I think we're in danger of conflating subjective and objective 'truths' here: because I (as a product, yes, of my genetics but also my time, place and culture) find something disgusting does not mean it is objectively so, or has always been seen as such. The objection to terms like "meant to" is not merely a moral but also a logical one, as one cannot authoritatively infer meaning and purpose from what we perceive to be "encoded programs".
(Much of the following is paraphrased from the 'Archives of Sexual Behavior'; I'll provide more detailed references to anyone who's interested.)
Regarding paedophilic attraction:
In the DSM-IV, the boundary for paedophilia is puberty; the younger person is to be prepubertal. Quite apart from the fact that puberty varies between individuals (and may be changing over generations), it is not a marker that's particularly grounded historically or cross-culturally.
The diversity of sexual behaviour in a cross-cultural perspective is amazing to those who assume that their own (or their own society's) moral standards are somehow laws of nature. Although child-adult relationships are currently condemned in Western society as being inherently abusive and exploitative, there have been (and still are) many societies that don't share this viewpoint.
A handful of examples: Ford & Beach (1951) described child-adult sex among the Siwa Valley North Africans - "All men and boys engage in anal intercourse. Males are singled out as peculiar if they do not do so. Prominent Siwan men lend their sons to each other for this purpose"; among the Aranda aborigines of Central Australia, "a man, who is fully initiated but not yet married, takes a boy ten or twelve years old, who lives with him as his wife for several years, until the older man marries"; Diamond (1990) reviewed child-adult sex throughout Hawaiian history and Polynesia, including public sex between an adult male and an 11-year-old girl "without the least sense of it being indecent or improper". Sexual relations between adult and child were seen as benefitting the child rather than gratifying the adult.
Bauserman (1997) reports that among the Etoro of New Guinea, from about age 10, boys would have regular oral sex with older men, swallowing their semen "to facilitate growth". Among the neighbouring Kaluli, when a boy reached age 10 or 11, his father would select a man to inseminate him for a period of months to years.
Finally, for three centuries the age of consent in England was 10 - up until within 39 years of World War I. The impetus to raise the age of sexual consent was fuelled not by outrage over paedophilia per se but concerns over child prostitution...
I'm giving these examples not to argue that child-adult sex is a really great idea but to point out that, as with ritual cannibalism, the practice is not inherently wrong or 'unnatural' but contingent upon cultural context.
Oh, and arguments that paedophilia is unknown among animals are flawed. The obligatory example is that of the bonobo: not only are 'non-fertile' (same-sex or juvenile-adult) sexual pairings as frequent as 'potentially-fertile' (adult male-female) combinations, but a third of sexual contacts by an adult with an infant were initiated by the infant (De Waal, 1990).
My previous assertion that around one fifth of adult males experience sexual arousal toward children may have been a conservative recollection. In Briere & Runtz's 1989 study of around 200 university males, 21% reported some sexual attraction to small children, 9% described sexual fantasies involving children, 5% admitted to having masturbated to sexual fantasies of children, and 7% indicated they might have sex with a child if not caught (the researchers concluded that "given the probable social undesirability of such admissions, we may hypothesise that the actual rates were even higher"). In a later sample of 100 male and 180 female undergraduate students, 22% of males and 3% of females reported sexual attraction to a child (Smiljanich & Briere, 1996).
In plethysmographic studies (those measuring penile responsivity), the rate of penile arousal to pictures of prepubescent girls "equalling or exceeding arousal to an adult" averages between 17-50%. The subjects of these studies vary from being 'normal' undergraduates and hospital workers to Czech soldiers.
The fact that sexual arousal patterns to children are subjectively reported and physiologically demonstrable in a substantial minority of 'normal' people - and historically common and accepted in varying cultures at varying times - would seem to make the term "perversion" rather questionable. Our current Western culture views paedophilic attraction as abhorrent, certainly, but claiming that this contemporary abhorrence is somehow translatable into 'hardwired' genetic or biological 'truth' is, at best, speculative. |
