effectively a dead-end. I therefore think of it as a ‘disordered sexual orientation’. But, that is just my interpretation. Many in the anti-contact camp — meaning pedophiles who feel adult/child sex is innately abusive, and don’t act on our desires — have different interpretations. In any case, I am a good person, which to me is more important than being a definitively sane-in-every-way person.

I’ve noticed that whenever someone even attempts to start an intelligent discussion about pedophilia, they are immediately accused of trying to ‘normalize’ it. Please understand that this is not my goal, nor is it the goal of anyone I know who speaks on our behalf. The goal here, at least in my eyes, is not to make others view us as ‘normal’. It is to help you build an understanding of who we actually are, and make you aware of the unique issues we deal with. We are human beings, which means we come in all shades of moral character; not just ‘bad’ and ‘worse’. Perceiving us to be no more than monstrous caricatures benefits no one: not us, not you, and certainly not your children. You’ve probably heard it before, but the more we are demonized and silenced, the less likely we are to reach out for help when we need it, which in turn creates pedophiles who feel depressed, anxious, and alone. Say you have two teenagers who both realize to their horror that they are sexually attracted to children. One feels comfortable talking to his parents, who are supportive, and help him find a qualified therapist, who provides him with the coping skills to get through life without offending or getting himself into situations in which he’d be more likely to offend. The other teen is too scared to talk to her family about it. She tries to push it away and pretend it’s not there, and becomes hopeless and depressed when denial doesn’t seem to be working. Because she is ‘so good with children’ she eventually allows others to pressure her into babysitting jobs, even though she is not entirely sure she trusts herself to work in such a position. Given these two scenarios, which one of these teenagers do you think is more likely to offend? Please understand that, by trying to lessen the stigma surrounding pedophilia, and by allowing people who are struggling with these desires to access support, we are attempting the prevent instances of child abuse. We are on the same side! I don’t know how to put it any more clearly than that.

There is so much more I wish I could say. I wish I could share particular events from my life, or bring up the other mental issues I struggle with, or tell you about the methods I use to cope with my unfortunate attractions. But, I’m frightened to release any information that could be used to identify me. In the end, I hope this narrative will serve its intended purpose, which is to add my voice to the ever-growing number of non-offending pedophile voices online. The more of us share our stories, the more difficult it will be for the world to ignore that we are capable of existing as morally decent, law-abiding humans. I will not be complicit in the silence surrounding this issue. In silence, people become isolated, and suffer, and I refuse to be part of that. Most of all, I hope that my particular narrative might provide some comfort to a teenage girl out there somewhere, who is just noticing her pedophilia and turns to the web for guidance. I want that girl to come across my story and know she is not all alone in the world: that other female pedophiles do exist. That we are rare, but we are real, and we are not irrelevant.

Thanks for reading.

Emma

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