TW: discussion of pedophilia, child sexual abuse and child sexual abuse material, mental illness and homophobia/queerphobia (transmisogyny briefly)
Over the last few days, a well-known transfeminist poster made a lot of waves by taking a stance in one of the modern internet’s most controversial arguments – and not a popular one. The blogger has since deactivated, and at this point, trying to find original posts while wading through the sea of hurt, angry or defensive responses is incredibly difficult. More than that, though, I think it’s less important than engaging with the argument itself – whether or not pedophiles are an oppressed group.
Before I get anywhere with this, I’m going to say straight out, my answer is no. Of course not. We’ve seen recently exactly how far the state will go to protect the interests of the rich and powerful child abusers that keep it propped up. More than that, though, the repeated refusal to actually address child abuse makes the performative hatred of pedophilia feel like a disgustingly over-the-top circus. Canada’s Supreme Court recently struck down minimum sentences for child sexual abuse material cases. I don’t agree with minimum sentences, most of the time, any more than I agree with the penal system as a whole. However, the context behind this is that they were concerned about the people being ‘adversely affected” by the minimum sentence of one year… And it has since come out that these minimum sentences were being subverted anyway, for perpetrators of crimes as ‘small’ and ‘harmless’ as….creating CSEM with children under five.
But the discussion, surprisingly enough, has very little to do with jail sentences, or legislation against CSEM, or the material reality of child abuse… at all. Instead, this repeating argument is much more abstract, and has to do with “pedophilia” as a desire, intrusive thought, or obsession. The logic is that pedophiles are loathed by society even before they act upon their desires, and that this hatred in and of itself is unearned. Which…. well. There’s a lot to unpack there.
I don’t fault anybody for their immediate reaction being “FUCK no”. Where it gets problematic is where it overlaps with the ongoing fight against censorship – and that’s exactly where this particular argument/case study has its origins.
Paraphilia, Kink, Fiction, And Reality
I’ve written on a few of these topics before, but it’s always worth defining terms and ideas before getting into something. Too often, we get into debates with each other and only halfway through realize we’re talking about different things. So, when we talk about pedophilia, what are we discussing here, exactly?
Pedophilia is, broadly speaking, an attraction to children. It doesn’t include, in any of its definitions, attraction to fictional or representational children; nor does it include adults who have childlike proportions, who resemble children, or who wear or are interested in childlike things. It does not include kinks where one or both partners are roleplaying as being young or even as being a pedophile; and it does not include age gaps where both parties are of consenting age, no matter how large the gap.
To many of you, all of the above may be painfully obvious. At the same time, kink and sexuality education is…not good right now. Many people get their education on anything other that missionary – if even that – from the internet, and the internet is full of liars. As frustrated as I get, I have to acknowledge that some people believe the above because that’s what they were told. So, no, if you enjoy dressing up as a kid and it gets you horny… you’re not a pedophile. You can have whatever opinion you like on it (I think you’re fine, just respect everybody’s consent) but factually, you are not a pedophile for that. There’s no wiggle room there.
The other thing that pedophilia is not – and this is important for complicated reasons – is the actual act of child abuse. Pedophilia is often used as a shorthand; but while many pedophiles are child abusers, not all of them are and not all child abusers are pedophiles. This is, quite simply, because they describe different things. Pedophilia is the attraction itself – child abuse is the action, which sometimes isn’t even intended as sexual. Many parents sexually abuse their children without even considering it a sexual action – ownership of a child’s body and punishing them for their sexuality is a common move for an abusive parent, but these parents largely aren’t pedophiles.
On paper, then, this seems like a very easy distinction. But if you’ve witnessed any arm of any of these discourses for more than five seconds, you know it’s become a huge mess. This is where the concept of “thoughtcrime” comes in. Borrowed from Orwell’s 1984, “thoughtcrime” refers to how thinking of an act ‘against the State’, something treasonous or impure, is in and of itself a crime – whether or not you actually perform any action. This is also a concept within Christianity. Catholic confession often includes confessions of impure thoughts, not just impure deeds; and Protestant branches are actually even worse mentally for not having the model of confession to alleviate the burden. (Please don’t take this as a defense of Catholicism.) A lot of modern feminist and queer discourse is driven by these Christian underpinnings – often subconsciously. Consider being raised to walk on all fours on a specific path. It’s uncomfortable, the path hurts your hands and feet, and someone introduces you to a fascinating, terrifying concept – that you can stray off the path. You do so, in time… but if you’ve never seen anybody walk upright, it would never occur to you. Even once you do, you might not know how. And even once you start, it’s hard to do. It might hurt less, but you’re still used to the pace you had before, the way you had to hunch over, the way you used your hands to explore the earth in front of you. Christianity is often like that, especially fundamentalist or otherwise right-wing branches. Many people leave the path for either other religions or atheism/agnosticism, but haven’t quite gotten the hang of a new way of walking yet. As a result, in all sorts of permutations, in all sorts of shapes, the idea of ‘thoughtcrime’ persists. (There’s more complex layers to this regarding other religions but I don’t think I’m properly equipped to handle them. What I will say is that this obviously doesn’t apply to everybody but the idea of thoughtcrime does persist outside of Christianity as well.)
The ‘thoughtcrime’ idea is particularly prevalent in the ongoing and escalating war on transgressive fiction and pornography. The line between these two is thin and permeable – the difference is sometimes whether or not a specific reader is turned on by it or not – but since the 70s, there’s been a lot of fear from feminist circles about what “bad” fiction could do to people, or was doing to people. The second wave of it today takes a lot of cues from the push for better representation – if good representation makes the world better, then surely, bad representation makes the world worse. It’s not quite that simple – the opposite of representation isn’t bad representation, but invisibility – but it’s a conclusion that makes sense especially paired with the ghost of thoughtcrime. If you think a bad thing, you’ve basically done a bad thing. You’re like, one step away from doing a bad thing. You’re basically just as bad as the person that did the bad thing! And the guilt and pressure of that feeling gets in the way of the very practical reality that, well, no. Fiction is made up. Nobody was hurt. All the ethical and moral and theoretical and rhetorical trappings in the world can’t change that if I throw a book off a balcony and I throw a child off a balcony, people will respond very differently, and they should. But this anxiety – the idea that fantasizing, or creating, or otherwise dwelling in the imaginary, is somehow equivalent to doing something terrible in the real world – lays the groundwork for what comes next.
So we have a distressed population either convinced that they’re doing terrible things, or trying to rid themselves of this conviction. What happens as a result is a nitpicking and finetuning of boundaries and expectations, an attempt to find the exact line between “is this still all fiction and fine” and “is this going to hurt somebody” that becomes more problematic the more it’s fussed with. A few years ago, back when Twitter was still Twitter, there was quite the to-do about a take that essentially claimed that you should ask for permission from a friend before fantasizing about them or jerking off to their pictures. And what a take! Theoretically, on the strict logic of consent, you can see how the hapless individual posting this got there. It’s unethical to do sexual things to someone without asking, fantasy is a sexual act, you should ask first. But practically, good lord! I would be so much more profoundly disturbed by someone asking me this than just like, accidentally finding out they did it. The reason is because being asked for permission involves me far more in this one-sided sexual act than just…doing it, ever would. The fantasy, in and of itself, has no bearing on me. I would never know about it, nor do I ever need to; there is literally no way for me to ever find out beyond me walking in on someone moaning my name with my Instagram open. (And statistically, that’s probably on me.) But also, the fact that the question is even asked demonstrates the uncertainty underpinning these interactions and takes. The folks engaging in these conversations desperately want to do the right thing, and need clear boundaries and clear communication about what that is, but the line between fantasy and reality is complex, contextual, and ever-changing. As a result, once you flip to the other side of it and decide to defend kink in all its forms, fantasy in all its forms… it’s easy, if you’re operating in this sea of distress and doubt and need for definition, to go “well, if you just want to do something but you’re not going to, it’s fine.” And thus we have the non-offending pedophile and their defenders.
It’s Not Hurting Anybody(?)
The logic behind standing up for non-offending pedophiles is not entirely wrong. A non-offending pedophile, or minor-attracted person, has by definition…not offended. They’ve done nothing wrong. All they’ve done is express an attraction, and on the face of it, it seems just as weird to demonize them for that as it is to demonize someone for wanting to step on cakes while naked or fuck a mermaid. We should be accepting, right? It’s who they are, and research says it can’t be changed, so why make them live in fear? It must be so hard seeing people post about how they’d kill pedophiles on sight when you’d never hurt anybody.
So I don’t fault anybody for buying into it. Especially since, well, none of this is…untrue. Which is what makes it so insidious, really. There’s not a lot of out-and-out lies. Certainly, it’s just as weird to demonize someone who’s got a kink for childlike traits or lolicon as it is to demonize someone who– insert the strangest kink you’ve ever heard of, but there’s so many. But it needs to be stressed: Pedophilia is not that. Pedophilia is an attraction to a group of people who, by definition, cannot consent.
Let’s reframe the theoretical Non-Offending Pedophile for a moment, especially with the example I gave of the “asking consent before fantasizing” model above in mind. Someone is openly, actively expressing that they have a desire that – according to the actual definition and the understanding of the word – means that they are attracted to children, and would be inclined to sexually assault children except for their word that they would never do that. They’ve still given you this knowledge, and – in many cases – a lot of other people as well. Why are they expressing this? They don’t want to be demonized… in the case that it comes to light. Why would it have come to light in the first place? It’s a bit like when someone makes a point of bringing up their scat kink at the dinner table. You do you, but why are you bringing this up? You are the one making this a problem… and because of the nature of this attraction, it immediately introduces suspicion about why you are so firmly laying the groundwork that you would never, you’re trustworthy, you’re a good person.
It’s of course very likely that the need for assurance is legitimate. The guilt complex outlined above means plenty of these folks are legitimately looking for reassurance, absolution, comfort – But they’re looking for it in all the wrong places. Interestingly for such a strongly-Protestant population, there’s a confessional dynamic at play here, where many of the people taking to social media or friend groups to “confess” that they’re pedophiles are explicitly looking to be absolved of the ‘sin’ of being a non-offending pedophile… when, by their own logic, they haven’t sinned at all.
This is a running problem with social media. Hyper-individualism and a lack of supportive community (often queer community, but this is far from a queer-exclusive issue) means that reassurance and validation is hard to find, and it’s a normal thing to want. A common thread in mismatched social conversations is the solution-oriented friend trying to fix a problem versus someone who just wants to be heard; and everybody wants to feel heard. But the social media algorithm and the valuation of attention, clicks, impressions, has muddled this with a persistent idea that everybody wants to feel heard by everybody. You Alone can Change The Tide. You Alone can be the Voice that Cuts Through The Noise – etc etc. It’s one of the many ways activism is packaged and marketed, so that you in turn as an “influencer”/social media user become a product, packaged and sold to advertisers. Social media is a wonderful way to connect with community, but it’s not therapy, and it’s not the place for your problems. This is two-fold – the opinions of thousands of strangers are not going to make things like anxiety or OCD any better, and likely to make it worse – and that your half-baked opinion on something important… has a very, very real likelihood of doing some damage. This is part of what makes the “does fiction affect reality” discourse so challenging – so often, it’s not the fiction, but how people talk about it that does more damage.
This search for absolution is a running thread in leftist spaces. I’m openly critical of running problems with slash shipping spaces, and one of them is that in an effort to be “better”, non-men writing slash will sometimes come to me… not for sensitivity reading, not for advice, but for ‘permission’ to write it. What? To put it in further context, too, the vast majority of my criticisms have nothing to do with the fiction itself and everything to do with how slash spaces exclude queer men in favour of continuing to be a “women’s space”. So why are you asking me for permission? What could I possibly say other than “read a book by a queer dude once in a while”? Most notably, white leftists have a bad habit of “confessing”, publicly, to ‘Nazi phases’ that were best left in the past. There’s virtue in being accountable for past bad behaviour – I myself talk about how I was more reactionary in the past – but so many of these comments are directly aimed at Black folks. (Even worse: a lot of them aren’t actually Nazi phases – they just said the n-word a bunch. Gross, but hardly a Nazi, especially in 2013.) Why are Black folks responsible for forgiving you on the behalf of all Black folks? What are you getting from this other than permission to stop feeling guilty? All you’ve done is make every person of color around you suspicious and uncomfortable.
There’s another aspect of the confessional aspect that does damage most people won’t even think about. Whether we like it or not, we all share the same Internet right now. I don’t like that I have to consider the possibility of 10-year-olds coming across my website or my threads on pornography – the most I can do is try to account for that and be ready to answer challenging questions, whether from them or their caretakers. Nor will it be the fault of anybody in particular if or when it happens. We’ve all been channeled into a few large sites when we used to be much more siloed off. For the most part, I just take this for what it is; I try to speak to intended audiences when I can, and signal when something is more directed where possible. But on top of the confessional aspect being useless and uncomfortable, it feeds into a significant problem faced by lawmakers and those pursuing predators: children are scared to turn in their abusers. This is the same reason why death penalties for child abusers are, despite initial responses, a bad idea. Children are generally abused by those close to them – sexual abuse in particular includes a lot of emotional closeness, grooming, and a mix of types of coercion that leaves victims struggling for years afterwards. Part of why pedophiles are painted as evil demons by so many at the moment is because, once you explore a little further, the idea of the pedophile who ‘couldn’t help himself’, who ‘loved you in his own way’, who ‘was a good person who made a mistake’, who ‘would never do that and you’re just looking for attention’, etc. is…much more persistent. Victims use the first because we are actively discouraged from demonizing our abusers by anybody who actually knows them. So every time someone does the ‘oh poor me’ routine about pedophilia, online, in public spaces – It does some real damage. I’m usually the last person to say ‘what about the children?’, especially since like I said, I post threads about porn, but this is such an easy thing to…not do. The last thing victims should have to worry about is another layer of worrying about how much their abusers suffer.
“But didn’t you say earlier that pedophiles and child abusers aren’t the same?” That’s true. But there are several groups we actually need to consider here. Pedophiles, as a whole, include:
-people who do not talk about it, at all, and will never bring it up or act on it
-people who are dealing with it with a professional (and have not offended)
-people who have offended and are dealing with it with a professional (by choice or otherwise)
-people working with support groups like VirtuPed which take very firm approaches (non-offending mean any form of offense, you can have offended in the past, privacy means everything)
-people working with MAP Pride groups (groups that encourage being ‘proud’ of pedophilia as a sexual orientation or identity even while emphasizing non-offending)
-NAMBLA and NAMBLA types, who may or may not be active offenders but who are agitating for legalization of their desires
And others as well; but it needs to be understood how many fall into the first four groups. You are rarely, if ever, going to hear from the first four groups. When you do, it’s firmly in a clinical context and often anonymous. The pedophiles getting involved in the discourses online are, statistically speaking, part of the last two groups… and those are also statistically going to be ongoing offenders. Maybe they’re not child rapists, but maybe they don’t consider ‘softcore’ CSEM to be such a big deal; maybe they just don’t agree with age of consent laws when it comes to their girlfriend, and she’s so mature anyway and it’s all online anyway. And that’s all without accounting for the fact that they’re also just not going to tell you. (Well, the last group might. They’re, uh… They’re a lot.) Maybe it’s something as small as thinking it’s fine to do a little bit of sexting with the twelve year old running the NSFW blog cause it’s all in fun– But the more you engage with MAP/NAMBLA stuff, the less you’re going to think these boundaries matter, because it’s not like you’re doing anything ‘really’ bad. It’s basically thoughtcrime at that point, right? The cross-pollination of “am I a pedophile (because of this book)” and “am I a pedophile (for sending this text)?” is unfortunately kind of inevitable – and it sweeps up a lot of people with it, too. I firmly believe a lot of people in the fifth group (MAP Pride) would be doing a lot better and be in a group from 1, 2 or 4 without the constant push-pull of anti-kink and pedophile apologia.
I’ve mostly talked about the confessional aspect of this, but now that I’ve mentioned MAP Pride, it’s time to talk about the other harmful aspect of these attitudes. The idea of pedophilia as a ‘sexual orientation’ is an old one, and has its roots in homophobia and queerphobia. That alone should scare more people off than it does, but sadly, the pedophile apologia has also persisted for that long. For much the same reasons, too; if you’re trying to untangle “I’m a fucked up homosexual” from “am I a pedophile?” sometimes you just end up bringing the whole mess with you. Allen Ginsberg was a notorious pro-NAMBLA advocate and while there’s no formal records of him abusing anybody, enough rumors drift around to make it a distinct possibility – after all, if somebody’s telling you how much he wishes he could do something and then more than one person’s saying ‘yeah he did in fact do that’, there’s not that much reason to doubt it. It doesn’t help that one of the few neurological studies on pedophilia claims to show that pedophilia can’t be cured – never mind the million flaws in the study, or that all the people in the study were cis gay men. (Variance is the backbone of reliability when it comes to scientific studies. Also, why did you only use gay men? Pal, straight men are out here openly talking about their daughters like they’re pieces of meat. Never mind all of those female teachers.) It’s one thing to talk about pedophilia as a paraphilia, and discuss it under the lens of mental health acceptance. If it was being done so more accurately and with a pro-recovery stance, I could get behind that albeit with some severe admonitions about how blogging about your obsession and what a good job you’re doing about not thinking about your obsession is…not generally a sign that things are going well. It’s quite, quite another to make claims that it’s a sexual orientation. Putting a firm line between sexual orientation and kink is difficult for a lot of reasons – gender is changeable, sexual orientation can sometimes be fluid, kink and gender interact in interesting ways – but when it comes to something like pedophilia, it’s as simple as that nobody who is the subject of a pedophilic attraction can return the attraction consensually. It’s an attraction to an imbalance of power, not anything actually about the person; otherwise, pedophilia would be easily curable through young-looking adults and lolita dresses after all. The fact that it isn’t makes the double case that the latter isn’t pedophilia, and that pedophilia rests very firmly on that non-consensual nature. Many offending pedophiles twist themselves into pretzels insisting that there’s consent, of course. But post-hoc rationalizations are a dime a dozen and aren’t worth much. The insistence that it can or should be regarded as a sexual orientation shows a vast misunderstanding of sexual orientation – and does damage to the queer community’s ongoing efforts to fight pedojacketing and false claims.
The logic of “this will harm our commnity” has been used for all sorts of terrible things. I know better than to deploy it carelessly. It’s also part of why I’ve tried to emphasize that the condition itself is not the subject of ire. But not everything can be fixed with pride and flags. The queer fight for acceptance isn’t really, at its core, about having people just Like Us. It’s about changing laws. It’s about being able to get married, about job security, about safety in housing and equality in the eyes of the state (and if we have to tear it down to get it, so be it). Trans people aren’t fighting so that people will feel good things about us, we’re fighting so that our murderers will be prosecuted and not feel like they’ll get away with it. Bisexual activists aren’t fighting to have people stop being mean about them online; they’re fighting for increased access to domestic abuse resources for bisexual women without being turned away from sapphic or queer resources. What are pedophile activists fighting for? At least the NAMBLA-types are stating what they want (so we can say fuck you to it). What rights are you being denied in society? You’ll face more consequences for writing smut about kids than you will for filming them – that’s what a lot of people can’t wrap their heads around. The man who abused me was arrested for possession of child sexual exploitation material, went to prison for a year, and had to go to prison another two or three times for the same thing before they finally locked up for any longer. A man in my family went to prison for exactly the same length of time for abusing a teenager. Ghislaine Maxwell is plea-dealing her way out of consequences, and Epstein was killed not for being a pedophile but for threatening to rat out his powerful friends.
So why do people fall for it? Once again, it’s the cross-pollination. Trans folks see their friends have their lives ruined over accusations of being a pedophile; and when they hear the MAP plea, they imagine, maybe there’s something to this. But it was never because anybody really believed that their friend was a pedophile. Even those who did, didn’t take action against a child abuser – they took action against a queer person who they could punish. It’s hard to swallow – but it’s the truth.
So What Now?
The most important thing when it comes to this discourse is to not fall prey to extremes. I’ve laid out some important points here, but there’s complexities I haven’t gotten into and couldn’t without writing a whole book. At the same time, I do think threats about “kill every pedophile I see” and suchlike are bluster that doesn’t help anybody. When these arguments flare up, the best thing I can recommend is to step back and either disengage, or try to see what’s fuelling all the different parts. A lot of people engaging in MAP apologia, for all the harm they’re doing, think they’re helping. They’ve picked up a cause they think they understand, and they want to advocate for an oppressed group. On top of that, people don’t like to admit they’ve been tricked. This is all the worse if they have POCD (pedophilic OCD) or anything similar. Taking distance from people doing it is still a good idea – but especially if they’re not calling themselves one, many of them probably aren’t pedophiles themselves.
I also think it’s crucial to stress, over and over again, that the line between fiction and reality matters. An attraction to real children cannot and should not exist in the same conversation as “this is why incest fanfiction is valid”. They shouldn’t even be in the same room. One of the most helpful things you can do is, when you see that comparison, stopping the conversation dead and refusing to entertain it. They are not the same thing, they are not the same discussion. You’re either talking about real children or you’re talking about fake ones. No quarter.
Finally – the less of this that happens on social media, the better. If you’ve got a friend who’s spinning out, get them offline. If you see the discourse happening, don’t boost it. Not everything has to be public. Not everything benefits from exposure. The world is so, so, so much bigger than social media – and the more we remember that, the better.
A post-script: As mentioned, the blogger who kickstarted this round was a transfeminist blogger. There are additional nuances to this topic and how it intersects specifically with transmisogyny, but while I can acknowledge them and see that they’re there, I’m not the right person to get into it. What I will say is that the rates of pedojacketing for trans women are higher than any other population… and so are the rates of childhood sexual assault. I don’t agree with her position, but it is born from a specific context even beyond the usual queer experience.
Elliott Dunstan 