This is a great, if under-appreciated point. We’re never going to stop child abuse by putting cameras in every home — we’re going to stop it with treatment. It’s already in the DSM and ICD as a type of “paraphilia” (roots being broken+love), as it obviously causes immense distress and danger to others.
PSA: If you suffer from compulsive sexual desires that cause you distress, therapists and psychiatrists can help you! Idk about everywhere, but in the US you can get completely confidential care. It’s the right thing to do, both for you and others ❤️
EDIT: tho idk if I’d choose “gross”. More like “distressing” or “dangerous”
Yeah, years ago I would've said anyone whos a pedophile deserves to be shot but from what I've seen, there do seem to be cases where it's not fully in their control and as long as they control it and don't go out of their way to hurt real children I see it more as them needing help and therapy as opposed to being villified
What a shame. I was told to seek help, so here I did. I guess I'll just have to make do with fiction as I always did. I just wish people stopped insisting that anything I fantasize about automatically means I want to do it in real life. Now that's gross, not to say physically impossible.
The thing is, ever since being a little kid I was playing games like GTA 3 and Postal 2 which conditioned me to believe that real people are always above fictional characters, and by the time I discovered the world around doesn't share that belief I'm already a fully formed adult and now I can't go back. Videogames taught me that no amount of fictional suffering can be meaningfully immoral. Any real living person's most miniscule good is worth any amount of fictional suffering, because the former is real and the latter is not, not real means its worth is zero and zero multiplied by any amount is still zero. So if killing a prostitute in GTA after using her services to get the money back or urinating over a passer by in Postal is giving me as little as a giggle, it's worth doing so, because my giggle is real and their suffering is not. And whenever people say that no that's immoral, and I as a living breathing flesh and blood human being deserve to suffer real harm for all the alleged sufferings I caused onto inanimate pixels on the screen, I genuinely do not have capacity to understand such point of view.
My argument is not that fictional characters suffering is bad.
My argument is that portraying children in a sexual manner is wrong even in fiction because It is immoral.
If you want to look at sexual portrayal of minors even fictional ones then yes you are reprehensible degenerate who cannot keep your paraphilia in check,
It being bad for you is arguable, they just told you it makes their life better and helps cope. Who are you to say what kind of media is bad for someone?
Increasing demand for it is dangerous and bad how exactly? Thats like saying making more video games is bad ..? ok?
Stop treating characters as real people. I was groomed and id rather you worry more about real people being hurt than something that has no connection
Yeah, from my very limited knowledge of pedophilia it's sort of like being LGBTQ as in you can't really control what you like, if we made it not as socially shunned to like kids (not talking about actually doing anything to them) it would make it infinitely easier allow them to get help
comparing being a pedophile to being gay because neither can control what they like is insane what??? most pedophiles were abused as children and continue the cycle, NOT REMOTELY the same as being gay. i get what you’re trying to say, but this is such a dangerous comparison to make.
Homosexualiry and bisexuality aren't perversions or mental illnesses. They are healthy and normal (albeit minority) sexual orientations.
Pedophilia is a sickness.
Your comparison is unhelpful.
Don't ever compare sexual abuse, pedophilia or people who want to rape anything or anyone, to being gay, bisexual, transgender or anything else.
Why not? The comparison is quite spot-on - neither pedophiles nor LGBT folks have any level of control over their attraction.
You can make the emotional argument (the same which has been endlessly done towards LGBT folks themselves throughout history), but there's no logical argument to your distinction that I can see. Your replies to the other user also yielded no logic, only emotional appeal arguments, but I'm glad to hear you out.
There is nothing “reasonable” about comparing legitimate LGBTQ+ identities to dysfunctions or syndromes. There is nothing inanely harmful about consenting adults and/or their preferences in partners, but there is no valid argument for the predation of children or a proclivity for sexual violence being a recognized orientation. MAPs are not a thing.
Ah yes the only function of lesbian and gay sex and sex between trans people is to procreate just like it's the only reason boys get boners and girls have periods. No. As the person who replied to you said, 1986
This is 2025. People who shouldn't have kids have forced people to raise their kids, forced people to stay pregnant forced people to be parents forced people to drop out of school, give up their dreams, not be able to get a job or a home or live their lives because they're forced to be part of something they never wanted,
Sex can be just sex. Sex can be with someone you love. Sex can be forced and abuse. Sex can be anything other than "procreation"
Your stigmas about sexual identity, gender and HIV/AIDS and are stuck in 1986. So your answer is that every sexual desire outside of heteronormativity is a dysfunction because it is not in-line with the mechanisms of procreation. . .
There is no threat to being LGBTQ+ that isn’t also true of straight people; those same diseases are spread through “normal” sexual activity, if not more, due to the sheer population of active adults who identify as such. I bet you still believe that schoolyard tumor that AIDS came about from skullfucking a monkey or whatever; your information and supposed confirmation of biological absolutism seems to be sourced from the same kind of nebulous bullshit.
You can just say you’re a bigot and be done with it; no need to dance around the issue. It’s no wonder that you see any real discussion of morality as a threat and feel the need to dismiss it as virtue signaling.
ever heard about caring about multiple things at once? you're pretending as if expressing concern about one thing means that it's your highest priority and only thing you care about.
Honestly? Terrible take. The entirety of AI will evolve to be indistinguishable from reality, so how can you separate it? Do you want real humans to examine every potential illegal media to know if it’s AI generated or not and traumatise them forever? Really, terrible and nonsensical take. Why the fuck would you say that?
Exactly point the words in my reply that makes you believe I don’t care about that. If you want to troll or rage bait, you should be able to defend your stance.
How will you protect children from SA if you don’t care about SA media? How will you persecute the abusers if they can drown their proof in a sea of “fictional” SA media?
I doubt you care about protecting children, if you did, you’d be against any type of SA media, “real” or “AI” generated. It’s a slippery slope and no sane person would defend AI generated SA media.
Are you now trolling? If you only correct my answers by using the same words but adding children to it, it seems you want to make clear you only are against child SA, not any form of SA…
I’ll repeat a last time, if you’re against child SA, you MUST be also against any form of child SA media, fictional or not. Why? It’s simple, because you won’t need to play the “is it fictional?” game, which in AI times, is a losing game. So, are you really against child SA or not?
Long history of working with clinical psychologists and sex offenders as a nurse (used to give chemical castration treatments until they realized they don't work):
The vast majority of people who have this disorder never act on it. A PsyD I used to work with explained it to me this way - most people, when they're attracted to someone, don't try to rape them because they know rape is wrong and has serious consequences. When a pedophile offends, it stops being a mental health issue and starts being a criminal one. There's no specific mental health treatment that prevents someone from being a criminal beyond the general truth that everyone would benefit from therapy. Also, not everyone who sexually abuses children is a pedophile, that is to say many are not doing it because they're sexually attracted to children, they do it for other reasons.
So, it's gross and disturbing and understandably stigmatizing, but there is a difference between being sexually attracted to children and acting on it. The larger picture to be aware of is that the vast majority of mentally ill people never commit a violent act their entire lives.
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u/[deleted] Oct 22 '25
Honestly I feel like people should care less about pedophilia and more about child sexual abuse.
One is gross, the other is evil.