Let's start by defining our terms. A pedophile is an adult who is sexually attracted to prepubescent children. For those of you just joining us at this blog, I am a pedophile.
People have been putting forward ideas about why we exist for ages. Usually with the idea that if they know our origin, they can get to the business of snuffing us out of existence once and for all. Still, we can't just halt the advancement of human knowledge because genocidal monsters would attempt to make use of it. Better to just recognize that's going to be their intent and press forward with science aware of that risk, in my opinion.
The reason we know as little as we do about pedophilia's origin ties into the fact that there is a vocal minority intent on murdering us in the streets. It's the same reason that the interesting theories on the origin of homosexuality have come about only very recently. Because it's only very recently that homosexuals could participate in such research without putting their lives in danger.
All the current science relating to the origin and nature of pedophilia is hindered by the fact that the samples are heavily biased. Even when researchers take care to utilize phalometric devices in an attempt to confirm that the child molesters they've got in their prison sample are actually attracted to children, they're still dealing with individuals with complicating differences from the general population, and unknown sample biases that will differentiate them from the general prison population outside their sexual response. Of course, that's when the researchers bother to notice that pedophiles and child molesters aren't the same thing, which is not as common as you'd expect for people explicitly conducting research in this area.
Lay psychology using terms like "cycle of abuse" is a particular bad offender in terms of conflating pedophiles with child molesters. One can make an argument for or against "cycle of abuse" as an explanation for some child molesters, but acting as though it has anything to do with the origin of pedophilia is misguided at best. For those of you fond of anecdotes, I'm a pedophile, and was never molested.
Identifying a genetic connection is difficult with current sampling techniques, given all the noise involved with trying to tease out closeted sexual orientations and using prison samples. One of my family members is in prison on child pornography charges (though given what counts as child pornography, no guarantee that has anything to do with pedophilia). Might be coincidence, which is why anecdotes aren't data, but it is enough to make me lean in that direction in the absence of good evidence.
But really, the bottom line is, we'll likely never have good answers as to why pedophiles exist until it's safe enough for us to come out en-mass. At that point, science can get to work doing the research and answering the interesting questions.
If we find the origin then we will remove it. There is no good reason to have them in society. Hopefully we can abort them.
ReplyDeleteAnd here you are, making finding that origin harder. How does it feel to be responsible for perpetuating the very thing you despise?
DeleteThe origin is probably something in early childhood development. According to psychoanalytic research, other sexual orientations and paraphilias usually have their origins in infancy and are connected to theories of coitus, choice of first love-object, and experiences trying to find out about sex or babies. A boy will grow up cishet if he primarily orients to his mother in childhood and comes to identify with his father and seek out mother-substitutes. However, he might become gay if he never gives up his mother as idealised love-object, or if he imagines too strongly in infancy that his mother has a penis (and makes the penis a condition of his love-objects), or if he has a primary attachment to his father or to a brother. Someone develops a foot-fetish or boot-fetish based apparently on trying to look up skirts and also on the maternal penis issue (the foot or shoe is imagined to be the substitute phallus seen when looking up skirts). A person becomes sadomasochistic if their early theory of coitus was that sex is a violent act committed by the father against the mother; this might happen if they observe actual rape, or if they misinterpret observations of sex among humans or animals (for instance, interpreting moans as screams). Infantile libido is polymorphically perverse and there is no sense of age, gender or species, but there appears to be little knowledge of penetrative sex or ejaculation (which is biologically possible), so early sexuality gets invested in the available zones and processes such as sucking at the breast, pissing, shitting, exhibitionism, stimulation of the skin and muscles, closeness, etc. Specific phantasies (unconscious or conscious image-stories similar to dreams) develop around these functions, which often also get tied-up with answers to the question about where babies come from. There's mention in Freud's work of Leonardo da Vinci having romantic feelings towards youths and boys, though he is discussed as "a homosexual" and not "a pedophile". According to Freud, da Vinci had a strong mother-attachment and also did something called "narcissistic object-choice", i.e. he looked for love-objects who resembled himself or parts of himself. The youths and boys thus stood for younger versions of himself, still inside the idealised maternal relation. Lacanians generally assume pedophiles mostly belong to the so-called perverse personality-type. The main traits of this type is that people belonging to it identify themselves with the love-object of "the Other" (initially the parent), and use an unconscious mechanism known as "disavowal", in which they simultaneously affirm and deny some traumatic fact (cis women not having a penis, their own penis being removable, or their not possessing omnipotence for example). The "perverse symptom" usually involves a compromise formation which encodes primary-process (metaphorical, symbolic) versions of both the affirmation and denial. For example, a flasher both "has the phallus" (an impressive, visible penis which produces effects such as shock) and "does not have the phallus" (does not create an actual sexual relation).
ReplyDeleteI'd speculate there's probably several sources of pedophilia. These might include flight from both parents as love-objects, seeking love-objects resembling a former (possibly idealised) version of the self, seeking to provide to other children based on whatever one remembers of early childhood phantasies, seeking to occupy the position of a parent or other adult (who might be a pedophile, a child molester, or metaphorically sexualised in memory), fixation on siblings, drives in other registers which are misremembered as sexual after puberty, being identified as a child oneself, desires to reverse sadistic or active/passive relationships in one's own childhood, projected desires to usurp parents in childhood, etc. IMO there's a misunderstanding involved - a confusion of children's libido in the broad sense with adult genital libido. That's harmless at the level of fantasy, but dangerous if it leads to misreading the actions of actual children.