Most men can imagine themselves raping a grown woman, since grown women are what they find sexually attractive. It grows out of desires that they themselves experience. Therefore, rape of a grown woman is classed as a crime (something that "normal" people may want to do, but must not) but not a perversion/disorder (something "normal' people do not want to do). On the other hand, (most) men cannot imagine themselves raping underage children -- or having sex, consensual or not, with other men for that matter. It's repulsive. Therefore, the desire to do so is considered perverse and/or a mental disorder, depending on how you classify these things.
--- On Fri, 5/22/09, Lenin's Tomb <leninstombblog at googlemail.com> wrote:
> From: Lenin's Tomb <leninstombblog at googlemail.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Irish priests beat, raped children
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Friday, May 22, 2009, 6:00 AM
> > Your figure is, I think, grossly
> overinflated. Most men are sexually
> > repelled by children, not attracted. That's why
> pedophilia is considered a
> > perversion or mental disorder. Most men cannot imagine
> themselves doing it.
>
>
> This is dubious. I had thought that the reason why
> child rape was
> considered perverted was because it is a wicked and cruel
> thing to torture
> children in that way, not because 'most men' 'cannot
> imagine' being
> attracted to a child. First of all, it is actually
> impossible to say how
> many men find children attractive, because beyond those who
> actually proceed
> from desire to rape, who else is going to make their
> desires known?
> Secondly, even among offenders, how many are actually known
> about? It is
> estimated that most such rape takes place within families,
> where it can
> remain secret and even protected by the family - the recent
> 'Italian Fritzl'
> case may be an instance of this. Thirdly, for your
> argument to work, you
> would have to assume that all child abusers meet the
> criteria for a clinical
> diagnosis of paedophilia, which would be an inaccurate
> assumption. It may
> also be that not every paedophile acts on his (or in the
> rare case, her)
> desire.
>
> Finally, the whole basis of your objection is laughably
> reactionary.
> Sexuality is socially produced, and there is no dearth of
> evidence that
> large numbers of men have been attracted to children
> throughout history. In
> fact, there are certain supposedly 'harmless' forms of
> paedophilia that are
> culturally quite common, such as the 'Lolita' and
> 'schoolgirl' child-woman
> fixations: for example, the multinationals that fashioned
> the Britney and
> JoJo personas presumably knew what they were doing.
> Racks and racks of
> perfectly legal and saleable pornographic magazines contain
> fantasies that
> allude to child-fucking, incest and so on: 'barely legal'
> and 'sweet tens',
> 'daddy's little girl' etc. British tabloids love to
> show you a page 3
> stunner who is only just legal: the Daily Star once made
> itself notorious by
> featuring a girl who was covering her nipples, with the
> disclaimer: "she's
> only fifteen, and when she's sixteen, we'll show you her
> nipples". The
> sexualisation of children in culture is hard to miss.
> While I'm on the
> subject, gay pornography often stars 'twinks' - young men
> who look extremely
> boyish and almost prepubescent, because they have little
> body hair and so
> on. I am not pretending that all of this should be
> equated with actual
> child pornography, in which what is enjoyed is the real
> life rape and
> torture of children. What I am suggesting is that the
> evidence would appear
> to be that at least millions of men - men who aren't child
> rapists - are
> prepared to entertain such desires. Any
> attempt to base the censure of
> child rape on assuptions about the 'normal' workings of
> male desire in a
> patriarchical society can only succeed by reproducing
> discourses of
> deviancy, discourses that medicalise sexual desire (bear in
> mind that
> paedophilia is actually treated as a subcategory of
> 'paraphilia' which is
> the usually harmless but apparently 'sick' desire aroused
> by a particular
> object), and which inevitably play into homophobic and
> misogynistic
> stereotypes.
>
> Perhaps what you meant to say, or should have said, was
> that most men are
> repelled by the idea of torturing children - which, even if
> we can't prove
> it, is a thesis I am willing to put my hope in.
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