Good! It belong here! I recall that we have discussed this theme. I don't recall that someone has mentioned that he has molested children. That is a courageous confession.kristoff wrote: Thu Jul 31, 2008 2:16 pm Definitely not the first of its kind...
This is a topic that has been debated many times over several years here.
I'll see if I can find some of the old links later.
My first grade teacher used to call us little people. That was both correct and wrong. Children live in a qualitatively difference world than adults. Piaget and others demonstrated that clearly.
I recall childhood vividly. I think that I recall it better than the last decade, but we embellish and change our memories even as we remember. I do know that I always felt sexual. I felt attraction to adult women for a long time--I know that I had fantasies about what we essentially intercourse with adult women when I was five or six years old. I really wanted to be with women in their twenties and older.
In fact, I had sexual fantasies (meaning masturbation fantasies about the mother of a playmate friend. Many years later, I learned that she probably sexually abused him. I was her without clothing enough to have some idea aboot what I wanted to do with her.
There was not one to discuss any of this. I recall feeling very alone about sexual desire. We don’t talk to children about sex--at least no one did until I was at the edge of puberty and that was much too late.
When I grew up, I knew why we don’t talk about sex with children. At least, I guess that I did. We rightly fear violating children and what we assume is their innocence. What children have is not exactly innocence but childhood, experiences that are suitable to the understanding of children.
Children do not usually do what we think of as abstract thought until (in our culture) eleven, though Tuesday Weld seems to have know a different world. I liked children and I liked being around them. I was the oldest child in a large family and the presence of children was just part of life. I understand affection for children. But they always seemed part of another world, one in the past, not part of the presence. You don’t form crushes on girls part of another generational cohort, even one close to your own. At least, one assumed this. But that is not the case obviously for everyone.
My wife told me that I was fortunate that I was not attracted to children. Thirteen-year-old girls used to form crushes on me. Most of them outgrew that by age fifteen. They completely outgrew them by the time they were in their twenties.
But I feel for those who are attracted to children. Sexual desire is an irrational force. It must be heartbreaking.
We need to be able to talk about such matters and we seem completely unable to do that. I hope that there are therapists who can, but even at that I wonder where are those with empathy for those who sexually violate children.
I spent some years on the edge of working with men convicted of domestic abuse. What I recall were men emotionally arrested at about three-years-old. I don’t know what plays with pedophiles. I assume it is something in plain sight that I have not yet seen. I know that they cause harm.
But if we cannot show humanity to pedophiles, we will never grasp the problem. Maybe the rest of us are just lucky that our sexual road maps took us other places. .
But the differences are qualitative. The world of the child and the world of an adult are not the same world. We are product of developmental processes. I rejoice that someone has the courage to become a eunuch for children, for his potential victims.
Thank you. 