In normal development of children, at around age nine, the child develops a strong sense of modesty, and can be very embarrassed at being seen undressed. It would be very unlikely for a child of this age, to suggest to an adult, twice their age or older, to engage in genital penetration or oral sexual contact. Normal sexual development happens gradually, accompanied by some level of emotional maturity, irrespective of this, there is no denying child sexuality is considered fundamentally different from adult sexual behaviour.
More chimpanzee derived blanket statements. many children are like this? are all children? is it part of their base DNA instinct or is taught? is it possible that some of this have it as their base DNA instinct? is it possible some of them dont? is it possible that some have a neutral base DNA instinct and are open either way? these are questions that you should be positing, but won’t, because to accuse and spread conflict and misery is part of the human game. i mean, this is coming from the same society and species that mutilates hermaphrodite babies genitals in order for them to “fit in”. humans number one priority is forcing conformity at the cost of the minority, the inevitible suitation of a geniune ten year old who loves someone older, of course will be squashed by the merciless grind of the human machine.
onesizefitsall aproach is not helpful, it’s damaging. people are not made equal.
Many - but not all - things are possible.
If/when the non-hypothetical science becomes available, I hope you present its findings in a calmer, more coherent style.
Meanwhile, we - most of us - must deal with life as we know it.
These kinds of divisions always end up on a slippery-slope. Is this protectionism objectionable per se, or is the intent of this protectionism good, only the things it calls ‘harmful to children’ are not harmful, or is everything about protectionism okay except for its prohibition of adult-child sex.
In the first case there would be a line drawn; surely there are some things children should always be protected from. Would you say, for instance, that a ten year old not being able to join the Marines is an unjustified restriction of the child’s freedom and independence?
In the second case, the idea of protectionism is great… but we have a difficult time determining exactly what children should be protected from.
In the last case, protectionism should keep its hands off sexuality.
All of these could be endlessly argued.
Now you should have known that’s what I meant and spared me the insipid humiliation of momentarily appearing to be too dumb to know the difference.
I think that might be it. I think also adults might have a kind of paternal or maternal instinctual sense to want to protect juveniles from any kind of obtrusive, physical contact with something. Sexual contact with another person who could be threatening would seem dangerous because it could involve the exploitation of the child’s temporary vulnerability during the sexual act.
One would not want a child to be in a position like that… a position where everything could go south real quick.
Also, as you know the victorian age of puritan values has long been over. I think humanity has developed, as a result of the period of sexual liberation during the last three centuries, a more vulgar interpretation and comprehension of human sexuality. It is today very easy to associate sex with erotic and neurotic perversion because of that aggressive, ‘coming out’ of the sexual geist in those last three centuries.
Ironically, you would think the liberation would bring with it the normalcy of pedophilia. Instead, it has only produced a more cautious awareness of sexuality.
We have seen what human sexuality is capable of, and we are shocked by it. This caution before the subject and practice of sex, especially when children are in question, is what I might mean by some kind of vague intuition.
2op
Don’t get me wrong as i get bad thoughts same as anyone, but if you are going to look at this thing honestly then you need look no further than its effect in the world.
Incest = bad genes. There are exceptions where e.g. Incestuous Lion siblings [and Pharaohs] will produce a load of defective offspring, but occasionally a singularly king-like stronger offspring. In effect and in human terms, this will produce a mixture of unintelligent and ugly genes, and psychopaths! and is most likely the very root cause of entropy in society. = harm.
children can die giving birth when their bodies are not ready for it = harm.
my first love had been raped by her father throughout her childhood, and in short this meant she couldn’t see herself meeting the right man, getting married and having a family and so finished our relationship. she didn’t have a say in the matter, so how can your freedom be justified when it is someone else’s incarceration. = harm
Alt + a female friend of an ex-lover told me she lost her at age 10 ~ and wanted to and liked it. However, if she got pregnant or lived in a culture without contraception, then she could die giving birth when her body simply isn’t ready. If it had been with a relative she’d produce defective genes. more importantly, she is promoting a culture where others don’t have that choice.
Conclusion;
A world without incest and child-rape [which it always is] would be a far better one. A world with legalised child sex would have nightclubs where men with no ultimate control over their urges [pedo = is a largely out of control emotion set] meet up with children and continue the distribution of bad genes. Children wont be getting married as virgins when old enough [don’t have the choice].
There is no way whatever that there can be genuine sexual love between a ten-year-old and a 30-year-old. Even if the child is precocious and the man is intellectually challenged, their physical development (never mind sheer size. Think about the width of a prepubescent hips for a minute.) and life experience are too dissimilar to have anything like parity in a relationship. Even the Eastern satraps who received tribute in the form of virgins and European princes whose alliances were arranged in the cradle, usually had the decency to wait until their brides reached the ripe age of 12.
Love involves sex. It would be retarded to tell a married couple “Oh you two are in love! Of course, love is unrelated to sex.” That’s why it’s called “love-making”. Then you presumably state something about “But what about platonic love? Love of country? Love of ideals?” Wasn’t talking about that.
I was talking about romantic love, which often comes along with sex. Then you presumably go on and waste my time talking about assexuals and celibate couples.
More hyperbole blanket statements with only anecdotal evidence to back it up. Does your species ever cease to be chimpanzees?
More ridiculous hyperbole, along the lines of slippery slope dystopian predictions. what child would go to these ridiculous clubs anyway? Who’s parents would let them? These clubs would surely go bankrupt their opening day. Of course you ignore that most children have early bedtimes and a curfew, and of course you also ignore that children are already experiencing a dystopian future of being sold as sex-slaves illegally worldwide. Your hyperbole about a nightclub is exactly what it is, a fantasy, and hyperbole, and would actually be less dystopian than our future today. Similar to the drug war, if drugs were legalized there would be less violence and killing over them.
ten year olds are not fertile, they cannot give birth.
All women can die giving birth, thousands of years ago it was advantageous for the species to impregnant as soon as they were fertile, because death could come at any moment. This is why males are naturally attracted to the teenage form (14), and not typically attracted to ten year olds. However I wouldn’t say such a thing would be “impossible” for a 10 year old to love someone older, saying that would make me closeminded, retarded, and unaware of the variation and uniqueness of every individual. One size fits all is not equality, we are not created equal, we are each individual and unique from each other. What pleases one person might not please someone else. Mutilating baby genitals might please society but rarely the individual. That is the problem of one-size-fits-all, telling everyone they have to participate in a tradition “for the greater good”. Most always someone loses out, most always someone suffers.
To me this is a bit like the hypothetical question: imagine if science showed that being beaten up as a boy by a stranger led to a toughening of character and that men who had been beaten up as children were found to be more successful professionally as adults and rated themselves higher on scales of happiness. It’s a big if which ends up rigging a discussion, since the conclusion once the hypothetical part is accepted, for sake of argument, presses for a satisfying, for some, conclusion. But it was presented as a hypothetical.
One reason it is a less interesting hypothetical is the section on ‘hysteria’. This means that the if part, about science showing it is OK for children to have sex with adults (manipulatively) not the only hypothetical. Children who have been sexually abused often do not mention this to others, not because of the stigma, but because they don’t realize anything out of the ordinary or harmful happened BECAUSE children often take all sorts of abuse as normal. Nevertheless these same children show all sorts of symptoms and later realize the damage was there. So there is a slimy part of this hypothetical since it is not presented as hypothetical: the idea that we know already that all children who show problematic results of abuse have also been stigmatized. And that is not the case. So the hypothetical facets are more and stronger than implied.
Rather offensive that you preemptively judge those who have a different opinion are not being philosophers.
Anyway, even if it was shown that having a stranger beat the shit out of my kid led to my kid - seemingly given what can be tested and what cannot be and how well when it comes to human well being - being happier later in life, I would still intervene with physical violence to stop the stranger.
A rather poor analogy, at that. A better analogy would be, does kids fighting and wrestling other kids boost kids self esteem? Does kids play fighting and wrestling with their dad boost development? The answer is yes.
You would certainly get underage teens making up the bulk, and some preteens esp 11, 12 yr olds [the most dangerous age in terms of potential conception]. Then once you have a society which accepts that, then why wouldn’t some parents let their kids go? Let me add that police statistics show 1/8 minors are sexually abused, so there are already a lot of men out there who would let their kids go. After all, it would justify their actions. Your majesty hasn’t factored in the duration of time over societal acceptability.
It is not the same as the drug war, drugs can be maintained and are >resultant< of other societal/life ills. This is one of the things which CAUSE much of the horribleness in society. Different logical classes.
I am aware of the historical conditions concerning why men are like this, but the imperative; “thousands of years ago it was advantageous for the species to impregnate as soon as they were fertile, because death could come at any moment.” is no longer valid, right?!!! Humanity has to evolve beyond its degenerate genes from mass incest.
When i was 10 a girl in my class who i ‘loved’ was in love with gary glitter, so i do agree it is possible for a 10 year old to love an older man. …but what that man has for her is dangerously out of control forces/urges, evidence for this is found in their inability to see or stop the harm they are causing. If one has to make up excuses to justify ones actions then you have already got it wrong, and that is what people e.g. In indian culture, do all over the world.
Its not a case of one size fits all, there is a main legal class and grey areas around that; if for example a 16 yr old boy shags a 15 yr old girl is is somewhat tolerated. Adults can do all manner of sexual activities including psychopathic acts, there is already way too much freedom in this and society should stop employing psychopathic philosophies.
"Deal with it maturely" doesn't mean 'accept pedophilia' though. There's a couple other options. It could be that pedophilia is the [i]argumentum ad absurdum[/i] that finally puts this "If science can't prove it's harmful we have to accept it" nonsense to rest. It could be that we revisit what we consider to be harmful. Suppose we could show that children that are molested (non-violently) at an early age have a strong tendency to grow up as promiscuous people who don't see sex as attachment-forming, and have a strong predisposition towards paraphilias later in life? The fact that we live in such a debauched society that none of that counts as 'harm' anymore doesn't mean the harm isn't there.
The point about legislation concerning pedophilia is about consent.
If there is a single child anywhere , for any reason that could come to harm from this practice, then it is worth a million pedophiliacs having to suffer restraint of forbearance.
As a child is deemed unable to give consent due to their age, then any act of sex practiced on them, even with apparent “consent” is an act of rape.
But if you need “proof” that child rape does harm, then there are plenty of examples. Examples that have had serious psychological implications that last the rest of their lives.
So shall we put this stupid fucking topic to bed, and ask the OP to fuck off and get a life?
Why is promiscuity, not seeing sex as attachment-forming, and a strong disposition toward paraphilia, bad?
All these things threaten the traditional, christian conservative value system, that’s why.
So why is threatening the traditional, christian conservative value system, bad?
If a person is a hard working, responsible, law abiding, tax paying citizen, it shouldn’t matter that he’s never been married, had five different sex partners in one month, and has a fetish for women’s feet.
Irony: the conservative value system’s imposing judgement on the private lives and sexual orientations of citizens seems to contradict its limited government mantra.
To discern the good or bad, one must learn a great deal more of the very, very many potential malignant strategies involved in trying to maintain a society against clever enemies. That is where most religious commandments are born - from prior societal wars. Moses said, “this is what we can do to them, so let’s make sure that we behave in such a way that they cannot do it to us” => morality.
Indeed, because all those slutty Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Stoics, first-wave feminists, Confucians, Taoists and so on have just been waiting for the Christians to get out of their way so they can express themselves, yes?
No. The belief that sex has all the moral significance of handshake is the outlier here, the new, wrong-headed belief that is threatened by virtually everything every other society has had to say about sex.
Anyway, my point is that we want to hold up “Is it harmful” as some absolute standard, when what’s harmful and what isn’t is as subject to interpretation as anything else.
This strikes me as abitrary. One could just as easily say "If a person is a responsible, law abiding, chaste, tax-paying citizen, it shouldn't matter that he doesn't work particularly hard and only does the minimum in order to get by". You're just listing off a series of commonly-held values and excluding the one that isn't important to you personally....but they all come from the same source-tradition. So to extend that argument, suppose it could be shown that being molested as a child caused a tendency to become lazy and non-hard-working later in life. Would you say [i]that[/i] constitutes harm, because it undermines a traditional value you hold in esteem instead of one you don't?
That is precisely an argument people supporting pedophilia will make, yes. You may as well have stolen the words straight from Alan Ginsberg’s lips.
There are probably endless examples of cultures throughout history doing things unheard of in other cultures with the exception of two immutable rules that they all followed; don’t leave food out and don’t kill your homeboys. Anything else you can think of that’s humanly possible but not utterly random and with no apparent reason was, at some time, somewhere, probably practiced. If these cultures worked, how are we to say the practice was detrimental?
Jeez, can’t get nothing past you, eh? Well played. That is exactly what I did.
In answer to the question you pose above, what ‘works’ depends in large part on how commited you are to a particular vice. I am disappointed that you didn’t answer my question about pedophilia and laziness.
If a person is committed to promiscuity, and they live in a society rampant with disease, where kids don't know who their fathers are, don't understand the bonding issues surrounding sex, and 'rape' has to be continually re-defined to account for women who can't deal emotionally with a society that is taught to fuck everything that moves...these are all just considered 'the price of living in a free society', and the forward thinking person looks for 'bold new solutions' to deal with all the catastrophes brought on by the vice they endorse.
Similarly, if a person is committed to laziness, and they live in a society in which people live with their parents until they are 30, there is a shortage of actual qualified labor, and every generation is a little more entitled than the last, expecting their basic needs, wants, and ultimately luxuries to be handed to them by a system they don't pay anything into, then one will see all of THAT as being 'the price of living in a free society', and look for ever more convoluted economic systems that can shoulder the burden of supporting more and more people who refuse to support themselves.
Both groups of people (if indeed there is any daylight between them), will without irony talk about 'harm' and how they are against what harms people and in favor of what does not. Embracing vice comes hand in hand with being tone-deaf to the harm that vice causes, and sufficiently commited people will see both of the above societies as 'working' just fine. Another thing they will embrace without the slightest sign of irony is that the above societies tend to arise' because vicious reformers forced changes on some previous paradigm that was also working just fine.
From observing remarks by various people, I began to think, that the stirrings of the loins and the stirrings of the soul is not, for each of us, the same. What after all is the meaning or the significance of sex for a person. What is sex all about anyway? Yes, the sexual desire is crude and hormone-driven, acting in the service of the species in the ongoing work of creation and if you look at it in this way, it is no different, to all other bodily functions, trapped in a hunk of flesh. Do our own sexual natures, form our moral personalities and identities. If so and this goes against what society dictates, what a struggle it would present, it would be likened to denying the need to drink when you are dehydrated.