Pedophilia has commonly been shamed against as sick, deviant, and harmful to children. NAMBLA has attempted to normalize the idea of children being sexually active with adults, Allen Ginsberg having been a famous proponent. The gay scare movement’s association of homosexuality with pedophilia is thanks to NAMBLA’s infiltration of the LGBT movement. However, pedophilia has been introduced to the wider public since before the LGBT movement even began, thanks to Hollywood movies sexualizing children. It has had a long history of pedophile rings and more and more actors are being outed as pedophiles. (See also: Kevin Spacey, a co-creator of Rick & Morty who published child porn on his Twitter, various male musicians, several government officials)

These things should be common knowledge. Yet, pedophile sympathizers want us to believe that pedophilia cannot be helped and there is no cure. We are supposed to accept the existence of “non-offending” pedophiles and trust them around children, even allow them to adopt. Their manifesto explicitly states using the LGBT movement in order to normalize pedophilia as a valid sexual orientation rather than a mental illness. Their shame and persecution are unwarranted, they say. They argue that legalization would protect the children instead of driving child rape and pedo rings underground.

Derrick Jensen “‘ Queer theory has a long relationship with pedophilia. The founding document of queer theory, Thinking Sex by Gayle Rubin, is about 50 percent an apologia for pedophilia, with lines like “Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boylovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation.” That’s a not atypical line from the piece. Michel Foucault, the godfather of queer theory, argued strongly for the elimination of age of consent laws, as in down to infants. the most important and influential queer theorist living today: Judith Butler, in her 2004 book Undoing Gender, wrote, “It is not necessary to figure parent-child incest as a unilateral impingement on the child by the parent, since whatever impingement takes place will also be registered within the sphere of fantasy. In fact, to understand the violation that incest can be­and also to distinguish between those occasions of incest that are violation and those that are not­it is unnecessary to figure the body of the child exclusively as a surface imposed upon from the outside.”[1] So here she is arguing that sometimes parent-child incest is not a violation.

She also wrote, “The reification of the child’s body as passive surface would thus constitute, at a theoretical level, a further deprivation of the child: the deprivation of psychic life.”[2] This is the same old pro-pedo argument we’ve seen so many times already: if you perceive children who are being fucked/raped by adults as the victims of sexual abuse then you are objectifying the child.

And she wrote, “So I keep adding this qualification: ‘when incest is a violation,’ suggesting that I think that there may be occasions in which it is not. Why would I talk that way? Well, I do think that there are probably forms of incest that are not necessarily traumatic or which gain their traumatic character by virtue of the cTonsciousness of social shame that they produce.”[3] And there we go again, with the same old pro-pedo notion that it’s not the child rape that is harmful: it’s the social stigma that is harmful.

And to bring it all home, she suggests that prohibiting parent/child incest is in itself harmful: “It might, then, be necessary to rethink the prohibition on incest as that which sometimes protects against a violation, and sometimes becomes the very instrument of a violation.”[4]

She is easily the most influential living queer theorist.

[1] Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender, Routledge, London, 2004, p. 155.

[2] Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender, Routledge, London, 2004, p. 155.

[3] Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender, Routledge, London, 2004, p. 157.

[4] Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender, Routledge, London, 2004, p. 160. This is not me editorializing: these are the queer theorists themselves.””

You might remember the movie Lolita. In it, a teenage girl is portrayed as a seductress nymphette. Although the creator intended for the original story to demonstrate and be against pedophilia, the reception treated it in the opposite manner: a romantic story of a man’s impossible, idealized love for a young girl.

There are other movies with a similar theme, such as Poison Ivy, but sometimes with a plot where the teenage girl turns out to be super jealous and vindictive. In real life, people blame teenage girls for any involvement with older men, rather than blaming the older men for pursuing girls. They really believe that minors have some power of seduction that adult men just can’t resist. When it’s the story of a woman who raped a boy, men are quick to cheer him on for “getting laid” and being “lucky.” Porn is also to blame for this.

Netflix is coming under fire for having child sex acts in the movie Desire, showing girls masturbating themselves. However, there have been other child stars depicted in a sexualized manner. Shirley Temple and Brooke Shields have been depicted as child prostitutes. Shirley Temple’s entire childhood career was based on men sexualizing her. One very obvious example is the way the hem of her dress is shorter in the back. Natalie Portman recently talked about being sexually objectified since childhood as an actress.

In addition to this, there are tangible examples of the sexualization of young girls in society. Revealing clothing, child beauty pageants, and pedophilic and incestuous porn themes abound. We cannot pretend that these instances are one-offs, or that they don’t have a history.

The praise of older men who are with much younger women is no accident. Older men who desire much younger women do so with the knowledge that the women don’t have as much wisdom or life experience, putting them at an inherent disadvantage and making them easier to take advantage of. Similarly, pedophiles/hebephiles are unwilling to allow children to explore sexually with each other (such as teenagers having sex); they believe they should be the ones having sex with (raping) children for the sole reason that they’re sexually attracted to them. They also argue that children can consent to sex with adults.

The average child rapist nowadays, unfortunately, does not fit the psychological profile of a pedophile. Instead, he is an opportunist. Thanks to porn introducing pedo themes, porn-using men become desensitized and bored and seek out more taboo acts, eventually becoming motivated enough to act on their desires. We cannot continue to ignore the harmful efforts of pornography and the normalization of pedophilia.