Is paedophillia a mental illness?

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The issue of peadophillia or being attracted to pre pubescent children goes to the heart of Neurodiversity, or the issue of if there is a right way to be wired neurologicaly.

Since these people are neurologicaly wired differently and it’s not illegal to be attracted to children just to act upon those urges, which not all do

Basically two schools of thought:-

1. Human template model (made up by me) - There is an optimal way for humans to be both physically and brain development deficits are pathology or disorders

2. The idea of all diffences in brain development are equally valid even if they are disorders or cause harm to the person

I believe in 1 because peadophillia is clearly harmful to all including the wretched minds who have it.

Another scary theory about pretty much any divergence is that if it persists it serves some evolutionary / adaptive purpose. That raises all kinds of questions that I'm not sure I'd want to know the answer to.

Maybe its just part of the sexual brain that doesnt develop with age.

If you think back to the time you was a kid at elementary school you may have found the girl in your class attractive, there may have been certain traits that you liked in her, after puberty happens in the teenage years the normal guy starts to evolve to discard those traits and find adult bodies attractive, i.e for men breasts & sexyness, for women manly bodies.

Maybe for these people (not inc those victims of abuse that become abusers) for whatever biological reason that just doesnt happen.

That's not necessarily true. Plenty of things persist due to evolutionary history rather than actual function. The classic example is the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe. There are plenty in humans too - for example, gooseflesh, and our tailbones.

But that's a bit like discussing the way the blood vessels in the human eye are routed and how that causes blind spots.

This is more modal and it's not something like the whole human species needed opposable thumbs, started by not having them, ergo pedophilia in between. This is more like a less-pleasant corner of the idea that people who take vows of celibacy and become priests, monks, etc. end up being lineage guards and cultivators, or that having LGBT aunts and uncles as a child means you have a backup familial guardian if your parents die in some tragic accident or in a raid by a neighboring tribe.

What seems easy to tell an evolutionary story about is heterosexual pedophilia, to the extent that someone can secure a genetic alpha in childhood and enhance the genes they pass on. With stories like Kevin Spacey or other guys where it's strictly young boys it's less persuasive and I think it then goes a bit like this - that your anima or animus is whatever's tucked in the closet that you can't actually 'be' in the world without getting destroyed by the people around you, for many people their childhood is a one-time thing that has to be permanently left behind for survival (competitive reasons), they might identify that period of their lives with a kind of purity or a place where everything was right, and hence being attracted to children ends up being an anima/animus projection. To that last point, for as much as people love to call Jung irredeemably pseudoscientific debunked BS these days, I've learned through enough experience that there is a part of our subconscious structure (at least in my own nervous system it works like this) that holds itself up as a ballast against whatever's happening to us right now, it's a homeostatic function (think of Mark Solms's lectures on consciousness and emotion - that's more where I'm going with that), and the idea that someone could be going through such hell in their lives that their counter-ballast rips through some boundaries and urges strange behaviors doesn't particularly shock me.

Pedophiles don't have an illness, they are the illness.

IDK, what is and what isn't a mental illness is a bit fuzzy at times. The reason pedophilia is considered one is mainly because it's often severely harmfull and unwanted.

I believe pedos should recieve proper mental health treatment, but in no way should it ever be normalised. It certainly should not be treated like any other sexual orientation and it has no place in LGBT+.

And I'm going to have to disagree throrougly with the crap DuckHairback said about fictional child porn. Sure, a lot of people go on about how it might prevent pedos from hurting real children, but if you're so out of control you can't manage to keep your hands off of kids in the first place a fantasy outlet won't do much I'd think.
Also, I have heard of people who said that fictional kiddie porn did not quell their desires at all. Rather it opened them up to them more, made them more comfortable with it and eventually led to seeking out more and more, coming dangerously close to crossing a serious line.

Yes, it is an extremely abnormal sexuality. I have always been inclined to say that paedophiles should be executed, but based on a personal experience of being abused, I am compelled to refrain from making this my ideology.

I more or less said this on page 1. But one or two of my comments was lost in a delete spree...I shall try to resurrect what i said on 13 Dec.




Just because you think it would be a good idea to placate them with dolls, doesn't mean it will stops them. In fact it might do the opposite, entice them, only drive their desires to act out, get a taste of the real thing. The most likely outcome.

Then I made allusions to to *john wayne gacy* and burying bodies in the garden....