The grail isn't holy!

What causes pedophilia?

"Nobody knows" was the usual answer. This is no longer true as research has made progress. In the following, I give an interpretation that answers most of the question. But, it involves a twist of logic. 

What causes darkness?

If someone expects the holy grail to be shiny, an ordinary object will escape the attention. Similarly, if someone looks for a distinct cause, the reason for a certain situation might not be obvious. The answer I give in this blog is not an answer to the original question, but an explanation of the phenomenon. 

Pedophiles have a preference for children. This also means that they don't prefer women. This seems to be obvious, but it is seldom discussed in scientific literature. However, this is the part of the question that is mostly answered by now.

Q: What causes darkness?
A: The absence of light.

Cross wiring

James M. Cantor PhD sometimes explains pedophilia as a cross wiring within the brain. Instead of engaging the nurture instinct, the view of children causes sexual arousal: "pedophiles got their wires crossed". A similar explanation claims that sexual arousal is caused by images of children instead of the appropriate partner. The cross wiring metaphor has inherent limitations. One imagines a wire being removed and thereafter a new connection being made. However, no pedophile was truly a heterosexual to begin with. Hence, no wire was removed, it merely is absent.

Cross wiring also suggests that the new connection is established after the old connection was removed. The phrase "instead of" points in the same direction. Understanding that "cross wiring" is a metaphor, one could ponder if the order of events could be reversed, a new connection is made before the old one is removed. Moreover, is this "new connection" really a new one or existing in all humans?

The results by Cantor and his colleagues make sense with respect to the "first wire". Much of it points towards brain organization. In short, his probands are more likely to be shorter, left-handed, less intelligent, having had head injuries before the age of 13, more cranio-facial anomalies, and less white-matter in the brain. Cantor himself points out that there might be a disturbance in the development responsible for all this and it can more or less be traced back to prenatal origins. All of it sounds rather as something not working as expected than creating a new orientation from scratch. Summa summarum: this makes perfect sense when thinking of that "removed first wire". What could that be?

Intuitive sexuality

This term is made up by me. However, similar terms are used by Steven Pinker in "The Blank Slate" to refer to innate abilities. Most humans have a pretty good idea, what others are thinking. Pinker calls this "intuitive psychology" and it is missing in people with Autism. They simply have no idea what others are thinking.  

With intuitive sexuality I mean normal heterosexuality. Since most persons experience their sexuality as something natural and intuitive, nobody spends much time questioning the nature of it. Sometimes, it is described as a sex drive, while in animals it is called mating instinct. Instincts are patterns of behavior that play out once triggered. Humans have the ability to think rationally and to act according to rational decisions and overriding those urges. However, we also have a thing called gut feeling and jumping to conclusions. Both are remains of instincts. Sometimes, we act in certain consistent patterns and are not able to give a justification. Kim Sterelny's book "The evolved apprentice" gives several examples related to cooperation.

The intuitive sexuality can be understood as a weak instinct. Instinct are hard wired in the brain, which according to Cantor was subjected to some disturbances (in pedophiles). Pinker points out that the brain develops while in use. The basic structure exists at birth, but a lot of changes happen after birth and during growth. One of those changes is the myelination - wrapping neurons in fatty neuroglia cells. In short, wrapped neurons fire faster. Cantor first found out on MRI-T1 images that those fatty cells are not visible in regions related to sex. In the latest paper by him and co-authors, missing myelination was reasoned as one of the possible explanations for the discovered anisotropy.

So, Cantor & Co found evidence, which I relate to the absent "first wire". This means that big part of pedophilia can be explained by the absence of intuitive sexuality.

The second peak

It is a myth that normal heterosexual people are only attracted to age peers of the opposite sex. Violent homophobic people are found to show genital arousal to same sex scenarios. There is homosexual prison sex, and homoerotic behavior in the military. Moreover, child molestations is mainly carried out by non-pedophiles - one study found pedophiles to make up just 16.2% of the tested child sexual offenders. The average person has not a narrow sexual target but reacts to a variety of persons of both sexes and different ages. It can be imagined as a hilly landscapes with peaks here and there.

Normally, the intuitive sexuality should overshadow all other peaks. People are aware of their main attraction. 

If the peak of intuitive sexuality is absent, some other peak is the highest. Which one it is, depends on a number of things. Some animals live in a homosexual partnership, because foraging is easier in pairs. Chimps are known to use youngsters as shields against aggressivity from other males. There are many ways, a certain company can be comforting.

The two-stage model of sexuality

It is difficult to explain a lot of sexual phenomena without assuming this two-stage model. First an attraction target is acquired, then the clues of comforting company are causing sexual arousal. If this second stage fails, one develops the paraphilia known as asexuality. This model also explains, why sexual conversion therapies failed - they tried to fix the second stage without working on the comforting company.

In short, if a person fails to obtain intuitive sexuality, and finds the company of children comforting, a lot of thoughts will focus on them. This might even be a self-enforcing circle - the more one falls out of the peer group, the less one will be driven to the opposite sex. The second peak gets a chance to take over. 

But why are some missing out on intuitive sexuality?

Some try to find an evolutionary reason for the existence of pedophiles. It is even harder to argue why some people should be affected by autism. It makes no sense, considering hebephile, pedophiles or autistic savants as isolated groups. Human evolution reduced the way instincts impacted our behavior, made humans more flexible, and it made intelligence possible. All this is related to the neoteny humans possess. Most attractions are to signs of balanced neoteny. Cute children are treated with many favors - so much that it is not fair to plain children. 

The price of this development is paid by those, who get some of it in abundance. Too much reduction of an instinct renders it weak. It is advantageous when not reacting with panic, when the box we are sitting in is moving. Fear of flying has become rare. Sea sickness as a false alarm to food poisoning is still frequent. Most persons are able to understand the mind of other people. Most people are still seeking the opposite sex for lifetime partnership. But a few don't. 

Conjectures

The ticking-time-bomb meme portrait in media and some scientific journals probably is false. If the absent intuitive sexuality is a precondition for pedophilia, sexual urges should be less strong than in heterosexuals. Most statements about pedophiles are made by normal hetersexuals. It is too tempting to draw from personal experience, when making statements about other. Too much what is said about pedophiles are in fact projections by heterosexuals.

Cross-wiring in the brain of pedophiles

There is this "common consensus" among "experts" that the brain of pedophiles is cross wired. In the last paper by Cantor et al, the authors say that there is no "disconnection", but a "dysconnection". Right. Or are they wrong? The "experts" claim the following. If a "normal" person sees a child, the parental love is activated. But in a pedophile, it is the sexual love instead.

Ok, there are studies using functional MRI's and they report differences. I have also seen a meta-study where they listed all those studies and listed which regions were activated in pedophiles - there was not much consistency to see. This could be a case of p-value hacking, which i discussed earlier.

Back to the "common consensus" of cross-wiring, how much truth is there to this assumption? Is there really an activation of something completely different in parents than in pedophiles? That is what cross-wiring implies, or am i wrong?

What are the chances that evolution created a sexual love system and completely separated parental love? Testosterone, oestrogen, adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and vasopressin are the usual suspects for love hormones or the cocktail of them. Some say it is a myth that mothers get sexual aroused by breastfeeding their children. But it is oxytocin that controls the milk let down. One treatment option for social interaction orders involves a nasal spray containing oxytocin. Just by reading the article about oxytocin, one understands that there are no two separate love systems, there is only one. So what is parental love, then?

I have read several accounts of boy- and girllovers, who did not feel any sexual attraction to their own children. However, the friends of their children had the usual effects. The reason for that is the Westermarck effect. It renders long known acquaintances sexually inattractive. Is parental love the same as sexual love, but with brakes put on by the Westermarck effect? I think so. From an evolutionary points, it makes sense to reuse an existing system and to add some inhibitors to it than to evolve a brand new system for offspring caring.

Moreover, it makes sense to loose sexual interest in a person after getting to know him/her for a long time. In former times children of age 7 were supposed to fend for themselves, coincidentally the seventh year is also the one with the most breakups in marriages. Love hormones make us befriend a complete stranger. The own kids are around from day one, not exactly being strangers. This is another reason, why parents don't feel a sexual attraction, they are already close to their children. If they have not been close to their children, genetic sexual attraction happens, just think of oedipus.

So, what exactly is this cross-wiring talk about if there is nothing to cross?

Why is everything upside down?

I mean, every morning the sun goes up in the east, she set in the west. During night, i can see the stars wandering from the east to the west. Hence, for me it's obvious that the universe revolves around the earth (or me). But Copernicus made sense of the movements of the few wandering stars, now called planets, by putting the sun into the center. This makes me think.

Sexual orientation sounds pretty much like a direction one looks into in order to find a mate. Or like an arrow pointing to the right one. But that makes no sense for bisexual persons. Kinsey showed some diagrams, which resemble a profile.

Edited 2015-08-30: Kinsey presented his results as a profile, while he used a one-dimensional model for sexuality. Newer research uses an additional axis of intensity for the definition of sexual orientation. However, many researchers are measuring the intensity of sexual arousal for each age/gender group.

We are more or less attracted to others. The sexual orientation science put humans into categories and measures if we are attracted to them. But for me those categories make no sense. Mostly they are gender and age based, leading to homosexual or heterosexual, pedophile, hebephile and teleiophile categories. There is no division into latino's or nordic blonds. Moreover, most boylovers are attracted to boys who go through puberty - right at the border between prepubescent and pubescent. This confuses boylovers, since they don't understand if they are pedophiles or hebephiles. It seems that the categorization is somewhat arbitrary. Shouldn't we ask, what are you attracted to? Then we might know what we are looking for. If we look at the wrong categories, then we might never understand what makes certain others so attractive.

Sex conversion therapy tried to break sexual arousal. Those therapists punished their patients if they showed arousal to clues. I say "punished", since giving electric shocks is nothing else. This therapy is based on the understanding that arousal causes desire. But haven't we learned to react positively to signs of our desire. Aren't we on the lookout for the right one? Maybe, arousal is a mirror image of our desire. Then those conversion therapies had to fail.

Some researchers are looking for single direct causes of pedophilia. So far they didn't had any success. If we compare the normal sexual development with a train on rails, then we might see a problem. Most trains arrive at their destination. Some do not - they crash, break down or derail. A train might go downhill and the brakes are failing. Getting more and more speedy the next curve is a challenge too much to master. The train jumps out from the track. Did the brakes moved the train sideways? Of course not. All disasters happen by a chain of events. Pneumatic train brakes can fail in many different ways. Brake lines can get disconnected, holes are punched into storage tanks, storage tanks can be depleted by human mistake. All different root causes are making the train go faster than advised.

There are indications that homosexuality has something to do with the X-chromosomes, since extreme skewing of X-chromosomes in mothers is correlated with a higher number of homosexual sons. The X-chromosome contains several genes that influence the brain development. Here we might have one tripping root cause, but homosexuality manifests itself only after a chain of events. Researchers are looking for root causes, but the layout of the rail tracks and the existence of switches is critical for understanding the chain.

Sometimes, we have to lean back and investigate other explanations, switching cause and effect, looking for chain of events and evil cycles. Sometimes, we assume that things exist, when they do not. Freud claimed that humans are born bisexual. He assumes that children are sexual, but i think they haven't learned the meaning of the artificial demarcation line located around the belly button. They aren't sexual, but just enjoying bodily pleasure. Some animals aren't homosexual, they are just not picky with whom they enjoy pleasure. Sometimes, things are not caused, but rather not prevented. This might be the case with missing white matter.

Sexual orientation in human adults might be a neotenous thing, which means we should compare human adult sexual behavior with behavior of juvenile animals. Are boys entering puberty later than girls, because they are left behind? Or is it the case that late puberty was evolutionarily selected for? Moreover, that this evolutionary pressure was exercised on boys. I say exercised, because boys enter puberty earlier than decades before. Now, how was this evolutionary pressure exercised?

Sexuality is like the tip of an iceberg

This is a picture of mine that emerged some time ago. Sexuality does not exist on its own, but it heavily connected the innermost emotions and needs a person has. It is like the tip of an iceberg. There is so much hidden underneath and it determines what shows up.

Those guys, who tried to convert homosexuals, tried to destroy the tip. And like in case of an iceberg, another part shows up. In reality, removing the tip of an iceberg only makes it's orientation more stable. Conversion therapy attacked the part that is only a consequence. In many senses the iceberg behaves like the heads of Hydra.

The current picture of sexuality as a fixed point along the axis from pure-homosexual to pure-heterosexual is simply wrong. I see sexuality like a multi-directional thing. Humans love every possible group of people more or less. Loving one group does not automatically mean no love for other groups. Its like beams of different length fastened to the center of an iceberg, which determines the shape of it.

Quite often, when i read biographies of person with non-heterosexual orientation, i find many things wrong in their family lives. Even Stephen Fry commented in his "out there" series that he did not come from a "normal" family. Boylovers also report about the lack of some emotional attachment in their childhood.

Sexuality was and is so imperatively important for the survival of mankind that the mechanisms of sexuality must have been hard wired at the lowest level, hence much below the consciousness. The nature of ones sexuality is not a choice. But i don't think that it is random or without any purpose, it does not happen by accident. There is this picture of homosexuals that the other part makes them a whole; they complete each other. Hence one could think of homosexuality as the search of a companion that reduces ones own perceived deficits. I said perceived, because those might not be real ones, but something indoctrinated in childhood.

The case with childlovers of all kind might be similar. We love girls and boys, whether small, peripubertal, or teenagers, only from the same race with traits similar to our own or exotic, all this to a more or less degree. Hence, we are dealing with an universe of childlovers. Also here sexuality towards children is only the tip of the iceberg. For some reason those adults are drawn to children, the main reason is hidden underneath the surface - since procreation is ruled out, it's basically not about having sex.

Some find children attractive, because adults are so mean, especially women. The current stigmatization works like a charm - similar to removing the tip of an iceberg, making it just much more stable.

I find the name sexology as a term for a science hilarious, since it is not a separate field if one follows my picture. How they can just deal with sexuality and ignore everything else, is completely incomprehensible to me. James, the guru, is looking at brain structure and erections, while others look at brain activity when it is exposed to nice pictures. This seems a dead end, at least to me. In order to understand sexuality, one has to discover the motives, what gives satisfaction besides orgasm.

My conclusion: if one wants to cure the sexuality of people, one has to dive and work on the parts underneath. Sexology researchers entertain the idea that sexuality is fluid, but so far have failed at making it work. From what i understand, it will be a lot of work, if not futile.