I think it's worth it for those of us who take a highly restrictive stance on pedophilia to try to get ahead of the curve on the conversation this time.

All the materials for a successful (and bad) revolution are just lying around:

1.

Massive shame (the self-hatred type, the "holding your value hostage" type, which is always bad) for people who didn't ask to "feel what they feel."

Rather than separating between the shame, the feeling, and the action, the discourse tends to lump them together at every step, first for the purpose of shaming, then (when we realize that the Offender actually has a precious soul) for the purposes of protecting.

We should be making this separation always and for every issue anyways, no matter how strongly (or violently) we oppose this or that, but we have extra impetus when the Discourse is always trying to resolve the "contradiction of shame" by affirming new actions.

2.

"Is it a choice or is it biology?"

I didn't think it was gonna come up in pedophilia discourse but people are more committed to this dichotomy than I realized. One or two of the big accounts I follow were arguing over it a few months ago!

We should begin, first, by recognizing that this is *usually* a proxy question for "Should people who feel this way hate themselves for it."

The answer is a resounding No. That ought to be loud and clear and it isn't.

The other thing it's a proxy question for is, "Should people who feel this way like idk chop themselves up psychologically and stuff and 'repress' so as to stop feeling what they're feeling."

The answer here, too, is a resounding No, with the caveat that if someone is in a situation where they might do some real damage I don't care so much how they persuade themselves to get out of there. Get out of there and figure out the motivations later.

But the stuffing and the 'repressing' and the psychological deadening maneuvers are the opposite of Christ's maneuvers of quickening and investigating and untwisting so that things can finally be healed, repented of, forgiven, or otherwise dealt with.

This is especially important for the people with the desires tending most towards destruction, because there's almost always something precious locked away behind the twisted impulse. People trying to recover their lost childhood, their lost virtue, their very bodies.

That's why, to so many people, the perversion feels like hope, or home, or finally grasping at life, or an overpowering need, not to mention that there's the sheer relief of letting oneself off the hook for a minute.

All of us need to love our flesh enough to be present for its desires while not letting them rule us. I don't mean that we need to like bask in every desire while simultaneously exerting great energy to resist it.

I mean that we need to be able to sit with the parts of ourselves that feel this or that and invite Christ into those places. When we resist something, we will aim to do so eagerly but without the "self control" that is from the devil, the "self manipulation" or "self wankery".

If we can't do that then we're just playing psychological whackamole, which is a game of the devil, and e.g. the LGTBQ and (before that) the pro-divorce-freedom movements have been entirely justified in hating it.

Anyways, what's probably gonna happen is that someone's gonna do a study (or has already done a study) that found some brain differences in people who profess a sexual interest in children (duh, that's a tautology),

or a gene that makes a person more susceptible to it (what are the chances that NO genes have an impact?), and there will be a bunch of irrelevant hooplah.

But dealing with the proxy questions will cut through 95% of that. All that's left is a factual question of whether you're stuck with these desires (biologically, or for some other reason) or can make choices to escape them or at least nullify their power.

I'm obviously pretty solidly in camp "there are some choices you can make," but most people don't know what those choices are and don't (yet) have the confidence to follow through on them despite their (most likely regular) failures in confidence.

but maybe it will be enough for the Discourse (and thus the laws, etc.) if there's grace and patience, so people won't think their friends and family members (or their own selves) will be beyond life and love until their desires are justified.

3.

Edge cases, some of which have been very poorly handled for generations (lady in my church, her nephew went to prison for 7 years for sleeping with his 16yo girlfriend; he was 18).

People will try to exploit these (or already are I'm sure). Obviously worth a) not handling them poorly, inasmuch as it's up to any of us and b) not talking in a way that would presume that i. edge cases don't exist and ii. there's nothing arbitrary in how we handle them.

4.

Scared/shamed/confused children.

"Once I realized that it was OK, I finally accepted my feelings for [insert older person]."

I actually knew a girl in high school who was obsessed with her youth pastor and was bothered by how people talked about her because of it. There's also Milo, with his oddly affectionate portrayal of the priest who molested him.

I saw a twitter thread just the other day where someone I follow was talking about how much guilt she had felt for her childhood interest in and involvement with older men on the internet.

Answer here is the same as before imo. Remove the flak from the air. Remove the shame and confusion.

5.

Denied or invisible sexualities / agencies.

I think a lot of what the creepy and bad hows on netflix are trying to get at is that

people at a young age can and often do have plenty of sexual feelings and interests. This is real and probably needs to be engaged with on some level besides "Be Hannah Montana until you're 21" or "ignore it and be ignored" or "make sure you stay pure."

A lot of teens find this vacuum to be deeply destructive, and I don't think it's hard to see why.

But since our culture is insane, netflix has engaged with this by making cartoons (and then live action movies!) that depict teens doing sexual things.

So I think if the pedophilia discourse moves in a bad direction, this is one of the things it may very well seize on. That kids have like a decade or more, in some cases, of being partially invisible, while they're trying to figure out who they are. Not good!

Also I wouldn't be surprised if some articles come around questioning how "consent" can be so strictly regulated. And they'll make some good points, because it's not always the case that young teens and even children are completely without agency or awareness.*

*obviously not to lay any blame at their feet. It's a Catch-22 if you think about it the wrong way because someone feels like they have to claim agency to ... well, have agency ... and like they have to claim non-agency to have innocence.

And it's also the case that "consent" as like the one identifying factor for which sexual activity is allowed is fake. There are other concerns. Hell they may even reach back to like more corporate forms of consent ...

you're not making the decision to enter into a relationship on your own, your family and community are there with you.

Combine this with "aren't our rules kind of arbitrary anyways" and the slide may start to look a lot more reasonable.

There may even be some places to give way here. if our rules are arbitrary there are almost certainly places where they could be arbitrary in a slightly different way.

so I guess ... I don't want anyone to be surprised if they start hearing these things and thinking some of them sound kinda reasonable, and then because of the surprise give undue credence to the ... motte? Or the bailey? Whichever one is the bad goal.

6.

The pervasiveness of child sexual exploitation.

What is it, like 25% of girls and 33% of boys end up molested? Or maybe that's over a whole lifetime.

And there are communities where the question isn't "whether" but "how young was the first time."

And that means that a lot (not nearly 25% or 33% but still a lot) of adults *and other children* are doing the exploitation.

I don't know how many people I know who were messing around with other kids when they were kids, older, same age, younger, friends, family, etc.

And when they finally like brought that into the light it was one of the biggest steps forward and releasing of shame and lies about their character.

I'm not saying no kid who's doing that has character issues, especially as the age gap widens. but there's a lot of bad shame and really destructive lies attached to it too.

(there are a lot of things you learn, btw, when you're in a church where like graceful and intentional confession is practiced!)

Reason I bring it up is because a) I think it matters anyways and b) sometimes the invisible regularity of that experience seems like a giant bubble waiting to burst. Usually I think it bursts by people being especially reactive to anything within a 10 mile radius

of their experience of pain. But just like a person that is abused may have a special temptation to abuse in turn, a whole culture that is being abused (and/or took part in abuse as a child) will have a special temptation to abuse.

The shame that works one way can work the other way at the same time.

I wouldn't be surprised if somehow it became apparent that this was part of what's behind all the netflix crap. But I think it could come out in the open, too. Maybe, idk, "Everyone does it" or "This is part of life"

or "I lived through it and it wasn't so bad" (some people do feel that way) or "Honestly I was happy in that relationship / with those experiences" (probably some people are, very easy to be happy in Chernobyl).

Maybe it would be easy to normalize since it's already so normal (=common) and yet at the same time hidden, hard even for the *victims* to talk about without feeling shamed, attacked, etc.

Anyways, there are probably other ways the Discourse could develop, but these are some ways I thought of.

Hopefully it won't happen, but I've decided not to bank on it not happening. Our culture has been grasping at straws for The True Sexual Reality and Wholeness for a long while without finding what it seeks,

so as unreasonable as it seems maybe a decade from now President Harris will be apologizing for crude remarks about pedophiles in 2010.

And anyways I think these things are worth talking about, even if the Discourse never seizes on them as a justification, because there's a lot of stuff that's happening invisibly and not being dealt with afterwards.