Project Willow wrote:That contention is not borne out by either the extensive research on the subject, nor my personal experience as a CSA activist for nearly 30 years. The vast majority of survivors do not develop pedophilia tendencies, even to a slight degree, quite the opposite. They develop an idiosyncratic range of sexual expressions depending upon myriad factors including their sex role indoctrination, sex in relationship to perpetrator(s), sex of perpetrator(s), ability to disclose, familial and community response to disclosure, capacity for dissociation, level of identification with perpetrator(s), capacity for resilience, environmental support for resilience, etc., etc. Seriously, there is no scientific basis for your assertion.
Do you have some links with studies and stats to back this up? I’m definitely willing to question my assumptions about this (and about everything), and I'm glad I used RI as a sounding board for that post rather than put it out there “untested.”
But at the same time, I can counter your 30 -year experience as a CSA activist with my 30-year experience exploring my own psyche and family history. We have perhaps opposite, but I think potentially complementary, approaches, yours being (I think) deduction based on social research, testimonies, and scientific statistics, mine being a more psychological approach in which I delve deeply into specific psyches, primarily but not exclusively my own, and extrapolate from that. In terms of how they react to trauma, I don’t think psyches differ greatly, any more than biology differs. (Not that there isn't a wide variety of nuance and adaptation strategies, but in the fundamental mechanisms, rupture, bleeding, scar tissue, etc).
I also think it’s worth questioning how sure we can be that people are going to be 100% honest about their own pedophilia tendencies, even with themselves, and even within the most seemingly safe of contexts. As this thread demonstrates, there isn’t much sympathy for an admission of having had urges of this sort.
Also, my point about victims of sexual abuse developing pedophiliac tendencies was secondary to that about most pedophiles being victims of some sort sexual abuse, even if mild. This was meant to illustrate that there is a continuum between sexual abusers and abused, and that, insofar as understanding or compassion goes, it has to be applied to that continuum. This was my main point.
My own sense is that when a child’s libido is mishandled (sabotaged) by an adult or adults during its formative stages, the child may remain ‘stuck’ at that level of sexual development. Biologically of course they will grow to adulthood, but emotionally, psychologically, and sexually, they are still at the age when the abuse occurred. Hence it is “natural” for them to be attracted to children of a similar age. It is what feels safe.
Project Willow wrote:Again, the science on the issue does not bear out your assertion, even though you go on to deftly describe the internal processes by which an abused child may develop the paraphilia. Not all pedophiles were sexually abused as children, although there are studies that show a correlation with other forms of abuse, and attachment disorders.
To recalibrate a bit then, my point about poison containers doesn’t require that all sexual predators or sociopaths, or whatever we want to call these people (I would prefer not to label individuals so much as behaviors), were sexually abused, only that poisons were put in them and that sexual abuse is one of the most effective ways to do so; congruently, the primary motivation for sexual abuse, I believe, is the offloading of psychic poisons into another.
Children are the perfect poison containers because they are defenseless and pure, empty vessels who can receive a lot of poisons. If we want to trace this mechanism far enough back, or deep enough in, maybe it is one of the reasons people have children in the first place, as receptacles to put their poisons into? This may seem like a bleak view, but again, my own experience bears it out, as does the prevalence of child abuse in our culture.
Project Willow wrote:This has always perplexed me because I approached the subject with the same presumptions you've outlined in your post. They make the most sense on many levels, especially to a lot of survivors. However, as the commenter who spoke to narcissism pointed out, the capacity for empathy and how it gets wrapped up in sexual expression is the issue, and sexual abuse is not the only experience or factor that impacts empathy.
Unless we widen our definition of sexual abuse and allow also for the sexual objectification of a child through the parent’s (or primary caregiver’s) gaze, through fantasy, through emotional incest, and the like.
Project Willow wrote:The perennial question for me has always been, if pedophilia, or more accurately, child sexual abuse, is as widespread and persistent as it seems to be, what possible functional role could it serve in our species' survival? An idea came to me only recently. Sexual selection is an ongoing battle within every species, with spectacular biological and behavioral outcomes in many cases. Pedophilia impacts mate selection, it arguably lowers female agency in the majority of cases. So it is not out of the realm of possibility that it is a (relatively in behavioral terms) naturally occurring behavior that generally aids the male sex in the war to control mate selection. Well, that's my shallowly informed theory on the matter. Would love to hear what others think.
I’m not really able to follow the logic of this theory. How does pedophilia impact mate selection, since children can’t be considered mates? (If they can procreate then they aren't children, if we want to get primal about it.)
You might want to bring in neoteny, and how younger-looking (more neotenous) females are more attractive to men because they signal increased fertility; how neoteny relates to brain development during a state of play, how sexual abuse sabotages brain development by activating the fight-or-flight defense mechanism repeatedly so the organism can’t ever recover and develop a natural, undefended way of being in the world, or of relating to others. I cant see how this would help a species to survive, but I can see how it would help a dominant culture and the power behind it to flourish.
I knew someone once who claimed that homosexuality was the species’ way of controlling its population, which is superficially plausible I suppose. I’m not much good at evolutionary models, so I’m at a loss to say how pedophilia might contribute to the species survival. But wouldn’t a species-adaptation view of pedophilia be the ultimate rationale for it? Not that this is reason not to look into it, just throwing that out there.
brainpanhandler wrote:
I have the feeling that pedophilia would disappear if we all attended church in the buff. Glib as that sounds, I'm only half joking. Transgression heightens arousal and desire in a culture such as ours. Remove the surface level rules and the transgression disappears along with it's accompanying arousal.
I used to believe something similar. Then I found out how many similar “solutions” were present at the early(?) stages of what we are now starting to recognize as the problem, that of systematized and rationally justified sexual abuse. People like Havelock Ellis would certainly agree with the above sentiments, and they were central to the Fabian psycho-sexual research of the early 1900s and the “progressive” schools that sprang up soon after, as well as the vegetarian movements and wiccan fraternities (complete with churches in the buff), etc., all of which appear to be central to the social engineering program, including or especially the sexualization of children.
The problem is, I think, when people are driven by poisons in their unconscious, whatever wonderful and progressive, anti-suppressive solutions they come up with, they will always just be subterfuges. The poisons will go where they want to go, which is into the next generation.
brainpanhandler wrote:How much did Reich have right?
Didn’t Reich advocate the sexual interaction of adults with children?
I'm not sure I agree with you guruilla about human beings being born in a state of "purity"
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