My disagreements with vegans.

In and of itself, if veganism is just a subset of sentiocentrism, i.e the idea that rights should be granted based on suffering-capacity, sentience, then I’m vegan by that definition.

I think suffering-capacity is the only important characteristic, it’s certainly not my human DNA that makes it bad for someone to stick a knife in my eye. I have human DNA right now, my body would contain human DNA when I’m completely braindead as well, but I’d certainly say that sticking a knife in my eye right now is much worse than to do it when I’m braindead.

I wouldn’t just flip a coin and say ”doesn’t matter, the problem is the destruction of human DNA, not the triggering of pain” – speciesism, just like racism is a misguided way of looking at the world where you ignore the suffering-capacity of all the organisms that aren’t in your particular ingroup.

Be it skin color, genitalia, nationality, family membership or species, it makes you a danger and a blight, similar to if I decided my brown eyes are the only reason why it’s bad to torture me, anyone else is less important because they don’t have brown eyes.

Yes, animals, unlike different groups of humans, are generally less intelligent than humans, but intelligence still doesn’t inherently change your capacity to suffer. More intelligent beings might suffer from different things, i.e a human female can suffer from not receiving a right to vote and go to college, so we give her one, but a cow does not, so the cow doesn’t need that right.

But when it comes to raping and confining someone in a cage, there’s no great difference in terms of suffering, so if you’re in a burning building and can only save twenty pigs or one human child, it still makes much more sense to save twenty pigs from being burned alive, their lack of intelligence doesn’t suddenly make being burned alive painless.

That’s my position on it, so we could say I’m anti-speciesist and (negative) utilitarian, but there are vegans who say they don’t only care about consequences of actions, but more about the idea that humans should never interfere with other animals, human=bad, animal=good, similar to how some feminists aren’t rationally looking at consequences, they just think woman=good, woman=always victim, man=bad, man=always rapist.

List of disagreements to follow.

1: Reproductive ethics (antinatalism vs. non-antinatalism).

I’m against creating new sentient life, because it always results in suffering. By preventing all conscious life, we prevent all suffering. We also prevent the chance of any happiness, but that is irrelevant, because there is no unborn purgatory where anyone is suffering from a lack of happiness.

In (conscious) life, we are forced into a position of having to chase satisfaction in order to avoid the otherwise resulting dissatisfaction. Eat or hunger, drink or thirst, shit or constipate, cum or get tense, socialize or get lonely, whatever example you want to use. But when martians and plutonians do not exist, while they are not enjoying great food, drinking refreshing water, taking a great big shit or getting an orgasm – they also never suffer hunger, thirst, constipation or sexual frustration.

So it’s no problem, so no one seriously mourns the non-existence of martians and plutonians, and all life on earth is just as irrelevant, not doing anything except constantly suffering, experiencing needs, wants, desires and then trying to get back to a zero point again of not suffering anymore, not experiencing any needs, wants, desires.

All downsides are avoided by not having said life in the universe, and the lack of happiness isn’t an issue because no one exists. No wound, no need for the bandaid. No dissatisfaction, no need for the satisfaction. Complaining about the lack of pleasure in a world where no one is there to crave it is like complaining about not having a bandaid when you have no wound.

Of course, the argument also applies to other animals, any sentient life, so that would mean humans would have to help other animals towards extinction as painlessly as possible instead of preserving nature, which leads us to our next points.

2: Wildlife suffering.

Even when the suffering is quite severe, vegans frequently don’t want any humans to interfere with wild animals harming each other, the reasons given for that I think are completely non-sensical.

1 – Other animals don’t have moral agency, they don’t understand what they are doing as much as humans, so they can’t be held accountable, they don’t know any better.

While it is true that a hyena doesn’t know any better than to eat a zebra alive, I could also argue that a severely mentally disabled rapist doesn’t know any better than to rape people. He’s not doing it to hurt anyone, he’s just trying to get off, so we can’t arrest him.

The idea that suffering is only bad if it’s caused intentionally or by someone that understands that they’re causing it is ludicrous, all this is is an emotional bias where we are more offended by someone intentionally causing us suffering than unintentionally doing it, but this doesn’t mean the pain is suddenly no longer painful.

You prevent yourself from getting viruses or falling into a meatgrinder, right? Although these things have no intention to harm or understanding of harm, but you still figure that the harm is harmful and try to avoid it either way.

Especially for an animal with lower intelligence and doesn’t have as many thoughts about the intents of others as humans, it’s completely irrelevant whether or not some sociopathic factory farm worker is hitting them or they’re getting eaten by a hyena, they’re just trying to get away from suffering, a wildebeast laying in the grass with its entrails ripped out by a hyena doesn’t pray to god, hoping no human comes to euthanize it because that would violate its religious beliefs that you must endure suffering to go to heaven.

2 – These other animals need nutrients in meat to survive.

True, but why do these animals need to be here to survive in the first place? Let’s say I’m a mad scientist, in my laboratory, I make a new alien species, they have to eat the intestines of human children in order to thrive.

What, are you going to tell me I can’t do that, I should euthanize my alien breed again? SO YOU’RE PRO-GENOCIDE? These aliens need meat to survive, and you have to agree they need to survive, otherwise you’re not vegan, we need these aliens to exist.

We don’t even have to go as far as to use an alien hypothetical, just in and of itself, if you are claiming that the animal’s need to eat flesh to survive justifies the harm, you also have to accept someone feeding a human child to a hyena, otherwise you’re already being speciesist, i.e inconsistent.

P1. The fact that the hyena needs meat justifies the harm they cause P2. The hyena needs any meat, doesn’t matter if it’s zebra or human child C. It’s justified to feed human children to hyenas. Why not? If ”the hyena needs meat” is in and of itself your justification, there’s no reason why the hyena can’t be sustained on human flesh.

So when the hyena eats a zebra, you wouldn’t pull the trigger, but when it’s a human child, you suddenly would? Why? That’s just speciesism, that’s like saying it’s justified for the rapist to rape women because he has an urge to rape, but then when he rapes a man you’re outraged, although you just said that the urge to rape in and of itself justifies rape. It’s like saying it’s justified for me to commit random acts of violence against group A because I have brown hair, but then when I do it to group B you’re suddenly outraged…although I still have the same brown hair.

If you say that the fact that the hyena needs to eat meat to thrive justifies the harm they cause to zebras, then you also have to accept it when the hyena eats a human child, because the nutritional needs of the hyena don’t suddenly change when you throw them a human child, hyenas don’t suddenly transform into herbivorous animals thriving on lettuce when they see a human child.

3: ”You can’t humanely kill someone who doesn’t want to die, animals want to live!”

I don’t accept the view that death itself is a harm, because when you’re dead you cannot feel hurt by anything, it is essentially the same ”experience” you ”had” before you were born.

If not being born isn’t a big deal, then why is being dead a big deal? You might fear being dead, but then that fear before being dead is the problem, the emotional harm, not being dead itself. I think you can only come up with practical reasons as to why it is bad, such as people’s anticipation to be killed, discomfort from knowing it could happen to them, pain felt in the dying process, preventing productive people from preventing more suffering in the world if you kill them.

With non-human animals, the biggest problem would simply be fear, pain, suffering in the dying process or during their lives (which still exists in many cases even on so called ”humane” farms) – but in practice I want to point out that I behave the same anyway and do not buy meat, dairy or eggs, not necessarily because of death anymore, but more because of breeding, as mentioned before, I’m against breeding because that does indeed always cause suffering/lifelong dependency on pleasure/relief, which is not guaranteed.

Many animals have been domesticated/raised to be fatter and sicker as well by humans (they were definitely different before they domesticated them), which another aspect one can bring up other than death as to why even the people who say they would support some kind of humane farming are probably wrong. Also, if you used the most painless way to kill someone, like injecting them, euthanasia, people would eat those chemicals in the animal, I think we should just stop breeding animals altogether but I’m not totally opposed to putting an animal down like some seem to be.

4: Beastiality, can animals consent?

Vegans often say an animal cannot consent like we as humans can, by speaking in the same language or signing contracts, so therefore, beastiality is wrong, even if the sexual encounter doesn’t harm the animal.

What they are completely hypocritically ignoring in that is that that would lead to the abolition of all social contacts between humans and other animals.

P1: It’s wrong to have sex with an animal because the animal can never consent like us humans.
P2: Animals can never consent to anything else like us humans either.
C: It’s wrong to socially interact with animals at all.

That’s where their argument leads.

P1: It’s wrong to have sex with an animal, even if it doesn’t harm the animal, because the animal can never consent like a human.
P2: An animal can never consent like a human to anything else either.
C: It’s wrong to cuddle with a dog in a non-sexual manner or pat the dog on the head, because the dog can never consent like a human, even if being patted on the head doesn’t harm the dog.

The most common retorts you’ll then receive will either be that animals are actually able to consent by using their body language to indicate whether or not they want to be patted on the head or go for a walk outside, or they will accept the position that even if an animal cannot consent, it’s still fine to socially interact with the animal as long as you’re not harming the animal, but both of these positions still fail to establish the beastiality taboo.

Again, let’s point out the premises and conclusions.

P1: Animals can actually consent by using their body language to show us whether or not they are fine with something.
P2: Sex is an activity that you can show whether or not you are fine with it by using your body language.
C: Animals can consent to have sex.

Or for the harm argument:

P1: It’s fine to interact with an animal, even if animals cannot consent like us, as long as we do not harm the animal by doing so.
P2: Not all beastiality is harmful though.
C: So not all beastiality is unethical.

So to sum up, if it’s wrong to have sex with an animal because the animal cannot consent like a human by speaking human language or signing a contract, then it’s also wrong to do anything else with an animal, like pat the animal on the head or go for a walk outside, because the animal cannot consent like a human in that situation either.

If you accept it though, on the basis that the animal can consent by using body language, then there is no reason to say the animal can’t also consent to sex by body language, and if you accept it on the basis that even if an animal can’t consent like us, it’s still fine to interact with animal as long as the interaction is not harmful, then all I need to do is point to an example of beastiality that didn’t harm an animal, and you’d have to accept that too.

Some people also think beastiality is bad in the sense that animals don’t really have any sexual feelings like humans, so you’re exploiting an animal’s drive to reproduce for your sick perverted desires, when the animal is trying to mate with another animal, but this is just kind of ignorant, similar to how when pedophobes want to pretend that children are purely asexual and ”innocent” (sex=guilt?).

Fact is, if we hypothetically have two chimpanzees here, let’s call one chimp A and the other one chimp B, and we let chimp A jizz inside another chimp and make another chimp, but then never let chimp A jizz inside another chimp again, but we give chimp B a vasectomy and then let chimp B jizz inside as many other chimps as possible, chimp B is ultimately going to be much happier than chimp A, I think that’s undeniable.

It’s not about making babies, sex drive is just a torture method nature accidentally and unintentionally invented to get things to shoot their semen and make babies, but that doesn’t mean that making babies is necessarily the goal of the semen shooter.

Why I reject the child/underage sex taboo.

NO EVIDENCE FOR INTRINSIC HARM AND TRAUMA, INTRINSIC VS. EXTRINSIC, SOCIETALLY MANUFACTURED HARM.

There has always been absolutely zero evidence that sex in childhood/youth in and of itself causes trauma, intrinsic (an important keyword here) harm, there are arguably certain cliché factors that could make it harmful that pedophobes automatically think of when they even hear the word pedophilia, such as:

Manipulation.
Blackmail.
Force of any kind.
Early penetration.
Early impregnation.
STD exchange.
Violent abduction, rape and murder.

But nothing says that any of these factors inherently apply to all cases of sex between minors and adults, society is simply disgusted by these relations and therefore fails to adequately distinguish between the harmful and the harmless ones.

There is in fact evidence that suggests children are harmed by these other factors when they feel traumatized after a sexual encounter rather than by sex itself, e.g. Rind et al. as an obvious example, or feel traumatized long after such encounters when they come into contact with society’s negative views on the sexual encounter they had, e.g. The Trauma Myth by Susan Clancy, it can be hard for scientists to talk about these topics in public because it puts them at risk to be publically ostracized by psychotic pedophobes.

This paper is a review of previous works and thus offers no new concepts; the apparent absence of harm in sexually expressed child/older person relationships has been attested to as far back as 1937 (Bender and Blau 1937) and 1942 (Menninger 1942).
C.A. Tripp asked “What is the mechanism {for transmuting a benign childhood sexual experience into harm}?”, noting that “victimologists have never provided one that is scientifically credible;” (as reported by Bruce Rind in personal communication 2002) and Kilpatrick (1987) also posed the question: “What has been harmed – the child or the moral code?” (p. 179).
Bailey (2011) observes what is to him “a surprising… lack of scientific evidence” (p. 3) for these claims. Clancy (2009) proposed that at least initial trauma is a “myth,” and noted that she “cannot offer a clear theoretical model as to exactly how and why sexual abuse damages victims” (p. 142).
Constantine (1981) described the effects of intervention based on this assumed/assigned harmfulness as “psychonoxious” (p. 241).
However, as Rind, Tromovitch and Bauserman (1998) point out, since the late 1970s a large number of mental health professionals have claimed that all sexual interactions between children and older persons “… cause harm, {that} this harm is pervasive,… {is} likely to be intense,… {and} is an equivalent experience for boys and girls…” (p. 22). However, no path or mechanism is offered as to how these sexual interactions actually cause harm.
https://www.brongersma.info/The_missing_mechanism_of_harm_in_consensual_sexually_expressed_boyhood_relationships_with_older_males

It’s just like some spiders are venomous and therefore dangerous, and some spiders are not, but because you find spiders disgusting anyway, you put both spiders into the ”dangerous” category.

Pedophobes feel disgusted by the idea of a child having sex anyway, so they throw the 6 year old girl voluntarily humping a pedophile’s leg into the same category as the 6 year old girl getting abducted and brutally raped, disgust can scare you away from a non-dangerous spider or pedophile.

In and of itself, there is no reason why a child would be traumatized by sex if they found out about sexual pleasure on their own by humping a pillow and now want to receive it by rubbing themselves against an adult’s leg – no manipulation, blackmail, violence required, nothing later on done to the child that the child is harmed by (like anal penetration or impregnation), unless society reacts negatively to it. Why would that be harmful? There’s no explanation of that mechanism, because it does not exist.

If you want to claim that sex in childhood is intrinsically harmful, point out to me in detail why such an encounter of a 6 year old girl voluntarily humping a pedophile’s leg would be harmful if she has not been in any way manipulated, blackmailed, forced into it and the pedophile did not brutally rape her later on, point out how magically trauma will poof into existence out of the great nowhere for no tangible, scientifically explicable reason whatsoever, even if society simply didn’t react negatively to such an encounter.

It is vital to be able to show a mechanism of some sort. Example, with alcohol, we can directly show how it alters your liver, no doubt about it, alcohol can cause liver diseases, independent of which society you live in at what point in time. Now what about sex in childhood, can you show me that a child will feel harmed by voluntarily having an orgasm even in a society that is perfectly accepting of children receiving orgasms?

Pedophobes are engaging in post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning here – B happened after A, therefore, B was caused by A. A child had a harmless sexual encounter, the child is traumatized at some point long afterwards because of secondary harmful factors, which can include society’s negative reaction to the sexual encounter, therefore, harmless sexual encounters cause trauma.

”The child left the house while it was raining, the child was wetted by the rain, therefore, leaving the house causes the child to be wetted.” – is this proper logical reasoning? No.

A child has a harmless sexual encounter with a pedophile, the pedophobes then inflict negative consequences onto the child and the pedophile as they fail to distinguish between harmless and harmful cases due to irrational feelings of disgust/repulsion, such as:

Separating the child and the pedophile.
Screeching hysterically at the child how they supposedly got molested.
Sending the child to a similarly delusional therapist.
Socially pressuring the child to ”accept their rape” or be labelled as delusional.
Telling the child they now ”lost their innocence”, implying they are guilty.
Tormenting/beating the pedophile in front of the child.
Making the child feel responsible for sending the pedophile to prison.
Telling the child how their partner is now going to get assraped in prison.

Then, the pedophobe confuses the harm they cause for harm caused by the harmless sexual encounter between the child and the pedophile, concluding that orgasms under 18 (or whatever holy age they were socially indoctrinated into believing is the only correct one) causes lifelong trauma and depression – a faulty conclusion.

As neurologically typical humans are predisposed to act as social copying machines who largely care about how they perceived by others, it is no wonder that children who engaged in such initially harmless encounters then frequently grow up to parrot the ”I got raped” – narrative when they grow up in order to be accepted by their primitive tribe.

When nothing helps, they also like to appeal to the consequences they themselves are at fault for creating.

When all this is pointed out to them, they then frequently like to commit the argumentum ad baculum fallacy and say that even if the harm/trauma is caused by the social consequences (that we inflict on children and pedophiles), it is still a consequence nonetheless, so there’s still no excuse for having sex with a child/minor, as they will be harmed either way. It doesn’t matter if the harm is just caused by society reacting negatively to the encounter, because society does react that way after all!

This is a catastrophically idiotic argument, considering that the harm is caused by them and could be easily eliminated by them no longer reacting in this fashion to such encounters between children/minors and pedophiles/adults.

It would be like saying if you sell a child ice cream, although selling ice cream to children might not be inherently harmful, if you do so, I’m going to castrate and shoot you in front of the child because I’m an anti-ice cream bigot who thinks everyone who sells ice cream to anyone under the age of 18 should be violently murdered, so therefore, you harmed this child by selling it ice cream, because in response to it, I cut your nuts off and set you on fire in front of the child, thereby traumatizing the child. See, it’s all your fault.

Why should a society have the right to make a harmless activity into a harmful one?

It’s blaming the victim just like any other bigoted nazi would do, no better than a rapist saying you can’t be a whore or else he’s going to rape you, or a homophobe saying don’t be a faggot or I’ll beat you, just that the pedophobe is saying don’t be a pedo or else I’m going to traumatize a child by beating you up in front of the child for giving the child an orgasm, don’t make me harm the child by harming you and by extension the child with my psychotic bigot meltdown in response to you giving a volunteering child a perfectly harmless orgasm.

HIGH INTELLIGENCE AND MATURITY ARE NOT PREREQUISITES FOR GIVING CONSENT.

It is untrue that children are fundamentally incapable of literal consent, agreement. Any conscious, sentient organism can be agreeable or disagreeable, children have preferences, almost everyone has seen a child spitting out food they didn’t like before or buy ice cream, I could argue even a dog can consent to go for a walk outside, the function of agreement and disagreement, attraction and repulsion exist in every conscious organism.

What is true though is that children are until a certain age indeed less intelligent and mature than adults, but there is no reason to think that this inherently disqualifies them from consenting to sex, which is what pedophobes would like to think.

A good word to use here is foresight and/or future concept, the ability to plan and think ahead, calculate future consequences and ramifications of actions. The point is that whether or not you need great foresight in order to consent to an act is entirely dependent on the future consequences of the act we are discussing.

If there is no innate, foreseeable harmful consequence to an act, a subject does not need great foresight, intelligence and maturity.

For example, let’s say we have a child subject that wishes to ride a bicycle, despite not understanding traffic rules yet due to their lack of intelligence and maturity. Would it be ethically responsible to allow this child consent to ride a bicycle? Can they consent? The answer is that it entirely depends on the environment and its consequences.

On the freeway? No, there is a potential negative consequence, i.e getting hit by a car that the child is unable to take into account yet, so they are disqualified from consenting.

In a completely safe, harmless, child-friendly environment? Yes, because there is about absolutely zero chance that they’ll get hit by a car anyway, so in a completely safe and harmless, child-friendly street, even a child with no ability to understand traffic rules is perfectly able to consent to ride a bicycle.

There is no age restriction for children eating broccoli, but there is an age restriction for children drinking alcohol, and the general idea there is that even if a child consents to drink a bottle of whiskey, they may not consent to the future consequences of that act but might not be able to appreciate that, whereas with broccoli, there is no such risk, so there would be no reason to prevent the child from consenting to eat broccoli.

Similarly, using the simple concept of logical consistency, we can apply the same reasoning to sexuality. If there is no innate, foreseeable harmful consequence to a sex act between a child and a pedophile that the child fails to see due to their childishness, then there is no reason to disqualify the child’s consent as ”somehow not real consent”.

So let’s use a similar example in a sexual context. We have a child subject that wants to receive sexual pleasure, but is too unintelligent and immature to grasp sexual education.

Would it be responsible to allow this child to have sex? Depends on the environment and consequences, just as with the bicycle example.

If the situation is sufficiently devoid of harm risk, i.e the child humps a pedophile’s leg, no risk of STDs or pregnancy involved, then there’s no logically detectable problem, if the child does something that exposes them to STDs despite not even properly understanding what STDs are yet, like having unprotected anal sex with strangers, that would be bad.

P1: Dangerous activities require foresight (ability to understand future consequences).
P2: Sex is not necessarily a dangerous activity.
C: Sex does not necessarily require foresight.

And of course again, pedophobes will sometimes appeal to the social consequences that they themselves are creating in response to such sexual encounters, i.e ”children can’t consent because there are just social risks amd consequences the child isn’t able to deal with yet!” – but obviously the answer to this is simply to abolish those social consequences, rather than to abolish a harmless sex act, again, it’d be like saying children can never consent to buy ice cream because I’m an anti-ice cream bigot who’ll burn you alive in front of a child for selling them ice cream.

”They could regret having sex later on!” might also be a concern, but that isn’t a fair risk to name, because that can literally be applied to every single interaction anyone ever has, so by that standard no social interactions should be allowed at all.

The reason why pedophobes think children need to be intelligent and mature to consent to sex is because they believe sex to be harmful (based on their irrational feelings of disgust) so in order for children to consent to it, they expect them to be rocket scientists first, even when the sex act in question is completely non-dangerous like leg humping.

It is equally ridiculous as not allowing a child to ride a bicycle in a safe and harmless environment just because the child isn’t competent to drive a car on the freeway yet, intelligence and maturity are not per se required for it to be possible for a child/minor to be agreeable.

We generally allow children to do what they want, as long as it has no secondary consequence that they may later on not want, resulting in harm to them, such as eating broccoli but not drinking alcohol. Pedophobes falsely believe that sex is one of those things that will later on always turn out to be harmful, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when they react negatively to it.

POWER DIFFERENCE DOES NOT EQUAL POWER ABUSE.

It is true that in certain areas, depending on what we are measuring, adults are more powerful than children, though it does not even apply to all areas of life.

It is irrelevant if adults are more powerful than children, because the existence of power in and of itself does not equal abuse. If a child voluntarily does garden work for an adult for a little extra pocket money and someone comes around the corner and accuses that adult of blackmailing a child into slave labor in his garden, they need evidence for that claim, the fact alone that this adult has authority does not mean that the child was forced to work.

When it comes to sex however, these critical evaluation skills shut down, and pedophobes see the fact that a given adult, be it a teacher or not has power over the minor as evidence that if sex happened between the adult and the minor, it must be the result of power abuse, no doubt about it.

Adult has authority over 15 year old, 15 year old however completely voluntarily does garden work for extra pocket money – not abusive.
Adult has authority over 15 year old, 15 year old however completely voluntarily sticks penis in them – somehow abusive.

Father has physical strength advantage over 6 year old daughter, 6 year old daughter consents to be lifted up by him – not abusive.
Pedophile has physical strength advantage over 6 year old girl as well, 6 year old girl consents to ride on his leg – somehow abusive.

This is a case of hypocrisy we are dealing with here, ”power imbalance simultaneously does and does not make an interaction abusive.”

The existence of power does not equate to abuse of that power, and in most other contexts, pedophobes are perfectly capable of recognizing that the possession of power is not the same thing as the abuse of power.

They only fail to recognize it in the sexual context, and this is because they most likely live in a delusional disney fantasy world where they want to believe that their 15 year old daughter is an asexual, innocent princess whose sexual impulses are all triggered by some kind of malicious pedominati propagandist fooling her into thinking that orgasms are totally not harmful, when in reality they obviously cause PTSD for life when you receive them under 18, 17, 16 or whatever may be the holy age they have been indoctrinated into thinking is the only correct one.

They already made another false assumption, which is that children are asexual, innocent (sex=guilt) angels that would never possibly want sex (that’s too icky of a truth to accept, OMG children can perform basic biological functions like producing excrement just like adults, this is unacceptable!), and they base their assumption that if sex between a minor and an authority figure happens on that first fundamentally false assumption that manipulation must be used to get a minor to have sex.

Someone can have sex with you in spite of their power, e.g. although I have a gun and have power over you, you want to suck my dick completely regardless of the fact that I own a gun.

Or, someone can also feel aroused by the power, but not abused by it, this can apply in cases where young girls might look up to an idolized musician or someone like that, but this doesn’t mean that 12 year old girls only want to suck Justin Bieber’s dick because they’re scared he’s going to kill them, so you could also suck my dick because you are aroused by guns, not intimidated by them.

Both are possible, so the power itself does not equate to abuse. If it does, then any interaction where there’s a power imbalance involved, not only sexual ones, are by default abusive.

In conclusion:

I don’t think there is any rational reason for upkeeping this backward taboo against sex in childhood and/or youth, or sexual relations between children/minors and pedophiles/adults, it is in the end just like all other bigotries a result of disgust and fear of the unknown, not truly rational thought.

It is barbaric pro-suffering non-sense, no better than having some kind of other non-sensical taboo, pick any other object and make it into a taboo, like candy.

Anyone who gives anyone under 18 candy will be violently harassed by society for the child that received candy to see, the child will be sent to a therapist and socially pressured to say they were forced to eat candy at knifepoint by the evil candy distributing monster.

You can say ”age of consent is not just some dumb religion, we have to draw a line somewhere”, but this principle of hyper-caution can literally be applied to any activity a child could ever engage in.

If we give people the freedom to tell children about religion, some islamic terrorists could try to manipulate children into joining a terrorist organization like ISIS, therefore, castrate and shoot every peaceful religious person.

If we give little girls the freedom to use beauty products, some narcissistic, abusive parents could use this freedom to try to manipulate little girls to participate in beauty contests they don’t want to partake in, therefore, we should assume a girl under 18 has been abused whenever she’s wearing make-up and throw the person that sold it in jail.

Arrest all, because some do bad things, that’s the idea there.

Instead of just making rape illegal, you end up harming a bunch of innocent individuals who did nothing harmful in this morally panicking crusade, when you could just make the abuse, manipulation, blackmail, force element illegal, in fact, rape and blackmail are already illegal.

Ultimately, pedophobes seem simply caught up in a state of moral panic like all kinds of other bigots, imposing their religious, non-sensical, unevidenced ideals on others to the detriment of both adults and children, thinking they’re saving the children, as is often the case with bigots.

Prevention of future suffering and pleasure.

A somewhat common objection to Benatar’s asymmetry in particular is the non-identity problem, basically stating that because a child is not born yet, it cannot appreciate that its future suffering has been prevented, so the prevention of future suffering for a would-be person is not good, it’s nothing, it’s just neutral, morals/ethics cannot be applied to the unborn.

How can it be good to prevent a pain from happening, if the person hasn’t been born yet to appreciate the prevention of said pain? One of the clearest examples that is often used would be the one of a severely disabled child that will be in chronic pain every single day once it’s born, the child can’t appreciate the fact that it hasn’t been forced into a life of chronic pain after being aborted, but that doesn’t mean that shitting it out would be a good idea.

Another example would be that there have been serial rapists and killers before that got off on the idea of keeping a girl in their basement, then producing a child for the sole purpose of raping that child. If some Josef Fritzl type of guy is overtly and clearly saying that that is his plan for the future, is anyone really going to argue that you shouldn’t call the police, because after all, he hasn’t done it yet, so therefore, what will happen when the child is born is also completely irrelevant?

I don’t think so. Is it a good idea to pollute the environment as much as possible, dump toxic waste into the oceans because the future generation that will experience complete environmental degradation is not here yet, so it’s not that big of a deal anyway?

Why do we euthanize dogs and cats in their sleep when they have terminal cancer and are in chronic pain, when they aren’t even around afterwards anymore to appreciate that their cancer and chronic pain have been prevented? Why not let the cat die as miserably as possible? It won’t appreciate that its more miserable death has been prevented once it is dead, so you might as well slowly torture the cat to death.

With some of these examples, of course the natalist will try to get around the idea that creating future harm is bad because in the scenario of the rapist breeding a child into existence to rape it or experience environmental degradation, the child already existed before it got raped or experienced environmental catastrophes, so they’ll say but the harm happened to someone who already existed, it’s different.

But then I can obviously just as easily say that every single harm in existence that definitely will and could potentially befall the child will befall them when they will already exist in the future, and you are at fault for that by bringing them into existence in the first place, same difference in the grand scheme of things, any harm befalling the already existent child is a byproduct of them having been brought into existence.

The idea here is that it is a good idea to prevent a state of deprivation, suffering from happening before it happens, in principle, but it’s only bad to prevent a pleasure, its relief from happening if the alternative to it is feeling pain, which the unborn do not, but you’re always doing once you are alive, chasing pleasure to avoid feeling pain.

As long as you exist, suffering is the alternative to pleasure.

You don’t eat, you suffer hunger.
You don’t drink, you suffer thirst.
You don’t shit, you suffer constipation.
You don’t cum, you suffer sexual tension.
You don’t socialize, you suffer loneliness.

So on and so forth, use whatever example you want. Once you’re here, you’re trapped in a system of having to chase relief or being subjected to more suffering.

So to use a metaphor for the asymmetry, you could say I need to take into account the future consequences of injecting you with heroine in your sleep before I inject you with heroine, how it might negatively affect you in the future, but it would be silly to lament that I need to take into the account the loss of pleasure of not injecting you with heroine, I deprived you of satisfying an addiction that you don’t have.

Though admittedly, even that is not a perfect example, it is hard to find a perfect example because someone who doesn’t exist can never feel deprived of anything, at least a person that already exists could miss the fun that heroin might bring them, whereas a non-existent person can miss absolutely nothing.

If the reason why we chase pleasure in the first place is to avoid the pain/discomfort/suffering of not having it, then that explains some of people’s common intuitions that Benatar often points to – preventing the severely disabled, chronically pained child from being born is good, but preventing the happy child from being born is not bad, because the reason why they’d chase pleasure anyway is to avoid being in pain, and by not existing, they already perfectly avoided all pain, you don’t need a fire extinguisher if you’re not in a burning building.

If I abort the child that’ll be in chronic pain every single day for the rest of their life, it’s good that I’ve done this, similar to how it would be good to euthanize a cat with cancer, even though the cat obviously doesn’t wake up afterwards to appreciate that now they won’t have to die of cancer.

You also prevent their pleasure, but they won’t miss it, it won’t harm them.

A ton of semen is ejaculated, never implanted into a vagina to grow into a sentient child later on, I don’t really know anyone who laments semen being flushed down the toilet just because it depletes the potential for future sentience, I would argue because we ultimately recognize deep down that the soul of the potential child in that sperm is not writhing in agony in the unborn purgatory, distressed over missing out on the pleasures of life.

Even pro-lifers don’t go that far, they think once sperm and egg is merged, there is an obligation to give it a right to life, or that it has some kind of natural right to life, but I don’t see them getting upset over wasted sperm, so the pro-life version for this ethical questions would be: ”If you knew the sperm contained an extremely unhappy person, would it be ok to use it to make a child?” and ”If you knew the sperm contained an extremely happy person, would it be ok to flush it down the toilet nonetheless?”

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 beastiality and sex with the verbally handicapped.

An argument sometimes made in favor of beastiality is that we already exploit other animals by slaughtering and using them as food resources, this is a bad argument because there’s nothing justifiable about that in the first place, when a non-human animal is harmed it’s bad for the exact same reason when human animals are harmed, i.e they’re sentient, it generates negative sensation, negative sensation is not unique to the human condition.

While carnists are indeed complete hypocrites for opposing beastiality whilst they support animal abuse anyway, I would still argue so are vegans, you don’t have to be in support of extreme forms of animal torture in order to be a hypocrite for opposing all forms of beastiality, the vital point here is that not all beastiality is harmful. Animals can consent in a simplistic manner, just not verbally.

An animal can consent by using body language, they just can’t speak in your language.

How do you know it is ok to pat the dog on the head or cuddle with the dog in a non-sexual manner? The dog signals by body language whether or not they’re ok with being patted on the head or cuddled with in said manner that is non-sexual, if the dog signals ”do go on” it is fine, if the dog signals ”do not go on” you should probably stop, unless violating that dog’s consent is important to its welfare in that situation, like a vaccination perhaps, so it’d be the lesser of two evils in that case.

If the dog’s body language is acknowledged as a primitive form of consent, which it is, just not the same as verbal consent, then it is hypocritical to not similarly acknowledge it in a sexual context as you do in the non-sexual context. Some will of course question how valid an animal’s consent can be, similar to when it comes to children, citing examples of how sometimes animals, children, severely disabled adults do things that might be harmful to them without knowing it, but that’s the keyword here – harm.

The dog can obviously also signal by their body language to prefer to lick or not to lick a girl’s pussy, so if the objection here is ”the dog can’t consent”, it really becomes questionable what that is supposed to mean in the first place.

How, why and in what way can the dog not consent to lick said girl’s pussy?

The dog can’t consent by speaking human language or signing a contract, that is true, but that is also true in all other non-sexual contexts such as patting the dog on the head or cuddling with the dog in a non-sexual manner, so all interaction between humans and other animals must be abolished by this standard.

P1: It’s wrong to have sex with other animals because they cannot consent in human language.
P2: Other animals cannot consent to anything in human language.
C: It’s wrong for a social interaction between a human and a non-human to take place at all.

If that’s the requirement for an ethically permissible interaction with other animals, that they consent in our language, and you’re going to say that it doesn’t matter if an interaction doesn’t harm an animal, it’s still wrong because the animal ”can’t consent”, then at that point the only thing left to do would be to exile them from the human community into a forest somewhere where they can’t be violated by interacting with agents that don’t speak the same language as them anymore, all human to non-human animal interaction is to be abolished by this standard – the dog will never interact and demonstrate consent like humans.

If they then retort that it is however acceptable to interact with other animals, even if they cannot consent in our language, as long as it doesn’t harm the animal, like being given food or taken for a walk outside generally doesn’t harm them, then they’ll similarly fail to consistently condemn all beastiality, because there’s no evidence that all beastiality is harmful.

P1: It’s acceptable to interact with animals as long as it doesn’t harm them.
P2: Not all beastiality harms animals.
C: Some beastiality would be acceptable.

This same arguments and rules of course also apply for mentally handicapped humans that can’t verbally express themselves, and are perhaps on the same intellectual level as animals like dogs, cats, dolphins, pigs, cows, etc, there’s no need to be hypocritical about it.

When someone is closer to the intellectual level of a pig and cannot speak, the obvious next step is usually trying to read their body language in order to discern what they wish to and wish not to do, if it is acceptable to hug a severely mentally handicapped person because they consented by all discernible non-verbal indication to be hugged, then there is nothing bad about the act of hugging them, but the same by rule of logical consistency applies to contexts of a more sexual nature as well.

Obviously, a non-verbal individual can also signal by body language to be happy about getting his dick sucked by a hot girl, so if you want to argue that this is wrong because it is not consensual, as in, the person did not give agreement in the same way that someone with the capacity for verbalization would, then of course no interaction with said non-verbal person could be ethically permissible at all, it’d be a violation to hug them as well, it’d be impossible to not violate them by interacting with them by this strict non-sensical standard.

So while I admit that no non-human animal or non-verbal person (on the same intelligence level of a non-human animal) gives agreement, assent, consent (or whatever you want to call it, the exact term is not relevant to the argument) in the exact same way as we do, they can still express their needs to us, it may be more complicated to read, but that doesn’t mean that it is entirely impossible for a non-verbal agent to express needs, non-verbal agents express needs by body language all the time.

I think the guardians of such individuals here frequently fail to notice that they’re doing more harm than good by adhering to this strict, rigid standard of requiring verbal consent, it’s dangerously delusional to the point they would rather confine someone like that to a life of sexual frustration than even considering letting them have sex with a prostitute or exploring other options for them to alleviate their sexual frustration, not even willing to acknowledge that their sexual urges exist.

A detailed refutation of common pedophobe arguments.

Children can’t consent legally.

Appeal to law, something being legal doesn’t tell you whether it’s good or bad (slavery, an arguably harmful act was and is legal in some places), and something being illegal also doesn’t tell you whether it’s good or bad (not wearing a veil, an arguably harmless act is illegal in some places).

The law does not determine whether or not you consent, it just determines whether or not you are allowed to consent, by this ”logic”, if a 16 year old girl from a country where the age of consent is 16 travels to a country where the age of consent is 17 with her partner, she no longer agrees to have sex with him, suddenly, upon trespassing the border, her preferences changed, now she no longer consents and it’s rape! Get away from me immediately!

Whether or not you are allowed to consent legally says nothing about whether or not you can consent. You can consent illegally, it’s just not allowed.

The law is also a representation of the majority consensus in a lot of first world countries, so in a democracy, saying that child sex is bad because it’s against the law is not a great explanation, as the reason why it is illegal to begin with is because everyone finds it so bad that they all voted to make it illegal, that just shows that they all really think that child sex is so bad that it should be illegal, but still does not explain why they actually think that it should be illegal.

Children can’t consent in general.

To deny that children can consent is to deny that children have a will/preference. To consent means to agree, and that means that you’re either fine with something or not fine with something, that your will is in concordance, in harmony with something that is proposed to it.

Of course children can agree, they do it every day. Agree to eat or not to eat, agree to go outside or not go outside, agree to be hugged or not be hugged by an acquaintance, and so on and so forth – children are capable of agreement, they have preferences.

What the pedophobes really mean here is most often a future concept, the ability to conceptualize the future, the ability to plan and think ahead, understand consequences and ramifications of actions, something along those lines, and this is something that children are worse at than adults until a certain age.

This is not necessarily an argument against sex in childhood though, because whether or not you need a great future concept is highly dependent on the consequences of an action, i.e if a child isn’t able to understand traffic rules yet, that doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t consent to ride a bicycle, that just means they can’t consent to ride it in an environment with a lot of traffic going on, in a completely safe and harmless environment it wouldn’t be a big deal.

The adult simply has to make sure there are no harmful consequences that the child fails to take into account if the child wants to do something that might, but doesn’t necessarily have to result in harm, and there’s no reason why that same rule can’t be applied to sex, the pedophile simply has to make sure they’re not subjecting the child to any undesirable consequences that the child may fail to see.

Example, if a child (that isn’t intelligent or mature enough to understand any risks of sex yet) finds out about sexual pleasure by rubbing themselves against a pillow, now wants to get that same pleasure by rubbing themselves against a pedophile’s leg, the child wouldn’t need a great future concept/foresight ability to consent to that act, because there’s no harmful future consequence to it that the child fails to take into account.

But it would be bad to let someone who can’t understand what STDs are have sex where STDs are involved, similar to how it would become unfair to let someone ride on the freeway if they cannot understand traffic rules, whether or not you need to be intelligent and mature depends on the risks of the action you’re about to partake in, and not all sex requires intelligence and maturity.

There are studies that show that adults that had sex as children frequently suffer from depression and other malaise later on in life, sex has a traumatizing effect on children, so they shouldn’t have sex.

Correlation/=/causation, the pedophobes are engaging in post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning here: B happened after A, therefore, B was caused by A.

The child had sex, is traumatized, therefore, sex causes trauma.

There is absolutely zero proof that child sex is inherently harmful though, there are only some factors that could make child sex harmful to the child, such as:

Manipulation.
Blackmail.
Force.
Penetration at a too young age.
STD exchange.
Impregnation.
Social consequences the pedophobes themselves are at fault for creating.

But if all of these factors are not present, and the 8 year old girl is simply rubbing herself against a pedophile’s leg because she wants the tingly sensation this generates between her legs which she discovered by humping a pillow or riding a pony for example, not because she has been forced in any way, and the pedophile does nothing later on that she doesn’t want to happen, there’s no hysterical social reaction, then there should be no reason to assume this would be harmful, certainly they never offer much of an explanation of this mechanism.

The pedophobes rely on adding these harmful factors in without ever demonstrating some kind of intrinsic harm to child sex, because they simply have no evidence for intrinsic harm, if nothing helps they’ll start to appeal to the social consequences that they themselves are creating in response to the act, e.g. how the parents and society react to it, that their partner will be sent to jail, etc.

The burden of proof is on the pedophobe here if they want to claim that child sex itself is somehow harmful, it’s like arguing with a religious fundamentalist, it’s easy to simply point out that they have no evidence for their belief system, getting them to acknowledge it is the hard part.

They will keep adding certain harmful factors that aren’t inherent to the act in (like manipulation, STDs, penetration, etc) and pretend that this applies to all child sex, because they’re simply disgusted by it, therefore fail to distinguish between harmful and harmless cases of sex in childhood/youth.

”What is the mechanism?” is the question to pose here. Pedophobes claim sex in childhood is harmful, even if the child/minor wanted it too and society doesn’t have a negative reaction to it, fine, then point out how that works. Young girl finds out about sexual pleasure by humping a pillow, rubs herself against a pedophile’s leg voluntarily, society is fine with it. Why would it still lead to trauma? Explain why, when, how trauma would still magically poof into existence out of nowhere.

Even if the idea of intrinsic harm is wrong, which means sex is not necessarily damaging to the child in and of itself, then there are still social consequences to this type of behavior in our current society that the child is not equipped to deal with, and the harm/trauma is still just as real.

This is an argumentum ad baculum fallacy, appealing to a self-created consequence, a threat. Exacting a harmful consequence upon someone for engaging in a harmless act does not prove the harmless act to be harmful, if I burn you alive for wearing a red hat, I harmed you, but I didn’t prove wearing red hats to be harmful. Of course the harm/trauma caused is still real, but it doesn’t need to exist in the first place.

Obviously, if society tyrannized people for giving broccoli to children, and a child consented to buy broccoli now and some deranged person of that cult came around the corner, castrating and shooting the broccoli seller in front of the child, you wouldn’t identify the act of selling broccoli to be the real problem just because as a consequence of it the deranged asshole castrated and shot the broccoli seller, you’d see the deranged asshole as the problem.

On the other hand, when a pedophile gives a child a pleasurable sensation in the form of an orgasm rather than any other random pleasure we could pick as an example, pedophobes tyrannize the pedophile in front of the child, then falsely attribute their trauma (over the ordeal they themselves initiated with their hysterical behavior) to the orgasm, when the real problem is them, the pedophobes here are appealing to consequences that they themselves are creating, it’s not a consequence that can’t be gotten rid of (e.g. the child jumps into a fire and the child starts to burn), so the rational thing to do is to just stop the negative reinforcement.

This isn’t different from another bigot saying ”even if gay sex is not inherently harmful, there are still social consequences to gay sex, which is that I’ll burn those faggots alive if they have sex, so therefore, gay sex=harmful” or ”even if prostitution is not inherently harmful, there are still social consequences to being a whore, which is that I’ll rape you if you’re a whore, so therefore, prostitution=harmful”.

That these aren’t the same thing is irrelevant, it’s about the reasoning behind it of ”I’m going to pretend x is harmful, although x is harmless, because I harm people for doing x”, when I’m arguing if the only thing making a thing harmful is our negative reaction to it, we should simply stop having that negative reaction, another example could be children being traumatized by being raised by homosexuals because homophobes raise their children to attack children of homosexuals.

Children do not want to have sex, especially not with adults, so therefore, if a child has sex, we should always assume there was some kind of abuse involved. Children aren’t sexual beings, that’s a pedophilic delusion to justify raping children. Period.

If it were true that children were actually never interested in sex, it would be much more reasonable to assume that whenever they have it, they were somehow blackmailed, manipulated, abused into it, fair enough. The problem is of course that this is simply not true though, sex is a rather basic need for most individuals, asexuality the exception.

Children have genitals, and they can through the exploration of said genitalia find out about the existence of sexual pleasure – this is a fact, even if the pedophobe wants to deny this.

Children may have lower sexual drives in some cases until hormones during puberty kick in, thus are less interested in sex, just like they may also feel less hunger until a certain age where they are able to eat more, but they still get hungry regardless.

They might experience sexual desires differently, e.g. no desire for penetration yet, may not have some kind of intricate or complex fetish yet, but still the raw sensation of sexual pleasure, many adults simply falsely equate all sex with penetration and then say ”of course children are not interested in sex (i.e being penetrated)!).

Children masturbate, not just out of some kind of delusion because the pedominati on disney channel indoctrinated them into believing that orgasms are trendy and you must reach them to be cool, I’m one of many that humped objects when I was a child, and I fail to see why it would have harmed me if I simply got this sensation from humping an older girl’s ass instead.

Pedophobes simply don’t like this to be true, so they tell themselves that yes, it’s just some kind of horrible manipulation that is going on, children would never be interested in sex on their own, it’s some kind of underground pedophile cabal that took over children’s tv shows and education.

It’s psychotic and delusional, a metaphor I always like to use is someone finding children too cute to admit that they are also capable of defecation, so they (without noticing it) degrade children by forcing them to shit into their pants until 18 instead of giving them a toilet to shit in, because then they’d have to face the reality that children are indeed capable of defecation, which is too much for them to face, too brutal of a truth.

”Let children be children” they screech, as if no one under 18 has any sexual needs that if not fulfilled may even lead to quite severe suffering, as though you’re doing them a favor by subjecting them to sexual deprivation. a 12 year old boy is assumed not to be traumatized by jerking off to a hot older girl, but if he were to stick his dick in her vagina that feels even better, it would somehow traumatize him for life? How come?

Children only want sex because they have already been abused by evil pedophiles before, so they developed it as a kind of coping mechanism to relive the trauma, by having sex with the child, you are enabling this unhealthy behavior.

Just because some children perhaps engage in such behaviors, that doesn’t mean that a child could only be interested in sex because they have been abused before, as sexual need can exist regardless of whether or not someone has been sexually abused, just like other needs and wants such as hunger and appetite.

Let’s say a child has been abused by their strict grandmother before, forced to eat brussel sprouts at knifepoint. Would that mean that if the child ever wants to try another green vegetable, we shouldn’t allow it, because it’s only an unhealthy coping mechanism with the abuse that happened before?

No, not necessarily, because hunger and appetite can exist regardless of whether or not you have been pressured and made to eat certain food before, it would depend on the case, perhaps the child simply wants to try another vegetable despite having been abused before, not because of the abuse.

Appetite is not necessarily caused by being abused with food, neither is sexual desire necessarily caused by abuse. I won’t deny that such events can certainly shape your perception of food and sex, but it’d be completely ignorant and unrealistic to conclude that only abuse could be responsible for the child being able to conceptualize appetite and sexual desire in the first place, that’d be dishonest to claim.

Parents don’t allow children to have sex, so it’s bad to have sex with children, parental decision/consent/allowance matters too or even first and foremost, if some pervert wants to touch my children I simply will not allow that!

This is an appeal to authority fallacy which proposes that whether or not it is good to do something with a child is determined by an authority’s, in this case the parent’s opinion about it, and it fails for that exact reason pretty much.

A decision isn’t sensible and in the child’s interest just because it has been made by a parent, parental decisions are up to scrutiny like all decisions made by any other authority.

If a parent locked a child in a basement and didn’t allow it to go outside anymore, that wouldn’t be a great decision just because a parent made that decision, if a parent allowed a child to set a forest on fire, that wouldn’t be a great decision just because a parent made that decision, so parental decision in and of itself, per se, is not an argument for why the decision is in the child’s interest.

So you need to do more than just say ”but this is what the parents allow and have decided!” when someone asks you why it’s fine for the parents to hug a willing child, but not for the pedophile to hug a willing child. If the parents decided to put the child in the oven and make a big pot roast out of the child, would that be fine? No, so just saying ”the parents said this and that” isn’t a coherent argument.

In a pedophilic relation there is always a power imbalance, so it’s always abusive to have sex with a child considering the relationship is unequal, adults have authority over children, so at least there’s always potential for abuse!

This presupposes that having power is the same as abusing that power, which it is not, pedophobes primarily assume this when it comes to sex, or it’s simply inconsistent with how we treat power dynamic differences in other areas of life, potential for abuse can exist everywhere, that isn’t a reason to stop all social interaction between the less and the more powerful.

Let’s say a child/minor mowed the lawn of an adult for a little extra pocket money, then someone came around the corner and accused that adult of using his authority to force children to do slave labor in his garden.

It would require evidence, did the teacher threaten the child with a worse math grade if it did not do the garden work? Then it is abusive.

In the case of sex, the pedophobe doesn’t care about evidence, they see the fact that the teacher has authority as evidence enough to think the child has been abused, because of the other false assumption that they have already made, which is that children would only have sex if they were in some way forced, manipulated, blackmailed into it.

We could even apply this to adults ultimately, doesn’t matter. Am I rapist if I own a gun, thus have a certain level of power over you and you suck my dick?

Depends on whether or not I used my gun to force you to suck my dick, if you just wanted to suck my dick in spite of my gun, or perhaps even because you’re attracted to guns (just like a younger girl might be attracted to an older man’s authority without the authority having to be abused for her to agree to sex though), there’s no problem.

That is also a possible scenario, the person with less power is attracted to their partner particularly because they have more power, in which case it’s not abusive either, it would be a lie to say that younger girls only have sex with older, famous musicians they idolize because they are scared to death of their higher position of authority.

So you can have sex with someone in spite, but not because of their power, or you could also have sex with someone because of their power, but not because you felt threatened by it, but sexually aroused instead, that’s also perfectly possible. Pedophobes just say ”there’s the knife on the couch, they had sex, therefore, rape”.

Children are too small to be penetrated yet, it’s bad for them. You think it’s ok to just rape an infant with your fist?

The subconscious assumption or dishonest accusation the pedophobes frequently make, although they likely won’t admit, is that all sex inherently equals penetration, a pathetic strawman attempt to conflate something that is already intuitively disgusting to many with something harmful.

A similar move/tactic here is also that some will make emotional appeals and bring up how they or someone they know has supposedly been brutally sodomized by a pedophile, then painting it as if that describes all sexual encounters between pedophiles and children just because the encounters happened around the same age. I know that rape happens, this is not what I’m talking about.

Just like any other bigot, the pedophobe likes to pretend that the sexual practice they’re irrationally opposed to cannot be practiced in a safe manner, so that then they’d have a rational reason to oppose said sexual act.

Just like incestophobes like to bring up crippled kids with genetic defects or homophobes liked to bring up AIDS in the past, pretending contraception doesn’t exist somehow, you can’t have sex with your sister and simply use a condom while doing so, the pedophobes like to bring up the fact that children’s holes are too small to be penetrated yet, pretending there are no other sexual activities to engage in somehow. A pathetic conflation tactic indeed.

Children/minors don’t have a fully developed brain yet, children are not fully mature yet, they are lacking in emotional maturity, etc, therefore, it’s bad to have sex with them. Period. You just need to have a fully developed brain and maturity.

Children do not have fully developed brains when they engage in activities other than sex either, so if the lack of maturity/a developed brain is what makes having sex with a child bad, then so is essentially doing anything at all with a child bad until its brain has fully developed.

P1 – It’s wrong to have sex with children because they don’t a fully developed brain.

P2 – Children do not have a fully developed brain when they do anything else either.

C – Engaging in social interaction with children is wrong.

The pedophobe is either making an argument that would require us to keep all children chained up in a basement until their brains have fully matured, or they are committing a special pleading fallacy by saying that ”children shouldn’t have sex because they’re not fully developed yet” without specifying why that is the case only with sex, obviously sex is just one of many interactions.

If you just regurgitate such phrases as ”but they can’t consent!” and ”the brain develops until 30!” and say this is literally why it is wrong, then there’s no reason it can’t be applied to any other activity the child/minor is doing. It’s wrong because the child is not fully matured? Fine, the child is not fully matured when riding a bicycle either, therefore, letting a child ride a bicycle is always wrong.

It would be good to also specify why a fully matured brain is necessary to have any kind of sex act, and then we can get into the discussion about whether or not really all sex requires one to be that smart to comprehend all the risks, which I think is not something that has been proven.

Children/minors also can’t do x (drive a car, vote, join the military, sign contracts, etc), so therefore they can’t consent to sex either/it’s bad to have sex with them.

The problem with this idea is that your ability to understand or enjoy a sexual experience is not necessarily measured by your ability to do any of these other things, your intelligence or lack thereof doesn’t make sex suddenly harmful for you.

There are adults that cannot drive a car due to perhaps visualization disabilities, many that cannot understand politics, even more that aren’t competent for the military and some also need help with contracts. But can we based on that fairly determine that sex must somehow be more harmful for them than those that can do these things, that they cannot understand the arguably much simpler act of sex? No.

Should we according to the pedophobes also deny our grandmothers the right to get fucked once they’re intellectually impaired enough to fall for a scam artist on the telephone, demonstrating themselves to not be perfect with contracts anymore?

It would be non-sensical, because your grandmother’s ability to understand her sexuality is not necessarily determined by how well she understands contracts, and neither is intelligence what determines whether or not sex is harmful for you.

You can’t even deduce she can’t sign contracts in general anymore, perhaps a different one, presented to her in a different, better explained manner she would be able to agree to just fine.

Pedophilia is a mental illness or sometimes even the result of brain damage, therefore it’s bad to have sex with children.

Whether or not pedophilia is a mental illness is not even necessarily relevant here, in principle this argument simply fails because even if something is a mental illness, that doesn’t prove that the act resulting out of it is necessarily bad.

Even if a schizophrenic with brain damage only donates all his money to children in Africa because he hears voices telling him he’d go to hell and get assraped by a demon otherwise, that still wouldn’t prove that the act of donating your money to starving children in Africa is a harmful act. Let’s say helping grannies cross the street is just an OCD compulsion, the result of mental illness, does that make the act itself wrong? No.

So you need to demonstrate that the act itself that results out of said mental illness or brain damage is actually bad, not just point to the fact that it is the result of mental illness or brain damage.