Talk:Pedophilia

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We don't need this article. In half an hour, if you don't give me $500 million in clean notes of varying denominations, in a black bombproof suitcase no-one raises any objections, I will ban-hammer it. Thoughts? -- מְתֻרְגְּמָן וִיקִי שְׁלֹום! 16:57, 6 August 2007 (CDT)

Lets use this as a reason to start some sort of proposed deletion proccess. tmtoulouse beleaguer 16:58, 6 August 2007 (CDT)

Eh, I think you should just ban-hammer it now. --transResident Transfanform! 16:59, 6 August 2007 (CDT)

But I want my $500 million! I'll wait out the 30 minutes, then


WHAM!

Goes the wikiMjolnir. -- מְתֻרְגְּמָן וִיקִי שְׁלֹום!

Dump it. It's spelt wrong anyway : pædophilia and "see also AS" is a bit naughty - the man might be a total wazzock but not one of those. Keep me in the dark 17:08, 6 August 2007 (CDT)

To you and me it's spelled wrong but to those wacky Americans it's not. RIP Noah Webster. Genghis Khant 17:12, 6 August 2007 (CDT)
Uh, just do it right and delete links to it as well, ok? And it wasn't Webster who tried to reform English spelling, wasn't it that library guy, Dewey? And he wanted to go much further. humanbe in 17:42, 6 August 2007 (CDT)

Contents

[edit] Analogies

With regard to this edit, can we come up with a better analogy? Or do we just need to dispense with analogies altogether when dealing with the topic of pedophilia.. It seems easy to offend people's sensibilities, because if we compare pedophilia to, say, chocolate cake, in an effort to make some point about it, then people assume that we're saying that pedophilia is as harmless as chocolate cake.

But the whole point of an analogy is to make a point about relationships between items. Apple is to stop sign as banana is to school bus. This analogy deals with colors; it doesn't imply that an apple is as good for you as a banana, just because they're used in the same sentence. Landmartian (talk) 20:25, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

Is an analogy really needed? I mean, will it improve anyone's understanding of the issue? I've got to say I can't think of a great example. Comparisons with homosexuality, even if well intended, are a really bad idea as the two things are often falsely lumped together for political point-scoring, both by pedophile advocacy movements hoping to benefit from the respect the LGBT movement has won, and by the religious right denigrating gay people by associating them with pedophiles. WèàšèìòìďWeaselly.jpgMethinks it is a Weasel 20:48, 24 December 2014 (UTC)
Valid point. Landmartian (talk) 20:52, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

[edit] Evolutionary psychology

Are there any plausible hypotheses about the evolutionary psychology of pedophilia?

We know that, up to a point, youthfulness is often an attribute non-pedophiles look for in a mate. For a long-term relationship, assuming the partners do not live in an industrialized society in which having a high school education is an advantage for a mate, it makes sense to mate with someone as close to pubescence as possible, since they have more years of fertility ahead of them. This would explain the fetish behind magazines such as Barely Legal and websites that advertise models who have just turned 18 and look younger than 18.

So maybe pedophilic attractions developed because it was more adaptive to err on the side of too young rather than too old. In pubescence, fertile young women still have many characteristics of children, and therefore it might be maladaptive for a man to be strongly repelled by childlike traits.

Maybe there were situations, in caveman eras, in which someone started a sexual relationship with a prepubescent, and that relationship continued into pubescence and produced offspring. Maybe those who did this had an advantage over rivals, by being the first to form an emotional bond with the child, and to claim the child as their long-term partner. Maybe this emotional bond was promoted by their providing the child with food and other resources; thus it also served to protect the child's well-being.

Who knows what complicated social purposes pedophilia might have served? Maybe, in a variant of the super-uncles theory, pedophiles served as caregivers for young family members, since they would tend to volunteer for roles that would put them in close contact with those kids. A counter-argument would be that their engaging in child sexual abuse would cause enough harm to those children to outweigh the value of the care they provided. Maybe in caveman days, though, the resources they provided would have meant the difference between life and death for the child, so that back then, the pedophilia was adaptive.

We might look to the behaviors of bonobos too, and try to figure out what purpose sexual play between adult and juvenile bonobos serves. "The range of partners includes adults of the same sex, an adult with a juvenile of either sex, and two juveniles together. The range of activities includes mouth-to-mouth kissing, oral sex, genital caressing by hand, penis-fencing by two males, male-on-male mounting, and genito-genital rubbing (G-G rubbing is the shorthand term) by two estrous females, who moosh their swollen vulvas back and forth against each other in a spate of feverish sisterly cordiality. Usually there’s no orgasm culminating these activities. Their social purpose seems to be communication of various sorts: expression of goodwill, calming of excitement, greeting, tension relief, bonding, solicitation of food sharing, and reconciliation. To that list of benefits we might also add sheer pleasure and (for the juveniles) instructional play." [1] Landmartian (talk) 21:48, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

Evolutionary psychology is itself a somewhat controversial discipline. I suggest it would be unwise to use such a vehicle to promote what could be construed as pedophilia apologetics.--Coffee (talk) 21:54, 24 December 2014 (UTC)
I wonder, then, how one would approach the question of, "Where did this come from? Why does it exist?" Landmartian (talk) 22:43, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

[edit] "Abnormality" section

The title + beginning of this section smells like the author was operating under the fallacy that normal = good, abnormal = bad. The percentages given aren't exactly a super tiny minority and a super quick Google says me it's not much less than e.g. the amount of homosexuals. Not sure how to improve; I'm just pointing out the fallacy. Ginko (talk) 22:34, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

[edit] Debate

See also Debate:Should pedophiles be pressured to remain closeted? Landmartian (talk) 19:19, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

[edit] online section ... cut it or improve it

I don't agree with the online section's inclusion, because it seems a little trivial for the article. It seems to say that one danger of pedophilia is that pedophiles might be called names. Maybe that's true, but it's so insignificant compared to the other points made in the article. I'd rather drop it. As an alternative, I think it could be fleshed out a little more to prove its relevance. I don't think that'll work, but, as it stands, it's not enough. If it gets beefed up it should not appear larger than the other, more important, points. MarmotHead (talk) 21:24, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

They get called "child molestors" and such but they also get discriminated against solely on the basis of openly being pedophiles, without necessarily being called any other names. When they get kicked out of places like Wikipedia, systemic bias is introduced into those sites' content. Perpetuating that bias is in fact part of the stated goal of kicking those editors out. People don't want them editing articles in ways that will produce a neutral point of view. Landmartian (talk) 21:36, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
No, people don't want them editing articles from a pro-pedophile POV, which is what inevitably happens. Plus all the other good reasons a site like Wikipedia would have for not wanting to be associated with pedophiles. As for the "online" section in this article, this is barely scratching the surface of the subject & reads a lot like pedophile apologetics (basically saying pedophiles on the internet are harmless). While this may be true of some, any reasonable discussion of pedophiles online should at least mention child pornography, pedophile rings, child predators on the internet, and the rather odious pedophile communities at Reddit, TVTropes, 8chan, etc. WéáśéĺóíďWeaselly.jpgMethinks it is a Weasel 22:30, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Does anyone claim, by the way, that the pedophile communities at Reddit, TVTropes, 8chan, etc. pose a direct threat to children? I was just wondering, because people seem to assume that they would on Wikipedia if allowed to hang around openly there. That always seemed a little weird, because most child sexual abuse isn't facilitated by the Internet, and wikis in particular seem like an unlikely kind of site on which to try to groom kids for abuse. If they were, To Catch a Predator-style stings would probably operate on wikis. Instead, they use chat rooms. Landmartian (talk) 23:18, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
The risk isn't necessarily predatory activities on Wikipedia itself, but pedophiles making connections with other pedophiles, which facilitates the child porn trade & may result in other crimes, as well as the site getting a reputation for this sort of thing, as with Reddit, 8cha, et al. WėąṣėḷőįďWeaselly.jpgMethinks it is a Weasel 23:29, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Wait a minute, what good reasons would a site have for not wanting to be associated with pedophiles? That sounds like catering to fear of people with a certain sexual orientation/preference they can't help (which is a totally different matter than fear of people who advocate or engage in a sexual practice, which they can help). Landmartian (talk) 05:01, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

[edit] Right-wing authoritarianism

With regard to this edit, removing the language "People scoring high on right-wing authoritarianism in this study showed reactions towards pedophiles that were more hostile than the reactions from people with average or low levels of RWA": that information seems kinda relevant. Right-wingers tend to favor more restrictions on "thoughtcrime" type offenses, such as looking at pornography or altering your mind with psychotropic drugs. Landmartian (talk) 22:15, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

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