Is sexuality a choice?

Nice little video. Another gay man who is sympathetic to pedophiles (not me).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fse-zKZiyhw

Full panel here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZsnPmuYp9c

If your sexuality is a choice, then I'd say you're bloody lucky.

Those Christian extremists in the US who insist being gay is a choice... I reckon they must be bisexual if that's what they really believe. I certainly couldn't 'choose' to be attracted to a man.

People with 'deviated' sexualities often go through years of anguish and self hatred. I didn't pick necrophilia off a shelf. It's there, and I live with it, but if I could have chosen who or what to be attracted to, I'd have picked an orientation that would have given me a much better chance of finding happiness than I currently have.

Such a I tersting topic
ive actuallyput alot of thought I to this topic because I used to suffer alot of self hatred for being attracted to prepubescent girls
ive cone to the conclusion that it is both a societal and personal choipleasurable ermines our sexuality in our later years
When we experience arousal strong neural pathwaths develope in our brains
As children we have no idea what we are doing we sinply do what feels good at tge time so when we draw a line between arousal to external stimuli such as masturbating to fantasys of something we seen or experienced than pairs the pleasuable response of arousal to the act were thinking of until it becomes an autonomic response. Think pavlovs law. (Arousal has the same effect on us as cocaine)
It saddens me that so many people are plagued with self hate for something that we have no control over because the ignorant descisions of our childhood. I dont think that a stigma should be so perecuted as paedophilia. Every person has fantasized about it literally every peraon in the world. Every teen and every prepubesant child has fatasized about sex relations with an adult or someone of the same age. Which means everyone has the same neural pathways developed in our brains wheather we know it or not or wheather we willing to come out and accept it publicly

I'm convinced that it is not a choice. The problem is that normal heterosexual people and people with paraphilias have different experiences and this is due to dwindling human instincts.

Normal people experience in puberty an urge to get into the pants of the opposite sex. This urge is basically an instinct causing the one to behave irrationally. Just ask any parent of teenagers in puberty. Since they followed an instinct in partner selection, nothing cognitive went on. For them, everybody should have developed a heterosexual orientation.

Paraphilics didn't experience that urge that strong - at least not strong enough to overcome the sexual repression that exists nowadays. You might ask any men with paraphilias if he was busy chasing girls during puberty or if something held him back. During the years 8 to 16 the heterosexual behavior should manifest itself. If that does not happen, then something else gets erotizised. At that time the environment may play a role in the specifics of the paraphilia. If the company of children is experienced as non-threatening and comforting, then the company of children is preferred.

I am an exclusive pedophile and I just have to say in my own opinion that being a pedophile is a choice for me...trust me I didn't wake up one morning and say oh yeah I think I am going to get sexually aroused by young children for the rest of my life....Nope I don't think so but yet that is just my opinion. I think I was born with pedophilia. I mean how can you choose to be this way, nope that doesn't make sense at all to me.

I agree in so far as I don't think anyone wakes up one morning and thinks to themselves - 'you no wait will be a right wheeze? I'm gonna give paedophilia a go', but on the other hand I personally don't think paedophilia itself is a sexual orientation.

I think there are healthy and normal preferred age ranges within a sexual orientation, some of which might be morally and/or legally questionable. I also think there are abnormal age interests (some of which may also fall in to the healthy/normal immoral/illegal category) that are the result of some deeper mental health issues.

Although my primary interest is in pubescent teenage boys that may be considered normal/healthy for a gay male even though the age range itself is considered illegal and immoral by society, I think my interests in this material fall in to the later abnormal category due to some much deeper underlying personal issues in my childhood.

Sexuality in and of itself isn't a choice. Preferred age ranges to a lesser extent is a choice. Fixation on a particular age range at the exclusion of others, or interests in pre-pubescent, stem from other underlying issues, so while not a choice, it's also not something you are born with.

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(1 week and 1 day since last relapse)

This is has nothing to do with science at all. People with that opinion have a goal. The problem is this:

Base idea: God created us all.
Problem: If that is true, he created some people being attracted to children, homosexuality, weird sexual behaviour etc. How can that be? Is god so evil that he creates people who cannot help themselves but rape children? Or is it about testing those people especially hard, why would SOME people get such a harsh treatment, others not. And since everyone has to be judged for his/her sins, the unequal treatment of people shatters the whole religious beliefsystem. One could write another 20 pages about that.
Conclusion: It CANNOT be. God is not responsible. It MUST be a choice.

That is bad science. I am always surprised how people can actually even think about this. It's not like there is really a disscussion about such things in the "outside world" of highly religious countries as US, Russia and some others.

MikeGer wrote:Conclusion: It CANNOT be. God is not responsible. It MUST be a choice.

Ah, horrible. It is a false dichotomy. Either is given by God or it must be a choice. Another one is that one is either controlled by instincts like animals or possesses free will. Free will is an illusion, humans react irrational "by design".

My explanation is that of dwindling human instincts. Some men rape women, when they are completely drunk and lost all inhibitions. If some have too much of the sexual mating instinct, then there are also some, who have too little of it. My assumption is that one needs a healthy dose of the sexual mating instinct in order to develop a heterosexual orientation. If one has to little, one might in puberty not overcome disgust by the opposite sex or the sexual repression of current society. Then one might develop a paraphilia. Nothing of it is by choice.

I don't believe it's covered by science, but it's a very interesting idea

As far as I know it is not sure how at least SOME of those things develop. I know it about homosexuality. There are some pretty good evolutionary explainations, but there is still no certainty. In the end you have an animal that gathers genes of all sort and the end result is the possibility of being "x", be it homosexual, pedophile or a lover of "all things green and slimey" for every newborn.

I guess in a couple of years we will all know for sure. Things tend to be revealed so fast these days... isn't it amazing?