VirPed Panel: 02 September 2024

Anonymous asks:

For pedophiles who discovered or accepted their pedophilia later in life, why do you think that is? Was it due to a conscious suppression or other reasons?

I first discovered my pedophilia when I was 54 years old. I am now almost 70. Looking back, it was there from puberty, but I was interpreting it as just a strong case of the fondness many adults feel for children.

I am a highly non-exclusive pedophile, meaning I have had strong attractions to women my own age up through my 20s and 30s. I eagerly sought sex with partners when I could and masturbated while fantasizing about them when I couldn’t. As it turns out, my sexual attraction to young girls is even stronger. Baked into my world view was that thinking sexual thoughts about young girls was forbidden, and I was not even aware of the thoughts. Perhaps this accomplishment was helped because I am quite a controlled person, deeply committed to doing no harm to others, and not at all impulsive. It helped that I had a strong sexual desire for women my own age, hoping to find one I could marry (which I did, and we had 3 daughters before divorcing). It helped keeping the sex drive controlled by frequent masturbation. Somehow I hid from myself the sexual component of how I felt about small girls.

Like most boys I was attracted to girls my age growing up. As I passed into my older teens, I retained my attraction to girls as young as age 13. But I thought that was just normal. The men who deny any attraction to that age group were fooling themselves, I thought (and still do). When in my 40s I reflected that 8th grade girls were about the sexiest ones around, it didn’t strike me as unusual. My few male friendships rarely included talking about what classes of females we found most alluring. But today I do think that finding 8th grade to be the sexiest age for girls is unusual – but still think that straight men denying any attraction at all to that age are fooling themselves. But I always believed that attraction to prepubescent girls, of age 10 or below, was “sick” and that surely didn’t include me.

I was really fascinated by some young girls, but told myself that adults often felt a delight in children, and I just had a stronger-than-usual dose of that. If a girl actually took my breath away, that was just part of the stronger-than-usual dose, right? I (and everyone else) is eager to know how I could have this strong underlying sexual attraction but not feel it. Who else might be confused on this point? Compare how teen boys and girls react to each other in certain cultures where they have no idea what sex is. Unless they “make out”, there might not even be any arousal or erections – just a strong infatuation with the other. That is how I felt towards my favorite small girls.

I liked young children (mostly the girls) and was often their favorite grown-up, finding things they liked and conveying to them just how wonderful I thought they were. I started volunteering naturally with children when my own girls were that age. But I kept volunteering with younger ones even as my own girls got older. That ended when I was 50, four years before my pedophile realization. When my youngest daughter was 14 years old, it was a stretch to justifying working with the 3-year-olds based on being “one of the daddies”, and society (circa 2004) was getting more suspicious and vigilant overall about older men volunteering to work with children. I knew to be worried about being tagged as a weirdo and potential molester, even before I knew that I had a key attribute (but just one) that could make me a molester. I haven’t volunteered with children since.

For most of my life I masturbated with my eyes shut, based on memories of girls in my life. Pictures were only rarely involved. But around 2006 I discovered the vast variety of pictures on the web. At first this was mostly soft-core porn of adults. Later, it extended to sports teams, parties, and family blogs. The closest thing to an “aha!” moment I had was looking at a family of girls in bathing suits, let’s say ages 14, 10, and 6. While entertaining a fantasy about the 14-year-old, there was nothing to keep my eyes from straying to the younger ones and nothing to keep my arousal from continuing or even strengthening. The usual barriers of “don’t think sexual thoughts about young girls” were down, and I could experience directly the effect of those young girls’ bodies on my arousal. And I soon realized those were the girls who really turned me on most. I never had the slightest temptation to act on those attractions to the girls, before, during, or after the realization process.

Around this time I finally accepted that I would never remarry and my sex life with other people would soon be at an end. (Partly this was because while I am highly nonexclusive, my attraction does not extend into women in their 40s). Giving up on future intimacy was the biggest disappointment, but the dwindling of partner sex was bad too.

Sexual satisfaction is one thing that makes for a good life, and if was to be only solo, I wanted it to be as satisfying as possible. I developed a strong interest in legal pictures and erotic stories involving young girls. While the sex had to be solo, I had an interest in sharing this side of myself with other adults who felt the same way. But I ran smack against the wall that it was unacceptable to talk about it in my normal social circles.

Unlike the majority of pedophiles who discover their attraction when they are adolescent and full of self-doubt, I felt solid and sure within myself and my anger was directed outward and squarely at the society I live in. I had long before adopted a framework knowing that it is actions that are morally right or wrong. Feelings can be complicated, sometimes a mix of “good” and “bad”, but have no moral status and just “are”.

I found anonymous communities online where I could discuss the attraction, but was turned off by the predominant view that man-girl sex could be just fine if only attitudes and laws changed. I was completely clear that such sex was deeply wrong and always would be, and this mismatch made those communities a poor fit for me.

I needed to find a community of pedophiles that had the sensible, correct, and obvious view on that subject. Unable to find any existing communities, someone needed to start one. I found one other guy with similar views and together we set about creating Virtuous Pedophiles.

I didn’t properly acknowledge my attraction until I was in my 50’s. Sure, there was plenty of supporting evidence, even as a minor myself I would date the smaller girls, or the freshman while I was a Senior. I believe part of the avoidance was just me thinking that it was normal male behavior to date younger. But primarily, I think we try to hold ourselves in higher regard than we deserve sometimes, and ignoring it was a way for me to just be normal. I’m also not exclusive, so dating older women and eventually marrying an older woman was fine as well. But there has always been this corner of my mind that never sees the light of day, and I can’t talk about it openly with anyone. Pushing that back has been easier for me than it has for others. I imagine exclusive’s have a real hard time fitting in. They don’t want to hurt anyone, but they also might never find a rewarding relationship. A tough situation to be sure, but a line that must not be crossed. Think about the thing in your life you desire above anything else, and now image you can never have it. It can be very depressing.

I think that in the post internet age, it’s a lot more difficult for someone to remain in denial for long, including teenagers. But in looking back, I was a pedophile since age 14 or so. I had an attraction to young looking boys my age, but homosexuality was the deepest of all taboos. Then my age of attraction froze. I looked at it as I had a pervasive fetish, but it was all a phase I’d grow out of. Looking at playboy magazines would surely help end that phase. Hitting age 50 and accessing the internet led me to the realization that I kind of fit into an element of sexuality where I found teens and kids attractive and also had a deep empathy for them. I certainly felt less unique. At no point did I ever feel that I threatened anyone.

Conscious suppression? Denial? I guess so. I tried not to think about it a lot. I focused on career and sports. I didn’t worry about it. The only time I felt concerned was as a teen, afraid that I was gay. I figured I’d probably become “normal” eventually.

I discovered my attractions at thirteen, and fully realized that I was a pedophile at sixteen, so I don’t quite fall into this category. But I can perhaps take an educated guess as to why it might take someone longer to realize who they are, as there was a three year period of me feeling this way about kids without fully connecting the dots. I was still a teenager at the time, and there wasn’t that much of an age gap between myself and the kids I was attracted to, so it wasn’t completely obvious to me that I was a pedophile. I can see this happening to someone with a higher age of attraction, and not realising that they’re a pedophile until well into adulthood because only then is the age gap quite sizable.

I also didn’t (and still don’t) have typical sexual fantasies (I consider myself sex-repulsed) and instead fantasize about “softer” stuff (such as cuddling and tickling), so for pedophiles who aren’t really into sex, they may not realize until later on who they are, because their fantasies don’t seem sexual. Another possibility, not applicable to me, but those who grew up before the Internet would have had limited access to information compared to teenagers and young adults today, which may delay discovering anything about themselves because they don’t have much to compare themselves to. And there may be those who simply refused to accept themselves because of the stigma, which unfortunately affects many of us quite negatively.