Disclaimer: like most pedophiles, I have never approached a child with anything sexual or otherwise inapporpriate, and I don’t plan ever to do so. I recognize the harm in such actions, and I don’t want to hurt the very people I love. If you expect AMA with a child molester, this ain’t it.
The account is a throwaway, hope you’ll understand this decision given the sensitivity of the topic.
Edit: Thank you for keeping civil and genuine in your questions. I did envision hostility, yet here you are, amazing as always. Lemmy is a wonderful place to be, thanks to you all!
Edit 2: Apparently we have another brave pedophile here in the comments, and he came with a good note I should include in the post: if you find yourself attracted to minors, that’s okay. Acting on your desires is dangerous, but having them isn’t. If you’d like to have some support and/or community that would help you get your bearings or just listen without any prejudice (we’re all in the same boat), there are places that can help you. Visit VirPed (18+) or MAP Support Club (13+; scroll down for details), or refer to other resources through the MAP Resources website.
Hey again, not OP, but also a pedophile. Those are great questions!
For myself, innocently interacting with kids is usually fine, but I am constantly aware of myself. If it ever feels like too much or it’s not fine, I excuse myself and have actually gotten irritable with children if they won’t leave me alone. Teaching kids boundaries with their own bodies sometimes looks like enforcing boundaries with your own body. If Saint says, “That’s enough for me, I’m done tickling/wrestling/playing/whatever” and a kid doesn’t resect that I mean it, they’re going to hear me raise my voice and walk away to enforce my boundary. This is good for me as well as the kid, so that they learn they can and should set redline boundaries for how people interact with them if they ever get uncomfortable.
As to age ranges… there is great variety. Pedophiles are one slice of what are called “chronophilias,” that is, people who are attracted to certain age ranges or Tanner Stages. In ascending order we have infantophilia (infants and babies), nepiophilia (2-4), pedophilia (prepubescent children), hebephilia (pubescent children), ephebophilia (teens, also this one is where attraction spots being a paraphilia as most of the population typically has some sexual interest in teens), teleiophilia (this is the “typical” age that people are attracted to each other something like 18-35), mesophilia (like 35-55?), and gerontophilia (people in their 70s+). There’s another one that I missed in between meso and geronto, I think.
I am a pedophile, but I’m other things too. If we were to look at the ages that I’m attracted to, the bell of the curve would be 6-16, but it doesn’t cut off sharply on either end of the curve, particularly as we get older. I’m attracted to some people in their 20s or even early 30s, and I’ve been attracted to kids in the nepiophile range. Age of attention is a little fuzzy for me also, because I’m at least halfway a cartoonophile. Cartoons are drawn with cutesy proportions and it can be difficult to tell the “age” of a character depicted.
Many people use the term “Minor Attracted Person” or “MAP” because it more broadly encompasses everyone with an attraction to children, not just people attracted to pre-pubescent children.
There are other community labels that we use for those of us that like boys, girls, both, or neither, as well as those of us that exclusively like children, or those of us that like adults too. There are other things, too, but this post has gone on long enough. 😅
I’m aware that some of that probably sounds super gross. It’s not anything that any of us chose to have. This is something that we experience. Imagine if you woke up tomorrow and were suddenly one of these things. It would be pretty difficult. Almost none of us have had an easy experience.
Thank you for your honesty! I’ve asked another followup question to OP on their response to my message which I invite you to answer as well.
But I have a question for you regarding cartoons! So, I have encountered, in my travels, fan art / cartoons based on shows where the characters would be young. Bart Simpson would be a classic example, since he’s supposed to be 10 or something, but there’s a tonne of Simpsons fan art. But they write on the front “all characters depicted are 18”, and more importantly he’ll be drawn with a huge, clearly adult, penis and balls. But otherwise his character design is the same, it’s not some “future” version of the character.
So my question is whether or not art like that – young characters with post-pubescent sexual features – is the sweet spot for you, or if instead that kind of ruins the comic for you because you were looking for a more child-like figure.
And feel free to not answer if you’d rather not, of course. This is the internet, after all!
It’s AMA, so I’ll answer anything honestly (as long as it’s in good faith). I like a pretty broad range of art. Some of it is more cartoonish (I’ve found comics of Bart before that worked for me) some of them are more on the realistic end. I’m also kind of an outlier amongst my pedophile peers because I like hyper features on child characters. Oversized genitals are a turn-on for me. But I do also like “normal” sized genitals. Some of the characters I’ve really liked are Naruto, Hiro Hamada, Aang (and the other Avatar boys), and Tyler Nguyen-Baker from Turning Red.