Some Aberrant Desires Are a Curse for Everyone
Posted by: Cisco
Subject tags: sexuality, psychology, human behavior
on Nov 6, 2008
I have an intellectual curiosity about things that most people don't like to talk about. My gay friends are too busy promoting gay superiority to listen to what I have to say about sexual deviance, and most heteros don't get it either. I guess that my perspective and interest has evolved out of a close familiarity with another flavor of sexual deviant. You see, my cousin (I'll refer to him as "Dave") is a heterosexual pedophile.
I know that this topic is going to horrify some readers, but I hope that it will help people to understand the torture that some people endure because of their inborn sexual desires. It might also open some parents' eyes to the risks they take when leaving their children with people they don't know (and even people they know well).
One might say that my cousin and I understand each other's pain, though his has been much greater than mine. At least I can legally satisfy my desires and I enjoy tolerance in my community. Dave lost his wife and went to jail for 2 years after an incident with a 9-year-old girl that his wife babysat. Now he's a registered sex offender and has all sorts of restrictions placed on him. (Just in case you're curious about his wife, she was 20 at the time of their divorce, but looked like she was 12).
Let me make something very clear, Dave has never raped a child or caused any lasting damage to anyone and he's not the guy in the park trolling for victims. He is guilty of taking nude photos of a girl and inappropriately touching her while posing her for photographs. There was no touching of genitals and he was fully clothed.
Yes, he did a bad thing and he was and continues to be punished for it, but his real punishment is what he lives through every day. It's hard for most of us to imagine not being able to act on our sexual desires and fantasies. Sexual deviance can be a real curse when one's desires are socially unacceptable. It wasn't too many years ago when homosexuality was taboo and gays were persecuted relentlessly. I feel very fortunate to be living in a progressive time. My friends are outraged because Californians reversed the decision to allow gay marriage, but I feel ever so lucky that this is the big issue for us.
Dave has lived a quiet life of despair and pain, purposefully isolating himself from the objects of his desire. He has been completely celibate for many years and he focuses his energies on constructive things. He's actually an amazing guy, very reflective and completely determined to suffer his fate quietly until he dies. That's a lot more than can be said for many Catholic clergymen. Dave is a volunteer carpenter for Habitat for Humanity and he is a regular donor to charities that benefit children and society.
I think that it's important to look at things from different angles. There's the social angle, the psychological angle, and the biological angle. What, I ask, is the biological difference between being gay and being sexually attracted to prepubescent girls (or boys)? How do those differ from heterosexual attraction to adult females. Biology teaches us that traits often form spectrums, with variation around a norm. Could it be that Dave and I are just unlucky biologically, because we fall outside the norm for traits associated with sexual desire? If so, it seems that we have been unfairly labeled as monsters, him more than me.
Dave is no monster, and nobody who knows him would say he is. He's a normal guy with abnormal sexual desires. What is sad for Dave (and this is something that he is very aware of) is that his desires can never be fulfilled without violating someone's rights and steeling their innocence. He can never pursue a consensual relationship with the objects of his desire. Now that's a curse!
The social angle states things very clearly. Violation of children is wrong! We all agree with that. But the psychological angle has to include the suffering that people like Dave endure, as well as that inflicted on children when pedophiles can't control their urges. Should we reserve our sympathies only for the many altar boys and other young victims that have endured violation, or is it okay to feel sorry for those who endure the relentless misfirings of their own brains?
I see so much contempt for pedophiles on the news and from people in general, and it always makes me feel like people don't really appreciate the suffering that these poor souls endure simply because their desires are aberrant. There are probably millions of people just like Dave. Some of them maintain strict control of their desires and others don't. While Dave has made mistakes, he has learned to control his behavior, but he can't purge his mind of his own thoughts. He faces a bleak reality every day, a social, psychological, and biological reality that he can't run from.
The last thing that I'll say about this topic for now is that, like me, Dave did not choose how his brain works. He sees his circumstances as a cruel twist of fate. More than anything, he wishes that he could have normal sexual desires, but it's not like there's a switch that can be turned off. When men want to experience an orgasm, they minimally have to visualize something stimulating. Nothing could be more normal, but the images that stimulate Dave's sexual response are morally reprehensible to us and to him. I hope that one day people can view these issues intellectually and without so much negative emotion. Then maybe we can focus on treatments for some very unfortunate neurological conditions that curse otherwise good people.
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written by littlefaith, November 09, 2008
I agree that we need not demonize sexual deviance, and I would even go further to state that the age at which we say consensual sex is possible is too high. I was sexually active by the time I was thirteen, and it seems if a person is biologically able to have children, that should be a stronger reason to set a cutoff, rather than our current arbitrary ideals of when a person is mentally "mature" enough. It also seems strange to me that say I were 13 and having sex with a boy that's 15, there is no crime. However, as we grow older, all of a sudden when I'm 17 and he's 19, we might now be straddling an arbitrary legal boundary, as he's above the age of consent (maybe 18 ) and I'm below.
I also believe in examining how past and present cultures other than our own have dealt with these deviances. I know that in China, very young children sometimes would marry other young children or much older adults as part of arrangements made by their parents to secure what they considered a good future for various reasons. Marriage invariably led to sexual intercourse, and no one even considered the consent of the children themselves as being of any importance. Parents as custodians were the only ones with the proper maturity to understand what would make a good match for children. While in the modern US culture, this system would be considered incredibly flawed, if not downright sadistic, yet this was the reigning system in a flourishing culture for centuries or millennia. At one time, it worked.
We seem to think that human beings and our cultural ideals are always only progressing and improving on the human condition, but I am not convinced that is true. Can we truly measure our current "happiness" to be more than that of our ancestors in some absolute sense? We in the prosperity of the US also seem to take our wealth as a sign that our culture values is also more "correct" in some way, but I don't agree with that assumption either. Our wealth and our culture both rely on the consumption of resources at an unsustainable rate.
The current emphasis on children's rights doesn't seem to make biological sense to me. The parents of children are the people who are most invested in their well-being, but in our culture we often value the advice of "experts" above that of parental instincts and we denigrate the ability of people to parent their own children by making laws to take decisions out of the hands of parents, such as education, medical care, when they can work or handle money, when they can be left alone, or even ride a car without special seats. I wish I were living in an era when my parenting was not legistlated and controlled to this degree, but I could be guided by my own judgment of my children's best interests and their maturity. Perhaps we wouldn't have so much teenage rage during those awkward years then.
I hope as you do, Cisco, that discussions like these about difficult topics can find a place to blossom without fear of backlash.
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Wow, your on quite a prolific roll--and tackling some unruly topics! I see what you meant in your warning. This stuff is not for the faint of heart. I think, however, that you presented some controversial arguments in a very intellectual way. I expect that there will be some debate on this topic.
I have two young children, so I am pretty biased when it comes to sympathy for pedophiles, but as a biologist trained in neuroscience I do see your point. I hope that your cousin is seeing a therapist, not for his biological reality, but for his psychological anguish.
I can actually understand your sympathy, as I knew a struggling pedophile in graduate school. Really nice guy, but he too slipped up a couple of times and that's what scares people. He wasn't a monster, but he was capable of some monstrous things if he didn't maintain a clear head.
We don't judge bears in Yellowstone when they ransack our camps, but we have to realize that they will do their damage if we don't guard against their mischief. I think that you make some good points and there is always room for examination of all sides, especially when, as you point out, we might help everybody involved through treatment rather than demonizing them.
Still, we have to weigh the risks against the benefits and most people are just going to sacrifice the bear to save the sandwiches. In other words, I think that sympathy is going to be a hard sell.