The idea that suffering can be good.

An idea often espoused in response to hearing about antinatalism or just in general as a delusional coping mechanism with life is that suffering can be good sometimes, individuals like Jordan Peterson for instance get celebrated for speaking to people with this type of ”tough love” approach, and telling them that life is suffering but it’s all worth it, we shouldn’t just stop the production of suffering-capable organisms.

The idea behind this general idea of suffering supposedly being good sometimes and we shouldn’t just prevent it all from happening by stopping the production of sentient, suffering life (e.g. humans, other mammals, insects, not necessarily fruits, vegetables, fungi) right away is that basically when you suffer, it builds character, strength and resilience that you will need to deal with aforementioned sentient life, or it might be a warning signal of some sort.

The issue with this should be obvious though – negative sensation itself is by definition bad just like water is watery, it is literal badness, a negative sensation/experience of some sort, the fact that sometimes one suffering is required to avoid an even greater suffering doesn’t prove suffering itself to be good. Suffering, badness itself, is bad.

For example, if we have to torture one person to prevent a billion from being tortured just as intensely and there’s nothing else we can do about it, then it’s the lesser of two evils, but the torture itself still feels bad, it’d be better if we could prevent it by cutting up an apple instead. If you say negative sensations can be positive, you might as well say wet is dry or hot is cold, it automatically cannot be anything but contradictory, good suffering is an oxymoron.

Sometimes in life, you have to experience one suffering to avoid an even greater one, but that doesn’t mean that suffering itself is good, that just proves it’s less bad than the more intense form of suffering that otherwise would have happened.

An example would be the painful vaccination in order to avoid a much worse disease you’d otherwise be prone to dying of, but you’re getting it exactly because suffering is bad, because suffering from an illness would be worse than one little needle prick in your arm for a few uncomfortable seconds. If you could snap your fingers in order to obtain the immunity, you would do that instead. The pain itself is bad, the good is the immunity to the illness.

Pain is a warning signal is also something that defenders of suffering will often say, i.e you feel your hand being burned on the stove top so you pull it away.

Again, we can demonstrate again that it’s not the pain itself that is good, but the avoidance of the greater pain, if you could be informed of the danger by something else without the pain, like someone standing next to you who notices it quicker always simply reminding you you’re about to burn yourself before you accidentally leave your hand on the stove top for too long, you would go for that instead of burning yourself to any degree at all.

So we can notice a pattern here in all of these situations where suffering is supposedly good, the person only falsely identifies it as good because it later on results in the prevention of an even greater form of suffering, and if the person could prevent the greater suffering without having to inflict a lesser suffering onto themselves, like snapping their fingers instead of getting an injection, then they would take that less painful option.

Why would you need a warning signal to prevent the worse pain of completely burning your hand on the stove top from happening instead, if pain is not a problem? You wouldn’t, so suffering can have instrumental value to the avoidance of a greater suffering sometimes, that doesn’t prove negative sensation itself to be simultaneously positive.

Suffering makes you stronger they say, but why do you even need to be stronger? Right, only to avoid more suffering associated with being weaker, thus vulnerable to more suffering in the future. If suffering is only ”good” because it helps you to avoid more suffering in the future, then that if anything proves that suffering is bad, because you’re only bearing said suffering to avoid even more of it in the future.

The only reason why you even need more character, strength and resilience built out of suffering in your life to begin with is to later on deal with more potential suffering emerging in your life, to not fall into deep despair upon being faced with adversity and challenges, so it actually doesn’t prove suffering to be good, it proves suffering to be bad.

When your hamster died of cancer, it was ”good for you” because it desensitized you to you later on seeing your mother die of cancer.

But why is it good to be desensitized to your mother dying of cancer?

Only because otherwise you’d suffer even more intensely from witnessing that incident, which is bad, it’s the avoidance of that suffering which is the real good which the suffering of seeing your hamster die has only been instrumental to achieving, not the suffering itself, suffering itself is always bad, just like all water is watery and all shit is shitty.

Negative sensations are indeed not positive. Going with the lesser of two evils doesn’t make it no longer feel bad, just less bad than the other bad. The needle in your arm still produced a negative sensation, it’s just that getting a disease would hurt even more, if you could snap your fingers to grant yourself immunity to illness, you’d probably do that instead.

If someone holds a gun to your head and forces you eat either one bucket of horse shit or ten buckets of horse shit, that doesn’t mean that one bucket of it suddenly tastes good, it just tastes less bad than ten buckets of horse shit.

The fact that suffering sometimes happened prior to a good event doesn’t mean that it is good, if a fire burns down your house in the winter and now you’re sitting in the cold, that doesn’t prove fire to be cold. Now you might be sitting in the cold, but the fire burned your house down exactly because it was hot.

But what about masochists?

Even a masochist ramming a needle into his urethra or a depressed individual cutting their arm isn’t enjoying suffering – they are enjoying the relief of a suffering they are already experiencing, merely using a pain to eliminate a greater pain.

A masochist will experience intensified sexual frustration if he doesn’t inflict pain onto himself, then leading to him becoming more tense and pressurized, thus ultimately more suffering in the long run.

A depressed person will experience intensified depression or other negative states if they don’t cut their arm, so they cut their arm to blend out the worse pain with the pain in their arm, so to speak.

If I told anyone beforehand who has absolutely zero masochistic preferences that I’m a magician and could it make it so that by snapping my fingers, they won’t be able to have an orgasm anymore unless they cut their eyeballs out and rub some chili sauce in their sockets, set their pubic hair on fire and extract every tooth they have with a plier, they wouldn’t want me to do that.

Perhaps they would even use lethal violence to prevent me from doing that, they would rather be able to cum without having to inflict intense suffering onto themselves, because all suffering is bad, just like all water is watery, all shit is shitty, if the masochist could get the exact same relief without the pain involved, they would do so.

Sometimes, some extreme masochists may find themselves in a situation where they have to do these things to avoid sexual frustration, which is a form of suffering, but if you could choose beforehand to get the exact same amount of pleasure from something else, you wouldn’t want to be the one who has to extract all their teeth with a plier in order to cum.

So what is happening here is essentially that as a delusional coping mechanism, when suffering is experienced by people, they observe that it is sometimes the lesser of two evils to bear one suffering over another even worse form of suffering, like the sensation of the needle pricking your arm to avoid a worse illness like small pox.

Then, they fall victim to the delusional conclusion that this now means that even when the suffering in question is not required to avoid a greater suffering, it is still good, because somehow, bad feelings can somehow be good, wet can somehow be dry, hot can somehow be cold.

I get that it’s a delusional coping mechanism which might help some of them to get through the day, but it’s a problem that they even have to get through a day where they require such a coping mechanism to begin with, and it certainly becomes a problem when this coping mechanism is used to justify all sorts of suffering that isn’t required for the avoidance of any greater problem.

War? Whatever, pain is a warning signal.

Factory farming? Whatever, suffering creates great wisdom.

Children dying of starvation in Africa? Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.

You have terminal cancer? Whatever, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

It’s being used as an excuse for not fixing problems.

The problem with this ”suffering is good” approach in the context of reproductive ethics (natalism vs. antinatalism, to procreate or not to procreate) used by pro-natalists and pro-lifers should also be rather obvious – there is no unborn purgatory from which children need to be rescued, no one is spared from a worse fate by being reproduced.

It’s true that once you exist, you sometimes have to tolerate one suffering to avoid an even greater one, but obviously before the child actually exists, the child doesn’t actually exist, so it’s not somehow worse off, suffering in an unborn purgatory, lamenting that their parents that don’t reproduce them are somehow subjecting them to worse suffering in the unborn purgatory than by subjecting them to life on earth.

You’re just creating a pain machine to be motivated by that pain to try to avoid that pain again, there’s nothing efficient or productive about that, the suffering caused by reproduction is not instrumental to avoiding some kind of greater pain that exists in the universe.

So if we use the vaccination example again, the child might need the vaccination to avoid a much more painful illness once it exists, that is true, but obviously, before it existed, it didn’t need to become prone to that illness it now needs to be vaccinated against in the first place, it wasn’t sitting around in the unborn purgatory thinking:

”I wish I became prone to small pox so that I can get a vaccination against it one day! Why do I have to suffer from an urge to obtain an urge to avoid illnesses?”

That the child is prone to illness in the first place is the fault of the parents that produced it, so it would still be perfectly rational for the child with a fear of needles to blame their parents for even creating its proneness to illness in the first place without knowing whether or not the child will be fine with that later on.

This same line of reasoning is then of course even used to justify more child abuse on top of reproduction:

”The child needs to be spanked!”

Why?

”To learn discipline!”

But why does the child need to learn to be disciplined?

”To toughen up and compete with others, get a good job! Hardship builds great character!”

But why do they need to be resilient and successful in life? Right, because otherwise they will fail to acquire resources to fulfill certain needs, wants, desires in their life, they won’t be as fulfilled and satisfied, perhaps not achieve their goals in life due to said lack of discipline.

And who’s to blame for that?

You are to blame for them experiencing those needs, wants, desires they need to fulfill to avoid being tortured by them, because you imposed those needs, wants, desires onto them by reproducing them in the first place, non-existent individuals don’t need, want, desire anything.

It’s like I create a some sort of sadistic game, call it torture and the carrot, where I’m locking you in my basement and tell you that in order to obtain food for further survival, the carrot, you have to saw your left hand off. Then I can justify cutting your little finger off, because that will get you used to pain and desensitize you to later on getting your entire left hand cut off, which you have to do to obtain the carrot or starve to death. See, I’m actually doing you a favor I could say, I’m helping you get closer to the carrot!

See the problem? The problem with this is that I created that problem of you being in need of the carrot in the first place. It’s true that sometimes children have to learn to be disciplined (though highly questionable if beating them will achieve that) to not fail later on in life, but they only have to do that in the sense that if they completely fail at life, they’ll fail to fulfill needs, wants, desires that the procreator instilled into them by not aborting them before they became conscious.

The procreator creates the sick torture and carrot game, sometimes the child now has to endure hardship to get to the carrot, so the procreator justifies giving the child a spanking so it’ll be more desensitized to the more intense hardships and adversities later on in life, but all of this is only a problem if the procreator puts the child into this torture game where you have to bear torture to avoid even worse torture in the first place, which they still haven’t explained why anyone should think that’s a worthwhile endeavor.

If little billy is not created, he doesn’t need to be spanked harder to be more disciplined in order to obtain a good job requiring his emotional resilience and strength later on in life in order to avoid suffering from a low income and being a loser, non-existent little billy does not suffer from an urge to obtain an urge to obtain a job to obtain enough money to fulfill his needs in life from the unborn purgatory in this very moment.

So first you abuse the child by imposing the threat of deprivation on it – need, want, desire, i.e do x or suffer, and then you justify making the child suffer as a necessary evil by disciplining it to desensitize it to later on facing even more intense suffering which will be instrumental to avoiding only some of the suffering you have imposed on it by creating the threat of deprivation in the first place, that seems rather absurd.

Bullying is another great example of this flawed thought process of ”good suffering”.

First you were all skinny and weak, were called a faggot and beaten up in school every day, every girl denied you access to her vagina, then you started working out, taking steroids and beating the shit out of everyone and now you’re drowning in pussy because now you’re much stronger.

Totally proves that negative sensations must be good, right?

Wrong, because again, even if the suffering helped you toughen up which then later on resulted in you staving off the suffering of sexual frustration by finally being tough enough to be sexually selected for by some females, the suffering itself you experienced was still bad, the experience of getting bullied was not enjoyable regardless of whether or not it helped you to avoid an even more unenjoyable experience at some point.

Now you exist, so now you need to stick your peepee in a vagina to avoid even worse suffering from not doing so, but when you didn’t exist, you were not trapped in an unborn purgatory, needing to need to stick your peepee in a vagina to avoid even worse suffering, thinking to yourself ”Man, I wish I had to stick my peepee in vaginas in order to avoid suffering sexual frustration, unfortunately my parents won’t impose sexual needs onto me by reproducing me”.

You need it now, but you didn’t need to need it, your parents put you in need by reproducing you, it’s a net negative, you didn’t want to want it before you wanted it, you didn’t desire to desire it before you desired it.

So ultimately, whilst you already exist where you have to tolerate negative sensations from time to time to avoid an even higher amount of negative sensations in the future, the negative sensation itself is always bad, just like water is always watery and shit is always shitty, and before sentience evolved in this universe, the universe was not somehow worse off without us, starving for sentient organisms to be put inside of it.

There was no pre-existing damage to fix, we are the damage.

The faulty idea that suffering is good is largely used to justify its continued infliction, it might help one as a coping mechanism to get through the day once in a while to believe it’s all happening for some kind of greater good, but the fact that you even need to get through a day to begin and tell yourselves these lies is a negative, a problem – you are in need, you’re in desperation.

And if we don’t start being more honest about the fact that suffering is bad, procreators will keep putting organisms into situations where they have to tell themselves that suffering is good to cope with life.

The reason why you need that coping mechanism in your life to begin with is because procreators keep creating problems, in an emotional state where they themselves are falling victim to the exact same coping mechanism, thinking:

”Suffering is good, might as well breed, if my children suffer horribly and die of cancer, it’s gonna be real good somehow, it’s just gonna toughen them up!”.

Once suffering exists, it can be necessary to bear one suffering to avoid an even greater one, but the existence of suffering itself to begin with is unnecessary in the grand scheme of things, the universe was never somehow worse off without sentient organisms inside it, our suffering serves absolutely no greater good.

Pedophobes and the argumentum ad baculum fallacy.

There is absolutely zero evidence for the hypothesis that sexual experience in childhood or youth is inherently harmful, there is at best proof that there is a correlation between sex in childhood and trauma in societies that are unaccepting of sexual relations between children/minors and pedophiles/adults, no proof whatsoever that sex in childhood or youth in and of itself causes the trauma.

Because pedophobes irrationally feel disgusted and threatened by the topic, they immediately think of certain harmful factors when they try to process it, like manipulation, blackmail, force, anal penetration, STDs, pregnancy, etc, which are all things that are not inherently connected to the act of having sex with a child/minor though.

Children have genitals and can obviously find out about the existence of sexual pleasure by exploring them on their own, without somehow needing to be fooled or violently coerced into doing so, there’s no evidence and/or reason to think it’s the result of some kind of evil scheme by some underground pedophile cabal misleading children through propaganda.

So if a little girl wants to simply experience the same pleasurable sensation from rubbing herself against a pillow by rubbing herself against a pedophile’s leg, and the pedophile isn’t some kind of violent psychopath that does something to her that she doesn’t want later on, like anal rape, there’s no evidence that such an encounter would be harmful to children unless society reacted negatively to it.

There is zero conclusive scientific evidence that children that voluntarily received sexual relief even in societies where pedosexuality was acceptable felt traumatized by sex, and there are zero reliable or coherent explanations from pedophobe professionals as to how this magical process of trauma just poofing into existence out of the great nowhere is supposed to work, even if the child initially engaged in the sex act without having been manipulated or otherwise forced into it and society simply stopped reacting negatively to it.

Pedophobes just like any other group of bigots assume that because they could prove a correlation between sex in childhood and higher depression rates in adulthood, it proves that it’s caused by the pedophilic sex act itself.

It is similar to how a homophobic bigot would assume that if they see some questionable study that says children of gay parents are more likely to suffer from depression, they assume that it’s directly caused by the fact that the parents are gay and definitely nothing else, the child is depressed because their father sucked a dick, not because the bigots are raising their children to harass children of gay couples.

It’s just a post hoc fallacy, correlation equals causation – B happened after A, therefore, A caused B. The child had sex, the child is traumatized by society’s negative reaction to it, so therefore, sex causes trauma, that’s the faulty idea here. The child left the house while it was raining, the child was wetted by the rain, therefore, so leaving your house causes you to be wetted.

When it gets to that point in the discussion, the pedophobes sometimes simply like to commit another fallacy to prove their point by then simply appealing to the extrinsic harm caused by the harsh social reaction that they themselves are creating in response to such sex acts and say something along the lines of:

”Even if having sex with children is not inherently harmful, in our society, there are still consequences to this perverted behavior either way, so it’s still just as harmful to the poor child in the end, they’ll feel ashamed later on! Why does it matter by what exactly the trauma is caused? No excuses!”

It is ultimately an argumentum ad baculum fallacy – because it’s an entirely self-created consequence. Instead of proving something to be harmful, society, which you are forming part of, is causing harm to someone for engaging in an activity you don’t like, then pretend that the activity they engaged in is harmful because you harmed them in response to engaging in the harmless activity, frequently followed with standard moronic phrases like ”don’t drop the soap LOL”, i.e if you’re a pedo, you get raped in jail, so therefore, pedo=bad.

Argumentum ad baculum (Latin for “argument to the cudgel” or “appeal to the stick”) is the fallacy committed when one appeals to force or the threat of force to bring about the acceptance of a conclusion.^[1][2] One participates in argumentum ad baculum when one points out the negative consequences of holding the contrary position (ex. believe what I say, or I will hit you). It is a specific case of the negative form of an argument to the consequences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_baculum

Let’s say you like to wear red hats. I don’t like that, so in response to you wearing a red hat, I cut your head off and set you on fire. Does this prove that wearing a red hat is harmful? No, it does not, it just proves that I harmed you in response to wearing a red hat, but it does not actually prove the wearing of red hats to be intrinsically harmful.

The pedophobe at this point in the discussion is just appealing to a consequence that they themselves are creating.

They pretty much admit that child sex is not intrinsically harmful, they just appeal to the consequences bestowed by the bigoted society they form part of, such as for example:

The child and the pedophile being separated.
The child being screeched at by their hysterical parents.
The child being sent to a similarly delusional therapist.
The child receiving strong social pressure to ”accept their rape”.
The child hearing they now ”lost their innocence” and this is a great problem.
The child seeing the pedophile tormented/beaten in front of them.
The child feeling responsible for the pedophile going to prison.

This is no better than any other bigot althroughout human history just using force and threat to explain why the behavior they are bigoted against is somehow bad.

Don’t be a homo or else I’ll beat you up for it, therefore, gay sex is harmful/bad.
Don’t be a whore or else I’ll rape you for it, therefore, prostitution is harmful/bad.

Just that the pedophobe is essentially saying:

Don’t be a pedo or else I’ll beat you up for it in front of the child you gave an orgasm, thereby traumatize the child, then attribute that trauma to the orgasm rather than my uncivilized primitive conduct, therefore, child sex is harmful/bad.

It is akin to a homophobe in Saudi Arabia arguing that even if the homosexual activity itself does not cause harm, when you, as a bigot, set the homosexuals on fire for having homosexual sex, they are still harmed by it, therefore, somehow the sex (rather than the consequences you inflict on homosexuals for having sex) is still harmful, so homosexual sexual relations ought to be outlawed because otherwise you’ll burn these faggots!

It’s ironically the argument of a rapist while pedophobes pretend to be so anti-rape, like saying you can’t go outside dressing like a whore, it’s bad, because if you do that, he’s going to rape you, this proves how harmful it is for women to not wear a burqa, there is a consequence for not wearing one, a consequence which the rapist himself is creating, which is that he’ll rape them for it.

It might even become circular reasoning, i.e it’s harmful to have sex with the child, because if you have sex with the child, we’ll harm you (and by extension through this whole drama the child too) by imprisoning you for it, and why do we harm you for it? Because having sex with the child is harmful, you sick pervert! – That would be circular.

As an example to illustrate just how absurd appealing to self-created, extrinsic harm to demonstrate that an act is harmful is, let’s say society acted about harmless sexual encounters between children and pedophiles about any other pleasure-seeking activity, like eating ice cream.

They all believe that because children don’t have fully developed brains yet, a child can never possibly consent to buy ice cream you sick monster, it’s a crime even if it really seemed like the child consented to taste the ice cream, that’s not real consent because they haven’t reached the age of consent yet where society has decided the child is allowed to consent to eating ice cream.

Whenever there’s an ice cream salesman and the child agrees to buy it, some psychotic lunatic father has a meltdown in front of the child.

”OMG this is my daughter you sick fuck, one step closer and I shoot! I don’t care that there’s no actual evidence whatsoever that eating ice cream in childhood in and of itself causes lifelong trauma, once I’ve beaten you pervert to a bloody pulp right in front of my little girl, she’s still traumatized, so that proves that ice cream is indeed very traumatizing, I’m doing this protect your precious wellbeing, little Suzie! You can’t consent!”

The child is then pressured by society to accept that they have been horribly wronged by having been sold exactly the ice cream flavor that they wanted, if they don’t, they’re just the poor dumb child that can’t understand how horribly violated it was by having been sold ice cream and the therapists won’t stop harassing her.

She also hears others joke how the guy that sold the ice cream is now going to prison and has Big Bubba shove his chocolate ice cream in his asshole, teehee, violent anal rape for a completely victimless crime harming absolutely no one, it doesn’t get any funnier than that!

At some point now, little Suzie is kinda sad.

Society concludes – ah see, ice cream is very harmful to children indeed! Doesn’t matter if selling ice cream isn’t ”intrinsically harmful” or any of this weird science and philosophy shit jargon, I’m a simple man, fact is, little Suzie is harmed, so no ice cream! NO ICE CREAM!

Has this society legitimately proven how bad the selling of ice cream is by harming the ice man in response to selling a child ice cream, have they made a great consequentialist argument as to why selling ice cream to children is always bad?

No, it hasn’t, they just demonstrated themselves to be primitive barbarians in need of psychiatric institutionalization that for some irrational narrative harm others in response to selling ice cream to children, anyone who has not been indoctrinated into their cult can fully see through their non-sensical notions of right and wrong behavior.

That they are in fact just suffering from a delusion that the selling of ice cream is harmful, and then attribute the harm that they cause in response to ice cream being sold to the selling of the ice cream rather than their uncivilized, backward, moronic behavior.

The vast majority of humans on this planet, neurotypicals, the neurologically typical are socially imitative animals that have a strong tendency to conform to many rules that are taught to them without questioning, this had certain benefits of social security at some point in our evolutionary history, but is also why humans can be indoctrinated into believing things that are completely disconnected from reality or fail to understand science like the earth being round, when their society keeps insisting that it is flat, it produces discomfort to go against their tribe.

Just like someone can be indoctrinated into believing that god is real but allah isn’t rather than to acknowledge that god is just as real as the easter bunny – someone can also be indoctrinated into believing that one particular age of consent, like 18 instead of 14 is the only correct one, and feel uneasy and repulsed whenever this delusional perception of their’s is challenged to any degree at all, although they most likely exactly see the delusion for what it is if they witnessed someone who believed in a special number that were even higher than their’s and thought that sex under 21 is never possible without resulting in harm later on.

Of course the lower we go, the more likely someone might be to be manipulated into having sex, the point is that it is being treated like a religion. Just because someone is more likely to be manipulated into sex, that doesn’t prove that when they have sex, it must be the result of manipulation, it could be, but doesn’t have to be, rape is the problem which can still be illegal regardless of the age of consent, but many pedophobes have a religious mindset in that they would pretend that all sex under the holy age is rape no matter what.

So does this problem apply to the ”victims” of ”rape” (wanting to get raped is an oxymoron, if it’s wanted it ceases to be rape) that they initially wanted to engage in when they were children, obviously, if a social animal is being put under excessive social pressure to pretend they got raped, then they will more often than not simply start to go along with the narrative to avoid being labelled as the poor, dumb rape victim that doesn’t even understand how raped it truly is.

Pedophobes would see their behavior for what it is if were to be manifested in someone else, like the hypothetical society that demonizes particularly selling ice cream to children, they would just as clearly detect that it’s not the selling of the ice cream itself that causes the harm, but the complete overreaction to it of sending someone to prison for it and pressuring the child to accept how it has been wronged.

Yet when a pedophile gives a willing child that discovered sexual pleasure and now wants to receive a pleasurable sensation in the form of an orgasm rather than ice cream (which is probably even healthier in the long run), they torment the pedophile in front of the child, then attribute the resulting trauma to the harmless pleasurable sensation of relief from sexual frustration rather than their fundamentally irrational, psychotic behavior.

Of course, you could even argue that because in response to ice cream being sold, the cult reacts in this violent manner, it might be somewhat negligent of the iceman to sell ice cream when he knows that the reaction has the chance of in some way emotionally harming the child from seeing the iceman being harmed in front of them, but the harm still lies in the reaction.

The social reaction doesn’t need to exist in the first place, so it would still be better to simply get rid of the reaction, just like in the cases of pedophiles and children exchanging sexual pleasure, obviously the real problem at hand is that you’re castrating and shooting people in front of children for selling them ice cream, not the selling of the ice cream itself.

Children/minors can consent.

A frequent argument in all sorts of discussions about sexual ethics, whether that is about having sex with children/minors, or also non-human animals or the mentally handicapped is that they are too unintelligent and immature to give consent, thus it is unethical to have sex with them, it tends to be the main focus of the discussion leading to a lot of confusion.

Consenting to something for the most part ultimately just implies willingness, being fine with something or not. When we talk about whether or not you consented in a sexual context, what is meant is usually just whether you wanted it to happen or not.

You can’t consent to get raped or be a slave for instance, it’s an oxymoron, if you wanted it it wouldn’t be rape or slavery anymore, what may be meant by ”wanting/consenting to get raped” is that you want someone to fuck you who doesn’t care whether or not you want to get fucked, but you still wanted it either way.

Children/minors are capable of agreement, they agree or don’t agree to do things every single day. Agree to eat food or not, agree to ride a bicycle or not, agree to be hugged or not.

A child can be willing, consenting to sexual pleasure too, I think that if we were to really steelman (as in, opposite of strawman, lay their view out as robust and coherent as possible) the pedophobes, what they really mean most of the time when they’re talking about consent is the child’s intelligence and maturity, foresight, i.e ability to plan and think ahead, understand consequences and ramifications of actions, this is something children are less capable of until a certain age, sometimes their foresight will be impaired.

Unless the pedophobe is some religious fanatic who thinks children don’t have erogenous zones and are innately asexual, what they are really saying is probably that a child may be willing, consenting to receive sexual pleasure, but that there are certain, potentially harmful consequences to that sexual pleasure that the child would not understand yet, in their disgust they automatically equate all sex in childhood with certain harms like anal rape, STDs, early pregnancy, etc.

That’s why even when you point out to them that the minor wanted to engage in some sort of sexual act with the older person, they act outraged and say it’s no excuse, even when the child supposedly wanted it, as if there is something innately harmful about sex that this poor child would just never agree to if they only knew about it.

These harmful consequences they automatically think of are not inherently connected to all sexual acts between children/minors and pedophiles/adults, so it doesn’t logically follow that just because someone isn’t intelligent or mature, they can’t consent to the sex act.

Whether or not you need a great future concept/advanced foresight depends on the future consequences of that act.

A greater foresight, intelligence and maturity are only important factors if there are potential negative consequences to your actions that you may fail to appreciate, if the act is harmless anyway, you don’t need high intelligence or maturity to process it.

If the sexual pleasure is indeed the only consequence of the sex act and there is no secondary unwanted consequence that the child didn’t want, then yes, all that can be objectively stated is that said child indeed consented to be sexually stimulated.

Example:

Let’s say a young child that doesn’t understand traffic rules yet and/or is too immature to take them seriously, this child wants to ride a bicycle.

Should we allow this child to consent to riding a bicycle?

The answer is that that entirely depends on the environment and its consequences. On the freeway with many cars driving around rapidly? No. In a largely safe and harmless environment with no cars driving or definitely slow enough to notice the child? Yes.

Whether or not the child has a great concept of the future, can think ahead is completely irrelevant in this scenario, because it is a harmless environment with no cars driving anyway, so the child doesn’t need to be able to think ahead because there’s about zero chance that they’ll get hit by a car anyway, all that matters is that the child wants to ride the bicycle, wasn’t forced to do so at gunpoint.

And the same consistently applies to sex, if a child found out about sexual pleasure by rubbing their private parts against things, but doesn’t understand possible risks of sex like STDs or different sexual practices like anal sex yet, that doesn’t automatically mean they can’t consent to any sexual act.

That means that they should not be engaging in the type of sex that has these risks they are unable to understand, but that is simply not all sex.

If the child for instance just wants to rub themselves against a pedophile’s leg for the exact same pleasurable sensation they received from rubbing themselves against a pillow, where none of these potential complications (like STDs, pregnancy, penetrative sex, etc) could even possibly exist, then indeed, all that can be objectively stated is that by all evidence the child consented to be sexually stimulated. It was wanted, and there was no future consequence to it that was unwanted either.

If the child wanted to ride the bicycle, and there was no consequence to riding the bicycle that the child did not want – the child consented to ride the bicycle.

If the child wanted to have the sex, and there was no consequence to having the sex that the child did not want – the child consented to have the sex.

The fact that children may not understand the consequences of their actions as much as adults yet is only a problem if those consequences are actually present, if the negative consequences don’t exist in a given scenario, there’s no problem. And just like in other scenarios, the responsibility should be on the adults, including the pedophile of course to make sure there are no negative consequences for the child (like STDs or pregnancy), instead of just forbidding the child to have sex. You don’t forbid the child to ride the bicycle at all, you just make sure it’s as safe as possible.

There’s no age restriction for children eating broccoli for instance, and that is because if the child consents to eat broccoli, it’s unlikely that there is any long term consequence to eating broccoli that the child will later on not consent to, so there’s no reason to stop this child from consenting to eat broccoli.

There’s an age restriction for alcohol and cigarettes on the other hand, and the idea there is that although the child may agree to drink a bottle of whiskey, they may not consent to the future consequences that could have on their body, but is not aware of that to the same degree as someone with a more mature understanding of future consequences, then able to weigh the pros and cons.

This argument similarly applies to humans that are perhaps on the same intellectual level as children, some intellectually handicapped individuals perhaps go their entire lives engaging in all sorts of recreational activities without fully understanding them to the same degree as someone who isn’t severely intellectually disabled, does that mean they cannot express their preferences to any degree? No, it simply means we sometimes have to take extra cautionary measures to ensure their safety, we can use a similar example here.

Another example:

Let’s say there’s a mentally handicapped person that likes to collect blue marbles, but they have a tendency to swallow said marbles sometimes and are too handicapped to understand that that’s bad, they can only say ”blue marble me feel good good”.

Does that mean that they just per se can’t consent to play with blue marbles?

No. Under the supervision of someone who makes sure they don’t swallow them and choke on it, there would be no problem with it. Completely alone in the house, probably a bad idea.

Same exact standard can then again consistently be applied to sex, so let’s say there’s a mentally retarded female on the intelligence level of a 5 year old, interested in sex but unaware of what STDs are.

Whether or not it would be responsible to allow her to consent again depends entirely on the consequences. If her partner has no STDs and takes care of the contraception process and all that the sexual encounter thus consists of is the desired exchange of sexual pleasure, there’s no problem, no reason to say she couldn’t consent.

Now if her partner has AIDS and doesn’t use protection, she doesn’t consent to get the AIDS but isn’t aware of that, so at that point it’d be sensible to intervene for us to prevent her from receiving the AIDS from the other irresponsible party.

Sex is not such a complicated act that always results in harm no matter what, so there’s no reason to assume one necessarily has to have a great future concept/advanced foresight to engage in it.

So if a child actually wants to receive sexual pleasure from rubbing herself against a pedophile’s leg instead of a pillow, wasn’t manipulated in some way to do so and there is absolutely nothing in that scenario the pedophile does that the child would later on not want, like anal rape or whatever pedophobes imagine to always happen, the question really becomes:

What is the supposed future consequence in sex that this child fails to take into account due to their childishness, that they need to be protected against at all costs, that they simply can never understand until the child is no longer a child?

The child cannot give consent they would claim. Why not, where is the harmful future consequence in leg humping as opposed to pillow humping that the child subject simply fails to take into account due to their childishness? What is it?

What is this magical consequence that supposedly exists for everyone under the holy age of consent when they have sex with someone over the holy age of consent that the child would need to be informed about for consent to be possible, but simply can’t because the child is not an adult yet?

On child sexuality.

While there are many different non-sensical arguments used to justify the sexual deprivation and repression of children, I think the most important thing to point out in discussions/debates about the topic of pedophiles and children having sex is that there is no actual evidence that child sex is intrinsically harmful.

There are some things that are inherently harmful, such as getting slowly tortured to death, getting violently gang raped with a baseball bat, burning kittens alive, etc, no matter what your surrounding culture opines on it, some things are simply guaranteed to cause harm.

Sex in childhood is not such an activity, it’s a fact that children have genitals through which they can theoretically find out about the existence of sexual pleasure on their own, without having to be manipulated or violently forced into it by anyone.

So if let’s say a little girl actually wants to obtain the same pleasurable sensation from rubbing herself against a pillow by rubbing herself against a pedophile’s leg, there’s no logical reason or evidence to assume this would be harmful outside of the social consequences that the pedophobes themselves are creating in response to such encounters, no evidence for intrinsic harm, only evidence for children feeling harmed once they see how negatively society reacts to it.

The theory that sex in childhood is inherently harmful is based on wrongful implicit assumptions, pedophobes immediately think of all kinds of different factors that are not inherent to the act of having sex with a child or minor when they even hear the word pedophilia, such as:

an unwilling, innately asexual, ”innocent” (sex=guilt) child
force
manipulation
blackmail
anal penetration
STD exchange
pregnancy
social consequences (that the pedophobes themselves are creating)
violent abduction, rape, murder

without ever demonstrating an intrinsic harm to the activity of having sex with a child/minor itself.

Then, they lump both the 8 year old girl voluntarily humping the leg of a pedophile into the same category as the 8 year old girl getting violently raped by some psychopath, their disgust inhibits any trace amount of rational and critical thought they had left.

They never prove the sex itself to be harmful, just that sometimes it can be made harmful, so that then they can use that as an excuse to lump all child and underage sex into one category because they feel equally disgusted by it, thus failing to draw a distinction between harmful and harmless cases of child sex – there is no proof that child sex itself causes harm, the pedophobe just foolishly confuses their disgust for evidence of harm like any other bigot would do.

They’re employing post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning – B happened after A, therefore, B was definitely caused by A. Person left the house while it was raining, got wet from the rain, therefore, leaving your house causes you to be wet, even when it’s not raining.

Children have sex, are traumatized, therefore, the trauma must have been caused by the sex, despite us having absolutely no objective explanation or evidence that children even in societies where it was more acceptable felt traumatized by witnessing sex, and not taking into account the harsh social reaction that we have to such encounters.

A child may be more likely to be manipulated into having sex, but this doesn’t mean that just because a child has sex, it must be the result of manipulation.

Just as a child may be more likely to be manipulated into anything else as well, but it’d be bad to therefore just ban adults from interacting with children, because obviously not all interactions between children and adults are automatically the result of abuse, this doesn’t suddenly change when it comes to sex just because you find it disgusting.

For example, just because some narcissistic, abusive parents force their children to participate in beauty contests, that doesn’t mean it’s reasonable for me to assume that whenever a little girl is wearing make-up, it must be the result of abuse, so I go up to the person that gave them the make up and decapitate them, because little girls can never under any circumstance consent to wearing make-up you sick fucks.

It’s better put a ban on the abuse element, not on harmless acts, you don’t arrest every person teaching children about religion just because some radical islamists try to use the freedom to teach children about religion to manipulate children into joining terrorist organizations like ISIS, that would be unfair to all the peaceful ones, and arresting all adults that have sex with willing minors because some manipulate and/or abuse minors is just as stupid of a concept.

I believe the pedophobes that there are probably many studies that show some kind of vague correlation between sex in childhood and various malaise, but that’s it, a strong case of correlation not implying causation. You could say children of gay couples are more likely to be depressed in a society where homophobes raise their children to harass children of homosexual couples, but this doesn’t prove that they’re depressed just because their parents are homosexuals.

They never demonstrate any conclusive proof that children even in societies were pedosexuality was acceptable felt traumatized after having had some sort of sexual experience, or scientifically explain in any way why we should assume that children would automatically be traumatized by sex itself, what is this mechanism of how wanted sexual encounters traumatize children.

Just like we can demonstrate that alcohol destroyed livers in the past as well as present, can you show us any piece of evidence that children have always been traumatized as a result of having had sex that they voluntarily engaged in, even in societies where it was more acceptable?

How, why and when does trauma magically poof into existence out of the great nowhere for no tangible, explicable reason whatsoever?

They just assume that correlation equals causation because they feel disgusted by it, similar to how homophobes in a society where they frown upon homosexuals would in their bigotry assume that children of homosexual couples are depressed because sex=evil, then may even ask you to disprove their theory that sex in childhood is intrinsically harmful, a theory that they’ve never proven to begin with, like a christian fundamentalist would ask you to prove that god doesn’t exist without demonstrating any proof for god first.

You can potentially raise children to feel bad about anything, humans had moral panics about all sorts of trivial things such as certain cutlery like forks in the past.

Your social delusions are more malleable than you likely think they are, with enough social indoctrination, there’s a possibility we could also create a cult in which giving children tomato sauce on their spaghetti would be seen as the ultimate crime against humanity, and children that have been given tomato sauce by an older friend would most likely grow up to feel quite bad about it.

Certainly, you could equally set up a study demonstrating a correlation between having been given tomato sauce by an older friend as a child and feeling traumatized, but would that in any way prove that tomato sauce is in any way inherently damaging to children no matter what, even if they wanted to have the tomato sauce on their spaghetti?

No, it would not. We simply know that it is not, we could show in an unbiased laboratory setting that if a child willingly consumes tomato sauce, it would have the overall same positively stimulating effect on said child as it would on the person over the socially acceptable age for tomato sauce consumption of their primitive tribe, so if the child wanted to have the meal, wasn’t forced to eat it, there should be no intrinsic harm element to tomato sauce itself.

And the same goes for orgasms. In an unbiased laboratory setting, we could demonstrate that if a child willingly receives a sexually pleasurable sensation, it has the same exact positively stimulating effect on them as on the person over the holy age of their primitive tribe, so if the child wanted to have the pleasurable sensation of relief from sexual frustration, wasn’t forced to receive it, there should be no intrinsic harm element to sexual pleasure itself.

So if the child wanted to have the harmless pleasurable sensation, it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that the only thing making sex harmful for the child is the consequences bestowed by the bigoted, pedophobic society they live in, that’s the only thing left that we could realistically point to.

When pushed to this point in the conversation, the pedophobes then sometimes like to commit the argumentum ad baculum fallacy immediately and say it doesn’t matter by what the harm is caused.

”But we still live in that society then and even if it’s just the social consequences that traumatize the child, well, then there are still consequences either way, so no excuses!”.

It is a cheap appeal to a self-created consequence, just because someone harms you or someone else in response to doing something, that doesn’t actually demonstrate the act itself you committed to be inherently harmful, the pedophobes are simply appealing to consequences they themselves are creating at this point like any other bigot althroughout history, it’s an extrinsic harm, not an intrinsic harm.

Don’t be a whore or else I’ll rape you for it, therefore, being a whore is bad.

Don’t be a faggot or else I’ll beat you for it, therefore, being a faggot is bad.

Don’t have sex with the child or else I’ll traumatize the child by beating you in front of it for it, therefore, child sex is bad.

Example, let’s say a child consents to buy chocolate ice cream, now some insane person escaped from the madhouse comes around the corner and castrates and shoots the iceman in front of said child because he believes that children are terribly harmed by eating chocolate ice cream without having studied every single ingredient in it first.

Consenting to taste ice cream requires rocket scientist level intelligence in this person’s distorted view of reality, obviously the problem here is the deranged person, not the act of selling ice cream itself.

On the other hand, when it comes to a pedophile giving a child a pleasurable sensation in the form of an orgasm rather than chocolate ice cream, society mistreats the pedophile in front of the child for it, for example:

An angry father may beat the shit out of the pedophile in front of the child.

In general, the parents may act hysterically towards the child.

The child is sent to a therapy indoctrination center where they receive strong social pressure to ”accept their rape”, the child feels social pressure to go along with this narrative for social acceptance.

They may feel responsible that their partner that gave them a harmless pleasurable sensation is sent to jail.

They hear others joking how said partner is now going to get raped in the ass in said jail by a big black cock upon dropping the soap.

As that then indeed upsets the child, they then falsely attribute that trauma to the entirely harmless pleasurable sensation rather than their primitive, uncivilized conduct towards the pedophile, when the real problem is them and no one else, just like in the example of the person castrating and shooting the iceman in front of the child, concluding that icecream is harmful because the child was traumatized by seeing him castrate and shoot the iceman.

We have at best proof of a correlation between sex in childhood and trauma in a society where sex between children and pedophiles is systematically demonized and violently interferred with, that’s all, the compilation of actual evidence of voluntarily received orgasms harming children is zero.

Or, the pedophobe simply resorts to denying that children could be sexual, that can also happen and is frequently a snuck in premise that the pedophobe presupposes to be the case, they deny that such children as the 8 year old girl that would voluntarily hump said pedophile’s leg even exist, so if child sex is happening it must always be the result of some kind of manipulation or scheme by an evil pedophile, but that is all that it is, a denial of objective reality.

Again, children have genitals, and through said genitals they can find out about the existence of sexual pleasure, this is a fact, whether or not that conflicts with the worldview of some delusional parent who wants to think of children as innately asexual. Many simply imagine all sex as being stereotypically penetrative rather than a sensation, so when they hear sex they already start to make all kinds of implicit assumptions again, imagining someone anally raping an infant.

If it were true that children are purely asexual and could never want to have sex for any reason at any point in the first place, then it would of course be reasonable to assume that whenever they are having sex, it must be the result of some sort of prior manipulation, that they’re being violated – fair enough, then that would be the problem.

But this is not the case in objective reality, the pedophobe simply frequently has a delusional fairytale narrative where children aren’t sexual beings and all sexual impulses in children are said to be caused by some kind of external manipulation, i.e the pedominati on disney channel told children they must have sex and unfortunately they ended up believing it, they’re putting something in the water to make everyone gay and also sexualize children although children would obviously never be sexual on their own.

It is like someone finds children too cute to admit that they are also capable of something dirty, like defecation, so they opt to completely degrade their children’s welfare by forcing them to shit into their pants until 18 (masturbation/abstinence) instead of giving them a toilet to shit in (the more exciting sexual experience with someone else).

The pedophobe insists the 12 year old boy is only allowed to jerk off to a hot pornstar fucking, not stick his dick inside her much softer, pleasant vagina if he were given the chance as that would supposedly then traumatize him for life to have the more efficient sexual outlet. Somehow soft vagina is traumatizing, bony hand whilst staring at the exact same vagina on a screen is not.

Children masturbate, I masturbated as a child and definitely under 18 purely for the harmless pleasurable sensations of relief from sexual frustration this generated inside my penis and so do many other children and minors in this day and age as well, there is absolutely zero reason to assume that if I as a child simply got this relief from humping an older girl’s ass as opposed to a pillow or some other object, I would have somehow been horribly devastated by it.

The problem is the pedophobes, sex is not an intrinsically harmful activity, so if they are legitimately interested in it with another child or even with a pedophile, there is zero reason to assume that this would be harmful outside of the confines of the social consequences the pedophobes bestow on children and their partners, they are creating this very problem they lament by acting like deranged chimpanzees in front of their children upon discovering that the child is not the asexual cute little accessory that they in their delusional fantasy worlds have made it out to be.

As such, it’s more sensible to simply remove the child sex taboo rather than trying to eliminate pedosexuality, just like it’d also be more sensible to remove the anti-gay taboo in Saudi Arabia rather than homosexuality, or any other taboo so as long as the act it demonizes is not legitimately harmful like burning puppies and kittens alive for example, something that is guaranteed, in principle, to always cause harm, suffering, negative sensations.

If the only bad thing about an activity is that irrational bigots will act negatively in response to it, the problem is of course the irrational bigots, not the act itself, and that is the point here, there’s no evidence for the intrinsic harmfulness of child sex.

Don’t socially transform a non-problem into a problem, it is no better than demonizing any other intrinsically harmless act, like giving children a certain type of food, like spaghetti with tomato sauce, and then pretending that the food itself is harmful just because society harmed someone in response to giving it to children. In the same way, a rational agent judging from outside, with no indoctrinated pre-existing bias from your society would look at your idiotic pedophile hysteria.