VirPed Panel: 23 September 2024

Scaling Enthusiast asks:

What is the benefit of exploring this attraction if one can’t act on it?

I have asked myself this. For about seven years now, I’ve been talking to others and sometimes even to the public about the experience of having this attraction. I’ve also been having conversations with other pedophiles, comparing how it is for them to how it is for me. In order to do this without keeping it secret from the person I loved, I had to leave them. I have often wondered whether it was worth this sacrifice.

I think for me, there are two main benefits:

1: Although I absolutely can’t act on this attraction in terms of real life children, or in terms of illegal material, it has still enabled me to have a rich fantasy life. This comes at a time when I’m sort of ageing out of the ability to hook up with people or easily get dates. I know most people are ashamed to admit they really value their fantasies and that these improve the quality of their life, but this is true for me. They make me (and sometimes others) happy in a world where I don’t have many options for happiness. Some people don’t think I should pursue this form of happiness, but those people don’t really care whether or not I’m happy, whereas I do.

2: A major theme of my therapy, and in fact of my life, is this horrible thing of always feeling split into two people: the side I presented to others, and this side I could never talk honestly about to anyone, that I know most people associate with shame and harm. Making connections to other pedophiles has created a space where it’s possible to talk about the attraction in a sane way, demystify the feelings, learn whether I am typical of pedophiles or not, debate what the limits should be in terms of moral behaviour, and generally become a much more integrated personality, someone who is able to own and acknowledge all the parts of myself and be more self-reliant. My self-respect has gone significantly up and I’ve gained a lot of humility on realising how little we all actually know about this topic.

Are these better benefits than I got being closeted in a long term relationship? Hard to say. Back then I felt loved and secure, but always like it could implode at any moment if he realised what I was. I was well along the way to killing myself. Now, I am lonelier and financially more precarious, and live in a world where people don’t always show up for each other, because they have their own lives and problems. I have experienced the disappointment and disillusionment that follows the initial boost from joining the community, but am still glad I went through all that instead of waiting fearfully on the edge forever. I see fewer reasons to die, and more reasons to accept and enjoy the life I was given.

It is a disappointment to realise I couldn’t have this thing that my brain (falsely) tells me would be wondrous, but after years of shrinking from this reality, I’ve now managed to grow into it. Trying to help and connect to other people in my situation also adds meaning to life.

Every time I have tried to deny this aspect of myself, it has cropped up in unpleasant and unexpected ways. Quite simply, it’s beneficial to me psychologically to realize that it exists, to sit with it, and to have some level of comfort with it, whether or not I can act upon it myself.

Attraction to boys for me like many others here is a three-legged stool: sexual, romantic, and emotional. I explore the sexual side by fantasizing and masturbating to harmless material. I explore the romantic side by being open to a relationship with another MAP and, as an exclusive, finding fulfillment in outlets other than sex. I explore the emotional side by finding opportunities to interact with boys in real life in safe ways that hopefully bring some joy to their day like they do to mine. I strongly believe it’s not only possible but healthy to explore all three components of our attraction.

The healthiest option for most of us with an attraction to children is to not deny it or push it away, but instead accept ourselves and find ethical ways to explore it. Keeping these feelings bottled up is never a good solution and will only lead to distress. I have found that using ethical outlets such as fantasies and legal content on the internet, wathcing movies with children in them etc have all made my attraction easier to deal with and I’m happier as a result. I even wrote a few fictional erotic stories involving boys, which was a harmless and fun way to explore my attraction and fantasies.

Being part of the community has also been a good way to explore my attraction. I have met people who know what I’m going through and we can share our experiences and fantasies. Dealing with this alone is horrible and I’m very grateful that VirPed gives people like me a space to safely be ourselves and support other pedophiles. I have also worked with children and continue to volunteer with them, and this has helped me see children as individuals with their own needs and personalities, as opposed to being fantasy objects in my head, and I’m more easily able to separate fantasy from reality. If I wasn’t around children at all, I might struggle to believe that I could be near a real child who I’m attracted to without harming them, but being around kids has taught me that I can acknowledge that some of them are attractive and that doesn’t impact my ability to behave appropriately around them. I think this is a very useful way to explore our feelings and learn that we’re not a threat to children.

The alternative is repression. That would be bad for my mental health. I want inner peace. I can’t have that if I am imprisoned within myself.

I think that both of the expressions “exploring the attraction” and “act on it” require some interpretation. I’m assuming that not acting on it means not interacting sexually with a child. I accept that. It has both moral and legal implications. But an attraction is so much more than “acting on it”. It’s fundamental to one’s existence. I spent a whole lot of time with younger kids as a teenager and also as a young adult. I just enjoyed being with them and vice versa. But I went through a long period where I experienced a fear of children and avoided them entirely. It took years to overcome. I could just never figure out what I was afraid of. Me? Them? There was no discernible reason for it. Losing my fear seemed to release my emotions. Yes, I was actually capable of falling in love with a child. Not that I wanted that. I just dropped my defences. But it turned out to be benign and not scary.

It has enabled me to feel more comfortable in my own skin and not be full of self hatred.

Also it has brought new friends into my life, ones to whom I can actually relate. We provide each other with the kind of support that we can’t receive from anyone else.

The world includes women and men with weak or modest sex drives. But it also contains a lot of men with a strong sexual desire. Some men may express this through a constant stream of partner sex, with few or many partners, but in total they have partnered experiences to match their sexual desire. But most men fall into a category where sexual desire far exceeds the ability to satisfy it with partner sex. Some might have a single partner but find their interest far exceeds their partner’s. Others will find partners only occasionally or not at all. The pedophiles who obey the law all fall into this category of “not at all”.

Although men with strong sexual desire have always masturbated frequently, the recent ready availability of pornography online has made this easier, and it is well known that pornography is now consumed by men in huge quantities. Some pedophiles realize that they must avoid the most natural sort of porn they would be drawn to, child pornography, but statistics suggest that unfortunately a great many do view such pornography anyway. Yet just as ordinary men in earlier times masturbated with no more stimulus than the memory of women they had previously seen, pedophiles have plenty of stimulus to support fantasies of the children we are attracted to without viewing illegal porn. This includes video of children in the news, in sports, dancing and singing, as well as websites of camps or schools or just family blogs.

Ordinary men with strong sex drives masturbate a great deal, and it is very rarely in the service of some plan to achieve partner sex in the future. The original question was, “What is the benefit of exploring this attraction if one can’t act on it?” and the answer for all these men is a partial satisfaction of their strong sex drive. The same is just as true of pedophiles. If we take “exploring” to mean seeking novelty, ordinary men seek novelty and variety, as we can document from their patterns of porn use. Many pedophiles will similarly seek novelty and variety in the sorts of child sex that they fantasize about, and there will be easily available material to support this, even if scrupulously avoiding illegal material.

Of course some men choose to limit masturbation or forego it entirely, but this is true of ordinary men as well as pedophiles, and is an entirely separate topic.

It helps me to find emotional fulfillment in my fantasies and in my interactions with other pedophiles. For me, it also led to my current family. I befriended a beautiful child, and soon learned he wasn’t properly taken care of, and that his parents didn’t care who he hung out with. I helped where I could, made sure he was fed, taught him to drive, and later learned I was the closest he’d had to a parent. As an adult, I adopted him.

I don’t think I would have gotten into that situation if I’d been at teleiophile. It’s also not the sort of thing I would recommend, as it could have turned out poorly, even with a false accusation, but that is my story.

No, we can not act on it. End of that. With that out of the way.

By exploring this attraction, I am taking the assumption that you mean every side of it, and I will attack every side of it, because it is very complex.

Exploring this attraction has helped me in many ways. Including, but not limited to:

1: Getting out of depression 2: Accepting myself 3: Finding friends 4: Being honest with people in real life 5: Finding a relationship 6: Finding ways to enjoy sex

1: Getting out of depression:

Before I ever dared to search for things about my sexuality online, due to the fear of finding only hatred and death threats, I felt like I was all alone. I couldn’t imagine there being anyone like me, or anyone who understood me. All that I had heard about pedophiles was that everyone wanted them dead, and that they were only a ticking time bomb for commiting CSA. The reason I use ’they’ is because I never like I belonged in that generalisation. I internalized it, the fact that I was doomed to offend. But there was still a small part of that knew I couldn’t ever do it. However, internalizing this hatred, only made me self-loathing and depressed. I was on the verge of sucicide many times. Finally looking finding out that there were people like me, who understood me, was just so amazing. There are no words to explain the day I found VirPed and what that did to me.

2: Accepting myself:

Before VirPed, I wasn’t able to accept myself as a pedophile. I couldn’t stand the thought, and I wanteds to remove myself from that part of me for so long. It was an unacceptable thing to be, it was disgusting, I was a literal scum of the earth, in my mine. As mentioned above I had internalized so much of this hatred and I was feelig that hatred every waking hour. Finding VirPed, and starting to learn about myself as a person with pedophilia made me eventually accept that I am who I am, and it is unchangeable. I discovered that my life got easier and more fun to live as I accepted myself and just started to let go of the shame around the attraction. Understanding that I didn’t choose it, helped me a lot. Intrinsically, I knew that I had never checked yes on the “Do you want to be attracted to children” button at birth, but everybody else was saying that we were disgusting for CHOOSING to be attracted to children. Realizing that I never chose it, felt good.

3: Finding friends:

As mentioned above, learning that there were other people like, who understood me did a lot for me feeling better about myself. However, I always felt out of touch with other people, being so different and also lying about big parts of myself. When finding VirPed and starting to be honest with myself about who I am, and also being honest with other people, something happened. I suddenly had people who I could relate to, and people who could relate to me. I started talking to people in private messages. Merging to other IM platforms, and before I knew it, I had friends. People I wanted to hit up everyday, ask how their day were etc. These are people I’ve grown to deeply care for. We talk every week, if not everyday. We videochat, we play board games online, we watch movies together, we meet up IRL when we can and we talk and talk and talk even more. About everything in our lives, including things adjacent to our pedophilia. It’s truly incredible.

4:Being honest with people in real life:

After accepting myself, there came a period where my feeling of being an impostor and a fraud in my real life, became really strong. I felt like I wasn’t honest with anybody, which well, it was true. After much thinking and also asking around in the commuinity, I decided to come out to a few people close to me. My older brother, my best friend and his wife. The 3 of them all took it really well and love me and accept me for who I am, which in turn has improved myb quality of life by quite a bit.

5: Finding a relationship:

Exploring my attraction also made me realize that even though I am exclusive, I do desire companionship. And the way for me to achieve that is being with someone who can truly understand me, and I can truly understand them. I am in a relationship with another excluisive pedophile, and while it is not perfect, and wouldn’t ever be considered ’normal’ in that sense, I love it, and I love him. I couldn’t ask for anything else. I truly feel lucky.

6: Finding ways to enjoy sex:

Exploring my attraction lastly made me realize, despite my exclsuiveness, that there are ways for me to enjoy sex, and enjoy exploring physical seuxality. While I am not attracted to adults, I can enjoy partaking in sexual activities with those whom I share this attraction, as long as the shared interest is the main theme in one way or another. Being able to do this has made me a lot happier.

So, in many, many ways, exploring the attraction and all that comes with has made my life worthwhile. It has made my life a good one, where I can be happy.