Because there's a power imbalance that predators are all-too-eager to exploit.
Sometimes in the literal definition in terms of raw strength, but just as much in terms of social manipulation and life experience that can take advantage of their often more naive victims. There's also a layer of assumed authority and deference at play.
Just like being attracted to women doesn't mean you're a rapist.
You can be, though.
Also consumption of any kind of distrubing porn doesn't mean you actually want to do things you see in it in the real life. This is about the same principle like when people are watching action movies (which is an accepted kind of often very disturbing cinematography), most don't want to go around and shoot/stab people.
Not all porn is produced by abusing someone. Not even all CP. So your statement can't be generally true.
Anyway, my point was that pedophilia being mostly caused by child abuse doesn't make much sense. Pedophilia is not child abuse by itself, and thus there's no cycle.
Cycle of abuse would just make you abuse someone in the similar way you were abused. (regardless of any attraction to the victim)
Just about every personality trait with a name has a high degree of genetic heritability. We know this from e.g. studies of identical versus fraternal twins. And people abused as children tend to be closely related to their parents; we know this because we know where babies come from.
So, how much of the “chain of abuse” thing is just genetic confounding? I don’t know, which is vexing. As far as I can tell, very few of the chain-of-abuse theorists even think of genetics, even though it’s the elephant in the room, and many are hard-line blank slate believers. (I don’t have citations at the moment, but last time I looked at the relevant academic literature it was, broadly speaking, an absolute dumpster fire.)
>it does not exist in any particular way as an obvious evolutionary benefit except for adult-adult-heterosexual.
it's not unique to nature. You're in heat, you want to mate with anything that looks attractive. What's attractive will vary immensely based on societal and personal experience, for reasons we still cannot fully understand as the human mind is still a huge secret to unlock. It's not perfect in the same way that few parts of nature are perfectly optimized. Remants of old patterns or general heuristics on "what is good enough" will remain and they can persist for very long times.
The only unique-ish thing about humans is that we have no "mating period". We are continuously in heat compared to most of nature, so that urge remains around consistently. Virtually every form of society has evolved some sort of culture to control these urges (as well as ways to control sexual conflict, which is another topic entirely) in order to advance as a civilization otherwise it'd be non-stop mating
> What's attractive will vary immensely based on societal and personal experience, for reasons we still cannot fully understand as the human mind is still a huge secret to unlock. It's not perfect in the same way that few parts of nature are perfectly optimized. Remants of old patterns or general heuristics on "what is good enough" will remain and they can persist for very long times.
Is it generally accepted that someone may not be born either straight or gay?
I honestly don't know and that's yet another can of worms to open.
I can somewhat sidestep that issue and say that societal factors can make you think you are exclusively heterosexual, even if we agreed that sexuality is an
internal factor and you were infact born bi/homosexual. Similar to how you can force a left handed person to become right handed.
I think that there's a fairly standard distinction, that doesn't require any consideration of psychological mechanisms. Homosexuality can be practised consensually and nobody else needs to care, because nobody is harmed. Paedophilia can't be practised consensually because children are below the age of consent, and can be harmed.
Hence, paedophilia is classified as a mental illness, but homosexuality no longer is (in most Western countries, at least, I believe).
It's not equivocation, it's a categorization of heteronormative and not-heteronormative.
Personally I suspect the issue here is that incest is the only form of sexual activity that we have a natural proclivity against, probably because of evolutionary pressure (as in, hard-wired into our DNA) against fucking blood relatives. Because a consistently-inbred population will breed itself into oblivion. People who fuck kids can still successfully reproduce and society trundles on.
I think your starting point is still kinda skewed, because "heteronormative" is a made-up thing by society rather than an actual thing someone can be.
There's a traditional view of sexuality that men are only sexually attracted to women, and vice versa, and that's normal and everything else is not normal (kinky). The more we learn about sex (and gender) the more we learn that there are very few completely "normal" people out there, and a lot of people who are a bit kinky in one respect or another. I think it's now accepted that the hetero-homo thing is a spectrum rather than a binary state, and the primary reason people of the same sex don't have sex with each other is societal pressure rather than biological attraction. e.g. women tend to experiment more with this because society has a more lenient view of "girl-on-girl" than male homosexual sex.
My personal opinion is that evolution "wants" everything to fuck everything as much as possible, just to see what happens. The best reproducers are the ones who did the most fucking, after all. But we're getting into Oglaf territory here.
> I think your starting point is still kinda skewed, because "heteronormative" is a made-up thing by society rather than an actual thing someone can be.
It's a term rooted in the conditions that make sex a reproductive act and not just something that feels good
Which is getting back to the religious crap of "sex is only for reproduction, between a married couple". Yes sex can result in reproduction, but I think making that its primary purpose misses the point. We experience a desire to fuck, separate from our desire to reproduce. They're two different things that are only related in a tiny minority of circumstances. Classifying someone's sexuality by its possible reproductive outcome is like classifying their tongues by the ability to curl into a tube: kinda valid, but not that useful.
A huge chunk of the GP’s post was disclaimers (“I think child molesters are despicable”, etc.) precisely to avoid their point being misunderstood in this way, which apparently didn’t work.
> Do you agree that 'adult-adult-hetersexual' is the only orientation that has obvious evolutionary benefit?
This shows a profound misunderstanding of evolution and natural selection on your part. "Evolutionary benefit" is impossible to divorce from circumstances. It doesn't exist as some right/wrong answer, or something you can divine through logic.
For instance, same-sex attraction could absolutely be advantageous to a species that is nearing the peak of sustainable population numbers. All species (who can fuck) wanna fuck, and will do so no matter their surrounding circumstances. The difference between one species keeping sustainable numbers, versus another species seeing runaway population numbers causing food source exhaustion and population collapse, could come down to lower procreation rates, in which circumstance strict heterosexuality may not be advantageous.
Point being, stop trying to use bad, dime-store "science" to justify your bad opinions about homosexuality.
I like this question because you explicitly ask me to agree with your premise that pedophiles and gay people are equivalent within your framing of this discussion and then follow it up with “my contention is something other than what I’ve clearly explained”
Edit:
For clarity, the post this is responding to originally started with “Do you agree that 'adult-adult-hetersexual' is the only orientation that has obvious evolutionary benefit?” It has since been edited to a generic copy-pasted response.
It’s a little puzzling to me still why this is. Physical attraction to almost-adults isn’t some big mystery, but most cp is something else entirely.