Are pedophiles sick?

No! They are normal, but not average. Nobel prize winners are normal, but not average with respect to intelligence. Pedophiles are not average with respect to sexual desire. Nothing causes pedophilia. Something causes heterosexuality.

The sexual desire in average people is driven by innate behavior (instinct), it is said that the sexual instinct is the strongest in humans. But humans are losing instincts in the course of evolution.

If one gets food poisoning, it affects the inner ear. The horizon does not move before our eyes as our ears indicate. That is how we feel the effects of food poisoning, and we become nauseated and throw up. On a ship, when we lose the horizon and the felt movements do not correspond to our vision, our body recognized food poisoning and we throw up. When we sit on an airplane and the airplane starts moving without any outside view indicating it, some people get panic and try to leave the place. Some innate behavior is good, while others like fear of flying affects us negatively. Hence, during evolution we got less and less affected by innate behavior and had to replace the guiding effect of innate behavior by learned behavior - we got intelligent.

During puberty, average boys start feeling a very strong attraction towards same aged girls. Girls experience something like that too, where they get flattered by the strange attraction of boys. Average boys start behaving irrationally, ignoring advices and prohibitions. Everybody says they should concentrate on their studies, pals demand them to spend time with them. Parents are concerned wrt. STD's ... And they do sexting, because they might score. These are the effect of a strong mating instinct. Every unexplainable consistent irrational behavior probably is an instinct. The human brain has evolved and many processes have been broken down into smaller pieces. The mating instinct probably now is a combination of an attraction and an erotization part. 

In pedophiles, the mating instinct seems to have become too weak. Prenatal insults can prevent the manifestation of innate behavior (instincts). Boys are supposed to play in a certain way, also called gender conform. They should prefer certain toys, and if they do not, chances are that they become homosexuals (or other paraphilic). All MRI studies find something that is not average in pedophiles and similar. They also have found non-average responses in hormones. Pedophiles are not average, pretty much like the overly intelligent nobel prize winners. But they are normal!

With respect to the sexual mating instinct, pedophiles are on the low end of the distribution - just like stupid people, or short people. When pedophiles start loving someone, it was someone whose company was comforting. The problem with society is, that they have made this love impossible. The more distance they put between pedophiles and the children they love, the less they see them as subjects with a personality and more as sexual lust objects. If all you want is to put your dick in a bum, then you have gone the whole mile and lost out on the refreshing company of children.

Not all pedophile-labeled people are like this. There are antisocial psychopath who kill children. There are dads and stepdads who don't get enough of the love they need from their wives. There are arrogant men who travel to third world countries to buy child sex, because money buys everything.

Neoteny, gut feeling, and dwindling human instincts

Human have a free will, right? My gut feeling tells me no. The field of psychology is a science that figures out what makes humans tick. If humans had a free will, we would just snap out of a deep depression and be happy at will. Psychologist wouldn't have a job to go to. It simply does not work that way. There is even a book about the science of fear. It shows how gut feeling interferes with rational thinking and even leads to riskier behavior.

The human gut feeling are the remains of fully functional instincts. Instincts guide behavior in animals, the perceived situation triggers one or another response. Reflexes are more simpler, sensory input leads to a motoric action. Instincts are like an advanced version of it.

Instincts are good for animals, but not so good for humans. We live in a more complicated world, where our actions should not solely be guided by gut feelings. As mentioned in the book, our gut feeling might be a disadvantage. In difference to animals, humans possess rational thinking, which leads to better outcomes.

Neoteny is an explanation for the dwindling human instincts. While most animals are born with a fully myelinated brain, humans are not. Those animals join the flock after a short rest following birth and show instinctive behavior. Newborn humans show few reflexes and very few instincts.

Neoteny works by slowing down maturation of the affected parts up to the point of standstill. The processes responsible for development simply work at a slower speed. Myelination of the human brain does not happen in uterus, it takes many years of human life. During this time, we learn how to cope with the challenges our environment throws at us, and we develop strategies for survival. Those strategies can work along with our instincts or work against them.

Neoteny appeared due to evolution. This means the maturation processes were faster in some individuals, and slower in others. Those small variations are enough to give an advantage to the ones going into the right direction. Moreover, not all maturation processes are slowed down equally. Compared with chimpanzees the body needs like 3 times the amount to mature, while the brain needs several more times.

Rebellion during the teenage years are a good example for instincts. The irrational behavior is exactly that: irrational. It often is attributed to raging hormones, but is better explained by instincts. The orientation towards age peers and conforming to their pressure is more important than obedience to parents. Even more important is the attraction towards the opposite sex. Parents might forbid it and age peers might ridicule one, nevertheless the opposite sex must be conquered. Some teenagers are more obsessed with it than others. This is so irrational, that instincts must be responsible for that. We all know how teenagers behave who were gifted with more than the usual amount of teenagers instincts.

Those, who have a lesser amount of teenage instincts, will behave according to the learned norms and conform to requests. Since the current society wants to keep adolescents immature for a prolonged time, those children will stay children. Stunted psychological or emotional development is real. There are several theories why this happens, but i'm missing the role instincts play. One very important instinct is the heterosexual mating instinct. If that one does not manifest, then the genes don't make it into the next generation. This is the disadvantage that evolution uses to stop the dwindling instincts from disappearing altogether.

Since i'm always seeking the connection to pedophilia, this is no exception. Quite too often i found on the internet the notion that boylovers see themselves as emotionally young. One even wrote that it is tiring to pretend to be an adult all the time. If one feels himself as a teenaged boy, one probably is stunted in his emotional development. It might be as simple as this. The heterosexual mating instinct is too weak in pedophiles. The obstacles for a normal heterosexual relationships offer too much a resistance for this instinct to overcome. Those obstacles might come in different forms. Sometimes the family environment is diametral to the romantic advances of the child, sometimes it is just missed opportunities. Common factor is the absence of "raging hormones".

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?

Is sexual orientation a nonsense term?

Everybody knows what sexual orientation is. There is even a lengthy wikipedia article about it. But researchers are still trying to figure it out. I'm not a researcher in this field, but a layperson who is sceptical on the whole concept. Looking carefully i even question if the term makes sense at all.

Ingredients of sex

Dr. Jim Pfaus thinks of sex as encompassing four categories — arousal, desire, pleasure, and inhibition. There is love and lust — and rewards. Moreover books are filled with romantic stories, another side to it. The christian church wants you to believe that reproduction is the sole purpose of sex. When listening to the many TED-talks about sex on youtube, you learn:

• there are at least 16 different functions of sex,
• 95% of all sexual activity is not reproduction related,
• hidden estrus is something special in humans,
• humans and bonobos are the only ones having sex face-to-face

among many other facts. Moreover, humans are exceptional with respect to upbringing of children and society. Hence not all explanations can be transferred from the animal kingdom without modifications.

Tampering with the wrong end

The term "sexual orientation" tends to unify sexual arousal and sexual desire. The former is this excitement when our senses catch sight of the object of our desire. The rush is real as hormones are released that switch our brain into the mode where we are blind to all flaws. It even tempers with rational thinking, making us believe to be the heroes we are not and makes fools of ourselves. The latter is more complex and might have been misunderstood.


Gay conversion therapies aimed at redirecting the sexual arousal onto more appropriate targets. It has failed big time, it is now considered to be unethical, and it is banned. Why didn't it work? Are we not desiring what arouses our senses? Or are we aroused by what we desire? D.J. Bem published a model for sexual orientation, the exotic becomes erotic theory. One basic element of that theory is that stuff becomes erotic if desired long enough. Women are hot, so are cars. Although, as men we find cars to be cool, or even sub-zero. So in order to understand sexual orientation, we should consider what we desire. Gay conversion therapies did not work, because nobody questioned what it was to was desired. The therapists were so disgusted by it that they never looked for the attraction.

What we want or not

There are clues out there, what influences our desire. Disgust has been found as a major factor in homosexuals. Sexual disgust is learned unlike pathogen disgust. Another important factor influencing relationships is the attachment from childhood. People who grew up with an avoidant attachment to their caregiver face difficulties in finding a trustworthy partner. One explanation for homosexuality is the older-sibling theory. However, having many older siblings leaves little attention to the smaller one. According to the older sibling theory, latecomers should be equally bound to be homosexual, but usually get much more attention from all family members. I haven't heard of a single case of such an homosexual, while i knew plenty who had to fight for attention.


Attachment is primarily not sexual, hence it tends to get overlooked in the sexual orientation discussion. It seems obvious that we seek company of those who make feel us comfortable. Reading Lautmann "Die Lust am Kinde" i noticed that pedophilic men desire the company of boys more than their bodies. Their attraction is to boys who behave like boys. As it turns out, their aim is not to transform the child into an adult sex partner, but to indulge into the childness. When listening to homosexuals talking about their partners, i notice that they tend to talk how the other half is making them into a whole one. Do homosexuals seek what they are missing in themselves?


Fish may have a pure sexual desire. Humans are more complicated. Women have hidden estrus, which means only frequent sex makes an offspring. The rate of attempts per success is one of the highest among mammals, equalling those of fishes 1000:1. Somehow reproductions scores low on the list of priorities when it comes to the selection of a partner. There is certainly sexual arousal, but the desires is not much sexual.

Genetic, prenatal influence, inborn or track bound result?

Our genetic makeup makes us women and men at the moment we were conceived. During the late first-trimester and second-trimester our developing brains are influenced by prenatal exposure to hormones making us more or less feminine or masculine. When we are born, we are more or less put on a track, like a railway track. We got engines of a certain kind and are exposed to family. From that moment on a certain dynamic is at work. How do we respond to our parents and siblings? Both nature and nurture are at work, working hand-in-hand and against each other. We know that gender is not a social construction, but we also see patterns in development. Those patterns are the tracks we were put on at birth. There are switches, but most of them are unknown. We have evidence, mostly from women, who show a fluid pattern of sexuality - hence we can assume that sexuality is flexible in some of us.

Conclusion

John Money assumes phylism to be part of the game. The ignorance of the sexual aspects seems to be right. Much of the search for a sexual partner is a quest for the right spouse with the right qualities. It seems like a puzzle game, where only certain pieces can get attached to each other. Which brings me back to attachment. From the cradle we learn to prefer to be around certain people or stuff. We get to feel secure and to derive comfort from their company. This sharpens our mind, at least the limbic system, to signal whenever we get close. We have to remember that the conceptual thinking is a recent acquirement in humans, symbols and gut reaction have accompanied us for millennia. Over time the exposure to the desired company will result in an arousal which will further drive us towards them or it. There might be no sexual desire, but a desire to seek certain learned attachments.


The ability to seek out and established attachment, the kind of attachments we seek seems to be in my opinion the key to understanding "sexual orientation".

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.

Kids don't want sex from adults

If this statement comes from a heterosexual, it possibly is true. One has to taken into account the limited understanding a heterosexual man has about sex. Just to remind you, having sex means a lot of preparation. First, one has to find out if PMS is far away. Second, women like to have it romantic, just a movie is not longer enough. Probably a nice dinner at a fancy place. And no, McDonalds does not count. Finally home, after endless forced smalltalk, one should not forget foreplay. Being direct equals being a jerk. After getting the final go signal from the lady, there may be a minute or two of the fun. Hopefully, there is no talk afterwards and one gets the well deserved sleep.

Do you know any kid, who wants that? Of course not. Hence, the heterosexual is right in his statement, and does not know how wrong he is. Kids are born with zero knowledge about intimacy and sexuality. But they are born with a soft skin, which is one continuous erogenous zone. Even tickling the nose produces that funny feeling in the stomach. They like that one, and want it as often as possible. Getting physical affection creates the feeling of belonging together, being cared for. In addition they couldn't care less about that artificial demarcation line, which for adults divides intimacy from sexuality. Kids know what they want. And if they want something, they want it now, this very instant. If you don't believe me, just take one kid to the candy shelf. Moreover, they let you know quite clearly when they no longer want something. One can simply not miss it. Try feeding brokoli. How an adult came up with the idea that kids don't know what they want, is simply incomprehensible to me.

The problem of communicating ideas with words is that they mean different things to different people. When the concept of sexuality got reduced to procreation, much of it's richness got lost - at least for heterosexuals.

So please, next time, when you talk to heterosexuals about the needs kids have, remember this! Use simple words and avoid the one term, for which they have a totally screwed understanding!

Sexuality is fragile

There once was a peach tree, in the garden behind the house of a man. He was very fond of the tree, because the peaches were so beautiful. That means those which were left by the birds and insects. The man, being kind of a genius, though long about the problem. Then, he got the idea to build a greenhouse around it. It did not take long and next spring saw the tree behind glasses. Even the air got filtered such that no dirty insect could touch the precious tree. The peach tree looked more beautiful than ever and the man could hardly wait until fall. But the disappointment was huge, when he started to harvest the results of his effort.

There was a man, who loved a woman. She got pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy. The man was so happy that he invested all his fortune into a Stradivari for his precious son, which got a place of honor in the home. Every day the boy passed by the pedestal on which the violin was set. Playing with it was out of question, a Stradivari is not a toy. To avoid any temptation, every literature about how to play a violin was off-limit. The boy was told that the violin would be his on his wedding day. Soon the young man became engaged to an equally nice girl and they married a little while after. On the wedding night the young man took his violin into his hand and tried the requested piece written by Paganini.

Do you think i'm talking about peaches and playing the violin?

The facts

• british children are now confined to 10% of the space that were roamed freely in the 1960's.
• Denmark's provinces have a birth rate of just 1.6 per couple.
• A common problem in german marriages is the missing sex.
• Japanese teenagers don't leave the parental nest.
• The only word for sex in english is rape.
• Women think that men are not even entitled to ask them out on a date.
• Women can decide in hindsight that the consensual coitus has been in fact a rape.
• Consent requires a written contract on some american campus.
• Teenagers are terrified before the debut.
• Being a virgin is both a virtue and a serious disadvantage in dating.
• Incarcerating 5-year olds for kissing 4-year olds, calling it sexual assault.
• Visual sexual aggression is a recognized term.

The question

Why do we assume that at the magical age of 18, everybody knows everything there is to know about sex and how to do it?

The horror

What if we are really messing with the sexuality of our children? We are putting guilt and shame into their heads instead of a good measure of how to express consent. They are not learning how to say yes  and no, and how to accept an answer. Body contacts are avoided from early age, kindergarten teachers, fathers and others keep a professional distance to children, so no child learns to appreciate intimacy. The only relationship is competition, the more aggressive the better.

Could it be that we completely lost it?