It’s a disease, Or: Pedophilia is OK, says Hollywood
by hulk
Wow. The whole fuzzy shmuzzy, we’re all beautiful people inside, no one is ever wrong, morally permissive culture has produced another gem. The Woodsman just premiered at Sundance, starring Kevin Bacon as a pedophile who’s just come out of jail and is trying to deal with his past and trying to overcome pedophilia. To quote the article from Reuters, “Ultimately, what audiences get from “The Woodsman” is not a movie about a pedophile, which is too simplistic. Rather, “The Woodsman” tells audiences what creates the disease and how keeping it in the dark ultimately does society a disservice, the film’s makers said.”
Uh-huh. I guess pedophiles are the real victims, right? Daddy hit them, or their mother didn’t breast feed them? Good grief. Let me play devil’s advocate. It is a disease, probably a genetic one. Something is triggered that young girls (or boys, who, as children, aren’t as different from girls as they are after puberty) become sexually attractive as opposed to adult women. I feel sick even doing this, but continuing the argument, it therefore becomes the problem for the pedophile, because in his eyes (almost always “his”), these children are the proper object of sexual attraction, and therefore it feels right but is societially wrong. So therefore society needs to understand that these pedophiles have an internal struggle.
Fine. I can maybe buy that. But that does not excuse the act of pedophilia! I enjoy movies in which people are killed. No, not snuff films, I just enjoy violent movies. I will sometimes cheer at an ingenious way of killing somebody, like when they took Sonny Redwhatever in Donnie Brasco. That doesn’t make it ok for me to go out and kill people.
And this “internal struggle” certainly doesn’t excuse child porn. In fact, there’s nothing you can say about the “victim” pedophiles that excuses the expression of their activites. It is clearly and always wrong, and it just pisses me off that they’re putting out this movie, trying to make it ok by showing this portrayal of a pedophile sympathetically. Before you throw words like “forgiveness” at me, let’s think of the real victims of pedophilia. Yeah, that’s right, let’s put the victims first, something that’s increasingly un-PC in this culture. Those kids are fucked up now, possibly for life, because a pedophile decided to express their “disease”. Obviously rehabilitiation is beneficial to the community, and obviously some kind of prevention is advisable, like a Pedophile’s Anonymous or something for people to go to before they reach the point where they might commit a crime. But I’m sick of reading articles about the “rights” of sex offenders. Harsh truth time, if you’re a pedophile, your privacy and your self-esteem and your ability to hug yourself is secondary to the rights of your potential victims.
Good job, hollywood. I can’t wait for whatever sick piece of crap you put out next year at Sundance.
Halffull.org 
Pree-cisely. The problem is twofold: there is a disease, but the acting upon the urges caused by the disease is a crime. Most pedophiles don’t have the insight to understand that their urges are really wrong — NAMBLA (yes, they really do exist) is full of people who insist that children *want* to be fondled and fucked by adults. Most of these people honestly believe that their victims want their attention, that they’re doing their victims a favor by introducing them to sex at an early age, that their victims like it. These guys are utterly convinced that they are doing no wrong.
I do feel sorry for anyone who has those urges, but as soon as they act upon the urges, they need to be (a) incarcerated and (b) treated. Here come the problems.
1: While in prison, many learn tricks to better commit crimes (“You used the babysitting ploy? That’s so 1980s. Try this one….” “Hey, thanks. I like to pick up boys at….”)
2: Treatment options for pedophiles are limited and not terribly ineffective — first you have to get it through to them that their desires are wrong, which may take years if it happens at all. Once you convince them of that, they have to be taught to focus desire on adults. It’s a long process and you can bet the state isn’t paying for enough counselors to make it happen.
In many prisons, counseling for sex offenders is optional… we just lock them up, untreated, and release them eventually, still untreated. Yep — it must suck to have internal struggle. As long as the disease remains, pedophiles and other sex offenders need treatment. They also need to be punished for their crimes.
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Pedophilia is not a disease at all, you morons.
IGNORANCE is the disease.
You people are obviously too STUPID to comment on things which you clearly know NOTHING about.
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Care to elaborate? Being a stupid, ignorant moron, I’m not sophisticated enough to understand your argument.
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Their argument is “I didn’t read the article, but because I’m dumber than a sack of hammers, I’ll comment anyway. I don’t understand sarcasm, playing devil’s advocate, or anything else fun, so I’ll just type IN CAPS to make MY POINT about nothing.”
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As a victim of a pedophile, I can say the bastards are sick. I will be dealing with the effects of his actions for the rest of my life. Thanks for nothing
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Thanks for commenting. I’ll end there because I don’t want to abrogate your comments or worse, use them for my own argument.
I must point out the latest headline case for those of you who haven’t heard: Mark Hulett in Vermont sexually assaulted a girl for four years. Judge Edward Cashman sentenced him to 60 days after he pled guilty. He said that he no longer believes that punishment works. Apparently this judge has been off kilter for a while, several years ago he told a rape victim that she had just seen one of the harsh realities of life and should get over it.
This is what I’m talking about when I talk about people killing a baby to save a puppy. It’s a reversal of morality: The poor pedophile can’t do anything to help himself. He’s driven by obsessions that he can’t fulfill. He conflicts with himself until finally, driven by complete mental breakdown he becomes a molester. I’m trying to avoid harsh language here because I don’t want to upset people, but there aren’t enough bad words to describe someone who lets their problems become a child’s problems. I should qualify that statement; there is a difference between the normal mistakes adults make with kids, like not teaching them good coping skills, and straight out abusing them. I need to explain my earlier statement about the baby and the puppy: when you sympathize with the molester you can’t reconcile that with sympathizing for the child. You no longer want “justice” for the child, your thoughts start drifting along the lines of, “Well, I can’t change what’s already happened. The best thing to do is help this person not do this anymore.” Problem there is I’m pretty sure there is no way to treat a pedophile, save chemical castration. I’d appreciate a shrink’s perspective/knowledge on the issue here. So when you start trying to reconcile the two, the harsh fact is that the best way to deal with the issue is probably just to lock up the pedophile forever to protect further children. The prisoner sympathetic mentality doesn’t allow for that, hence the myth of a “cured” pedophile with the help of state mandated counseling and some jail time. Bullshit. If you wanted something better than prison, just put all pedophiles on an island somewhere or in a work camp. I know it sounds crazy but at least it allows them to live a semi-normal life. On the one hand it sucks that their brain is wired that way. On the other hand, you can’t let them hurt kids. What choice do you make? The mistake lots of people are making is to let pedophiles be in a position to hurt kids out of respect for the humanity of the pedophile. You can’t do that. On some level, you have to deny the humanity of the pedophile to save kids. But we don’t benefit from those kinds of choices. Our political leaders and judges, especially this one, are usually too weak to make those decisions.
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Ur comments strike fear in me! I’m a result of child abuse, now 26 i’m on benefits & struggling with the basics! My mind wanders, I think of violence & anger. Constantly fighting with right & wrong! I see how offenders are forged from innocence.
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that’s sad mike. my question is once a child is abused, how do u address that so the child does not grow up to be an abuser?
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The permanent solution for Sexual Predators and Pedophiles is castration. Better for them and better for society. This is a cost effective and humane solution.
There is no need to keep these people in jail for years. A simple visit to a vet and the problem is solved. As a bonus you never have to worry about them returning to society or living in your neighborhood. Talk about a good deterrent..
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I have to admit, some of these posts bring out some weird comments. I only delete spam, though, not trolls.
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You have to consider questions as “can pedophiles really help themselves?” “is being a pedophile really a mental disorder? If so, why isn’t being gay a mental disorder?” “Why did nature make the average twelve and a half-year able to reproduce?” “Isn’t evolution to blame if someone wants to have sex with young girls; after all, the younger the girl, the more prone they are to giving birth to healthy offspring, right?” “Suppose a 30 year old and a 14 year old, who’s wise beyond her years, consented with sleeping with each other, how wrong would that really be?”
These are complex issues and difficult to answer and is one the reasons I find it hard to agree with your conclusion.
Someone else on a different forum wrote: “Roman Polanski has asserted that everyone wants to fuck young girls. Using the artifacts of Western popular culture – network and cable television programming, movies, magazines, popular music and the products of the various fashion industries – attempt to disprove Polanski’s claim. Avoid the temptation to cherry pick anomalous examples and please, be thorough.”
Could you do it?
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The comparison between pedophiles and gays is not valid. I think being gay is more like having a favorite color. You don’t “choose” your favorite color. Some people just prefer the color blue and some prefer the color green.
Pedophiles are more like alcoholics. Of course, no one chooses to be an alcoholic either, but both alcoholics and pedophiles suffer from chemical addiction. Procreation is chemically driven, and for some people, the drug “testosterone” is just as potent as heroin or cocaine and just as destructive.
While the age of consent is arbitrary and changes from one society to another, all societies ban sexual contact between an adult male and a young girl before she “turns” into a woman (usually around 12).
Pedophilia, on the other hand, is not constrained by culture, and has nothing to do with “selecting a potential mate”. Pedophilia is all about sexual gratification and power. Anyone who imagines that a pedophile sees a three-year-old child as a potential reproductive partner is delusional.
Like an alcoholic, a pedophile can resist his urges “one day at a time” – if he has enough willpower. Unfortunately, also like an alcoholic, curing a pedophile is impossible. A pedophile will always be under the “pressure” of his biological urges. While these “urges” can be controlled with medication, drug based control requires a lifelong commitment by the pedophile.
At the risk of being seen as a troll, involuntary castration is one solution that really should be considered. First it provides a strong deterrent for borderline pedophiles. Second, it removes the problem of “testosterone” and the need for lifelong medication. Third, it reduces imprisonment and the associated costs.
While this potential “cure” may not prove 100 percent effective. It could nevertheless provide better results than we are able to achieve with the current system. In fact, a few people (troubled by their own uncontrollable sexual urges), voluntarily choose castration as solution to their problem.
To many, castration appears inhumane and inhuman and brings to mind Hitler’s “final solution”. Objectively however, society must weigh the potential lifelong suffering and mental scars of the victims (our children), against the potential lifelong suffering and mental scars of a deviant sexual predator. When a sexual predator is caught, tried, convicted and subsequently released. Society clearly shares the blame if that “freed” predator ever harms another child.
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Actually, if I have to believe one of the people who commented on the question involving that what Polanski asserted, differences in other cultures toward pedophilia exist. Or at least existed. A portion of what he said was:
“in many ancient cultures, such as Rome and India (much more recently) men in their 40’s married girls that sometimes were not even in their teens yet.”
By the way, I think considering one’s sexual orientation similar to having a favorite color is really, really off. I don’t think you’ll lead an unhappy life if you’d never be able to see your favorite color.
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