'Recovering Pedophile' *trigger warning*

Hello everyone. I noticed these forums quite some time ago but have been deliberately avoiding them. I don't believe that it is a good thing to actively remember the harmful things that I have done in the past although I concede that I should never, passively, forget them either.

I used to believe that I was an expert at playing with fire; that I knew better than society and even other experts. Then one day I looked deep into her eyes and I could literally see the hurt, the psychologic and emotional harm that I had inflicted upon her.

I still believe that it is naturally ok for an adult man to marry a prepubescent girl, but not in our day and age anymore, and fornicating with children, especially in our present day and generation, in no doubts, causes harm to one extent or another in my humble opinion.

So during my last stent in prison, I had no treatment, however, I forced myself to stop fantasizing and masturbating to acts with children. It was hard and I failed often, however, by the time that I got released, I had forgotten my skills of forming relationships with children. In almost a decade since I got out, I have hardly so much as even said, 'hi,' to a child I pass by on the streets.

If someone truly, truly loves children, then they would do anything to avoid whatever might cause harm to them. If billions of people are saying that sexual acts with children causes them harm, then just maybe an active pedophile should stop and think just a little bit that these acts just might be harmful to the kids. And if there is even the slightest chance that it might harm them, (and any honest, open minded person must admit to him/herself that it is possible), then for someone calling him/herself a child-lover, boy-lover, girl-lover to act on what possibley could be harmful, then that person doesn't truly love children. They love children the same way that a person might say that they love fish: if the really do love fish, then they wouldn't eat fish, they would leave the fish alone in the fish's natural environment; ocean, sea, lake, river or stream.

*Sigh* I want to request a trigger warning for depressing material, but I doubt that would happen anyway.

Your post depresses me because you are right.
Aaron and I had already made a post somewhat pertaining to this, (paraphilias/topic141174.html), but reading this kind of opened up old wounds, and again, it's because you are right.

I've never understood why this concept is so upsetting to me, but it is. Maybe I can't handle reality, or maybe I'm stubborn and I don't realize it, but I really do believe that adult-child relationships can be beneficial for both parties involved. And yet I've never touched a child. Why? I was never certain of that myself. But recently, I've realized why; I'm scared. But not of prison, not of everyone turning against me. No, what I'm scared of is that I'm wrong. I'm scared that I really can't have a sexual relationship with a child with shattering their very being, scared that they WILL be scarred in spite of my best intentions and precautions. I don't want to accept it. It defies all logic to me that something I love with all my heart will be severely harmed by be expressing my love for it. But I can't prove I'm right, and I'm too afraid of being wrong to take a chance. I would sooner go through the prison system (and all the things people like me go through therein), and die, hundreds of times over, than live once knowing a child suffered at my hands.

If someone truly, truly loves children, then they would do anything to avoid whatever might cause harm to them. If billions of people are saying that sexual acts with children causes them harm, then just maybe an active pedophile should stop and think just a little bit that these acts just might be harmful to the kids. And if there is even the slightest chance that it might harm them, (and any honest, open minded person must admit to him/herself that it is possible), then for someone calling him/herself a child-lover, boy-lover, girl-lover to act on what possible could be harmful, then that person doesn't truly love children. They love children the same way that a person might say that they love fish: if the really do love fish, then they wouldn't eat fish, they would leave the fish alone in the fish's natural environment; ocean, sea, lake, river or stream.

This quote is my entire reason for posting here. This quote is devastating for me. There is nothing more painful than being told that the best way to show that you love someone is to never show them your true feelings, and as much as I desperately want to fight this statement, I can't. Because you're probably right, and I have to consider the idea that you, and the millions upon millions of people who agree with you, have been right all along.

But what does that mean? Do I really have to stay as far away from children as possible? Is there anything I can do with a child that I can be certain will make them a happier child than if I hadn't done it with them? I love children. I know there are some people I will never convince of that, but it's the truth.

Well, that's all I had to say. You guys can get back to your lives now, sorry.

araKnid wrote:If billions of people are saying that sexual acts with children causes them harm, then just maybe an active pedophile should stop and think just a little bit that these acts just might be harmful to the kids.

First off, I don't like meaningless terms like "active pedophile". Child molesters can be pedophilic or nonpedophilic, and using terminology like that erases the overwhelming majority of child molesters out there. I refuse to let them be associated with my kind.

As to your idea that billions of people all telling one lie should make a sane person reconsider that maybe the liars are right, I believe George Orwell had something to say on that subject in 1984. The takeaway line from that book, in my view, is "Sanity is not statistical."

Now, that said, in the case of child sexuality, those billions of people are doing far more than just being passively wrong about the nature of child sexuality. They've built a culture that enforces that belief by abusing any sexually active child as much as necessary to ensure they conform to the broken rape victim stereotype.

I would never subject someone I cared about to the torture this society inflicts on sexually active children. But I'm not losing sight of where the ultimate responsibility for that harm lies. Just like I wouldn't send someone I loved down a crime ridden alley, I don't lose sight of the fact that the act would be harmless were it no for the people who are really responsible for whatever happens, and I don't stop resenting the people who make that alley unsafe despite having the compassion and presence of mind to keep my loved ones from that artificial risk.

araKnid wrote:And if there is even the slightest chance that it might harm them, (and any honest, open minded person must admit to him/herself that it is possible), then for someone calling him/herself a child-lover, boy-lover, girl-lover to act on what possibley could be harmful, then that person doesn't truly love children. They love children the same way that a person might say that they love fish: if the really do love fish, then they wouldn't eat fish, they would leave the fish alone in the fish's natural environment; ocean, sea, lake, river or stream.

Again, I take issue with your choice of framing, even if I think your specific advice about this subject is largely sound.

There is always the slightest chance that anything you do will harm someone. Drive them to soccer practice? They might get in a car accident. Take them to an amusement park? The roller coaster could go off the rails. Treating slightest chances of harm as though they were deliberate harms is not something we do about anything else in life, and isn't something we should do with sex.

Now, because there are a lot of people out there who will abuse any sexually active child, whether out of malice or out of a misguided idea that they're doing it "for their own good", we aren't talking about "the slightest chance" of harm. We're dealing with the core of our culture being dedicated to making sure those kids are harmed.

And yeah, the fact that people engage sexually with kids in a culture that will torture those kids for having done so does make me think those folks can't care about kids that much if they're willing to disregard the obvious risk.

O_O

Wow. I think we can officially list this as a triggering thread.

I think you can report a thread and just ask that a trigger warning be added to the title in the body of the report.

YouthRightsRadical wrote:Now, that said, in the case of child sexuality, those billions of people are doing far more than just being passively wrong about the nature of child sexuality. They've built a culture that enforces that belief by abusing any sexually active child as much as necessary to ensure they conform to the broken rape victim stereotype.

Ok, YouthsRightsRadical, I don't wanna discuss too much about this because I'm not even in the right mood and mental condition to write and read a lot about this topic, so I'll be very quick.
"Sexually active child"??? Are you serious?! How can you believe a child is or should be sexually active? Please tell me, cause I really fail to understand.
It's not a "rape victim" stereotype. Prepubescent children are not aware of sexuality and not capable of making decisions about sex. Period. Please. This is not a stereotype, it's a fact.
Go tell a child rape victim about it, and see what they have to say.
Personally, I find it quite offensive. I wasn't molested as a child, but I've come into contact with sex (on tv) too early, I already knew too much about sex when I was a kid and I felt corrupted and damaged, violated somehow. Even during puberty it might affect a child negatively. And even the slightest mention of sexual acivity made by kids my age made me feel uneasy.
So I somehow feel affected by it and what you said. And I'm sure victims of child rape would feel offended, too. It's not that this culture abuses "sexually active children". This culture protects children (not always, though). Keep in mind I am a pedophile while you read this.
This culture doesn't encourage to feel ashamed or raped or victim. There is no exaggeration of anything.

I would never subject someone I cared about to the torture this society inflicts on sexually active children.

I see what you mean, YRR, but I strongly disagree with this. Basically, you blame it on "culture", you're saying that if it weren't for this culture, children who somehow engage in sexual activities wouldn't feel so ashamed and violated. Is this what you're saying? You're not blaming the act itself, you're blaming how society makes children perceive it? What exactly makes you think the act itself is harmless? Children are not adults, I wish people stopped comparing children to adults. Children aren't supposed to be "sexually active". The consequences can be devastating. A child has no clue about sex. Period. A child is weak, vulnerable, easy to manipulate, and whatever is done to a child is destined to remain in their memory forever, and affects them profoundly.
I'm not saying children are not intelligent creatures. They're much smarter than adults, actually. But when it comes to certain "adult things", such as sex, they can't be compared to adults.

araKnid wrote:And if there is even the slightest chance that it might harm them, (and any honest, open minded person must admit to him/herself that it is possible), then for someone calling him/herself a child-lover, boy-lover, girl-lover to act on what possibley could be harmful, then that person doesn't truly love children. They love children the same way that a person might say that they love fish: if the really do love fish, then they wouldn't eat fish, they would leave the fish alone in the fish's natural environment; ocean, sea, lake, river or stream.

I agree with this, araKind.

There is always the slightest chance that anything you do will harm someone. Drive them to soccer practice? They might get in a car accident. Take them to an amusement park? The roller coaster could go off the rails. Treating slightest chances of harm as though they were deliberate harms is not something we do about anything else in life, and isn't something we should do with sex.

This is totally off-track.

Now, because there are a lot of people out there who will abuse any sexually active child, whether out of malice or out of a misguided idea that they're doing it "for their own good", we aren't talking about "the slightest chance" of harm. We're dealing with the core of our culture being dedicated to making sure those kids are harmed.

Huh?!? AGAIN, you're blaming culture for a damage done to children, which is actually caused by the act of sexual abuse and by whoever perpetrated that.
What should society tell those kids, that it's ok that they've been abused?? That they should feel proud or blessed, or what??

ElKahn wrote:

YouthRightsRadical wrote:Now, that said, in the case of child sexuality, those billions of people are doing far more than just being passively wrong about the nature of child sexuality. They've built a culture that enforces that belief by abusing any sexually active child as much as necessary to ensure they conform to the broken rape victim stereotype.

Ok, YouthsRightsRadical, I don't wanna discuss too much about this because I'm not even in the right mood and mental condition to write and read a lot about this topic, so I'll be very quick.

Feel free to take time away from the topic if it gets to be too much for you, and if you need to come back to it in a couple weeks when you're feeling more up to it, I'm happy to have the discussion then.

ElKahn wrote:"Sexually active child"??? Are you serious?! How can you believe a child is or should be sexually active? Please tell me, cause I really fail to understand.

Sexually active is simply a value neutral way of saying "is having sex". Children can be sexually active quite easily. It isn't even criminal most of the time when their partners are similarly aged children.

As to "should" that's a value judgement. I don't tend to think of it as something that ought to be mandatory, but I do think of it as something that ought to be allowed. That's part of the problem with the use of the word "should", since "should" implies to me something much closer to mandatory than allowed.

ElKahn wrote:It's not a "rape victim" stereotype.

The stereotype is that the person will be forever broken, unable to live a normal, happy life. The stereotype is that something important in them is dead and gone forever. The stereotype is that they're never going to stop dwelling on it, their future relationships will be poisoned, and they'll never experience any of the positive aspects we associate with childhood ever again after that point.

The fact of the matter is, the reactions of rape victims to abuse are individual, and any attempt to force them to conform to the most victimized stereotype compounds the abuse. I absolutely consider anyone who would try to foist that identity on anyone, much less a small child, to be perpetrating a heinous act of abuse.

And to push that identity on someone who doesn't feel like they were abused? How can people justify that to themselves?

ElKahn wrote:Prepubescent children are not aware of sexuality and not capable of making decisions about sex. Period. Please. This is not a stereotype, it's a fact.

Actually, that's an assumption. One not actually supported by facts.

Prepubescent children vary considerably in the degree of education or ignorance they labor under. Some are kept ignorant of sexuality by a culture that's still caught up in the victorian cult of childhood "innocence", while others know considerably more, whether through being actually taught about this aspect of life, seeking out the knowledge on their own, or through direct sexual experience of their own.

As to their capability of making decisions, can you qualify exactly what the difference is between sexual decisions, and the sorts of decisions they make all the time? Is it merely that you're treating sex as a decision with higher stakes, do you think this inability stems from your previous assumption about how ignorant they are, or do you feel there is something qualitatively different about the character of the decision?

I recognize that the entire point of the age of consent is to establish the legal fiction that anyone under that age is incapable of making informed decisions about sex, but legal fiction is not an objective law of reality.

ElKahn wrote:Go tell a child rape victim about it, and see what they have to say.

I have. More than once.

You see, I out myself as a pedophile everyplace I go online. And like clockwork when I do so, I get messages from victims of child molestation wanting to talk. "To understand what happened to them." I don't shy away from my views with them, and we've had a lot of very productive conversations.

Most of the time, they're pretty offended that what happened to them is routinely lumped in with consensual activities. The ones who said "no" typically don't like the idea that people keep ignoring that fact in order to focus on the idea that they were too young to make their own decisions. At least one that I recall has compared that act of disregarding their decision in the aftermath to the disregarding of their decision during the act itself. Basically, their rapists didn't respect their ability to make their own decisions either.

ElKahn wrote:Personally, I find it quite offensive.

I'm sorry to hear that.

ElKahn wrote:I wasn't molested as a child, but I've come into contact with sex (on tv) too early, I already knew too much about sex when I was a kid and I felt corrupted and damaged, violated somehow. Even during puberty it might affect a child negatively. And even the slightest mention of sexual acivity made by kids my age made me feel uneasy.

How did you know it was "too early" at the time? Where did these feelings of being corrupted and damaged come from? Were you cut off entirely from messages about what children should or shouldn't know about?

That you were made to internalize so much shame is a crime committed against you. The same one I've been talking about in this thread.

ElKahn wrote:So I somehow feel affected by it and what you said. And I'm sure victims of child rape would feel offended, too.

Our expectations in that regard don't line up. As I said, I'm sorry that you feel offended by what I've said, but that sympathy doesn't extend so far as to convince me that censoring myself is a reasonable course of action.

ElKahn wrote:It's not that this culture abuses "sexually active children". This culture protects children (not always, though).

Not always is right, and I think this is one of those areas where it's doing more harm than good.

ElKahn wrote:Keep in mind I am a pedophile while you read this.

I honestly don't see what that has to do with this?

ElKahn wrote:This culture doesn't encourage to feel ashamed or raped or victim. There is no exaggeration of anything.

You just got through telling me how damaged and corrupted you were made to feel, even though you weren't molested, just saw something on tv.

ElKahn wrote:

I would never subject someone I cared about to the torture this society inflicts on sexually active children.

I see what you mean, YRR, but I strongly disagree with this. Basically, you blame it on "culture", you're saying that if it weren't for this culture, children who somehow engage in sexual activities wouldn't feel so ashamed and violated. Is this what you're saying? You're not blaming the act itself, you're blaming how society makes children perceive it?

That is correct.

At least with regards to consensual activities. Obviously unwanted acts are harmful in and of themselves.

ElKahn wrote:What exactly makes you think the act itself is harmless?

Because no one has ever demonstrated harm from the act itself. Because for all the propaganda, the age of consent is not the product of a reasoned assessment of mental capabilities taken in aggregate by well founded researchers, but rather is the product of a specific late nineteenth century moral panic that was nothing more than a backlash against the burgeoning women's rights movement. Because I have asked, begged even, for anyone I've been arguing with for evidence that consensual acts are harmful void of society's reaction, and in over a decade of this coupled with my own searches, have turned up nothing.

If there were anything to this, it would have been presented at some point by now. Hell, if there were such evidence, that would be literally the first thing everyone who hates pedophiles would lead with in their argumentation, and they universally present nothing.

If you have that evidence, PLEASE give it to me so I can spread it far and wide, post it on every wikipedia article on the subject, put the references on flier designs to send to the Nation Center for Missing and Exploited Children. And on a more selfish note, so I can have something to point to and remind myself of if at any point in the future, I run across a child who's coming on to me and I need to talk them out of it.

ElKahn wrote:Children are not adults, I wish people stopped comparing children to adults.

I wish people would define what they mean by "adult" in a fashion that isn't circular.

ElKahn wrote:Children aren't supposed to be "sexually active".

That is the cultural standard, enforced in ways I find exceptionally cruel to the children who violate that standard.

ElKahn wrote:The consequences can be devastating.

They can be. I agree. I think we should be doing what we can to lessen them, because regardless of whether you or I ever lay a finger on a child, there will be some who are sexually active, whether by their choice or otherwise. And I'd rather those kids didn't have to face any more trauma than they have to.

ElKahn wrote:A child has no clue about sex. Period.

This is a dangerous message. Not only does it lead to potential child molesters deciding that since *this* child knows what sex is, they must not "really" be a child, but it also leads to things like the feeling you've reported of being damaged and corrupted by mere knowledge. As though you were somehow lesser because you learned something. That last sentence leaves such a bad taste in my mouth, as someone who considers knowledge an inherent good, that I feel like spitting.

ElKahn wrote:A child is weak, vulnerable, easy to manipulate,

If how physically strong you are or how effective you can fight off manipulation even comes up, what you are describing isn't consensual in the first place.

ElKahn wrote:and whatever is done to a child is destined to remain in their memory forever, and affects them profoundly.

Given the emphasis our culture puts on the subject (and I assume you're only talking about sex, since plenty of kids have long since forgotten the details of when they broke their arm climbing on a jungle gym or when they scraped the skin off their hand falling off a bike), you're probably right. I don't think that's a good thing.

ElKahn wrote:I'm not saying children are not intelligent creatures. They're much smarter than adults, actually. But when it comes to certain "adult things", such as sex, they can't be compared to adults.

"Adult things" is an arbitrary category. It is nothing more than a cultural construct.

ElKahn wrote:

Now, because there are a lot of people out there who will abuse any sexually active child, whether out of malice or out of a misguided idea that they're doing it "for their own good", we aren't talking about "the slightest chance" of harm. We're dealing with the core of our culture being dedicated to making sure those kids are harmed.

Huh?!? AGAIN, you're blaming culture for a damage done to children, which is actually caused by the act of sexual abuse and by whoever perpetrated that.
What should society tell those kids, that it's ok that they've been abused?? That they should feel proud or blessed, or what??

How are you using the word "abused" here? Because I'm pretty satisfied with the evidence that nonconsensual acts are inherently harmful.

YouthRightsRadical wrote:Sexually active is simply a value neutral way of saying "is having sex". Children can be sexually active quite easily. It isn't even criminal most of the time when their partners are similarly aged children.

I still believe that children who have sex (but not being abused in the traditional and literal sense of the word) are not capable of fully understanding their decisions or possible consequences, even when it seems they're "choosing" it. The damage can still be possible.

As to "should" that's a value judgement. I don't tend to think of it as something that ought to be mandatory, but I do think of it as something that ought to be allowed. That's part of the problem with the use of the word "should", since "should" implies to me something much closer to mandatory than allowed.

Then we have a different perception of what the word "should" implies.

The stereotype is that the person will be forever broken, unable to live a normal, happy life. The stereotype is that something important in them is dead and gone forever. The stereotype is that they're never going to stop dwelling on it, their future relationships will be poisoned, and they'll never experience any of the positive aspects we associate with childhood ever again after that point.

I don't think a child needs to feel like that, but still, I think it's how most of abused children (sexually and non) feel. They're not forced by anyone to feel like that, that just comes from their broken, damaged hearts. I think you underestimate how sex can damage children's lives and corrupt their minds.

The fact of the matter is, the reactions of rape victims to abuse are individual, and any attempt to force them to conform to the most victimized stereotype compounds the abuse. I absolutely consider anyone who would try to foist that identity on anyone, much less a small child, to be perpetrating a heinous act of abuse.

I can't see how this culture forces children to feel that way. I fail to see. Maybe you can give me some link or a reliable source?
What makes you think it's society that forces that identity upon children, and not the children's minds?

Actually, that's an assumption. One not actually supported by facts.

Experiences of people talking about abuse especially while prepubescent and attempting suicide as they grow up and other unpleasant things are facts.
I still strongly oppose the absurd and perverted Freudian theory of child sexuality.

Prepubescent children vary considerably in the degree of education or ignorance they labor under. Some are kept ignorant of sexuality by a culture that's still caught up in the victorian cult of childhood "innocence", while others know considerably more, whether through being actually taught about this aspect of life, seeking out the knowledge on their own, or through direct sexual experience of their own.

Well then, I'm very glad this victorian vision of child sexuality still exists.
They may seek out sexual knowledge on their own, but it still exposes them to risks because as I stated before, I don't think children are fully capable of understanding the mechanisms and emotional/physical implications of sex.
You can consider me victorian and puritanical if you want, and I admit I am, when it comes to children's innocence and stopping excessive exaltation of child sex and sex culture in general, and it's not because I'm against sex (I actually believe everybody should be sexually free and able to express their own sexuality, and I really mean EVERYBODY, especially paraphiliacs since we've always been demonized by nons), but it's because I'm against sex shoved down children's throats. And you can see it pretty much everywhere. And you can see the sexualization of children in the media. I may sound puritanical, but that's my opinion.
Again, the consequences of this behavior can be devastating.

As to their capability of making decisions, can you qualify exactly what the difference is between sexual decisions, and the sorts of decisions they make all the time? Is it merely that you're treating sex as a decision with higher stakes, do you think this inability stems from your previous assumption about how ignorant they are, or do you feel there is something qualitatively different about the character of the decision?

A decision is simply a decision. I'm not capable of expressing it otherwise and diving into complex linguistical labyrinths. All I know is that deciding to have sex is very different from deciding to, let's say, drink water instead of soda. It has to do with the quality of the difference, so yeah there is something qualitatively different. Definitely. The emotional implications coming from having sex, especially at a young age when you're not even fully aware of who you are as an individual, let alone aware of what sex implies.
I'm not treating sex as a taboo, please don't get me wrong. I'm just stating that sex ain't something that should be undervalued, especially its consequences.

I recognize that the entire point of the age of consent is to establish the legal fiction that anyone under that age is incapable of making informed decisions about sex, but legal fiction is not an objective law of reality.

I don't think there is an objective law of reality, just as I don't think there is an objective reality or truth.

You see, I out myself as a pedophile everyplace I go online. And like clockwork when I do so, I get messages from victims of child molestation wanting to talk. "To understand what happened to them." I don't shy away from my views with them, and we've had a lot of very productive conversations.

I'm glad you found conversations with them helpful. So, you should have a good understanding of the destructive consequences I was talking about.

Most of the time, they're pretty offended that what happened to them is routinely lumped in with consensual activities. The ones who said "no" typically don't like the idea that people keep ignoring that fact in order to focus on the idea that they were too young to make their own decisions. At least one that I recall has compared that act of disregarding their decision in the aftermath to the disregarding of their decision during the act itself. Basically, their rapists didn't respect their ability to make their own decisions either.

I see. I see. But what I'm trying to say when I claim that they're not fully aware is that they're not fully aware of the possible negative consequences when they have "consensual sex" with other kids. I say with other kids because there's no such thing as consensual sex between a child and an adult, since the perception that an adult has about sex is very different, so whoever takes advantage of a child is ignoring this difference and manipulating the victim. An adult should know better. That's why it's never the victim's fault.

How did you know it was "too early" at the time? Where did these feelings of being corrupted and damaged come from? Were you cut off entirely from messages about what children should or shouldn't know about?

I knew because I wasn't very aware of what sex is, why it happens, its consequences, etc.
Where did these feelings come from? I became obsessed with sex, I started having fantasies and engaged in possibly dangerous activities on the internet (chatting with adults about sex, looking for adult women and chatting with them, and I can say engaged in cybersex with them when I was 12!
I say TWELVE! I was a child, goddamn it! And even though I admit I enjoyed that back then, now I feel like I've grown up too fast, skipped an entire phase of my life, I didn't enjoy that innocence everyone talks about, the innocence and happiness of having no "adult thoughts", no responsibility, no preoccupations whatsoever. Well, the chance of being innocent and free from sexual thoughts was denied to me. Denied by myself, BECAUSE OF things on tv and somewhere else that introduced me to the world of sex too early. I skipped an entire phase of my life, and now I'm paying the consequences. Now I find myself struggling with the possibility of a porn addiction, I find myself struggling with constant sexual fantasies and it's not funny to think about sex all the time without even being able to act on my fantasies, struggling with fantasies that involve rape (me raping someone), struggling with all these overwhelmingly destructive feelings.
And it's not a guilt or shame issue, because I'm proud of being a paraphiliac.
I already had fantasies before turning 10, if I remember right.

That you were made to internalize so much shame is a crime committed against you. The same one I've been talking about in this thread.

I don't feel ashamed, just "dirty".

Our expectations in that regard don't line up. As I said, I'm sorry that you feel offended by what I've said, but that sympathy doesn't extend so far as to convince me that censoring myself is a reasonable course of action.

I don't want anyone to censor themselves. I like to hear people's opinions even when they're completely different than mine. That's what debates are for, as long as they're constructive.

I honestly don't see what that has to do with this?

Cause sometimes my opinions might sound like they're against being sexually attracted to children or against pedophilia. It's not the case, since I'm a pedophile, just like you, that's all I meant.

You just got through telling me how damaged and corrupted you were made to feel, even though you weren't molested, just saw something on tv.

Do not undervalue the damage tv can do to people, and do not belittle my feelings, please.

That is correct.

At least with regards to consensual activities. Obviously unwanted acts are harmful in and of themselves.

The difference between you and me is that you make a distinction between harmful sexual acts on children and non-harmful ones. I don't make this distinction, as I tend to consider every sexual act performed on a child is abuse, or at least, a prepubescent child.

Because no one has ever demonstrated harm from the act itself.

If an adult penetrates a 7 year old vagina/a**, yes, the act itself is harmful, both physically and emotionally. It's the same thing with every form of sex performed on a child, actually.
Children have the right to do what they want about their bodies, but they're not fully aware of what their bodies are capable of and what they can be used for, so that's why there's an age of consent and that's why there's the need to protect children.

Because for all the propaganda, the age of consent is not the product of a reasoned assessment of mental capabilities taken in aggregate by well founded researchers, but rather is the product of a specific late nineteenth century moral panic that was nothing more than a backlash against the burgeoning women's rights movement.

Alright, there's no absolute way of establishing the "right age of consent", but notice how most countries set it to where full puberty starts. There's a biological and psychological reason for this.
There was no 19th century moral panic and it has nothing to do with women's rights.

If you have that evidence, PLEASE give it to me so I can spread it far and wide, post it on every wikipedia article on the subject, put the references on flier designs to send to the Nation Center for Missing and Exploited Children. And on a more selfish note, so I can have something to point to and remind myself of if at any point in the future, I run across a child who's coming on to me and I need to talk them out of it.

Again, people's personal experiences represent an evidence.

I wish people would define what they mean by "adult" in a fashion that isn't circular.

From Wikipedia:
Biologically, an adult is a human being or other organism that has reached sexual maturity. In human context, the term adult additionally has meanings associated with social and legal concepts. In contrast to a "minor", a legal adult is a person who has attained the age of majority and is therefore regarded as independent, self-sufficient, and responsible.

They can be. I agree. I think we should be doing what we can to lessen them, because regardless of whether you or I ever lay a finger on a child, there will be some who are sexually active, whether by their choice or otherwise. And I'd rather those kids didn't have to face any more trauma than they have to.

They need to be protected in other ways, not by telling them that sex at a young age is ok.
And again, I don't think they're capable of making that choice.

This is a dangerous message. Not only does it lead to potential child molesters deciding that since *this* child knows what sex is, they must not "really" be a child, but it also leads to things like the feeling you've reported of being damaged and corrupted by mere knowledge. As though you were somehow lesser because you learned something. That last sentence leaves such a bad taste in my mouth, as someone who considers knowledge an inherent good, that I feel like spitting.

It was not mere knowledge, it was becoming obsessed with sex and engaging in possibly dangerous activities online, when I still didn't know what I wanted from life, let alone what I wanted from sex or the opposite gender.
And children who know what sex is doesn't mean they're not children, it means they've been corrupted somehow and led to grow up "too fast".

Given the emphasis our culture puts on the subject (and I assume you're only talking about sex, since plenty of kids have long since forgotten the details of when they broke their arm climbing on a jungle gym or when they scraped the skin off their hand falling off a bike), you're probably right. I don't think that's a good thing.

I'm not "probably right". I AM ABSOLUTELY RIGHT.

Adult things means things that adults do, simple as that. Check the definition of adult, the one I copied and pasted from Wikipedia. See it includes "sexually mature". Sexually mature is a biological, scientific concept.

And the "sexually active" children, as you say, well...they've already been abused in some way or another, if they engage in sexual ways - EVEN if they do it with other kids. There's still a cultural abuse here.

How are you using the word "abused" here? Because I'm pretty satisfied with the evidence that nonconsensual acts are inherently harmful.

Just in case you didn't understand this thing about me, I don't make this distinction between consensual and nonconsensual when it comes to sex with kids. To me, everything regarding child sex is NONCONSENSUAL.

ElKahn wrote:

YouthRightsRadical wrote:Sexually active is simply a value neutral way of saying "is having sex". Children can be sexually active quite easily. It isn't even criminal most of the time when their partners are similarly aged children.

I still believe that children who have sex (but not being abused in the traditional and literal sense of the word) are not capable of fully understanding their decisions or possible consequences, even when it seems they're "choosing" it. The damage can still be possible.

You and I don't disagree about the presence of the damage. We merely disagree about it's source. You think it's inherent, while I think it is externally imposed.

ElKahn wrote:

As to "should" that's a value judgement. I don't tend to think of it as something that ought to be mandatory, but I do think of it as something that ought to be allowed. That's part of the problem with the use of the word "should", since "should" implies to me something much closer to mandatory than allowed.

Then we have a different perception of what the word "should" implies.

It would seem so.

ElKahn wrote:

The stereotype is that the person will be forever broken, unable to live a normal, happy life. The stereotype is that something important in them is dead and gone forever. The stereotype is that they're never going to stop dwelling on it, their future relationships will be poisoned, and they'll never experience any of the positive aspects we associate with childhood ever again after that point.

I don't think a child needs to feel like that, but still, I think it's how most of abused children (sexually and non) feel. They're not forced by anyone to feel like that, that just comes from their broken, damaged hearts. I think you underestimate how sex can damage children's lives and corrupt their minds.

And I think you underestimate how much society's judgement and condemnation can damage children's lives.

ElKahn wrote:

The fact of the matter is, the reactions of rape victims to abuse are individual, and any attempt to force them to conform to the most victimized stereotype compounds the abuse. I absolutely consider anyone who would try to foist that identity on anyone, much less a small child, to be perpetrating a heinous act of abuse.

I can't see how this culture forces children to feel that way. I fail to see. Maybe you can give me some link or a reliable source?
What makes you think it's society that forces that identity upon children, and not the children's minds?

If you're interested, I can track down some testimonials from folks who had sex as kids, experienced no immediate negative consequences, then years later learned that it was a taboo thing and retroactively assigned abusive qualities to the previously positively remembered act.

Is this the sort of thing you're looking for, or would I be wasting my time retrieving those? Honestly, I'd be surprised you hadn't run across similar testimonials yourself, so my initial thought is that they're probably not what you're looking for.

ElKahn wrote:

Actually, that's an assumption. One not actually supported by facts.

Experiences of people talking about abuse especially while prepubescent and attempting suicide as they grow up and other unpleasant things are facts.

No, they're anecdotes. And have nothing to do with the claims you were making about what children do and don't know in this section. This section was about you making claims about knowledge and decisionmaking, not about subsequent consequences.

Beyond that, I've read testimonials of that type. They're typically from folks who didn't agree to the sex acts in question.

ElKahn wrote:I still strongly oppose the absurd and perverted Freudian theory of child sexuality.

I oppose it soely on the grounds of it being bad science. How do you feel about Paiget?

ElKahn wrote:

Prepubescent children vary considerably in the degree of education or ignorance they labor under. Some are kept ignorant of sexuality by a culture that's still caught up in the victorian cult of childhood "innocence", while others know considerably more, whether through being actually taught about this aspect of life, seeking out the knowledge on their own, or through direct sexual experience of their own.

Well then, I'm very glad this victorian vision of child sexuality still exists.

Obviously, I disagree. I think anything that actively works to enforce ignorance rather than enlightenment is an enemy of mankind.

ElKahn wrote:They may seek out sexual knowledge on their own, but it still exposes them to risks because as I stated before, I don't think children are fully capable of understanding the mechanisms and emotional/physical implications of sex.

The mechanisms and physical implications are pretty straightforward. They're less complicated than the old "touch hot stove, hand burns" concept we work to impart to three year olds. Admittedly, pregnancy is somewhat more complicated due to the delay between the act and the onset of physical symptoms, but for prepubescents, that isn't a concern yet anyway.

ElKahn wrote:You can consider me victorian and puritanical if you want, and I admit I am, when it comes to children's innocence and stopping excessive exaltation of child sex and sex culture in general, and it's not because I'm against sex (I actually believe everybody should be sexually free and able to express their own sexuality, and I really mean EVERYBODY, especially paraphiliacs since we've always been demonized by nons),

I put children in the category of "EVERYBODY", so I don't agree with the way you characterize your position.

ElKahn wrote:but it's because I'm against sex shoved down children's throats. And you can see it pretty much everywhere. And you can see the sexualization of children in the media. I may sound puritanical, but that's my opinion.
Again, the consequences of this behavior can be devastating.

I agree that forcing sex on kids is wrong regardless of the culture.

ElKahn wrote:

As to their capability of making decisions, can you qualify exactly what the difference is between sexual decisions, and the sorts of decisions they make all the time? Is it merely that you're treating sex as a decision with higher stakes, do you think this inability stems from your previous assumption about how ignorant they are, or do you feel there is something qualitatively different about the character of the decision?

A decision is simply a decision. I'm not capable of expressing it otherwise and diving into complex linguistical labyrinths. All I know is that deciding to have sex is very different from deciding to, let's say, drink water instead of soda. It has to do with the quality of the difference, so yeah there is something qualitatively different. Definitely.

This answers my question. I'm not trying to complicate the discussion, and I hope you don't think that's what I'm aiming for.

ElKahn wrote:The emotional implications coming from having sex, especially at a young age when you're not even fully aware of who you are as an individual, let alone aware of what sex implies.

Are these emotional implications something we can define as adults? Likewise, can us adults go ahead and explain what sex implies? Because those seem like pretty subjective things that most adults don't have any better grip on than kids do.

I wold also tend to disagree with your characterization of children as not being aware who they are as individuals.

ElKahn wrote:I'm not treating sex as a taboo, please don't get me wrong. I'm just stating that sex ain't something that should be undervalued, especially its consequences.

Whereas I think it's currently overvalued, which leads to most of the consequences.

ElKahn wrote:

I recognize that the entire point of the age of consent is to establish the legal fiction that anyone under that age is incapable of making informed decisions about sex, but legal fiction is not an objective law of reality.

I don't think there is an objective law of reality, just as I don't think there is an objective reality or truth.

The whole point of a legal fiction is that even the people writing the law know that isn't how the world actually works. They make the law that we have to pretend things are a certain way to streamline the courts' jobs.

ElKahn wrote:

You see, I out myself as a pedophile everyplace I go online. And like clockwork when I do so, I get messages from victims of child molestation wanting to talk. "To understand what happened to them." I don't shy away from my views with them, and we've had a lot of very productive conversations.

I'm glad you found conversations with them helpful. So, you should have a good understanding of the destructive consequences I was talking about.

I do indeed. And that's been part of the driving force behind my desire to see those destructive consequences stopped, and our culture reformed so that what they went through don't have to happen to others in the future.

ElKahn wrote:

Most of the time, they're pretty offended that what happened to them is routinely lumped in with consensual activities. The ones who said "no" typically don't like the idea that people keep ignoring that fact in order to focus on the idea that they were too young to make their own decisions. At least one that I recall has compared that act of disregarding their decision in the aftermath to the disregarding of their decision during the act itself. Basically, their rapists didn't respect their ability to make their own decisions either.

I see. I see. But what I'm trying to say when I claim that they're not fully aware is that they're not fully aware of the possible negative consequences when they have "consensual sex" with other kids.

As an adult, are you fully aware of the possible negative consequences of consensual sex with another adult? Is there any particular reason you couldn't articulate those in terms a child could understand?

ElKahn wrote:I say with other kids because there's no such thing as consensual sex between a child and an adult, since the perception that an adult has about sex is very different, so whoever takes advantage of a child is ignoring this difference and manipulating the victim. An adult should know better.

I don't agree that the differences between how a child and adult view sex are greater than the differences between how to different adults or two different children view sex.

ElKahn wrote:That's why it's never the victim's fault.

That's a platitude. I hate to point that out, but this phrase is so fundamentally meaningless. By using the word "victim", you're assuming the very thing you're arguing about in the first place. By using the word "fault" you bake in the assumption that something bad has happened that we need to find someone to blame for.

ElKahn wrote:

How did you know it was "too early" at the time? Where did these feelings of being corrupted and damaged come from? Were you cut off entirely from messages about what children should or shouldn't know about?

I knew because I wasn't very aware of what sex is, why it happens, its consequences, etc.
Where did these feelings come from? I became obsessed with sex, I started having fantasies and engaged in possibly dangerous activities on the internet (chatting with adults about sex, looking for adult women and chatting with them, and I can say engaged in cybersex with them when I was 12!
I say TWELVE! I was a child, goddamn it! And even though I admit I enjoyed that back then, now I feel like I've grown up too fast, skipped an entire phase of my life, I didn't enjoy that innocence everyone talks about, the innocence and happiness of having no "adult thoughts", no responsibility, no preoccupations whatsoever. Well, the chance of being innocent and free from sexual thoughts was denied to me. Denied by myself, BECAUSE OF things on tv and somewhere else that introduced me to the world of sex too early. I skipped an entire phase of my life, and now I'm paying the consequences. Now I find myself struggling with the possibility of a porn addiction, I find myself struggling with constant sexual fantasies and it's not funny to think about sex all the time without even being able to act on my fantasies, struggling with fantasies that involve rape (me raping someone), struggling with all these overwhelmingly destructive feelings.
And it's not a guilt or shame issue, because I'm proud of being a paraphiliac.
I already had fantasies before turning 10, if I remember right.

That period of innocence, that phase of life you're talking about, is a myth. No one actually experiences that. That is a product of jaded adults looking back at mostly forgotten childhoods and at current children with the skewed prospective of that old "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" cognitive fault humans have going.

These myths about childhood serve to make everyone feel inadequite because no real human's life can live up to those myths. It's like the "high school is the best years of your life" thing people spread around despite high school having been fundamentally an aweful experience for a massive number of people, and the years after having been far kinder to most of us due to being able to choose the direction of our lives and exclude toxic and destructive people from our social circles in a way that was impossible during high school.

ElKahn wrote:

That you were made to internalize so much shame is a crime committed against you. The same one I've been talking about in this thread.

I don't feel ashamed, just "dirty".

We may have another terminology disconnect. In my experience, feeling "dirty" is basically synonomous with shame.

ElKahn wrote:

Our expectations in that regard don't line up. As I said, I'm sorry that you feel offended by what I've said, but that sympathy doesn't extend so far as to convince me that censoring myself is a reasonable course of action.

I don't want anyone to censor themselves. I like to hear people's opinions even when they're completely different than mine. That's what debates are for, as long as they're constructive.

I'm glad to hear it.

ElKahn wrote:

I honestly don't see what that has to do with this?

Cause sometimes my opinions might sound like they're against being sexually attracted to children or against pedophilia. It's not the case, since I'm a pedophile, just like you, that's all I meant.

Fair enough.

I tend to think of the issue of child sexuality and age of consent as completely separate from issues relating to pedophilia. I think of them as the youth rights issues they are. (Pointing at my handle, I do recognize that my positions on youth rights subjects is very different from the current standard.)

ElKahn wrote:

You just got through telling me how damaged and corrupted you were made to feel, even though you weren't molested, just saw something on tv.

Do not undervalue the damage tv can do to people, and do not belittle my feelings, please.

I'm not trying to belittle your feelings. I know full well that the media can cause a lot of damage to a person's self-image and feeling of self-worth. That's what I've been talking about all thread after all.

I was trying to point out that sex isn't the most obvious source of the harm if you were experiencing similar harms without having had sex. But you were exposed to the media and its cultural messages about children and sexuality.

ElKahn wrote:

That is correct.

At least with regards to consensual activities. Obviously unwanted acts are harmful in and of themselves.

The difference between you and me is that you make a distinction between harmful sexual acts on children and non-harmful ones. I don't make this distinction, as I tend to consider every sexual act performed on a child is abuse, or at least, a prepubescent child.

More accurately, I make a distinction between sex acts performed with a child that are inherently harmful, and sex acts performed with a child that are harmful only because of the cultural context in which they take place. I don't claim either of them is harmless in this culture.

ElKahn wrote:

Because no one has ever demonstrated harm from the act itself.

If an adult penetrates a 7 year old vagina/a**, yes, the act itself is harmful, both physically and emotionally. It's the same thing with every form of sex performed on a child, actually.

Do you consider mutual masturbation a sex act? If so, how is that physically harmful?

ElKahn wrote:Children have the right to do what they want about their bodies, but they're not fully aware of what their bodies are capable of and what they can be used for, so that's why there's an age of consent and that's why there's the need to protect children.

That's them not having the right to do what they want about their bodies.

ElKahn wrote:

Because for all the propaganda, the age of consent is not the product of a reasoned assessment of mental capabilities taken in aggregate by well founded researchers, but rather is the product of a specific late nineteenth century moral panic that was nothing more than a backlash against the burgeoning women's rights movement.

Alright, there's no absolute way of establishing the "right age of consent", but notice how most countries set it to where full puberty starts.

First off, there's no such thing as "full puberty" much less a start to that. Secondly, most countries set it well after the onset of puberty.

ElKahn wrote:There's a biological and psychological reason for this.

No, the reason for its location is political. Try to set it any higher and you won't get the minimum level of compliance required for the law to be treated as legitimate. Basically, it's set at the point where sex becomes such a biological imperative for people that the nationstate in question is no longer confident of its ability to enforce celibacy.

ElKahn wrote:There was no 19th century moral panic and it has nothing to do with women's rights.

There most certainly was a 19th century moral panic. The age of consent was raised to its current position in the United States over a period of about thirty years (due to the way age of consent is handled on a state by state basis, things happened incredibly fast by the standards of similar initiatives) starting in 1890. Writings from the time, most notably by a group known as the Women's Christian Temperance Union, advocated for raising the age of consent explicitly in response to the increased number of women entering the workforce, and growing concern that such women who were now working outside the home might have sex outside of wedlock if they were allowed to be around men in the workforce.

ElKahn wrote:

If you have that evidence, PLEASE give it to me so I can spread it far and wide, post it on every wikipedia article on the subject, put the references on flier designs to send to the Nation Center for Missing and Exploited Children. And on a more selfish note, so I can have something to point to and remind myself of if at any point in the future, I run across a child who's coming on to me and I need to talk them out of it.

Again, people's personal experiences represent an evidence.

I'd very much like to read the testimonials you're claiming to have read, because none of the ones I've encountered over the years supported the conclusion you're advocating. I'm open to being educated.

ElKahn wrote:

I wish people would define what they mean by "adult" in a fashion that isn't circular.

From Wikipedia:
Biologically, an adult is a human being or other organism that has reached sexual maturity. In human context, the term adult additionally has meanings associated with social and legal concepts. In contrast to a "minor", a legal adult is a person who has attained the age of majority and is therefore regarded as independent, self-sufficient, and responsible.

In that case, children are not adults merely because you've defined them to not be adults. That isn't an argument and it says nothing about how valid any given comparison might be.

ElKahn wrote:

They can be. I agree. I think we should be doing what we can to lessen them, because regardless of whether you or I ever lay a finger on a child, there will be some who are sexually active, whether by their choice or otherwise. And I'd rather those kids didn't have to face any more trauma than they have to.

They need to be protected in other ways, not by telling them that sex at a young age is ok.
And again, I don't think they're capable of making that choice.

And I think telling them that it's not okay is part of why they're as traumatized as they are by it when it happens.

ElKahn wrote:

This is a dangerous message. Not only does it lead to potential child molesters deciding that since *this* child knows what sex is, they must not "really" be a child, but it also leads to things like the feeling you've reported of being damaged and corrupted by mere knowledge. As though you were somehow lesser because you learned something. That last sentence leaves such a bad taste in my mouth, as someone who considers knowledge an inherent good, that I feel like spitting.

It was not mere knowledge, it was becoming obsessed with sex and engaging in possibly dangerous activities online, when I still didn't know what I wanted from life, let alone what I wanted from sex or the opposite gender.

I thought you said it was that you saw something on TV that corrupted you and left you feeling dirty. Now you're saying that the problem was some other behavior you were engaged in after that point? Am I misunderstanding you?

ElKahn wrote:And children who know what sex is doesn't mean they're not children, it means they've been corrupted somehow and led to grow up "too fast".

If you've "grown up too fast" that implies you have indeed grown up. That's how you get to the logic of "corrupted children don't need to be protected", which I hope we both agree is not a line of thinking we want to encourage.

ElKahn wrote:

Given the emphasis our culture puts on the subject (and I assume you're only talking about sex, since plenty of kids have long since forgotten the details of when they broke their arm climbing on a jungle gym or when they scraped the skin off their hand falling off a bike), you're probably right. I don't think that's a good thing.

I'm not "probably right". I AM ABSOLUTELY RIGHT.

Eh, it's not really worth arguing the point given how close we are to broad disagreement on this.

ElKahn wrote:Adult things means things that adults do, simple as that. Check the definition of adult, the one I copied and pasted from Wikipedia.

So adult things include walking, talking, playing games, reading storybooks, and spending time with people who love you. Because those are things adults do. That's why I told you there was a problem with the term's definition in the way you are using it.

ElKahn wrote:See it includes "sexually mature". Sexually mature is a biological, scientific concept.

Sexually mature means is biologically capable of reproducing, which happens in humans a hell of a long time before the age of consent in every nation that has an age of consent.

Again, adulthood is an arbitrary cultural construct. Have you read the Myth of the Adulthood Fairy? I find it covers the basic problems of how we define adulthood pretty well.

ElKahn wrote:And the "sexually active" children, as you say, well...they've already been abused in some way or another, if they engage in sexual ways - EVEN if they do it with other kids. There's still a cultural abuse here.

Since you don't agree with me that our culture harms sexually active children, can you clarify what you mean by "a cultural abuse"? My initial reading was as something agreeing with my previous thesis, but in context that doesn't fit with the rest of your argument.

ElKahn wrote:

How are you using the word "abused" here? Because I'm pretty satisfied with the evidence that nonconsensual acts are inherently harmful.

Just in case you didn't understand this thing about me, I don't make this distinction between consensual and nonconsensual when it comes to sex with kids. To me, everything regarding child sex is NONCONSENSUAL.

Do you understand the distinction I'm making, even if you don't agree with it?

So, ElKhan and YRR, is this like a regular thing for you guys? I have a feeling you've done this before. In any case, there are a couple of things I'd like to say myself to each of you, if you don't mind.

@ YouthRightsRadical

You see, I out myself as a pedophile everyplace I go online. And like clockwork when I do so, I get messages from victims of child molestation wanting to talk. "To understand what happened to them." I don't shy away from my views with them, and we've had a lot of very productive conversations.

You, sir, are brave, perhaps a bit too brave for your own good. I admire that. Both Levi and myself have wished for awhile to talk with sexual abuse survivors (particularly, ones in which they had not necessarily been forced), because we believe that if we understood why the experience affected them so negatively, we would have a better understanding of our opponents' point of view that sexual activity harms children. I'm glad to know that you have had a greater deal of success than we have.

That period of innocence, that phase of life you're talking about, is a myth. No one actually experiences that. That is a product of jaded adults looking back at mostly forgotten childhoods and at current children with the skewed prospective of that old "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" cognitive fault humans have going.

I'm afraid I must disagree with you, YRR. Most children are somewhat naive and do in fact view the world in a more positive light than adults; a view that, if shattered suddenly, could be understandably damaging to the child.

@ElKhan

A child has no clue about sex. Period. A child is weak, vulnerable, easy to manipulate, and whatever is done to a child is destined to remain in their memory forever, and affects them profoundly.

There are many teens and adults who are also weak, vulnerable, and easy to manipulate -- my alter Levi is one of them -- and yet they can consent to sexual activity. While I agree that a child is likely to to be the "weaker" of the two in a contact with an adult, to say that that makes a relationship with a child inherently abusive is to imply that the adult will inherently take advantage of their superior knowledge and power to force or manipulate the child, which may not be the case.

If an adult penetrates a 7 year old vagina/a**, yes, the act itself is harmful, both physically and emotionally. It's the same thing with every form of sex performed on a child, actually.
Children have the right to do what they want about their bodies, but they're not fully aware of what their bodies are capable of and what they can be used for, so that's why there's an age of consent and that's why there's the need to protect children.

While I agree fully that penetrative acts are very dangerous for children and can cause them serious (physical) harm, I'd have hard time declaring the same to be true for "lesser" acts, such as touching (I'm not certain as to what you mean by "emotional" harm). Furthermore, children do not need to be aware of all aspects of sexual activity, just the aspects that are involved in whatever they are doing sexually (e.x. An encounter that only involves light fondling should only require that the child know what fondling is and the type of physical and emotional feelings that are generally associated with it, as well as what to do if the feelings they are experiencing do not match up with the associated feelings, or if they want the interaction to stop for other reasons). I believe that basic and proper sexual education (meaning that talks about the feelings involved during sex as well as to what sex is for), should be more than sufficient in accomplishing this task.

From Wikipedia:
Biologically, an adult is a human being or other organism that has reached sexual maturity. In human context, the term adult additionally has meanings associated with social and legal concepts. In contrast to a "minor", a legal adult is a person who has attained the age of majority and is therefore regarded as independent, self-sufficient, and responsible.

This isn't really an argument so much as a recommendation. In general, Wikipedia is viewed as an unreliable source of information, as anyone who has access to internet can come along an edit it. As such, it's generally not considered a valid source for research papers and I would imagine that the same would hold true for a serious debate as well. Just something to consider in the future.


That is all. Sorry if my arguments aren't very strong, I'm kinda new to this whole debate thing.