1. Symptoms of Pedophilia
2. What being a pedophile means (and what it doesn’t)
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4. There seems to be a big lack of understanding of what being a pedophile means. I have written extensively about how pedophilia doesn’t really “fit the mold” of a “mental disease” and how the scientific consensus is evolving towards acknowledging that — in all ways that matter — pedophilia is “just” another sexual orientation.
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6. However, I ultimately don’t care what people consider pedophilia to be, as long as they acknowledge what this “disease” is and isn’t.
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8. So I will now proceed to provide an extensive list of all the symptoms of the mental “disease” called pedophilia. I’ll list them alphabetically, just to make sure I don’t miss any.
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10. Symptoms of pedophilia (in alphabetical order):
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12. * Finding children attractive.
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14. Well, that’s it. There’s no symptom #2. This is all that being a pedophile means.
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16. Not-symptoms of pedophilia (aka these things are in your imagination)
17. And just to be sure, the following are not symptoms of pedophilia:
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19. Lack of empathy.
20. Psychopathy.
21. Sociopathy.
22. Depravity.
23. Desire to harm anyone.
24. Desire to rape anyone.
25. Desire to “fuck” anyone with no regard for their feelings.
26. Lack of or inability to form and keep a moral compass.
27. Inability to understand the difference between right and wrong.
28. Inability to control one’s actions at all times.
29. Irresistible “urge” to touch children inappropriately that must be resisted 24x7.
30. Uncontrollable and instant erections at the sight of a child in any setting.
31. Irresistible impulse to drop one’s pants and hide behind a bush to masturbate while looking at children playing in the swings.
32. Obtaining pleasure from the suffering of children, in particular through the acts of kidnapping, raping, torturing and — gasp — murdering children.
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34. I could list many others, many things people tend to associate with pedophilia but are really nothing more than in the fantasist’s twisted imagination. Those things are simply not there. I’m not saying no pedophile has ever experience any one of those symptoms. I’m saying those symptoms are not inherent to pedophilia as a “disease”. If they exist, they do as symptoms of a condition that co-exists with pedophilia, just like it can co-exist with heterosexuality or homosexuality. There are no more psychopathic sadist pedophiles, percentage-wise, than there are psychopathic sadist heterosexual men. And no scientific study has been able to find any meaningful correlation of any of those symptoms with the condition of pedophilia:
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36. From http://www.b4uact.org/know-the-facts/:
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38. Studies of personality characteristics on average find low levels of aggression among pedophiles. Other than the attraction itself, studies fail to find any abnormal or pathological characteristics. In particular, people attracted to children or pubertal adolescents have not been found to exhibit narcissism, psychosexual immaturity, low intelligence, aversion to adults, psychopathology, neurosis, or any personality disorder any more than people attracted to adults. The presence of these characteristics have been assumed, rather than being tested scientifically (Bradford et al., 1988; Langevin, 1983; Okami & Goldberg, 1992; Wilson & Cox, 1983).
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40. Conclusions
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42. Like I said, I really don’t care if you want to consider pedophilia a “mental disease” rather than a sexual orientation, as long as you know what the “disease” is characterized by, and what it isn’t, and you don’t attribute to it things that are objectively not inherent to the condition.