On Pedophilia

One of the things I miss about the vanished world of my youth was not having to hear constant references to pedophilia. We knew it existed, of course. I grew up amid the sexual revolution and had heard of all sorts of bizarre sexual perversions by the time I was fourteen. So I knew there were a handful of strange men known as pedophiles who were sexually attracted to prepubescent children, just as I knew there were a few necrophiliacs attracted to corpses. But I was inclined to assume that the number of pedophiles was small, possibly no greater than the number of necrophiliacs.

One reason pedophilia was not obsessively discussed the way it is today was that sex with the underaged really was not regarded with the same horror. This was the 1970s, the early, libertarian phase of the sexual revolution when the rules were going to be loosened, and doing so was supposedly going to lead to greater happiness for all. Most of the utopians were content with a formula that endorsed all sex for pleasure “between consenting adults.” But a handful went farther and advocated for extending the “joy of sex” (to quote the title of a then-popular book) even to children. Why should they be get left out of the fun? One group proclaimed the slogan: “sex by eight or else it’s too late.”

But I must immediately caution the reader not to get exaggerated ideas about that era, or to imagine that all who spoke this way were criminal monsters. Not many children were actually having sex, nor were very many adults having sex with children—quite possibly no more than in previous or successive decades. “Sex by eight” was largely the empty talk of utopian dreamers. Even those actively engaged in such talk may not have taken it with full seriousness, and probably took reasonable measures to protect their own children. Human beings are very good at keeping thought and behavior compartmentalized, i.e., separating idle chatter from practical life.

Things are certainly different today. One recent phenomenon I have noticed is “competitive signaling” regarding pedophilia, or what was known in my youth as “one-upmanship.” It works like this: somebody starts the game by declaring that all pedophiles must be shot. Not much time passes before somebody else declares himself dissatisfied with this proposal and suggests instead that they must be castrated before being shot. Pretty soon everybody is ransacking the 120 Days of Sodom looking for tortures hair-raising enough to give all those horrible pedophiles the punishment they deserve.

Let us use necrophilia for comparison, as I did above. One could certainly make a case that necrophilia is an antisocial practice which should be discouraged through punishment. But however draconian the punishments individual necrophiliacs deserve to have meted out to them, the total amount of punishment required for them as a class may not be all that great for the simple reason that not very many people are sexually attracted to corpses. In the same way, regardless of how great or how justified one’s horror of pedophilia, it may not require quite as much total punishment as the one-uppers and competitive signalers imagine. The one good thing to be said of pedophilia is that it is not terribly common: the vast majority of people are simply not sexually attracted to prepubescent children. The probability that the world is being run by a vast, secretive cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles—as apparently now believed by many posters to internet forums—is therefore quite low.

So where is all this talk coming from? And why has it arisen now?

I have seen just one answer suggested, viz., that today’s moral panic over pedophilia is a by-product of the “new morality” condoning all sex for pleasure between consenting adults. People cannot live without some target of moral opprobrium, and so when they are no longer able to condemn immoral sexual behavior between adults, they react by doubling down on vituperation against sex with children—regardless of how much of it is actually going on. This thesis deserves serious consideration, but it is not the only possible explanation.

Another possibility is revealed by coverage of the Jeffrey Epstein case. This man’s criminal actions have been widely described as pedophilia on the grounds that many of the girls involved were under eighteen, with some being as young as fourteen. What reason could there possibly be for moral condemnation of his actions other than the age of the girls involved? Adult women would have been left perfectly free under American law to provide sexual services within the context of a financial or other contractual arrangement, after all.

In fact, there are two sound objections to condemning Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplices as pedophiles. The first is that most girls in the age range fourteen to seventeen have long since reached menarche, and so sexual intercourse with them does not actually fit the definition of pedophilia. The second is that historically it has been perfectly normal for girls of this age to get married.

In the European Middle Ages, a peasant wedding might well feature a bride of fourteen and a groom of sixteen. When I was growing up in the 1970s, a fourteen-year-old girl could still get married in the state of West Virginia with her parent’s consent (Scots-Irish hillbilly girls used to marry quite young). Early in the present millennium marriage at sixteen was still legal for girls in all fifty states with parental consent, although I understand this is no longer the case. Many people are starting to consider it shocking for even a seventeen-year-old girl to be married, although this was still acceptable pretty much everywhere in the United States of my youth.

In short, there is a rash of “pedophilia” in America today because we have redefined the term to cover girls of marriageable age. But it should be obvious that if male attraction to girls in their late teens is to be described as pedophilia, society is going to have one hell of a lot of pedophilia on its hands.

Today’s moral panic is in part simply one aspect of a powerful trend in our society to delay marriage ever farther. It has reached such proportions that in parts of the West (e.g., Scandinavia) women are on average above thirty before they marry. We don’t consider this odd today for the same reason fish do not notice water. But historically it is extremely odd: female fertility peaks between the late teens and the late twenties. This is when they need to marry in order to produce families, and preferably closer to the beginning of their nubile years than to the end if the families are to be large. There is absolutely no reason to postpone marriage until both husband and wife have completed postdoctoral fellowships and thoroughly established successful professional careers—and many good reasons not to.

A second reason for the pedophilia scare was pointed out to me a few years ago by Simon Sheppard, proprietor of the heretical.com website: women’s fear of aging and consequent loss of sexual attractiveness motivates them to portray men’s evolved preference for youth as morally objectionable. But of course, anyone with the slightest understanding of evolution knows perfectly well why men prefer younger women, viz., because those with such a preference tend to father more children, thus spreading the preference within the rising generation. So it is constantly getting reinforced, and no condemnation by older women is ever going to have the slightest effect upon this natural process. Men prefer younger women because it is adaptive in the evolutionary sense for them to do so, not because they like to be mean to older women.

Nature has simply played a trick on men by making girls attractive to us at an age when their minds are not yet fully mature. But this admittedly awkward fact is not men’s fault, nor does it make us “pedophiles.” Perhaps in this era of looking for pedophiles under every bed the reader may suspect the author of having some personal stake in the question. Could Roger Devlin be trying to legitimize the marriage of teenage girls out of an unclean dirty-old-man’s passion for such girls? This, of course, is precisely the pattern of thinking characteristic of a moral panic: if you express skepticism regarding witches, you must be a witch yourself.

So, no: I have no personal desire to marry a seventeen-year-old girl. Fortunately, however, I do not need to take any personal hand in resolving the issue of already sexually attractive but still somewhat immature girls. As with most of humanity’s problems, the best solution was already discovered long ago. This is to marry such girls off to men just a bit older than themselves—by between two and seven years, let’s say. And this is extremely easy to do because plenty of young men in the 19-24 age range really dig seventeen-year-old girls. Letting a young man “use her as a sex object” can represent a very good career choice for a teenage girl, one a great deal better in fact than what we now call having a career, and lightyears ahead of going to college to earn useless degrees under the direction of the dykes in the Women’s Studies Department.

The young men who used to marry girls in their late teens were known not as pedophiles but (in view of their own relative youth) as suitable boys. Their job was not to be the “equals” of their young brides, but to take charge of them for the brides’ own good. Young husbands were presumed to know better than their even younger brides for the simple reason that in most cases they did; this is why they were assigned to the girls as protectors and guides. We could start doing this again, but it will require us to stop punishing husbands and fathers through divorce and custody law, the legitimate fear of which is one of the few human motives sometimes more powerful than young men’s desire for intimacy with teenage girls.

A more general point: in an era when the abnormal has been normalized, people start to forget what constitutes normality. If you believe there is something morally questionable about a young man in his early twenties having sexual relations with (i.e., being married to) a seventeen-year-old girl, you may be part of the problem. This does not, of course, mean that every father in America must marry off his daughter before her eighteenth birthday; it just means that doing so falls within the realm of the normal.

One of the strangest aspects of the contemporary furor over “pedophiles” attracted to teenage girls is that many of those caught up in this moral panic also agonize over what we can do to raise the birth rate. Well, you might try getting girls married at an age when they are still attractive to young men instead of waiting until they are two years short of menopause and then getting angry at men for preferring youth and innocence! But this will require us to stop paying attention to bitter spinsters who wasted their own nubile years and now want to convince anybody who will listen that wanting to marry a younger, still fertile woman makes a man a “pedophile.”

As for Jeffrey Epstein, the nature of his crime was to make his young women available to men for casual fornication. The marriage of a twenty-four-year-old man to a seventeen-year-old girl, by contrast, is not criminal because it involves the acceptance of permanent obligations: not only toward the girl herself, but toward any children produced by the marriage.

A final thought: it is also normal for adults to be fond of small children and to demonstrate such fondness by petting them. I remember adults petting me when I was a child, and neither my own parents nor anyone else ever suspected them of being pedophiles. Today, in spite of a general decline in civility, a new rule of etiquette has emerged: one must never touch other people’s children. Quite obviously, this is an expression of generalized social anxiety over pedophilia. And it may not be good for the children themselves. Very young children establish trust with others through touching, and may even assume that an adult who never touches them dislikes them. A return to normality in both marriage practices and the relation of adults to children is going to require once again recognizing pedophilia for what it is: a serious but rather rare sexual disorder which must be deterred through punishment where it actually occurs, but which should not become the occasion for a society-wide obsession.