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Dan Just wanted to get to this one e-mail. This is not the kind of e-mail he wanted to do on this show, but they have no choice now that it is here. They don't typically do very controversial and serious e-mail.

Being a pedophile (RW142)

Hello Dan and John!

My name is James, feel free to call me that. I'm going to put all of the personal details you ask those who write in to include on the bottom because I'd rather you didn't read them out and would like a chance to convince you not to. I would like your thoughts and opinions on a problem I have been having. I believe I have a moral imperative to kill myself. I am a pedophile. I am a fundamentally immoral dangerous person and the chance that I might cause severe harm or do something unforgivable is too high for me to comfortably continue to exist. I have never been tempted to act on my horrible nature, I do not even let myself get within 100 miles of having the opportunity to be tempted unless I absolutely cannot avoid it.

Despite that I don't trust myself, I also don't want to kill myself, so I don't. Instead I spend every day on edge, feeling guilty like I'm an awful selfish person, like I don't deserve to be happy or comfortable. It is driving me insane. The fear that I might do something keeps me from sleeping. I can't remember the last time I slept through the night. Part of the reason I haven't acted on my belief, aside from fundamentally not wanting to die, is that I might be missing something. Most suicidal people seem to believe that they don't deserve to be alive or something to that effect and I am sure that most feel as justified in those feelings as I do. I can't trust my own conclusions. I would like advice on resolving all of this, please write me back if you need additional details.

Thank you for reading my letter! — James

Dan and John had talked for a minute before they recorded and discussed if they wanted to address this mail, but they both felt they had to. John read that e-mail when he first got off the JoCo Cruise and he didn't request more information or read it again until hearing Dan read it aloud.

Dan and John assume that when James describes himself as a pedophile he does not mean being attracted to post-pubescent 14 year olds who give the appearance of nudging into adulthood but are still adolescents, but if he believes that he should kill himself he is attracted to little kids.

These days we have much more information about mental illness than we have ever had and we have much more compassion for people with mental illness in our culture than we traditionally had. There are diagnosable, if not treatable, but certainly comprehendible difficulties, emotional, mental and otherwise where people who exhibited those symptoms in the past would have been institutionalized, ostracized, forcibly operated upon, sterilized, lobotomized, or electroshocked. In some cases we see those as very manageable illnesses today, in other cases they still baffle us.

It was in living memory that people were lobotomized or electroconvulsed in order to treat things like bipolar, depression, attention deficit disorder, or hypomania, let alone schizophrenia or sociopathy or whatnot, even just epilepsy. Pedophilia is an outlier case and it often gets used by bigots as a false equivalency to other people on the wide spread of sexual desire. You hear all the time that if we allow gay marriage then there will be pedophiles in the schools, which is absolutely inflammatory and prejudiced ignorance about how the spectrum of consent manifests.

Consent is very important in our culture and we understand that a child cannot consent, particularly a young kid. Two consenting adults can agree to what they want to do and it is nobody else's business. If no-one is being hurt, then it isn't a matter for the state or for the culture. Lots of things may be a person's proclivity, but we can't tolerate them because they do not involve two consenting people.

Particularly in the case of pedophilia we as a culture have decided that it is a mental disorder and we 100% attach morality to it without reservation. We give lip service to the idea that it is a mental illness, but we talk and think about it and treat it as though it is a disease of the soul and a person with these impulses is not thought of as someone who is ill, but rather has someone who is bad.

We use words like disgusting or repulsive because the idea is abhorrent to us. You don't have to go very far back in time to find those same attitudes attached to things that we don't consider illness now, but that we consider within the spectrum of normal behavior. John is not making an equivalence here! He is not saying that because people used to and in many cases still do refer to normal homosexual behavior using those exact same prejudicial terms and attitudes, he is not saying that homosexuality and pedophilia are equivalent, because clearly they are not. Schizophrenics for example were considered possessed by the devil not that long ago.

Their listener is driven and impelled within his mental universe and his sexuality is inextricably connected to a behavior that we cannot tolerate as a society. He has attached a language to it that people in the past would have used to talk about demonic possession or intentionally morally abhorrent behavior. Pedophilia is not uncommon! It is common enough that it is within a spectrum of human mental illness.

Attitudes about pedophilia vary considerably throughout history and in other cultures. We talk about the Greeks as an enlightened society, but keeping boys as sex partners was absolutely part of Greek culture. There was no moral attachment to it. You probably could not keep a young girl in Greek society, but there are plenty of societies where you can and in many cultures even today you can be a 50 year old and marry a 12 year old. There is probably no culture where you can have a sexual relationship with a 6 year old but you can certainly have a 6 year old betrothed to you with the intention to marry her when she reaches the age of menstruation.

Our cultural attitudes are particularly restrictive and even 16 year olds or in some cases 17 year olds are regarded as children and to be attracted to a 15 or 16 year old is regarded with the same kind of revulsion as being attracted to a young child, which is absolutely just a cultural attitude and nothing in nature suggests it, but those cultural attitudes are strong.

Should their listener kill himself? Absolutely not! He is hyper-vigilant over his desires and conscious of the fact that they are socially unacceptable. He made no attempt in his letter to justify those ideas, but he recognizes them as intrusive and unwelcome. It sounds like he wishes that he didn't feel the way he feels and he wishes he could be rid of this compulsion. It is a strong enough compulsion that he is afraid that he might act on it even.

(Dan:) Dan agrees that he should not kill himself, but he should definitely try to get counseling or go to a therapist, not under the implication that he is going to get cured and will not feel this anymore, but it might help him understand that feeling this way doesn't mean that he is in a hopeless situation. Dan for example is attracted to women and no amount of therapy would make him not be attracted to women, even if you told him that being attracted to women is wrong and you are not supposed to be attracted to women and no one should be attracted to women, which is what you would say to a pedophile about children: Nobody should be attracted to kid! It still wouldn't stop Dan being attracted to women. If it goes deep enough in their listener's nature that his attraction to kids is equal to Dan’s attraction to women, no amount of therapy will convince him out of that.

(Dan:) He knows that it is wrong, but he might not know why it is wrong. Is it wrong because society says it is wrong? Is it wrong because children cannot consent and because doing something like that to a child is not going to be good for the child? How did he come to believe that it is bad? Dan’s suggestion to him would be to talk to someone, and not just a friend, not just Dan and John, but a therapist, a psychiatrist, or a psychologist.

(Dan:) If he has never acted on it then he has not committed any crime yet. Another question is: Is he still also attracted to adults of any gender or persuasion? Is this a side thing or is this his main thing? Does he still have a relationship with an adult significant other? Does he go on Tinder dates? Or is he not doing anything because this is what he really wants? We don't know the answer to that. Can he get help for this? Is there help for this?

John would be very particular about going to a counselor. Their listener should very specifically seek out a counselor who specializes in sexual deviancy and, if he has the resources or is in a big enough city, find someone who specializes in pedophilia. Although he has not committed a crime, there are plenty of places in our society where admitting to being a pedophile is to have committed a crime for all intents and purposes, even if you have done nothing. The stigma is so strong!

There are an awful lot of psychologists and psychiatrists and counselors who are not very smart, not very sympathetic, and not very well educated. All you have to do is to look at the programs that churn out psychologists on an hourly basis and you know that they can't all be geniuses and they can't all be experts on everything. This is a specialty! John would not just walk on down to Joe Blow Psychologist Office and say ”I'm a pedophile” because you don't know what you are going to get and this needs to be handled delicately.

The question about whether or not he is capable of adult relationships is a really good one because there are a lot of sexual impulses that people are able to integrate into normal sex lives through roleplaying. There are all kinds of people who are fascinated with the idea of rape or forced sex, but they also recognize that it is not a thing they can act on in the world.

Rape play is a huge part of the BDS&M community. Two people are both consenting adults and once they enter this room or enter into this scenario they are going to pretend that you are trying to get away and I am going to pretend that I am making you. We are going to get to the end of this and we are going to have a safe word in case you feel like it is going too far. That is 100% true also of age play, which is a big part of alternative sex. I'm the daddy and you are the baby. It goes all the way to diaper play. You can enter a situation where one person adopts the manner and perhaps the clothing and appearance of someone who is maybe too young.

Talking about pedophilia in the general world is an example of people saying ”This is abnormal! It is not normal and we can't talk about it being outside the sphere!” because of the way it is received. Age play sexual behavior within the alternative sex community is very normal. There are people who convincingly play these games, but they recognize them as games. You don’t engage in age play without getting a big charge from acting on a taboo. Whether or not this would satisfy their listener's compulsion is a question they cannot answer.

Within Japanese culture there is an entire universe of hentai comic art devoted to Lolicon and Shotacon and there is somehow a pass given because it is comic book art, but in some countries the obscenity laws are stricter and even comic book representations of under-age people are against the law. In the United States that is not the case, although we are practitioners of pretty draconian consequences for any action toward a child. For there to be a genre of comic book art dealing with underage kids reveals to what degree this is somewhat commonplace.

There are resources and alternatives to their listener's compulsion and John agrees with Dan that counseling is especially effective in dealing with the compulsion. It is behavioral and he is already gutting it out and he is really white-knuckling. The impulse to kill himself is probably 100% derived from the fact that the world he lives in is utterly unforgiving and does not recognize this as an illness on a spectrum of illness, rather than a moral failing that needs to be eradicated from the Earth.

Dan and John both live in urban communities and have exposure to somewhat more sophisticated writing on the question and to alternative sex communities or awareness of those. John’s impulse is to have sympathy for someone like that because the sex drive is so strong. John has tremendous sympathy for people who's sex drive is attached to violence, non-consent or any other of a host of things that are against the law or that we consider abhorrent.

If you connect violence and non-consent to the family of pedophilia, you are dealing with a not insignificant portion of people who are suffering. Their listener should seek out a place in the community where there is some recognition and understanding that pedophilia is something that a person would suffer from rather than something that they should be condemned for indefinitely.

Dan and John would absolutely feel differently about him if he would have had imposed himself on a child because it would need an intervention and that would be confusing. It is hard for John to get to the bottom of their listener's feeling of panic that his urge might be irresistible because he is clearly not advertising himself as a babysitter, he is not putting himself in a situation where he is giving baths to five year olds, and he doesn't sound like the type of person that is going to snatch a kid off of a playground. John doesn’t know how strong his compulsion is, if he fantasizes about stealing a child, and if he is maintaining a hyper-vigilance over himself because he feels at risk of any moment saying ”You know what? Fuck it!”

Dan hopes that their listener can stop white-knuckling it and actually get into a program and into a relationship with a counselor where he is confronting his overwhelming desire, not just a desire for children, but a desire to commit an actual crime beyond a crime compounded by kidnapping or worse. It would be different if he was married and has a regular sex life with an adult and when he closes his eyes he is imagining that she is young. It is really something to investigate with a qualified mental health professional, but he is certainly not a pox on the world.

Dan doesn’t think he should kill himself. If you are writing to Dan and John they are going to blanket say ”Don't kill yourself!” John does not think you should kill yourself! There are perhaps people who might write in where John would say ”You know what? Let's revisit that blanket!”, but there would never be a case of somebody saying ”The world is better off without me!” and John saying ”I agree!”, but there would be people who say ”I'm ready to be done!” and John would say ”Let's talk about that!” In this case we have a thoughtful and sensitive human being who needs some help.

It is probably a better world with you as a happy person than with you as an unhappy person, but it is definitely a better world with you in it, a better world where you have faced this and dealt with it and are available to other people who come along behind you who with similar problems. You can be an aid and comfort to them because you are not the first one or the last one and there is probably someone who has been through this already who wants to talk to you and can share some experience, strength, and hope. There is probably a person who's life is dedicated to helping someone just like him, and that gives one a purpose and a way of reminding yourself every day that you have been given some work to do.