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.

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?