Adam Lanza’s Pedophilia Essay

On 2012 December 14, Adam Lanza murdered his mother and 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School before committing suicide. While Lanza is mainly known for mass murder, his philosophy and his YouTube channel aren’t widely known. The main theme of Lanza’s philosophy was the rejection of culture and value. He was obsessed with the irrationality and oppression of culture.

As Lanza stated on his YouTube channel, he had a purely academic interest in pedophilia, despite not being a pedophile. For his college application, Lanza decided to write an essay analyzing and critiquing the near-universal cross-cultural rejection of pedophilia and the brutal treatment of pedophiles by society. From his perspective, writing the essay seemed like a great way to demonstrate many of the problems and the irrationality that he perceived in culture.

This is an improved version of the essay on Adam Lanza’s hard drive. This existence of this essay has been mentioned in many news reports on Adam Lanza, and has thus been heard of by tens or hundreds of millions of people. However, most people have never actually read the essay, nor would most people understand the ideas that Lanza was trying to explain.

Many people also mistakenly believe that Lanza was a pedophile, even though he clarified many times that he was not attracted to children. I am not a pedophile either, though I’m sure that many people won’t believe me. I don’t know what I’d have to do to prove that I am not a pedophile either. My interest in this essay and Lanza’s beliefs are purely philosophical. I only desire to create a rational philosophy.

In the video description of “On pedophiles and children -Part 1-8”, Adam Lanza wrote that he did not have the motivation to finish writing the essay:

I have to emphasize for the fifth time, I AM NOT A PEDOPHILE. My position is that children would not be harmed by consensual sexual interaction with adults any more than other adults are, unless their culture forced them into being ignorant of it and manipulated into being horrified by it.

I recognize that my anti-pedophobia was only a futile retaliation against culture, so I will never have the motivation to improve any of this. [links to several other YouTube videos, including the other parts of this series]

Lanza later died by suicide ~14 months later. Since he is dead, and since I don’t think that his insightful work should go to waste, I decided to format, edit, and publish it. Most of the editing consisted of rewriting and rearranging paragraphs and sentences, adding headings and hyperlinks, properly attributing excerpts, completing unfinished arguments, formatting, and writing this editor’s preface. Nevertheless, Adam Lanza still wrote most of the content and ideas featured on this page, so he deserves most of the credit, as this webpage wouldn’t exist without his work.

There were many unattributed quotes and excerpts by Tom O’Carroll and Paul Wilson included in the original essay file. Based on what Lanza said in his audio recordings, he was probably planning to paraphrase these excerpts, before he decided to never finish the essay. Although the excerpts were unattributed, I managed to find the original source of almost all of them through a search engine.

This version re-arranged all the paragraphs into what I thought would be a more logical and optimal order for covering all the topics. The order of the contents in the essay is different from the order covered in the original file and Lanza’s audio recordings. Regardless, all the information and ideas remain intact. Even if there are multiple ways how it could be expanded and further refined, I’m certain that Lanza would approve of the final draft and formatting if he were alive to see it.

Before I read Lanza’s essay, I always found pedophilia and child pornography to be too disgusting[1] to bother thinking any further about whether anything related to pedophilia should be legal or not. After reading his essay, I now think that most arguments against consensual pedophilia are contradictory or fallacious. Pedophilia can be defended within the humanist value framework of the Modern West. Most pedophobia frankly seems to be motivated by fear, irrationality, and disgust.

However, I still oppose normalizing pedophilia because it is maladaptive and unnatural. Human sexuality is probably heavily based on imprinting. Exposure to pedophilic interactions could cause children to imprint abnormally, thus causing them to have permanently abnormal sexual desires for the rest of their lives. Pedophilia could also be connected to the pathogen hypothesis for male homosexuality, but more evidence would be necessary to prove this. These possibilities weren’t addressed by Lanza.

Nevertheless, I still think these are questionable justifications for outlawing consensual pedophilia. As Lanza explained, it makes more sense to educate children about sexuality with the most accurate information that we have available, rather than to censor them from it. If it’s possible that sexual activity at a young age could have permanent negative effects on a person’s sexual desires for the rest of their life, then the best thing to do is to warn children about it. That would probably cause most kids to be cautious or avoidant of sexual activity, at least until their teen years.

If children had adequate sexual education and society sufficiently re-evaluated its response to pedophilia, then I would support legalizing consensual pedophilia.[2] However, we cannot put the cart before the horse. Society cannot legalize pedophilic acts before educating children about their sexual rights and their right to refuse. Children must be aware of their rights to understand and refuse sexual activity before engaging in it. The boundaries and requirements for consent have to be more clearly defined. Society must understand that its legal and cultural responses to pedophilia are often comparatively more harmful.

Legalizing consensual pedophilia before these conditions are satisfied would have disastrous consequences. Even if a child explicitly agrees to sexual activity with an adult in our modern culture, it’s dubious whether it should be considered truly consensual. An ideal legal framework for consent must mandate that all parties understand their legal rights (including the right to refuse), the importance of consent, the potential risks, and the potential consequences. People (including children) are incapable of consent when they don’t fully understand all these concepts.

I don’t think anybody would disagree that sexual activity is harmful when: 1. consent is violated, 2. one or more parties is incapable of consent, and/or 3. the parties aren’t well-informed about the potential risks. Pedophilia can be harmful, but only for the same reasons why other types of sexual activity could be harmful. Additionally, pedophilia is unique for generating an adverse societal response (unlike other types of sexual activity), which is arguably more traumatic than the sexual activity itself.

If adolescents had adequate sexual education and society sufficiently re-evaluated its response to ephebophilia, I believe that ephebophilic interactions (sexual activity between adults and pubescent adolescents) should be fully legalized when the conditions of consent are properly satisfied.[2] I also believe that the age of adulthood should be determined by merit, rather than a static age. From a purely biological perspective, it’s perfectly natural for humans to have sex and children during adolescence.

There could be some debate about the extent to which ephebophilic activities should be discouraged or not, since it’s financial better for parents to avoid having children until they have a stable education, job(s), and financial status. Beyond that, opposition to ephebophilia is mostly based on moral delusions. Our ancestors didn’t have modern sexual morality. They often had sex outside our modern moral boundaries. In English common law, the minimum age for marriage was 12 for females and 14 for males.[3]

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I haven’t seen all the evidence regarding Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual activities. Epstein and his associates allegedly engaged with adolescents. While most 14-17 year-olds have sufficient mental capacities for understanding sex, I am doubtful that all of them were properly informed about the importance of consent, their right to refuse, or all the potential risks (e.g. sexual activity at a young age could cause abnormal imprinting and unchangeable maladaptive sexual desires for life).

Unfortunately, our culture does a terrible job of educating children about these concepts. For example, I was never taught about the importance of consent or the types of contraception until I was 16 years old. I never heard about the potential effects of imprinting on sexuality until I was 25. Most adults have probably never thought about it either.

Jeffrey Epstein also allegedly filmed some of the sexual activities between him and his victims without obtaining their consent first. If these allegations are true, then Epstein and everyone associated with committing similar anti-consensual crimes must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and every effort should be made to prevent further harm to his victims’ lives and identities.

This topic has been debated by other bloggers and writers before:

• AI Child Porn Will Probably Save Real Children – Aella.
• Against Aella’s “AI Child Porn Will Probably Save Real Children” – Joseph Bronski.
• Paedophilia: The Radical Case, Chapter 10: “Children in Erotica and Pornography” – Tom O’Carroll.

If society sufficiently re-evaluated its response to pedophilia, then I think child pornography should probably be legalized when all the participants have adequate sexual education and consent is legally satisfied.[2] Non-consensual child pornography should be punished and condemned, just like any other type of non-consensual pornography. Pornography must be destroyed in cases where it’s unknown or unclear whether all the participants were properly informed and explicitly consented.

I am convinced that there are no good reasons to prohibit consensual pedophilia, so I don’t see any reason to take a different position on pornography. Society should prevent people from developing abnormal sexual desires, but it’s debatable whether society should prevent people from engaging in abnormal yet harmless desires or not. For the latter, I don’t think either position is uniquely rational.

It’s debated whether porn increases the tendency for people to seek out the real thing. I think this probably depends on a number of factors. But even if it’s true, that would be a rationale for outlawing other types of abnormal and maladaptive pornography, not just child pornography. Of course, this assumes that society should prevent all abnormal sexual behaviors. As covered in Lanza’s essay, it’s difficult to justify this based on maximize consent, especially if the sexual behavior is harmless.

I concur with Aella’s reasoning that legalizing pornography would probably cause more pedophiles to avoid seeking the real thing. Pornography is a major reason why young people are having less sex these days.

It’s already easy for anyone to find CP on the Internet nowadays if they’re trying to find it, yet most people don’t watch CP. The same argument also applies towards drugs and prostitution. People will engage in those activities, regardless of whether they’re outlawed or not. And even if they are legalized, most people will never try them because they don’t want to. Legalizing CP would also make it less profitable to produce CP, which would discourage illegal (and hence abusive) CP from being produced.

The main thing that normalizes abnormal sexualities is public acceptance. Normalized sexual behaviors conform with the public’s values. So, I don’t think access to pornography is a primary factor for normalizing abnormal sexualities. Access to homosexual pornography didn’t do much at all to normalize homosexuality, especially since most people never found it appealing enough to bother looking at. The same could be said for all other genres of pornography that portray abnormal activities. The real reason why homosexuality was largely normalized is because people re-evaluated their humanist values.

Instead, it is the users of pornography who are at risk of developing a corrupted conception of normality. When people watch lots of fake (or statistically unlikely) information, it alienates them from reality. That applies to all digital media, not just pornography. If people watch too much pornography, it could delude their judgments about what’s normal or appropriate in the real-world. A rational society would never forget that pedophilia and watching pornography are maladaptive.

The illegalization of child porn has been used to justify searching people’s data, for the sake of ensuring that absolutely no one possesses or watches any child porn. Many people are rightfully skeptical if that’s a genuine reason, or just an excuse to justify infringing on everybody’s privacy.

Ultimately, I support whatever leads to fewer violations of consent and better outcomes for society. While we can theorize about which is better and why, I would ultimately support whichever position is best supported by the evidence. More evidence is needed to determine the exact consequences of legalizing, outlawing, and decriminalizing child pornography. I’m also open to changing my mind on legalizing pedophilia if someone can present me with rational arguments that I haven’t heard or considered.

Tyler Clementi’s suicide seemed to be something new to everyone, and I was the only one who remembered a similar death. Clementi’s roommate had placed a hidden camera in his room and recorded eighteen-year-old Clementi having sex with another man, and broadcasted the events over the internet. The ridicule which Clementi received as a result of this was presumably what caused him to jump off of the George Washington Bridge on September 22, 2010. I do not mean to say that I was reminded of the several other young homosexuals who had died by suicide earlier in the month: the comparison was more tangible than that. It was the death of 56-year-old Louis Conradt on November 5, 2006. He had fallen prey to a sting operation which was broadcasted on NBC’s former television series, To Catch A Predator.

The show originally emerged from the activity of Perverted Justice, a civilian watchdog group. Members of the group posed as boys and girls ranging from 10 to 15 years old and searched online chat rooms for adults who were willing to engage in sexual activity with them. Once they found one, they posted his personal information on their website. They additionally contacted as many people involved in the adult’s life as they could, such as employers, to inform them about what he had typed to their decoy.

When NBC became involved with Perverted Justice, the adults began to get invited over to a house which was covered with over a dozen hidden cameras. When an adult arrived, the cameras recorded him being confronted by the host of the show, who carried a transcript of the sexually-explicit online conversation with the Perverted Justice decoy. The host read the most embarrassing sentences to the adult and asked several questions about what he was intending to do. When the nervous adult stepped out of the house, he was dramatically arrested by the police. He was subsequently charged with numerous crimes, usually including at least one felony. NBC nationally broadcasted the events for the amusement of its viewers.

Louis Conradt was one of the pedophiles who had agreed to meet what he thought was going to be a 13-year-old boy for sexual activity. When Conradt didn’t show up at the house which was leased to NBC, police pursued a warrant for his arrest. The To Catch A Predator crew drove to Conradt’s house to wait outside along with the police. When all of the legal technicalities were completed the next morning, they broke into his house and encountered Conradt. He reportedly said, “I’m not going to hurt anyone”, raised a pistol to his head, and shot himself dead.

Perhaps this is making you uncomfortable, and some awkward questions might be surfacing in your mind:

• “Is this doctrinaire madman expressing sympathy for a pedophile?”
• “Is this supposed to be a sick kind of bigoted satire against homosexuals?”
• “Is someone in the office pulling my leg?”.

Independent of whatever opinion anyone might have of Louis Conradt, the similarities between his death and Tyler Clementi’s seem obvious. Both men felt as if they had been forced into killing themselves owing to the way in which their society treated them in the course of pursuing its voyeuristic entertainment through surveilling their romantic lives. In Clementi’s case, there was national sympathy expressed for weeks and the students who were responsible for broadcasting his sexual activity were universally condemned. In Conradt’s case, the only criticism which was ever directed toward Perverted Justice, NBC, and the police, only applied to the technical methodology of his arrest. Xavier Von Erck, the founder of Perverted Justice, responded to Conradt’s death by effectively saying that he would have preferred if he hadn’t died, but the only thing which bothered him about the situation was that they would not be able to press any charges against a dead man.

Why is it that one of these deaths is considered to be tragic, yet the other is dismissed as being nothing other than an inconvenience and has been completely forgotten? If hypothetically only one of these cases can be considered tragic, why is it Tyler’s death by default? Momentarily forget about all of the details pertaining to the lives of both of them for a moment, and only focus on the way in which their society responded to their sexuality. While the treatment which Tyler received was unjustified, it effectively amounted to nothing other than simple ridicule. In comparison, the treatment which pedophiles receive cannot be described by words.

They are perhaps the most universally condemned, vilified, and isolated group of people on the planet. Pedophiles, virulently rejected by their fellow LGBT activists, have literally no one for them other than several effete associations which haven’t been active in decades. In contrast, homosexuals have innumerable support groups to help them with anything they might need. While the discrimination which homosexuals receive is primarily directed toward them from other private citizens, the absolute contempt which pedophiles are subjected to is institutionalized by their government. If someone has been identified as an active pedophile, he is automatically imprisoned for prolonged sentences. If the other prisoners discover that someone is a pedophile, he is brutalized beyond belief, with the rest of society nodding in approval. The prospect of this happening is a significant incentive for pedophiles to commit suicide before being imprisoned. One pedophile who was being charged with child molestation expressed possibly the same sentiment which Louis Conradt was feeling by saying, “If it comes down to that, I’ll swallow a bottle of pills. I’d rather go on my own than die in prison”.

Everyone who is convicted of engaging in pedophilic activity is given a life sentence independent of the actual verdict. If a pedophile is lucky enough to leave prison within their lifetime, after being subjected to mandatory castration in some cases, they must live the rest of their life branded as a violent rapist. They are constantly under the supervision of their government, in some cases through the use of GPS bracelets. Their personal information is widely divulged to their neighbors, as if public castigation against them is encouraged. They can be evicted or denied service by landlords and can be denied employment without any opportunity for legal recourse while any other group could successfully win a civil rights lawsuit. Left itinerant and without meaningful employment, they are additionally subjected to the universal seething rage of everyone around them, and no one has any sympathy for any harassment, vandalism, death threats, or overt violence which is directed toward them.

Why is this the case? Is it right that pedophiles are the one social group which everyone can agree deserve to be tortured, if not outright killed? Are they truly the demons which everyone sees them as, which lead one judge in sentencing a pederast to saying among shouts of “Shame!”:

“…the crime of which you have been convicted is so bad that one has to put stern restraint upon one’s self to prevent one’s self from describing, in language which I would rather not use, the sentiments which must rise in the breast of every man of honor who has heard the details of these two horrible trials. That the jury has arrived at a correct verdict in this case I cannot persuade myself to entertain a shadow of a doubt …

It is no use for me to address you. People who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame, and one cannot hope to produce any effect upon them. It is the worst case I have ever tried… I shall, under the circumstances, be expected to pass the severest sentence that the law allows. In my judgment it is totally inadequate for a case such as this.“

Although the judge was speaking of pederasty, he presumably would have been even more appalled by pedophilia. Both terms are among a vague series of categorizations for adults who are sexually attracted to youths:

• Pedophilia is the sexual attraction to prepubescent children.
• Hebephilia is the sexual attraction to children in the early stages of puberty. Louis Conradt was technically a hebephile, not a pedophile.
• Ephebophilia is the sexual attraction to pubescent adolescents.
• Pederasty is generally an instance of an ephebophilic relationship between males.

Pedophilia is commonly used as a blanket-term to encompass all of these, and I will be using it to refer to all of these for the sake of simplicity. Recognize that, however devious, perverted, or illegitimate it might be seen as, and despite the derogatory “phile” appended to it, pedophilia is merely a sexual orientation. It’s a part of the rainbow, along with homosexuality and heterosexuality. A pedophile could live their entire life without ever coming into contact with a child because the only requirement for being one is having a sexual attraction to children. However, allowing myself even in the slightest to define pedophilia here as including adults who merely have a dormant sexual attraction to children, would be vapidly conciliatory, and would not address the larger issue. For that reason, the definition of a pedophile which I will be using is an adult who both desires and engages in sexual activity with any person who is considered to be under the legal age of consent, id est a child.

People who deny the legitimacy of sexual orientation being based on age rather than gender believe that gender is a sort of immutable pseudo-metaphysical categorization of humans yet age is not, so it does not constitute a sexuality. Telling pedophiles “You can’t handle a relationship with an adult?” is no different than telling gay males “You can’t handle a relationship with a woman?” Age is a part of sexual orientation.

Statutory-rape laws encode the outdated and sexist idea that a woman’s virginity must be protected for her father’s sake and that she herself can never desire on her own, Levine argues.

– Hanna Rosin, “Lust Busters”

Before addressing whether or not the treatment of this group of people is right, the nature of persecution itself must be addressed. Regarding the subject of apathy of persecution, there is a quotation by the pastor Martin Niemöller which goes by several forms and is quite popular. An example of it is:

First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Everyone feels good about saying such things, but the use of this quote is actually quite counter-productive because it insufficiently addresses the problem of historical perspectives. If you were to look at many of the groups which have been persecuted throughout history, you would find that many people have never actually been explicitly apathetic to the persecution. They were simply incapable of seeing that the persecutory treatment of some group was wrong. After all, Martin Niemöller himself was an anti-communist who was not merely apathetic to the way in which communists were treated by the Nazi Party, but actively supported it, incapable of seeing that it was actually unjustified.

For example, many Christians during the Middle Ages did not somehow know in the backs of their minds that persecuting “blasphemers” was wrong, yet did not care enough to do anything about the issue. They genuinely believed that blasphemy warranted floggings, imprisonments, and murders. The highly influential theologian Thomas Aquinas illustrated this belief by saying that heretics “by right …can be put to death and despoiled of their possessions by the secular [authorities], even if they do not corrupt others, for they are blasphemers against God, because they observe a false faith. Thus they can be justly punished [even] more than those accused of high treason”. The harm which the Christian persecutors inflicted was not caused by apathy, but by a barbaric perspective.

Simultaneously, every generation of people believes that they are lucky enough to be living in a society which is the most enlightened of all history. They believe that they have the best perception of the world out of anyone, and that they are not fundamentally fallible. As much as everyone thinks that this is somehow non-applicable today, this absolutely includes the current generation just as much as prior ones. Bigotry prevails when people have genuine certainty, without any willful ignorance nor deliberate malice, that their actions are justified by their somehow optimal perspective. People must understand that they do not think any fundamentally differently from anyone who lived hundreds of years ago. We do not have some sort of metaphysical comprehension of everything which transcends anything prior people were capable of understanding.

Because of the certainty that we have in our perspective, and being aware that people in the past have always had this identical perspective for themselves while still being fundamentally wrong (as best as we can discern), we can assume that we have beliefs which are fundamentally wrong. The only problem is that it’s not exactly a simple matter to identify which ones they are. People who use that Martin Niemöller quote should not be asking themselves “What can we do to stop the persecution of X group?”, which is highly dependent on their preexisting prejudices, but rather, “Who is X group?”. You can ask yourself if the treatment of pedophiles is genuinely nothing other than the correct way to deal with them, or if this is yet another unseen incarnation of communists, trade unionists, and Jews.

Just like all marginalized groups, pedophiles are stereotyped in undesirable ways. In their case, a typical pedophile is portrayed as being a creepy old man in a dirty rain coat who hides in the bushes of a park with a bag of candy. This, however, is no more legitimate of a representation than any other generic stereotype for its associated group. What then, is a typical pedophile like? To Catch A Predator was actually quite successful in demonstrating that there is no such thing as a typical pedophile. The pedophiles who appeared on the show represented every age group, from 19-year-olds to a 68-year-old. They were of every race, major religion, and type of personality. They were employed in a wide variety of fields, which included education, engineering, marketing, medicine, law enforcement, fire control, and law; Louis Conradt was a district attorney for over twenty years. The one similarity between the pedophiles who appeared on the series was that every one of them was male.

This is not because every pedophile is male. Female pedophiles rarely look to the internet to meet children because they generally have greater access to them without causing suspicion. It is not too unusual for females to be in situations where they can undress or bathe children, and it is considered to be culturally acceptable for females to cuddle, kiss, and fondle them. Females comprise 6% of reported child molestation cases, although this number is lower than the real value owing to the aforementioned reasons in combination with a lower likelihood of being reported.

As Plummer perceptively points out, one obvious problem with the stereotyping of paedophiles and the consequent myths that arise as a result of these stereotypes is that the myths and stereotypes usually direct us to look only at the behaviour of men. Similar activities when performed by women such as cuddling, caressing, touching and stroking children are socially acceptable. But for a man to engage in such contacts is inviting the label of paedophile and possibly risking imprisonment. The stereotypes surrounding paedophiles erect a sexist myth – and that myth is that only men have intimate physical relations with children. The myth conveniently ignores the fact that women often engage in similar sexual behaviour and therefore perpetuates two common views. The first is that ’men should not do this but women can’ and the second that ’any man who does this is deeply disturbed’. But by perpetuating these myths, we conveniently forget that children have sexual needs and emotional components that are well documented by contemporary psychology. The very barriers that we put between ourselves and paedophiles are in a sense the same barriers that we put between ourselves as parents and our own children. With both groups we prefer to stereotype them (’paedophiles are monsters’, ’children are innocent’) and in this way avoid realities that we would otherwise be forced to face.

– Paul Wilson, The Man They Called A Monster, “Challenging the Social and Sexual Barriers” (1981)

The age range of the decoys on To Catch A Predator was also fairly representative of what the most pedophiles are attracted to, although skewed toward the ephebophilia range. Pedophiles who are attracted to prepubescent girls have an age preference of 8-10, and pedophiles who are attracted to prepubescent boys have an age preference of 10-13.

Socrates, along with innumerable other Greek men, practiced pederasty. The trial from which the earlier judge’s excerpt came was for the highly lauded poet and playwright Oscar Wilde.

What does a person need to “get” about sex? What makes it any more spectacularly involved than tying your shoe, eating some ice cream, or watching a really good film? People don’t do themselves any favors by placing sex in its own category of importance and significance. People can connect with each other intimately in many different ways, spiritually and intellectually, as well as physically. Let me hazard a guess what people mean when they say “children don’t understand”. They mean that children don’t have the cynical, ugly, jaded view of human beings as manipulating quasi-psychotics. The people who say this tend to see a poisoned well everywhere they look. They see ulterior motives beneath the surface of every expression.

Does a child understand that her step-mom buys her candy and takes her to the park in order to curry her favor? Does she understand that she has to go to Sunday school because her parents want her to grow up with the same inculcation they received? Does she comprehend the subtle molding and shaping and channeling her guardians impose upon her, in order to try to steer her closer to matching their ideals? No, most children would not. But you don’t say “you shouldn’t buy sweets for your kids because they don’t understand your motives”.

Can a child understand the consequences of different diets, and the serious health risks involved? Can a child understand the consequences of traveling in a car? It is impossible for them to understand the possibility of them getting into a car wreck? Do they have enough of a conception of the way that cars operate to have informed consent to take the risk? Can a child understand what it means to have a religion? How is it possible for their feeble minds to comprehend its doctrines? Can they comprehend that if they fail to follow particular rules, they will eternally burn in hell?

No, instead people telescope on sexual expression. By all means, manipulate children as you see fit. Pour your religion into them, fill them up with your phobias and your cowardice and weaknesses. Most people don’t give two squats about manipulating each other, manipulating children especially. Don’t try to fool me that they do.

Moralists care about sex because they had it blemished by their own parents’ shame and guilt and feelings of dirtiness. Religions, but not just religions, have told them to turn their nose in disgust at their animal selves, as if they should castrate an entire aspect of their nature. But you can’t. The human animal has its desires and always will. That does not mean, however, that it does not come packaged along with human ego, human consciousness, and conscience.

People will manipulate. People will engage in sex. But these two do not necessarily occur at the same time. They do not entail one another. If someone detests manipulation, then by all means fight it. I feel the same way, and I hate seeing children lied to and cheated. But I won’t for a second let someone make me feel ashamed because they have issues with human sexuality and place it on a black pedestal.[4]

Sex can express beauty, rapture, spiritual awe. It can represent almost nothing but biological imperative. It can mean domination. It can mean insecurity, or acceptance. But I won’t presume to know the particulars of any given case, projecting my problems onto another. I’ll summarize with one of my favorite Nietzsche quotes: “The … resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.”

If children are genuinely uninterested in sex (in spite of any manipulation), then they always have the right and option to refuse.

Someone who argues against pedophilic relationships in this way might concede that there are individual children who are capable of consenting, but that the majority are unable to, so there must be, at the very least, an age of consent law to protect them. In either case, the belief is that at least a considerable portion of children are incapable of consenting to sexual activity, therefore any instance of sexuality among children should be outlawed because it might constitute rape. To include both groups, all references to “a child” and “children” will refer to a completely average child, rather than an exceptional one.

Personally, I do not understand why sexual activity is considered to be incomprehensible to a child. Perhaps I missed a memo which I was supposed to receive at some point, because I have the same conception of sexuality as I did when I was first exposed to any information pertaining to it at age 11. While my value judgments of sex have changed, I haven’t had a divine transcendence which I was presumably supposed to have pertaining to the conception of it. Additionally, when I was prepubescent, it was my observation that none of my peers would have had any incapacity to consent. I have never understood the mysticism with which this topic is treated. However, I will try to treat this assertion seriously.

Different jurisdictions across the world bungle all sorts of things together, including the sexuality of children. Each one seems to conclude that the children in one place are fundamentally different than the children in another, given that the legal ages of consent range from 9 to 21. If that’s not the case, then these laws are arbitrary and meaningless. There have also been absurd instances where boys below the age of consent were claimed to be incapable of comprehending sexuality, while simultaneously being held responsible for child payment.

My short response is that children are incapable of consenting merely because the adults around them say that they aren’t capable of consenting. However, this understandably would not allay anyone’s anxiety by itself, so I will have to go in-depth into this.

The usual mistake is to believe that sexual activity, especially for children, is so alarming and dangerous that participants need to have an absolute, total awareness of every conceivable ramification of taking part before they can be said to give valid consent. What there most definitely needs to be, is the child’s willingness to take part in the activity in question. Whatever social or legal rules may be operated, they must not be such as to allow unwilling children to be subjected to sexual acts. But there is no need whatever for a child to know ’the consequences’ of engaging in harmless sex play, simply because it is exactly that: harmless.

Supposedly, adults are universally “more rational” than children are. Professing that children are therefore incapable of understanding the concept of consent, and thus do not deserve to control their bodies, is equivalent to claiming that females do not deserve to control their bodies because males are “more judicious in personal affairs” in relation to them, or some other such inane fatuity. It’s a senseless and morally reproachful position to hold.

Supposedly, children are bumbling creatures who are incapable of knowing what is good and what is bad for them, and so other people must act on behalf of them to protect them. Even if you really do have better judgment than I do, and even if doing so might actually be in my best long-term interests, you still don’t have a right to make decisions on my behalf.

It would be better to inform children of accurate technical knowledge of sex, rather than having them base their information on pornography that they happen to stumble upon.

These factors may prompt some approving nods as criteria for consent, if only because they appear to rule out most, if not all, children. However, a problem arises after giving it a moment’s more thought. Even adults cannot be sure ’where it will all end’ when embarking on a sexual encounter or relationship. Nor do most people enter adulthood with a fixed idea as to the activities, and people, that might turn them on. The scope for experiment and discovery is a lifelong one. Only the third factor, that of control over the situation, appears to maintain its crucial importance when viewed in an adult context.

This argument is based on the assertion that children’s frontal lobes are inadequately developed to conceive of something as allegedly confounding as sex. The state of their frontal lobes is supposedly relevant because their capacity to reason is perceived as being considerably affected by it. The capacity to reason is a requisite for understanding what sexual activity entails, which is necessary for the establishment of consent to it.

From this view, children would be similar to a mentally-impaired adult. An argument against such an adult’s ability to consent does not directly pertain to the developmental state of their brain, but instead relies on a doubt as to their capacity to reason. Similarly, a child’s ability to consent would also be purely dependent on their capacity to reason, rather than the irrelevant developmental stage of their brain.

At the beginning of 2011, the High Court of England and Wales had to determine the criteria applying to a mentally-impaired adult in establishing the legitimacy of consent to sex. It ruled that:

The following factors must be understood for the capacity to consent to sex to be present:

1. The mechanics of the act.
2. Only adults over the age of 16 should do it. This implies that participants need to be able to distinguish accurately between adults and children.
3. All parties to the act need to consent to it.
4. There are health risks involved, particularly the acquisition of sexually transmitted and sexually transmissible infections.
5. Sex between a man and a woman may result in the woman becoming pregnant.
6. Sex is part of having relationships with people, and may have emotional consequences.

The court did not need to isolate mentally-handicapped adults into some quasi-metaphysical category separate from typical adults. The ruling applied to both. Momentarily ignoring (#2), these appear to be mostly reasonable criteria for the establishment of consent to sexual activity, though the requirements could be improved to specify the necessary sexual education and the right to refuse that participants should know. I cannot imagine other jurisdictions coming to vastly different conclusions.

The ruling states that any mentally-impaired adult who could understand all of this would be eligible for sexual activity. Likewise, it would intuitively apply to children, who are to be seen as being mentally-impaired, due to their underdeveloped frontal lobes. Therefore, if a child understood all of this, then they would be free to engage in sexual activity, if they so desired. However, the judge threw in (#2), a requirement that only adults could legally engage in sexual activity. It is a qualification which I would similarly expect and disapprove of from every jurisdiction.

Additionally, the Gillick competency test can formally determine if a child is capable of consenting to their own medical treatment without input from parents or guardians. There’s no reason why this standard medical framework cannot also be used for determining consent to sexual activity.

If a severely mentally-impaired adult may engage in sexual activity simply because they are capable of understanding sex, then why should a child not enjoy the same right? While it might be conceded that children are cognitively capable of understanding sex, it is further argued that for some number of external reasons, they should not be allowed to engage in it. The court did not attempt to justify its position on (#2), so I will have to assume that it was a general reflection of the attitude of the rest of its society. I will attempt to address those widespread contentions.

If that is the case, then that is an indication that children should be exposed to all of the relevant information pertaining to sexuality, rather than continue the standard practice of distorting their image of the world. It is as if someone has lived their entire life while forcefully being help captive in a cage. Upon telling the guard to release the prisoner, they proclaim “What do you expect me to do? He has not lived in the cage long enough to have a conception of how to live outside of it”. If a particular child is ignorant of sexuality, it is not owing to some inadequacy they have. It is because their society has deliberately witheld the relevant information from them.

It is said that, because sexual relationships are multifaceted, they are subsequently incomprehensible to a child. This view can only mean that children have not been conditioned into having the same arbitrary cultural values about sexuality as the rest of their society has. Basically, in the case of childhood sexuality, they argue that children have not been indoctrinated into understanding that child sexuality is supposed to be morally outrageous.

If homosexuality were to be considered indecent by a society, would you tell a new member of that society that they cannot engage in it because they do not have an accurate conception of what homosexuality means to their society? Or would you dismiss their society’s perspective and recognize that the only relevant parties are the ones engaging in the homosexual relationship? Why would those external societal meanings matter? Who gets to decide what the values are which pertain to sexual relationships?

Personally, it is my opinion that the overwhelming majority of adults have no conception of how to participate in a meaningful romantic relationship, and that they would be better off if they were single. Should that mean that I would be justified in treating everyone in the same way which this society treats pedophiles and children? My personal opinions seem to be entirely irrelevant, along with every other person’s opinions. The most prudent position would be to allow everyone to live in the way they desire, instead of forcing them to behave according to some irrelevant external notions of vague prerequisites of what sexual relationships are “supposed to” entail.

It is the responsibility of individuals involved within any particular relationship to understand and perceive the context of it. In the case of children, why can’t each child determine by theirself what sex means to them? If children were allowed to engage in sex, they would no longer be alien to any of those meanings, and they could constructively share those values with the rest of their society. Everyone applies their own meanings to sex, so why not allow children to do that on their own, instead of forcing meanings onto them?

“Maturity” is someone’s ability to conform to others’ expectations. This argument only raises the question of whose expectations should reign supreme and why. Children should set their own expectations about sex because self-ownership should be respected.

What does “innocence” mean, other than enforced ignorance of sex?[5] “Innocence” is a socially sanctioned notion which is thrusted upon children independent of their will. People who want to prevent children from having any information about sexuality only want to force anti-sex culture onto people, rather letting people live however they want.

“Protecting” the innocence of children by preventing them from engaging in sexuality is no different from “protecting” females from engaging in premarital sex:

We can’t allow our dear women, with their dainty and purely untarnished minds, to be exposed to such vulgar and immoral matters as sex. It would fluster their poor hearts and corrupt their very soul. We must outlaw their premarital sex for their own good.

Instead of acting on behalf of females, it makes the most sense to allow each one to come to her own conclusions and act in the way she desires. Similarly, instead of outlawing sex before the age of consent, children should be able to make their own conclusions about sexuality and act however they desire.

Anyone can strongly disagree with a child having consensual sex with an adult, but it remains their decision to make. You don’t have a right to make decisions on my behalf, even if you really do have better judgment than I do, and even if doing so might actually be in my best long-term interests. A functional society must allow people to make their own choices. Sometimes it’s also valuable to let people try, fail, and learn from experience.

This question is characteristic of society’s view of pedophiles. Society views pedophiles as invariably molesting children, instead of having consensual relationships. “They are seen as preying on children rather than relating to them, and corrupting them instead of showing them affection”. Pedophiles constitute only half of the relevant parties in a pedophilic relationship. The other party is the child.

Society tries to reduce pedophilic relationships to an adult sexual attraction to a child. Imagine trying to describe an adult heterosexual relationship to someone who, no matter what you say, inevitably responds with “I will not be tricked by you, despite whatever justifications you might contrive, the relationship is fundamentally based on the decadent sexual attraction of a male to a female. Women are subjected to patriarchal manipulation and thus are not in any position to willingly participate in a relationship with a male.” What can be said to someone who indubitably believes that women should be dismissed as precious fools who are abusively preyed upon by libidinous males? I don’t know what you could say to such a person.

If a Muslim were to say that a female would be harmed if she let anyone see her skin, and he said that I needed evidence to prove otherwise, I would dismiss his claim. She would only be harmed if everyone told her that she was supposed to be harmed by it. There are no innate harms to it. Similarly, children are not harmed by letting adults see their skin, unless their culture disaprroves of it.

If you want to teach a child to understand that violence is bad, you must expose the child to accurate information about genuine violence, instead of distorting children’s minds with cartoons of anvils flattening animals. Many are appalled by the idea of exposing a child to an autopsy report of someone who was bludgeoned to death, reports of rape, etc. It is because our society has an artificial cultural notion of “childhood”, which harms children infinitely more than any degree of truth ever could. Demonstrating the effects of violence is immeasurably more persuasive than saying “Violence is bad because I said so” because it has a basis in reason beyond “I’m bigger than you, so what I say is true”.

If protecting children is genuinely important to people, then they should be eager to inform children about sexuality in an honest manner. This notions of “innocence” is very harmful to children. Imagine a case in which a little girl is sitting on her uncle’s lap. The uncle fondles her genitalia against her will. Information about her genitalia, which she only knows as her naughty off-limits zone, was viewed by her parents as being so dirty for a child, that they never mentioned anything about it. It’s predictable that the little girl would never mention her uncle to anyone in a house where sexuality is a topic which everyone acts nervous about whenever it is remotely referenced to. She would be too worried about getting into trouble over the matter because she would imagine that her molestation was her fault, and that she was being naughty. Meanwhile, she continues to get molested every time her uncle sees her because her parents were afraid of destroying her “childhood innocence”.

Children are less likely to report sex abuse when their parents have made it clear (by their behavior) that they don’t like talking about sex. When children are mandated to obey society’s authority figures, forbidden from knowing about sex, and cannot engage in sex, society cannot reasonably expect children to decline when another adult says that they must have sex. The little girl could’ve prevented her uncle from molesting her and been better off if she had even the slightest information about sexuality. Instead, she was kept ignorant about it and had parents who were too terrified of the topic to inform her.

A better approach to prevent children from being molested is to provide them with the most accurate and most extensive information about sexuality that we can. Children should be informed about sexual activity, consent, their right to refuse, and their right to report any violations of consent.

If children have the proper information, they would necessarily find that the cultural values are illegitimate, for the same reason why it’s illegitimate to keep children uninformed about violence. Sexuality cannot be reasonably argued against because it is not harmful. People should reevaluate why they don’t want the child to engage in sexuality. It’s probably because of the indoctrination that they received when they were children, which dogmatically states that sexuality is wrong.

The same argument could be made against all sexual activity in general, regardless of age. But no one argues or believes that society should ban all sexual activity, so this argument creates a contradiction. A distinction must also be made between consensual sexual activity and rape.

This is blatantly false and no evidence exists to justify this. Even infants are sexual. When people say that children are asexual, they aren’t really talking about children being asexual. They’re just contriving the justifications for why children should be controlled. The reason why people think that children being sexual is somehow pathological is because they’re not expected to be sexual in our culture.

These are the same notions that have been used to relegate females to the status of property: “Females are asexual, so there is nothing wrong with denying them their own decisions because they must be controlled for their own good. Violent coercion is justified against females, because no female would ever desire anything sexual.”

Males are usually the ones who initiate sex with females. Even if 100% of sexual encounters between males and females always begin with males initiating sex, it would not follow that male-female sexual relationships are always harmful. Likewise for child-adult sexual relationships. Sex is not synonymous with violence.

I do not believe either of these statements to be the case. If they were true, then it would be no different than slaves in the Antebellum United States believing that their slaveowners have bestowed a positive economic benefit upon them, and they’re happy to live the way they are. After all, they receive food and housing in exchange for their obedience.

But whatever children desire is quite irrelevant, especially considering that it is the result of the current state of things. I am not saying that they cannot be enslaved if they so desire. What I want to offer them is the choice to be free, with them deciding if they want to be. I wouldn’t need to demonstrate a slave’s desire to be free. I would only need to allow them to have the option of attaining freedom. The same applies to children. I do not need to demonstrate their desire to be free. All that I need is to allow them to have the option of attaining freedom. I’m not going to act of behalf of children, coercing them to behave in the way I want them to. If a child wants to engage in sexual behavior, then that is all there is to it.

A number of factors dispose Bender and Blau and others to think of the sexuality of children as pathological. Chief among them is the cultural factor that children in our society are not expected to have sexual relationships, certainly not with adults, and that any expression of such ’symptoms’ is a sufficient indicator that they need ’treatment’.

Pedophilia is subject to numerous explicitly fallacious arguments, which are often accepted as obvious truths. If they were applied against homosexuality, many people would see them for what they are, but the inclusion of children clouds people’s vision. An example would be to say that pedophilia is unnatural, and therefore should not be tolerated. People who make that assertion presumably believe that anyone who exhibits unnatural behavior deserves to be tortured. But beyond that, whether or not some behavior is “natural” is entirely irrelevant to whether or not it warrants any mistreatment.

Another example is the assertion that pedophiles need to be treated in such a way because the DSM-V recognizes pedophilia as a mental illness. Beyond the relevance of this assertion, it is difficult to take any of the DSMs seriously when it comes to the classifications of sexuality. Prior editions arbitrarily listed homosexuality as a mental illness, which was equally arbitrarily removed in a revision. Despite all that could be said about the status of pedophilia under the DSM-V, it is not relevant to the legitimacy of pedophilic relationships.

I could claim that sex doesn’t benefit anyone, regardless of age. Technically speaking, nobody “needs” sex, in order to survive. But sex can be an enjoyable activity and a great way to form healthy emotional bonds with others. What makes consensual sex with children any different?

People of all ages can be vulnerable to brainwashing, especially when they are unaware of it. Many other types of brainwashing are permitted by society, while being unrecognized as such. If this argument were taken to the most logical conclusion, then society would have to drastically restrict everyone’s freedoms.

A glance at the way in which we think about religion, and the religious education of children, may help to put our own culture’s attitudinal response into a useful perspective. At an official level, it is agreed that a child’s introduction to religion is extremely important. In Britain it is enshrined in the 1944 Education Act that all children in all schools shall begin the day with an act of worship – the only element in the curriculum which is insisted upon by statute.

This being the case – religion being considered to be of vital importance – one might have expected that there would be an equal concern in Government, at least as great as that in relation to sex, that children should not be subjected to ’manipulation’ by ruthless adult salesmen offering every kind of creed; that these people should not be free to exploit the vulnerable minds of children.

For if it is true that children are incapable of making judgments about sexual relationships, how much more adept are they likely to be at judging the rival claims of Protestant and Catholic, or Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Exclusive Brethren? How can a child, who is so easily persuaded to believe in Father Christmas, be expected to make sense of it? Won’t she or he accept, far too uncritically, the highly contestible notion that there is a god? Why not leave the child’s mind in a state of unmolested innocence until an age is reached at which intellectually valid judgments can be made?

But no. Even though this is an important issue, adults are free to fill a child’s mind with any prejudice or bigotry they like, without any danger of facing a sentence for corrupting a minor, assault on a child’s mind, or anything else. Children are seen as fair game for the imposition of any religious belief or value system that the adult, particularly the parents, cares to impose. As Bertrand Russell has remarked, ’One of the few rights remaining to parents in the wage-earning class is that of having their children taught any brand of superstition that may be shared by a large number of parents in the same neighbourhood.’

– Tom, O’Carroll, Paedophilia: The More Radical Case, “Consent and Willingness”

Why does society tolerate this? Partly, there is a vague feeling that it is better for a child to have some religion than none at all – not least because most religions emphasize a restrictive sexual ’morality’! But it is instructive to note that very little is made of the dangers of manipulating a child’s mind.

The dangers are demonstrably far greater than any consequence of manipulating a child towards consensual sexual activity (one need only mention Northern Ireland to remind oneself of how religious bigotry reinforces antagonism between peoples) but, quite irrationally, society cares less about it. Religious manipulation is assumed to be good and is positively encouraged; sexual manipulation (or ’guidance’, ’showing how’, etc.) is assumed to be bad and is stamped upon with maximal force. I shall try to show that the latter assumption is misplaced.

– Tom, O’Carroll, Paedophilia: The More Radical Case, “Consent and Willingness”

Why do people believe that sexuality is what harms children, rather than actual abuse as distinct from sexuality? Why is sex with children associated with psychopathic behavior? Is the abuse which can be observed in pedophilic relationships endemic because of the age difference? Could it be that all these beliefs only exist due to extensive societal brainwashing?

When we “protect” children, we prevent them from having access to information and experiences. We may justify doing so in order to promote the idea of the “good life” (having long-term relationships, falling in love, having a family, being successful, having good mental health, etc). We lie to them and lock them up for their own good. But really, it’s for our own good – our conception of “the good”. All the aforementioned examples are euphemisms for pursuing a particular kind of life that may, in fact, be very immoral by some standards. The goals of reproduction, achieving high social status, and behaving in a predictable manner do not seem so universally honorable that they justify denying 13-18-year-olds control of their own bodies.[6]

Those who see only a negative potential in power discrepancies between pedophiles and children should bear in mind that there is a comparable discrepancy in the parent-child relationship – in which women, as mothers, may sometimes with justice be dubbed the oppressor. Mothers often make the ’ageist’ assumption that their children aren’t old enough to things that they want to do (regardless of her actual development), that they need ’protecting’ from a new experience. This assumption is oppressive. The reality is that children need to be freed.

Similarly, the psychological need of many women to keep their children as children, rather than letting them develop, is often an oppressive fact during those children’s later childhood and early adolescence. In extreme forms, it can go on well into adulthood. This type of oppression is common enough. The sexual constriction of children in early childhood by their mothers is all but universal in Western cultures.

In the Freudian formulation, little boys fear that their fathers will castrate them, but in fact, it is generally mothers who take upon themselves the role of imposing sexual taboos. It is the mothers who tell their little boys (and girls) the places where they must not touch themselves, the parts they must not play with. And if the barriers against masturbation in infancy are gradually being broken down, mothers still reinforce prohibitions against guilt-free sex play with age-mates, to say nothing of the incest taboo and the prohibition of sex with adults. It is the mothers who must answer for the ’complexes’ which are the result, and which give our culture its characteristically guilt-ridden flavour. The father may appear superficially to be the stern law-giver in the family, but mother is the law-giver-in-chief to both girls and boys in the formative early stages. Her threatened capacity to withhold love is a far more potent weapon in fashioning what Freud called the ’super ego’, or castrating conscience, than any sanction wielded by the father.

The disparity in size and power between parent and child creates a potential for abuse: a mother could not batter a baby as big as herself. But, on the basis that parent-child relationships are generally positive (and, in addition, given that safeguards can be built in, such as according rights to children), we accept that inequality is simply in the nature of the thing. In itself, it is not an aspect on which we would focus our attention in determining whether a particular mother-child relationship was good or bad.

I would like to see paedophilic relationships looked at in a similar light. I believe that the comparison with the parent-child relationship is in most cases more appropriate than that with adult sexual relationships. Another model, made much of in J.Z. Eglington’s Greek Love, is that of teacher-pupil – the mentor relationship. Why should these models, traditionally asexual as they are (in our culture), be appropriate? Essentially because, notwithstanding the sexual element of paedophilia, the affectual structure of a paedophilic relationship, so far as the child is concerned, is more like that between parent and child, or between teacher and pupil, than between lovers.

Sometimes the child feels ’love’ for the adult, in a romantic sense; more often, in the case of pre-adolescent children, the affection for the adult is not different in kind to that which it would feel for a parent. On the adult’s side there may of course be romantic, essentially non-parental feelings, but in any discussion of the impact of the relationship on the child, it makes sense to take as one’s model that which best fits the child’s perceptions.

– Edited From: Tom, O’Carroll, Paedophilia: The More Radical Case, “Power and Equality”

On a more general level we can look at the undoubted fact that in this society children are the property of their parents; they are placed in the hierarchical family structure which demands that they be non-sexual and denies them the liberty to choose with whom they want to associate. However much a child may suffer persecution from peers and be unloved by parents, because of this property relationship, a friendship with an adult is frowned upon. Together with the wrath which results from their breaching of property rights, paedophiles also incur wrath because many people consider sex to be basically brutal and exploitative by its very nature and not mutually enjoyable. Some people therefore assume that any paedophile relationship must necessarily consist of an adult sexually exploiting a child. Consequently the law operates on the assumption that the superior power position of the adult has been used to force the sexual relationship. The criminal justice system then, according to this argument, is not primarily concerned with the safety of the child at all but with the safety of the family structure and the maintenance of private property.

– Paul Wilson, The Man They Called A Monster, “Challenging the Social and Sexual Barriers” (1981)

The notion of ’protection’ by means of taking all decisions out of the hands of the party to be protected, and giving all responsibility to ’authorities’ who are presumed to know best, is clearly evident in the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) procedure. In this case it is the social worker who is presumed to know best. And the social worker is clearly charged with the task of convincing the child and family ’of the necessity for prosecuting the offender to protect the community’. What if they are not convinced? What if the child was very fond of the adult and knew a damn sight better than any social worker that he was not a danger to the community? What if the parents knew it too? – for parents often do oppose prosecution.

It appears that this ’we know best’ attitude is even allowed to influence the judicial proceedings when they are under way, in the SPCC scheme of things: evidently they do not feel they are overreaching themselves by moral blackmail of the accused, in persuading him to plead guilty so as to protect the child. Yet this kind of pressure is just as unfair, in terms of being contrary to the ordinary rules of natural justice, as the Israeli system described above. Incidentally, it should be realized that the person most sensitive to the harm done by police and court proceedings is often none other than the accused. I have known several people who have pleaded guilty when they might have escaped conviction, simply to save the child from the anguish of it all. One of them got a life sentence for his pains! Can it really be satisfactory to rely on a system which exploits the courage, the moral strength, the sheer goodness of the accused, in order to condemn him?

– Tom, O’Carroll, Paedophilia: The More Radical Case, “Towards More Sensible Laws”

The same question and argument could be applied towards men and women, since men are stronger and more powerful than women. Even if that was a good rationale to prevent sex between unequals, it would be a rationale to prevent any interaction between unequals… unless one could demonstrate that sex is different for some important reason.

This argument against pedophilic relationships can be applied to females to oppose their premarital sexual relationships. Because males in such a society have more “power”, that makes their relationship illegitimate? What is wrong with that? Someone could say to a male that, “The institution of an adult male having sex with an adult female is rife with innumerable centuries of domination and oppression. Females cannot countenance the power dynamics involved in such a relationship, and thus must be prevented from engaging in any until they attain our societal milestone of marriage”. No one believes that a pretentious “power disparity” argument applies to the legitimacy of sexual relationships between adults, so there’s no reason why it should arbitrarily apply to children.

The proposed solution to eliminating instances of a discrepancy of authority in relationships, is to use the authority of adults to control children as property, rather than allow them to live in the way they desire. It is counter-intuitive and self-defeating. Adults are prevented from “exploiting” children by making children slaves to their parents.

Children are forced into relationships with their parents by stripping away their right to employment and property. It’s no different than forcing women to have husbands by stripping away their right to employment and property.

This is no different from saying “Slaves should be prevented from behaving the way they desire because free people have more authority”. The issue would have absolutely nothing to do with the slaves. All of the fault lies in the institution which oppresses them and continually contrives justifications for its existence.

All that pedophiles can say to anti-pedophiles is, “This has nothing to do with specious notions of institutions, power dynamics, and society. This is what we want to do and it only involves us. Nothing else matters.” The real reason why anti-pedophiles bring this up is because of a patronizing perspective of children as being sub-human.

The issue present here is the notion of societal authority. Children should not be taught that they are to be submissive to the will of adults. It is appalling that such a practice is accepted. Children are treated as sub-human, and then society is appalled when an adult has sex with one.

How can anyone criticize a pedophilic relationship as being based on a power discrepancy, while supporting the power discrepancy in every single non-romantic relationship that children are forced into having with adults? Why is it that the presence of sexuality makes one relationship abusive, yet not any of the others?

It is because the opposition to pedophilia from a power-disparity perspective has nothing to do with pedophilia in itself. The reason why it is opposed, like the others, is because of an atavistic opposition to sexuality.

What about the power disparity between a politician and a subject? A politician has the ability to write an arbitrary law which allows police to kill the subject on sight, yet no one objects to this for the reason of a “power discrepancy”.

What if the instance of power changed? Or what if there is one person who is significantly better at doing something which the other person is completely unable to do? Would it be right to persecute the ones with more power in their field for “abusing” the one with less? What if a child desired the wisdom, experience, or strength of an adult? There is innately a “power disparity” in every relationship.

Instead of eliminating sexual relationships which have power discrepancies, it seems as if the most prudent solution is to eliminate the notion of power, the idea that it is right for one person to be subject to the caprice of another, and instead allow people to live in the way they desire. If a child wants to have sex with an adult, why can they not?

In any event, the pedophile doesn’t have any “power” in the relationship. Numerous people will want to kill the pedophile as soon as he is discovered. How can it be said that there is any power involved in pedophilic relationships? In fact, there is a subversion of power- a subversion of the power of society. Society vehemently opposes pedophilia, so any power that is involved in a pedophilic relationship will always be weaker than the power of society.

Young children above the age of infancy become susceptible to manipulation of a less direct kind, characterized by deception. When children acquire language, they can be told untruths, from the relatively (though not entirely) benign Father Christmas myth, to the pernicious threat of the ’bogeyman’, who comes to take away naughty children.

Sexual myths usually fall into the pernicious category, alas, so that the whole area of sexuality becomes poisonously invested with mystery and darkness – and the perpetrators, far from being paedophiles, are usually ordinary parents who, because of their own sexual anxieties and conflicts, are inclined to fob off children with such classics of deception as the idea that babies are brought be the stork.

If the use of deception is a possibility for parents, it is of course a possibility for paedophiles too. A paedophile who concocts a non-sexual ’reason’ for he and a small child to strip naked together, say, may succeed in arousing the child’s sexual curiosity and excitement. This would quite clearly be manipulation, based on exploiting the ignorance of the child as to the adult’s motives.

Supposing, by contrast, the paedophile had been scrupulously non-manipulative. Supposing, instead of playing tricks, he had simply, and openly, invited the child to ’play’ sexually. Both approaches would require for their success the child’s willing involvement and participation at all stages. The fact that in the more manipulative case the participation is induced by sleight of hand is really less important than the fact that the child is relaxed and enjoying the situation. Indeed, the sleight of hand may be an effective means of enabling the situation to occur ’naturally’, so far as the child is concerned, without any embarrassment or uncertainty on the adult’s part.

If the child is being led, or manipulated, it is at least a benevolent manipulation, in the sense that it leads – so long as the child is willing – towards a pleasurable and harmless outcome. Parents constantly engage in benevolent manipulation of this sort, without fear of social condemnation: usually it is called not ’manipulation’, but ’encouragement’.

Very often, parents will presume to anticipate a child’s long-term wishes by ignoring, or manipulating their way around, her or his immediate wishes. For instance, in teaching a child to swim. The child may at first be tearful and apprehensive of going into the water, or beyond a certain depth. By encouraging ’pull’ forces, and cajoling ’push’ forces, the parent persuades the child to have a go, to not be afraid, to do that which is not at first desired. The parent does this in the full knowledge that eventually the child will relax, learn to swim, and enjoy the water.

– Tom, O’Carroll, Paedophilia: The More Radical Case, “Consent and Willingness”

What the sensible parent does not do is to drag his protesting six-year-old screaming towards the edge of the pool and throw him into the deep end. Interestingly enough, were he to do so, and providing the child were not allowed to drown, this would probably not qualify as a criminal offence, although for the child it could be as nasty an experience as rape. It is not an activity in which the intervention of law is thought to be necessary. There is no elaborate questioning of whether in any particular case the child actually consented to be introduced to the water, or was manipulated into consenting. It is presumed that the adult will be benevolently intentioned, and that all will work out well.

I am not suggesting that in sexual activity a child’s wishes should be ignored, in the same way that a parent gets round his child’s fear of the water. Given that many children in our culture grow up with a deep suspicion and fear of all things sexual, and given that there are deeply held views as to the ’sinfulness’ of many sex acts, adults are morally obliged to accept the child’s attitude towards sex.

A parent does not accept his child’s inalienable right to be afraid of water and of swimming. That would be silly. But the paedophile does have to respect the child’s fear of sex. It is the child’s right to take a negative attitude, whether because she/he is genuinely afraid of sex, or because she/he simply doesn’t fancy, or like, the paedophile in question, or for some other reason.

As a boy-lover, I am aware that chatting to a twelve-year-old is a vastly different matter, on average, to doing the same thing with a boy half that age. The potential for manipulation, benevolent or otherwise, by a male adult at any rate, is enormously curtailed. By this age, practically every boy has learned a great deal.

He will be well aware of the prevailing sexual mores. No adult could con him into sexual activity by disguising his own motives. He would know too well what the grown-up was after. He would know that such people are usually looked down upon. He would know that they are described as ’queers’ and ’benders’, and that to go with them could result in social disgrace.

….

There are others who use the opportunity afforded by such social integration to consciously and deliberately seek sexual encounters. Over a period, they may succeed in creating an atmosphere in the group in which sexuality generally is seen to be acceptable, in which the prevailing barriers of sexual inhibition and guilt are lowered. In such a context, the ’seduction’ of an individual youngster is likely to be facilitated. It is possible to view the whole, long-term process as cunningly calculating, and therefore manipulative in a mischievous way, but only if one believes it proper that youngsters should feel sexual inhibition and guilt, and that they are being cheated out of these feelings.

As a final exercise in perspective on the theme of manipulation, we may consider the advice given in a recent medical textbook to those doctors called upon to examine children following a discovered sexual relationship with an adult: ’If the child refuses to be examined, a process of negotiation and bargaining sometimes results in acquiescence.’ (By offering a bag of sweeties, perhaps?) ’Sedation or deferral of the examination to another visit are other alternatives, depending on the circumstances. Occasionally, none of these alternatives can be utilised successfully, these cases will require admission of the child to the hospital for examination under anaesthesia.

So much for the consent of the child to an examination! In the same textbook, a contributor describes the paedophile’s efforts ’to persuade his victim to co-operate and to acquiesce or consent to the sexual relationship, oftentimes by bribing or rewarding the child with attention, affection, approval, money, gifts, treats, and good times. But he may be dissuaded if the child actively refuses and resists because he does not resort to physical force. His aim is to gain sexual control of the child by developing a willing or consenting sexual relationship.’ The desire for a consensual relationship is thus represented as merely a cynical combination of manipulation and bribery by the adult, although it is conceded that ’At some level, he cares for the child and is emotionally involved with him or her.’ The point is that when the consent condition is fulfilled, the rules of the game are suddenly changed and consent is no longer of any account: the paedophile simply cannot win.

Society forces children to be dependent on the caprice of their parents. How can you be surprised if another adult offers them independence?

– Tom, O’Carroll, Paedophilia: The More Radical Case, “Consent and Willingness”

Perhaps a personal anecdotal experience will help you to see this. A while ago, I knew a thirteen-year-old boy online. He was the youngest person in an online group of people ranging from mid-teens to late thirties. He didn’t speak very often, but a couple months after first meeting him, I asked him about his opinion on something and we got to talking about various things each night. At one point, he degraded something he had said because he was “just a kid”, and I replied that age meant nothing to me. Another time, he asked me what I thought about homosexuals and I said that someone’s sexuality was irrelevant to me. He thought it was amusing that I appeared to not judge anything about anyone. Soon after, he confided in me that he was bisexual and that I was the only person he had told. He began talking to me about sexuality and all sorts of personal things, like his anxiety over being in a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, of being in an abnormally-homophobic school, and of his attraction toward his male best friend. I had never tried talking about his sexuality to him. He brought up the subject himself because, for the first time in his life, someone was actually willing to listen to him as a person instead of the label of a child. He appreciated that very much, and even joked about wanting me to be his father for the next five years.

All of it made me wonder how many lonely children there are who are dismissed as being unimportant because of their age. While there was nothing pedophilic about any of this, it illustrates how a pedophilic relationship could begin. One pedophile in his journal described:

“Boys just want to know about sex and no one really wants to tell them about it – they want to play with themselves and with other people and they want to do it more times than teachers or parents would think possible. All I do is give the boys what they want and to let them talk about things that no one else would let them talk about”.

After the previously mentioned pedophile was discovered by the police, and subsequently died by suicide in standard pedophile-style, one of his young lovers said of him:

“I could really talk to him about this girl whom I wanted to fuck. We had petted but I guess I was a bit scared about what to do then and she, I think was like me. We spent a bit of time together (him and I) working out what I should do and it seemed to work. When I went back to his place a week or so later I was very proud and couldn’t wait to tell him what I’d done and how it had gone. He seemed very pleased with me and asked me all the details and I told him and we were both happy.

It was really a big kick to have (him) do things to me. I mean I really liked him touching me there and all over the body in fact. I might have felt a bit guilty to start with but as the years have gone by I just see it for what it was; just a bit of fun and a way for me to get a new experience.“

Pedophiles have the capacity to relate to children better than the rest of their society’s adults, precisely because they do not see them as “children”. Pedophiles are seen as reducing children to sex-objects, but it’s instructive to see how the rest of society actually views children. This perspective might explain why pedophilia is so abhorred by society. A clue is provided in a quote from Xavier Von Erck’s personal website. A couple of months prior to Louis Conradt’s death, he said that, “I’m not in this to protect children. It’s a nice side benefit sure, but my motivation is to make life a living hell for predators and pedophiles online.”

Most people’s opposition to pedophilia is purportedly based on a desire to protect children. However, Von Erck’s rationale for targeting pedophiles indicates that he’s actually mainly motivated by a visceral hatred of pedophiles. Von Erck hates pedophiles because they’re pedophiles, just as homophobes hate homosexuals for being homosexuals. In both cases, the hatred is motivated by nothing other than disgust.

Moreover, the mother of a girl who had consensual sexual activity with an adult said:

My little girl was abused and abused. She probably knows more about sex than I do. It sickens me to have to say it, but I think she came to like it. She must have, she was always excited when he came around to the house… when police told me what he had done to my little girl I thought she would be better off dead.

Death is the antithesis of protection, so how can this belief be reconciled? For the pedophile, she said that she “just wanted to tie him on an ants’ nest and pour boiling water over him”. This is a view which is expressed invariably by adults: that children are better off dying than having consensual sex. Where does this dogma come from??

Hidden beyond the overt treatment of pedophiles in this society, it is instructive to see the treatment of children. What is the life of a child like? Battery of children, euphemized under the cute-sounding “spanking”, is fully legal in the United States. Bizarrely, the penalty for loving a child is significantly worse than the penalty for hating one. Children’s free wills are suppressed and annihilated in every conceivable manner within families. Their associations, location, and every action are subject to the arbitrary caprice of their parents. They are denied their own thoughts, opinions, values, and religious beliefs, instead being manipulated into adopting their parents’. Within the rest of society, children are denied property. Their parents can instantly siphon it from them, regardless of how the child obtained it. Furthermore, they are forced into all of this through being denied employment, and they are denied the right to have even the remotest impact on their government which institutes all of this.

If an adult discovers that a child has chosen to engage in a pedophilic relationship with another adult who is able to sympathize with the child’s pain, the relationship which the child considered to be valuable is instantly destroyed. Children are indoctrinated into believing that they have been unimaginably abused by the pedophile, even while their own parents continue to control every facet of their life. They are labeled as horribly damaged victims, and are subject to the (abusive) will of psychiatrists who “treat” them into believing that they can overcome their “abuse”. Doesn’t it say everything about society’s view of children when consensual pedophilia is compared to necrophilia and bestiality? Society views children as being no different than inanimate, unfeeling matter at worst, or mindless animals at best.

Consent is extremely important to me. On the contrary, people who oppose pedophilic relationships are the ones who do not care about consent. They completely dismiss children’s wills and desires as being nonexistent. Imagine that the world takes away the only person who loves you, and tortures him for the rest of his life, and the world tells you that you have done something very wrong for not submitting to its will, which demands that you abstain from such a meaningful relationship. The world shouts that your feelings are nonexistent at worst and completely illegitimate at best, and that you must be taught to see everything in the same way everyone else does. People think of children as being fundamentally different than adults, as if their emotions are meaningless, and that they must be conditioned into having the values the rest of society has.

I can only come to the conclusion that adults do not fear pedophiles at all. Adults fear the freedom of children. The assertion that children are incapable of consenting is an indication of the abusive mentality which is inflicted upon them daily in this society, dehumanizing them and oppressively relegating them to the status of slaves. The opposition to the sexuality of children cannot be conceived as a concern for them. The adults who oppose it are self-serving. The world believes that children are not people: Children are property.

What the younger one in the relationship from earlier said:

“I can’t really think how this could have possibly affected me adversely, but I sometimes think about what would have happened if we had been caught. Certainly, he would have been devastated by the law and the police. I think I would have been made to feel as though I was some sort of freak and might well have sort of begun to think of myself as being a queer or whatever. But that’s all that might have happened. What really happened was enjoyable and didn’t affect me in a major way at all.”

Do any of these quotes by pedophiles[7] expressing their admiration for children imply anything about a desire for abuse? It seems like projection to say that they do:

“He’s just like a flower in bloom. He’s at that perfect stage in which he is hermaphroditic. That is to say, he is neither all male nor all female, not that anybody is of course, everyone is some mixture of those two characteristics, but he is at the moment in that wonderful limbo between being a child and being an adolescent, that is, he is certainly an adolescent at this point, but he still has this soft feminine grace about him. A 12 or 13 year old boy.”

“I would try by saying that it’s the freshness of their mind, the nimbness of their bodies, the way in which they move, they act- They’re graceful.”

“I just want to be able to walk down 5th avenue and see adults and children mingled together.”

These quotes sound similar to how a typical male would describe their admiration for the beauty of a typical female, except that they’re describing children instead. If a male gave a similar description for a female, no one would say that that male is objectifying the female and manipulating her. In both cases, they’re just describing what they’re attracted to. It’s not pathological, it’s just love.

Pedophiles as a group are not psychopathic. They love children and would not want to harm one. The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure, which everyone was freaking out over at the end of 2010, represented the general opinion of pedophiles when it explicitly stated that there should be no penetration with prepubescent children. It’s absurd to say that all sex is coitus.

When children are taught that engaging in sexual activity is immoral, of course they will feel guilty. Adult panic or disgust about young people seeking pleasure for themselves is responsible for much of the trauma that minors experience when they are caught behaving “inappropriately” for their ages, even in a consensual context. Children are also less likely to report sexual abuse when they live in a culture that suggests that engaging in unpleasant experiences is their fault in some way. Children end up developing issues regarding sexuality due to how society treats sexuality.

An associated myth concerns the very common view that the child is traumatised and socially and sexually seriously damaged. We have dealt with this point in length in past chapters, but it is worth reiterating that the evidence simply does not support these assumptions. In the short run, the studies suggest that problems with the partners of paedophiles often flow from the reactions of parents and officials, who respond to news of their son’s relationships with such horror that it elevates the significance of the event in the child’s life. Even in the study showing the worst possible result–Gagnon’s sample of 333 victims – only 5 per cent of the ’victims’ had what Gagnon called ’damaged adult lives’. Even here though ’damaged adult lives ’is a vague term and diverse causes of the damage besides the paedophile relationship could be possible.

– Paul Wilson, The Man They Called A Monster, “Challenging the Social and Sexual Barriers” (1981)

It’s also worth viewing the following meta-analysis:

Rind, Bruce; Tromovitch, Philip; Bauserman, Robert (1998). “A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples.” Psychological Bulletin, 124 (1): 22–53.

Think of it intuitively. Imagine the position of a child whose family just found out about (consensual) sexual activity he had with an adult. The father is pacing around yelling that he’s going to kill the adult. The mother is crying hysterically. The siblings are afraid to treat the child normally. Subsequently, all sorts of strangers begin interrogating the child over and over. Other children treat him like a freak. Doctors examine them against their will. If they hadn’t been raped by the adult, they most certainly are raped by the doctor. Everyone is constantly treating the child differently. He’s under constant supervision.

If the adult is out on bail while the legal process begins, the child is forced to move to a far location. Even if the child liked the adult, he is incessantly compelled to testify against him and is forbidden from associating with him again. The court process takes an unimaginable amount of time, during which the child keeps getting interrogated by many different strangers. Psychiatrists and the rest of society tell the child that he has sustained something unimaginably horrible. The child is under the impression that sexuality is something absolutely evil, and that he is terrible for having participated.

Was the sexual activity really harmful, compared to the obscene response of the child’s society? All of this is done under the pretense of protecting the child, who really needs protection from the people who claim to be acting in his interest. There is nothing metaphysical about sexuality. The only reason why everyone perceives sexuality as being dangerous of children is because everyone feels that childhood sexuality is in some sense “wrong”. Despite any contrary evidence, they continue to profess this.

Children would not be “scarred” by their voluntary sexual experiences any more than adults in typical sexual relationships would be “scarred”, unless their society shamed them into believing that they should feel guilty. Children have consented to sexual activity are only mentally damaged when they are socially conditioned into believing that what they did is deleterious in some ill-defined way. This is no different than submitting to oppressive religious beliefs that premarital sexual activity should be viewed negatively, and that anyone who engages in it should feel shame and remorse for having committed their sins. In reality, there is nothing innately pernicious about the nature of sexual relationships between adults. There is nothing innately immoral about sexuality in general. The morality of child sexuality should not be evaluated any differently than the morality of adult sexuality.

Legalizing or even decriminalizing consensual pedophilia could also make it easier to regulate and ensure that it’s compliant with the laws and best interests of society. A similar argument is commonly made for legalizing prostitution and illegal drugs. When all of those activities are illegal, the justice system is unavailable to ensure that those activities are followed in a harmless way, because engaging with them at all in any form will be punished. By contrast, legalizing these activities makes it easier for victims and concerned citizens to ask the justice system to intervene to ensure compliance with the law.

This is just another ad hoc justification. If STDs did not exist, pedophilia would not be any less opposed. STDs are stigmatized because they pertain to sexuality, not because they’re diseases. As for physical harm to children, 95% of consensual pedophilic relationships do not involve penetration.

If STDs are to be perceived as a serious threat, then it makes more sense to expose children to full information about sexuality as early as possible, instead of deferring any relevant information until they reach adolescence. The most important information about pregnancy and STDs can be sufficiently explained in fewer than five minutes. If needed, it’s easy to explain either of them in greater depth. Children should also have access to contraception and protection, rather than the current situation where they have nothing.

People need to realize that children are exposed to risks significantly more harmful than STDs (i.e. automobile accidents, domestic violence, suicidal thoughts, etc). In the United States, motor vehicle accidents are the leading cause of accidental death. Automobiles are obviously far more dangerous than sex. If people were genuinely concerned about the health of children, they would exhibit it in other ways. They don’t seem to care what unhygienic actions they take. They also don’t care about nutrition.

Quite the contrary, I don’t think I am encouraging the kind of behavior that some priests in the Catholic church have been practicing. Rather, I think I am arguing for an atmosphere and an attitude opposite to what began in the Catholic church, which would be more protective of children.

Most data on pedophilia is distorted. Many studies have built-in methodological biases towards producing figures which make the proportion of molestations look artificially high. Instances of rape and molestation are conflated with instances of consensual activity. Many findings are also based on offenses which resulted in a conviction, so they are heavily biased towards relationships which gave rise to complaint by the child. Consensual instances are also less likely to be revealed to authorities.

Where the literature suggests that negative consequences of a short or long term nature occur as a result of child-adult sexual contacts, it is found that the consequences are generally associated with three common factors. The first relates to a situation where physical force, coercion or psychological pressure is used. The most adverse reactions occur when physical violence is involved, especially when the child attempts to resist but is unsuccessful. The second negative consequence occurs when poor communications exist in the child’s family. Sexual matters cannot be discussed openly and the child receives, or anticipates receiving strongly negative reactions to disclosure of sexual activities. The third relates to a situation where there is little sexual knowledge on the part of the child or alternatively where the child has absorbed parental values suggesting that sex is dirty, painful or frightening. But even when the last two conditions exist the effects, the research would suggest, are nowhere near as traumatic as popular folklore would have it.

– Paul Wilson, The Man They Called A Monster, “The Effect on Children” (1981)

“I was abused as a 13-year old, but it wasn’t abusive just because of my age. No, it was abusive because this guy was lying to me and keeping me from my family. Sex is OK if it is consensual and safe, no matter what the person’s age is. There isn’t some metaphysical category of ”children“ who are all nonsexual, naive, innocent beings.” – Unknown Testimony

The response of the criminal justice system both to the ’victim’ and ’offender’ in adult-child cases is counter-productive. We have already seen that the older male is treated with contempt by both the police and the courts and little sympathy is shown towards the way he will be treated in prison. Similarly, the young male’s treatment bears a remarkable similarity to that received by incest victims. In both paedophilia and incest, considerable distress to the boy or girl occurs when parents, relatives or the police themselves discover the relationship. Constant and often insensitive questioning adds to this distress and it is not unusual to find that many researchers have noted that far more damage is caused by the confrontations the child has with his parents or the legal authorities than by the act itself.

– Paul Wilson, The Man They Called A Monster, “The Effect on Children” (1981)

Not all those involved in the prosecution process are that dogmatic, thank goodness. In a letter to The Times, [note 30] a police surgeon of twenty-five years’ standing echoed Ingram’s feelings by pronouncing that legal proceedings in most paedophilic cases do the children more harm than good – and he was honest and courageous enough to admit that the examinations of children he had been obliged to conduct over the years contributed much towards this harm.

– Unknown Excerpt

In the case of paedophiles as opposed to, for example, parents, it is assumed that any disparities and inequities in power between the adult and the child will be exercised by the adult malevolently. In reality, however, many paedophiles are patently well disposed towards their partners and take the role of loving teachers, house parents, or simply close friends. Clarence Osborne often epitomised the benevolence that exists in paedophile relationships because, in many respects, he displaced the interest shown by their parents. In short, it is a myth to assume that paedophiles necessarily use their greater experience and power in a destructive way.

– Paul Wilson, The Man They Called A Monster, “Challenging the Social and Sexual Barriers” (1981)

Inevitably, every parent will shout “But what of my parental rights?”, or their right to “raise” their children however they see fit. By definition, the existence of “parental rights” can only entail the license to curtail other people’s rights, i.e. children’s rights. It’s no different than a slaveholder being aghast over someone else telling him that he cannot enslave someone. “But what of my rights as a slaveholder?” he asks. It’s nothing more than a weird cultural perversion that enables parents to control children. Parents cannot logically object to someone else preventing them from controlling their children under the notion of “human rights”, unless they view their child as being sub-human and thus beyond human rights.

There are two common justifications for why parent get to control their children until they reach some arbitrary age: 1. The child is alive due to the parents, and/or 2. The child is financially dependent on the parent. By this logic, if someone were to rescue someone else from death, the rescuer would have a right to enslave the survivor because they would not be alive without them. Similarly, if someone were to help someone else escape from a labor camp, then that person gets to enslave the laborer. The correct solution is to stop forcing children to be dependent on their parents, just as slaves should not be forced to be dependent on their owners. Parents do not have a right to parenting, just as slaveholders do not have a right to slaveholding.

In all of this, there is one resounding question: What should we do? How can children be anything other than property? Children have continually been the conceptual fall-guy of civil rights groups.

• Slaves, “We are not children. We are not any different from freemen.”
• Women, “We are not children. We are not any different from men.”

It is time for society to stop viewing children as sub-human. The emancipation of children is the final frontier of civil rights. Such a multifaceted revolution cannot be realized immediately, so I will only prescribe actions which are simple enough to be executed in the current political environment.

Children must no longer be the property of their parents. They should not be viewed any differently from a tenant living with their landlord. They should not be subject to their parents’ coercion to opinions, religion, memes, education, careers, etc. Most of all, this includes the right to be free from corporal punishment. “Spanking” should not be viewed with more toleration than wife-battery. The cultural conception of “age-appropriate” material and information must be eliminated.

Children should have the opportunity to separate from their parents as early as is possible. To prevent independent children from becoming destitute, children must have a right to employment and a right to contract for land. Children should not be disenfranchised from voting either, since they are subject to laws. They are to be viewed no differently than adults. People must be forbidden from acting on behalf of a child without the child’s consent. Every individual owns themself.

Lastly, children should be sexually liberated. There are many dynamics regarding how consent works, but there simply is no artificial construction of an “age of consent”. All romantic relationships should be decriminalized between consenting people. Current laws which protect against genuine abuse, such as battery, already exist. There is no reason to outlaw a relationship owing to whatever arbitrary labels this society may want to append to people.

Children should be more autonomous in every way. They should be informed about sexuality. They should be free to engage in it with anyone who agrees. The right of children to have sexual relationships is a small step toward liberating them from the oppression of adults, which they currently endure.

[C]hildren should have the right to conduct their sexual lives with no more restrictions than adults … [and] must be provided with all information about sex and related matters so that they are in a position to make reasonable choices… A punitive and draconian justice system that directly punishes a paedophile, indirectly scapegoats a boy who has been involved in a sexual relationship with an older man, … and does so with an impact that severely damages both… For the reality is that boys have come to men and will continue, for time immemorial, to come to them in order to have their sexual and emotional needs met.

For [Clarence Osborne] has shown us that… young people in western countries feel sexually repressed, alienated from adult company, and emotionally bankrupt… Young boys are sexually active from a very early age and will pursue their sexuality whenever they can find an opportunity to do so; young males wish to give and receive affection in ways that we as a community have not clearly understood before; men who have relationships with boys often do so for benevolent reasons… But if we don’t heed the lesson that Osborne taught us, then we will continuously reinforce bigotry and prejudice and we do so at the cost of further damaging our children’s welfare.

– Paul Wilson, The Man They Called A Monster, “Challenging the Social and Sexual Barriers” (1981)

Pedophilia undermines an atavistic societal opposition toward sexuality. It subverts adult authority. If pedophilic relationships were condoned, then it would be a recognition of the rights of children, which demonstrably do not exist in this society. Children, being people with their own legitimate thoughts, feelings, and desires, deserve the same rights that adults receive. Instead, they’re currently nothing other than the sub-human property of adults who have free-reign to do whatever they please with them. It’s quite ironic that everyone views pedophiles as manipulating children, with everyone being completely unable to observe what they themselves do to children.

If one straddles the fence on consensual pedophilia, and even if one does not, education seems to be of the greatest importance. Granted, we live in a time where most adults cannot frankly discuss sex with a child without fear of repercussion. I can’t even form a close friendship with a young friend without raising suspicions. That makes education difficult. Sometime, somewhere, someone has to fight this if it should ever change.

What children really need is the option to refuse. The freedom not to engage in sexual activity is as important as any other aspect of sexual freedom. But children are raised in such a way that they cannot refuse adults. Parents have insisted that children accept all forms of affection from relatives and friends - being picked up, fondled, hugged, kissed, pinched, tickled, squeezed - leaving children with little experience in saying no. They also have little experience in trusting their own reactions to people and in resisting the promise of rewards. They are not informed about sexual matters, do not understand their own sexuality or that of others, and thus cannot cope effectively in this area. Our society keeps children ignorant, and then we hypocritically worry that they will be vulnerable to sexual advances.

A man is walking down a street at night. He comes upon a few houses and, being a bit of a voyeur, looks inside each window he passes to see what his neighbors are up to. In the first house, he sees a child being ordered around. He thinks to himself, “What a great work-ethic those parents are instilling in their child.” In the next house, he sees a child being told what thoughts are appropriate, and he says, “What great values those parents are instilling in their child.” In the third house, he sees a child being spanked and proclaims, “What great discipline those parents are instilling in their child.” He approaches a garden and sees a child who is sitting on the lap of an adult. He arrives just in time to hear the child say, “It’s a good thing my parents haven’t found out about us”, as the two lovers passionately kiss.

Our voyeuristic friend screams in horror at the scene which would be considered romantic if only the younger lover were a few years older. A policeman runs over to (beat) and apprehend the pedophile, and thus begins the process of persecution. The lonely child, previously happy about having his adult friend, will be “treated” by his society to “overcome his abuse”. He will grow up cold, isolated, and terrified of sexuality. I cannot comprehend how someone can look at this situation and say that the first three children are abuse-free, living in “loving homes” with “parents who care”, yet the fourth child is considered to have sustained horrible abuse.

The only abuse which I can conceivably see the fourth children receiving comes not from the pedophile, but from his society, who shoves the child into the dirt and leers, “Who are you to have sexual feelings? You don’t have feelings at all. You’re a child. It’s not your place to have emotions.” Society then shoves the pedophile into the dirt, and shouts, “I expected better of you! I thought you were one of us, an adult who respected our right to control each of our slaves in the way we see fit. How dare you love a child?”, while kicking the pedophile until he eventually dies a miserable and inevitable death.

Am I the only one who sees the partially-buried corpses of blasphemers, communists, trade unionists, Jews, and all of the others who have been persecuted in history, decomposing in the dirt alongside him? The pedophile turns over and sees the rotting corpse of a Middle Ages blasphemer of Christianity. He sees all of the scars, the worst of which being the B which had been branded onto his forehead, and the pedophile knows what fate his own sex offender status will bring.

The child turns over and sees the corpses of slaves rotting all around him. Society snarls at the child and shouts, “Stop crying! You won’t end up like them. You’ll grow up and become one of us eventually. The lives of slaves was terrible because they were never freed, but your slavery is only temporary.” Yet the fact that every person is at one point an oppressed child does not mitigate their treatment in any way. If it alters the nature of the oppression at all, it’s even more pernicious that everyone is subjected to this without anyone escaping its clutches.

How can I look at the treatment of both pedophiles and of children, and see anything other than a tragedy? (The depths of my soul scream) that this is wrong, this is evil, and no excuse exists which can justify this. Meanwhile, this goes completely unseen. All sorts of civil rights groups march up and down the street nearby this cemetery and protest everything imaginable, except for this. The pedophile fashions a NAMBLA sign and manages to crawl to the street and begs the LGBT group to let him join. They shove him back into the dirt and shout, “No! You’re not one of us. You’re scum and you’re making us look bad by associating with us!” as they go back to proselytizing about Tyler Clementi. Louis Conradt’s corpse is rotting in the cemetery along with Clementi’s, yet not a single person cares to mention him. Is his death really to be forever ignored because a young boy agreed to meet him for sexual activity? I am unable to see how Oscar Wilde’s “love that dare not speak its name”, which earned him a sentence of hard labor, could be thought of as so horrible when he declared to the court and the world that it was.

“… such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as ”the love that dare not speak its name,“ and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.”

– Michael Hattersley, “How Gay Was Dorian Gray?”

• Okami, Paul (1991). “Self-reports of ‘positive’ childhood and adolescent sexual contacts with older persons: an exploratory study,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, 20, 437-457.
• Leahy, Terry. (1992). “Positively experienced man/boy sex: the discourse of seduction and the social construction of masculinity,” Journal of Sociology, 28(1), 71-88.
• Leahy, Terry (1994). “Taking up a position: discourses of femininity and adolescence in the context of man/girl relationships,” Gender & Society, 8(1), 48-72.

None of these are freely available online, and I only recommend the first. Paul Okami is a deeply honest researcher, and all of his work is well-worth reading. “Sociopolitical Biases in the Contemporary Scientific Literature on Adult Human Sexual Behavior with Children and Adolescents” is a fantastic primer on the problems with most “child sexual abuse” research.

I am not expecting to change anyone’s thoughts on pedophilia. That is not the actual purpose of this essay. It is also not meant to be a thorough analysis of pedophilia, although I would have loved to have the opportunity. I deliberately tried to limit this essay to as many a priori assertions as possible for the sake of brevity.

Perhaps contrary to what you might have expected, I have absolutely nothing at all to do with pedophilia. I am not myself one, I have never been touched by one (at least not from what I’m aware of!), and I have never knowingly had any contact with one. Then why would I write about pedophilia out of all subjects for a college application essay? I can almost hear you shouting, “Does he have no idea of what’s appropriate?” as you crumple this page. Pedophilia is certainly not my idea of a conversation-starter, but as strange as it may sound, this is the most appropriate topic I could select. It is my belief that the best way to understand someone is to understand the way in which they think.

For all of these reasons, I have to conclude that the most noble form of activism would involve the advocation of pedophiles’ rights and the liberation of children. This is why I’m currently considering becoming a member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association.

Structured, stoic, methodological, thoughtful, calm, and dispassionate. And I am aware of its obscene length. Being inappropriately thorough is actually a component of my personality. The most amusing description of me which I’ve heard is, “You usually sound absurdly calm, as if the world could be ending and you’d just rub you chin and say, ‘Interesting’”.

I could have written about a more mundane topic, but it would not have illustrated my thought-process as well. Somewhat amusingly, this also allows me to evaluate the school.

• If I would have been rejected independent of my essay, then I could have written anything and still get rejected.
• If I was otherwise eligible however, I could use my topic to evaluate the college. While each admissions officer varies, they presumably would not have fundamentally different criterion for selection.
• If one were to be aghast about my topic and could not comprehend why I would write such things, then it would be safe to assume that all of them would also have some level of dismay.
• If one were to find this to be an intriguing topic, all of them might have had some level of interest. Presumably, the admissions officers would also reflect the overall college considering that the applicants have to go through them to even be there.
• If they would have been interested by this topic and not aghast, then it’s possible that there would be many people at the college who are like-minded. The most important criterion for me is the type of people which are there, so that I can engage in discussions which pertain to topics such as this.
• If I could not do that at such a college, then I wouldn’t want to be there in the first place.

And in the course of writing this, I realized that it illustrates something else about me quite well. While rhetorical questions asked to the own writer are to be expected, they are highly reflective of my life. All I have ever been able to do is talk to myself (rhetorically, of course). I have been isolated my entire life. At such a college with like-minded people, I would be able to have discussions with others rather than always thinking about things while alone.

These quotes mainly talk about his pedophilia essay, and what he was planning to do with it. The part where he said that he had “8000 words in notes” to add to the essay explains why he had so many quotes and excerpts by Tom O’Carroll and Paul Wilson in the essay without any noted attribution.[8] It seems most likely that Lanza was planning to paraphrase what O’Carroll and Wilson wrote, if he had ever been willing to finish the essay.

“And you have to develop such extensive arguments just to refute that delusion, that somehow having sex with children is harmful to them innately. I’ve written an essay that’s already 10,000 and, I’m nowhere near finished and it’s already 10,000 words long with 8,000 words in notes that I have to add. It’ll probably end up over 25,000 words and it’s just refuting this simple nonsense. And basically, all that it really boils down to, is that children aren’t harmed by having sex, the reason why pedophilia is opposed is because it combines an atavistic cultural opposition to sex with the undermining of authority of adults who relegate children to the status of their property. I’ve…typed that sentence, or forms of it, so many times, and it’s really all that it is. It’s just that you’re undermining their authority to impose their cultural values on children, and of course when you interfere with that process, people are going to react violently. And it’s…not innately harmful for children to have sex, it’s… so absurd, I’ve never seen a valid argument stating as such. And, um, really that’s all that culture is. [The] reason why I’m interested in this topic of pedophilia is not because I have any ties to it, at all. It’s because it really represents what culture is. It’s a bunch of lies that exist to propagate itself. Infecting countless children for countless generations and just…continuing to perpetuate, heh, I promise in the future I’ll make some videos about pedophilia.

– Adam Lanza, “Rambling vlogrant of a ruminative vagrant (Part 1/2)”

Personally, I think O’Carroll, Wilson, and other authors all had great arguments and information in their quotes. My main complaints are that they have a verbose, wordy writing style, and they use British spelling. Hypothetically, I could paraphrase those excerpts to eliminate the need of including them in quote blocks, as Lanza had originally intended. However, I don’t think it’s necessary to do this to finish the essay. Including their arguments as quote blocks also helps to show some of the influences and information sources that Lanza had read prior to writing. Many people would probably want to know this.

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In this quote, Lanza explained that he originally wrote the essay for a college application. Without this quote, we would not know the context for which he wrote the introduction and reflection of the essay:

Wouldn’t it be funny if I tried to apply to a university and … and wrote, oh man, this is funny, in my, originally I was writing that um, pedophilia essay as um … the general essay for a college application. Why was I doing that? Basically, just saying, “Fuck all of you I know the truth and you don’t” and now like, I know they’re gonna reject me for it, but I enjoy that rejection because I’m a masochist too because that’s what culture does to me. It’s really ironic, people see pedophiles as hurting children. They call me a pedophile because I admitted that I find young teen-aged girls attractive who have the bodies of anorexic pale twelve-year-old boys, but they’re post-pubescent, so by definition I can’t be a pedophile? And you think about why people hate pedophiles so much. It’s because they’re … I already explained it in my first rambling video so, I don’t really think I have anything else to say about that … topic. I still haven’t elaborated on what I mean by “Pedophilia is not innately harmful,” culture is by definition harmful. I used to have such an interest in reading … anything which goes against the position that sex is horrible for children. But I’ve lost that interest because I recognize that my interest only existed because … it was a retaliation against culture. Because pedophobia is culture, and now I can see that that retaliation was cultural too. And even if it had not been, feral values are just as messed up as culture is.

– Adam Lanza, “(Pointless) CulturalPhillistine The Movie Part 2/6”

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In this quote, Lanza explains some information about how and why the essay was written. It indicates that he regrets appealing to things like rights and morality at the end of the essay. I approve of this since I also believe that morality is a delusion. Lanza seems to be one of the few people I’ve ever heard of who share this particular view on morality:

Hello, I’m your host Philip Greaves Junior[9] and I’m going to just jump right into this so I’m sure I’m going to be missing a lot of things, it’s going to be very redundant, it’s going to be very unorganized, but I should say that before I start, I’m not a pedophile, I’m not remotely pedophilic, I’ve never knowingly had any association with anyone who is remotely pedophilic, I have never seen child pornography, I’ve never tried to look up child pornography, I have absolutely nothing to do with pedophilia or anything like that.

My interest in anti-pedophobia is entirely academic and if you think, if you think that, if you’ve listened to my other videos and by the time that I finish reading this quasi-essay, that… I’m just trying to justify some latent pedophilia, then I really have nothing to say to you, just flame me or whatever.

But I’m just going to just start this video.

“And I should warn you that I haven’t worked on this in a while, other than adding a few excerpts a few months ago from an online discussion I found between a pedophobe and a post-modernist. I haven’t done anything to this in months. And I appeal to things like rights, and I sound like a complete moralizer so just try to excuse that and pay attention to what I’m actually saying.”

“And what I’m saying, I should say is… that pedophobia, anti-pedophobia is a very expansive topic and this essay isn’t going, isn’t meant to cover even a small portion of all of it, it’s just a response to the assertion that children, even if they consent to sex, really don’t consent, it’s statutory rape because for some reason, they can’t consent. And I’m just addressing that, in this. And once again, this is going to be completely unorganized because this essay really never got to a presentable stage, I just threw out my thoughts everywhere.”

– Adam Lanza, “On pedophiles and children -Part 1-8”

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There are other quotes where Lanza disregards the “moralizer” views that he had:

And here I go talking about justifications, I’m such a moralizer, aren’t I? I really was.

– Adam Lanza, “On pedophiles and children -Part 2-8”

“Oh, here, heh, um, pedophile… if pedophilic relationships were condoned then it would be a recognition of the rights of children would serve a small step towards liberating them from the oppression of the adults that own them. Yes, I was such a moralizer back then, just ignore that.

– Adam Lanza, “On pedophiles and children -Part 6-8”

I go on to say that simultaneously every generation believes that they are lucky enough to be living in a society which is the most enlightened of all history. And I’m saying that we think we’re so enlightened… when, people think that we’re fundamentally different from anyone who lived hundreds of years ago but we’re not. We haven’t had some metaphysical comprehension of everything that prior people were incapable of understanding, and I say because of all of this, we could easily just be as bigoted as um… as the Christians were who treated blasphemers the way they did in the Middle Ages. We easily could be Nazis. I’m surprised I actually said this because I believed in morality when I was even writing this, I mean I still believed in morality so… even I was cognoscente of this whole… all of this whole ’we are bigots’ thing.“

– Adam Lanza, “On pedophiles and children -Part 6-8”

Given that Tyler Clementi died on 2010 September 22, he probably started writing most (if not all) of the essay between that date and when he narrated it in 2011 October 14. This indicates to me that Lanza probably didn’t fully reject morality until a few months before he made the recordings.

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Lanza said that he would’ve researched feminism more and made more comparisons between feminism, homosexuality, and pedophilia, if he decided to write more:

I was going to research feminism more and… confirm that and tie everything into it. Um, but people would say ’how dare you compare pedophiles to feminists, it’s so absurd!’ I write this as clearly as I can and people think I’m… they say, I say that you’re expressing bigotry, you think you’re so… egalitarian by talking about how homosexuality is, homosexuals shouldn’t be persecuted, but you do the exact same thing to pedophiles and when I point that out they seem to think that I’m saying that homosexuals are bad and pedophiles are bad.

What I’m saying is that you’re bigoted, and the same applies to this whole feminism thing. I’m not saying that pedophiles are feminists, I’m saying that… if you’re a feminist and you oppose pedophiles, you are a bigot. Pedophilia isn’t a bad thing, despite what you say. And somehow I’m only… [laughter] somehow it’s been like an hour and I’ve only gotten halfway through this file. I’m not sure what else I said because it’s pretty close to the end of… what I remember typing.

– Adam Lanza, “On pedophiles and children -Part 5-8”

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This quote is also worth reading (or listening to), since it states Lanza’s final audio comments, after he finished paraphrasing / narrating the essay on his CulturalPhilistine YouTube channel:

That’s pretty much the end of the relevant section, that– that’s pretty much the end of … it’s – I know that all of this sounds very inflammatory but, I mean I’ve sounded inflammatory regarding this subject because it just seems so insane. It’s like I’m trying to argue against people who assert that God exists, and at least, at least in that case I know that there are other atheists, but I mean there’s pretty much no one who’s anti-pedophobic. When I was fourteen and I first thought about it for the first – when I was fourteen and I first thought about pedophilia, I thought … how can you possibly say that homosexuals are discriminated against, but pedophiles aren’t?

“And how can you possibly say that children can’t consent to having sex? I mean a few years ago when I was… 11 I easily could’ve had sex. And for some reason some people would even argue that when I was 14 saying those things… they would say that somehow I was incapable of consenting, that’s completely incomprehensible to me. [sigh]”

“Is this really terrifying as it sounds, there’s… voluntarily… voluntary mutual masturbation between a 5 year old and a 50 year old. It’s the same thing between an adult, between adults doing, it’s the same thing that would happen between adults. It’s not going to harm them anymore than it would harm the adults unless the child’s culture created an environment in which they were ignorant of sex and they were manipulated into being terrified of it.”

“The… primary factor in all of this, that determines whether or not sex is harmful, really depends on their willingness to participate. That’s the more important thing than, that’s the most important thing. You’re - you’re not doing your children a favor when you dismiss them as being sub-humans, saying that they can’t have sex, you’re really just doing yourself a favor.”

“And I’m not saying… ‘you’re evil’ as like to [?] I wouldn’t say to him, you’re evil for having a child. Although, well I wouldn’t say you’re evil for having a child even though I think that’s… it’s kind of cruel, heh. What I would say to [?] is, just be honest about what you’re doing, having a child… isn’t in the child’s interest, it’s in your interest. The entire purpose of children is to propagate certain values and of course when one of those values entails being morally outraged by sex, of course they’re going to… be terrified of it.”

“But it’s not something that’s innately harmful about sex, it’s the culture that’s causing the problems. It’s the culture which is causing all of these problems. But I’m pretty much done with this topic, if you’re interested in this topic of anti-pedophobia, which I would argue is even more… infinitely more expansive than feminism ever could be, um… you can go to… IPCE.info, it has a ton of information on the topic, it’s a great website.”

“And… I think I’ve covered everything. Um, if you have any questions I’ll try to answer them, but otherwise I’m… I’m done with this topic. [laughter]”

– Adam Lanza, “On pedophiles and children -Part 8-8”