trenton

Apparently, most human beings cannot comprehend that a parent would do these things to their own child. It challenges their sense of reality because what is held as absolute to parents is in reality subjective. Parental love can be applied in destructive and horrific ways. Loving your child therefore does not prevent incest and rape. If you dig into sex offender typologies it might challenge your understanding of reality once you see the twisted nature of evil. Meanwhile, I see that you are sorry this happened to me, but sometimes I struggle to comprehend what kind of empathy I would need from others. Part of the problem is that love has proven dangerous and it might make me attached to a perpetrator. It is also frustrating that those who see the pain can often do very little to help the situation somehow. This may be part of why therapy is ineffective in that the therapist does not realize that they are God and are therefore limited by the paradigms they apply to child sexual abuse. I think it would be worth discussing, what kind of love do I need? If I have learned to numb myself to my feelings because of how overwhelming they are, then I become numb to people offering love as well. This is complicated by autism leading to difficulty understanding my emotions and is compounded by shut down when exposed to severe trauma. Eventually I just become numb because of how overwhelming it would be to feel everything. This in turn leads to chronic stress and emotional dysregulation in which death is seen as an escape from the psychological wounds and my sense of existential dread. I will try to figure out what kind of love I need if family isn't helpful. If not family, then I thought career accomplishment would be something to pursue instead of relationships, but it was undermined by depression and educational disruptions. If career does not fill the void, then what love do I need? I hoped spirituality would give me an alternative sense of purpose and reality, but that too is easier said than done. Ideally healthy relationships are helpful for recovery, but in reality this is hard if family has betrayed their own children.

There's all kinds of ways for the ego to play God. As far as I know, I am everything. It is a bit much to explain all of it, but I'm sure you or someone else on the forum figured it out. There are multiple paths that can be followed to realize this.

In case it wasn't clear. I went for a walk and there was a suicidal guy on the bridge. There was actually a guy acting like he was going to kill himself a couple of days ago when I posted that. We seriously need better programs for addiction and poverty or this is what we end up with in our society. Not to mention the organized criminals that exploit jurisdictional gaps on different sides of rivers while targeting people in these areas to ruin their lives. Individual compassion is important, but systemic change is needed if we truly want to help the maximum number of people. I can't be at the bridge everyday to stop people from jumping. We can't rely on the good Samaritan forever because there needs to be a better social structure in place to stop people from reaching such a severe state of crisis.

Green also values love and connection. Sometimes this can be applied in inappropriate ways. Green is also open minded to cultural relativism including the reality that some cultures were fine with incest. It might make it seem like incest is not evil if a parent loves their child very deeply. Sometimes rapists act from love, not from power and domination. This includes statutory rape cases for example. Combine this with severe stress, trauma, and possible drug problems from poor coping, and you might end up with a stage green rapist with a warped worldview who believes he is acting from love, not from power.

I believe the mechanism by which this would happen would most likely be an opportunistic or situational offender. There are incest perpetrators, pedophiles, and zoophiles who believe that they are not harming the victim. In fact, they believe that this kind of love is appropriate for the victim. A father doesn't rape his daughter because he hates her and wants her to suffer. Instead it is more often out of his twisted sense of love, just as with a mother and son. In the case of the mother and son incest, the mother often has a trauma history with which she is identified and therefore locked into a depressing schema while becoming emotionally incestuous with her son. Again, she develops an inappropriate bond, similar to the mental health centers I've been to in which people bond very fast through vulnerability such that they start having sex when their not supposed to because they love each other and have confused boundaries around sex as a consequence of past abuse. Of course there are also animal lovers who have sex with their dogs because they believe the dog can consent and that this love is appropriate. The key is that they must believe their behavior is not harmful, otherwise they can't maintain it. They actually have a distorted moral reality rather than simply being evil. Obviously drugs might be a factor in disinhibiting someone who copes poorly with trauma. Severe stress can also temporarily override normal inhibitions stage green would have. In the case of this man, he may not have believed that having sex with that 16 year old was harmful if where he is from it would have been consensual and he felt the love was appropriate. The secrecy comes from beliefs such as harm comes from discovery not from a father raping his daughter. @Leo Gura is this how a stage green rapist thinks?

@Zen LaCroix I will clarify these things. I'll start by summarizing the shame. Firstly, I was shamed by my mother at age six when she accused me of raping her daughter and threatened me with jail. This was after sexualized play with my four year old sister due to having a dream in which my uncle molested me. My mother was also a Catholic drug addict with an ex boyfriend who abandoned his children following his multiple sexual relationships with highschool teenagers as an adult while carrying out gang activities like child trafficking. This should summarize my sexual shame clearly, although there were further details related to various boundary violations they were responsible for against me. My moral issue has recently collapsed. I did some digging around Christianity and found an old unconscious childhood belief that maintained my shame. It had something to do with the virgin Mary representing something I could never be. The belief is that due to unforgivable sin I am permanently broken, unlovable, tainted, and irredeemable, such that not only can Jesus never salvage me, but also I will be damned to perpetually try in vain to prove worthy of my own existence. This ties into present sexuality due to the fear that further sexual acts will taint me further, thus confirming what I already know to be true. In terms of viewing women sexually, what happened was after my past experiences, I lost my ability to look at a woman and feel attracted to her appearance. It's not that finding a woman hot makes me bad, it's that my ability to look at a woman and spontaneously feel these things is dead. I therefore require proximity, established safety, mutual interest in hobbies or intellectual frameworks, and respect. Over time I can develop an appreciation for your looks. I just can't operate like a normal man anymore. My developing sexuality was actively shaped and undermined by those around me. The closest thing to a moral issue I have would be toxic masculinity. I have no idea what version of masculinity would be worth embodying. Not to mention it probably won't be tailored to the traumatized autistic mind anyway. I seem to be especially sensitive to toxic masculinity.

I have been struggling with this conflict for a long time. My natural sexuality such as attraction to the opposite sex was disrupted due to internalized shame. I see conflicting messages on this subject constantly, mostly with women emphasizing respect, morality, and not acting like pigs, while men emphasize getting laid. The conflict is intensified to an extreme degree when a male has a father who was a sexual predator, and therefore had no decent role model at all. I have also been feminized due to being the only boy in a household of women who viewed me as more dangerous unless I was gender non-conforming. I probably struggle with this cognitive dissonance much more than most people, but I have some frames that might resolve the tension. Firstly, from a biological perspective, the the brain is structured such that pleasure and disgust are processed in overlapping regions such as the Insular Cortex. This may be linked to postcoital dysphoria in which there is sudden feelings of repulsion and shame following a sexual climax. On some level this makes sense if as humans beings we were not designed to do nothing but have sex all the time. Eventually we would have to get sick of it while also needing a pleasure incentive to engage in the act. In this sense, pleasure and disgust is part of a biological process which operates independently of morality or objectifying ideologies. If in the cycle of emotional disgust, then morality would probably be given precedence compared to pleasure which prioritizes objectification in the moment, but can be generalized by an ideology. In my case, due to my association between sexuality and severe moral transgressions in childhood, my disgust response is probably much more prevalent or more intense compared to the general population. Therefore, for me especially, what is considered normal seems horrible and unacceptable. This was reinforced throughout school when boys would hit on me at the urinal, causing me to be afraid of urinals to this day and preferring stalls. I'm afraid of someone coming up right next to me, winking at me, licking their lips, and putting their hands on my shoulder. I feel vulnerable and exposed at urinals now. There were other instances of sexual assault and harassment which made the cognitive dissonance worse, including girls who insisted that I always wanted it because I was a boy. This was happening while my family disputed which sexual orientation was desirable for me to have while I was being vilified as predatory due to my father's actions. This creates a lot of cognitive dissonance that is hard to resolve in terms of morality and prowess. given that my disgust response is stronger in response to moral violations, there is probably a function to this disgust beyond just getting sick of sex so you can move on. maybe it is supposed to be protective, although in my case there was significantly more terror than moral disgust. That said, perhaps the disgust is itself rooted in fear in which case it would explain why fear amplifies disgust. If I am afraid of intimacy due to the possibility of harm, then this would amplify disgust around sexuality and especially prowess. I recall that my core fear was being unloved. This was combined with repeated exposure to the nakedness of female relatives and disgust. Given this fear of being unloved at the core of the avoidance of intimacy, what exactly would a woman want from me in order to love me? It seems that this would be closer to resolving the cognitive dissonance I have been describing. I have been under the impression that I need to be somebody different or to change my identity as there was a fear that my current self was not good enough. It would probably help to clarify what are the exact standards that women are looking for. There might even be a system available for types of women and what they want. I don't know where I would be if there were an equivalent model for men, but it seems that safety and trust needs to be prioritized in some kind of demisexual pattern of attraction. I previously did not have a problem with looking at women and walking up to them based on beautiful appearance, but now the disgust response was overwhelming to the point that it has erased this natural attraction mechanism to a woman's appearance that I previously had. I now have a hard time selecting a woman who is attractive based on appearance and then approaching as this form of beauty has become largely invisible or irrelevant to me until I first establish a person's character. It seems the only exception is massive obesity which makes me terrified of getting close. Other women are more neutral. It might also help to know how exactly to go about practicing vulnerability if women seem to emphasize that. If I have autism, then it is harder than normal for me to communicate my feelings. I tend to instead describe the surrounding circumstances and my responses to them as well as how they impacted my predisposition. The outcome is that my explanations are long because I am not sure how else to discuss my feelings without using models to help me navigate this terrain. Perhaps I am afraid that women will be disgusted with me and I therefore cannot show my full character. The outcome is more isolation instead which is kind of a silent death. What are the exact things which are categorically unacceptable about a person such that they should remain perpetually condemned without a shred of compassion extended to them, and which are the things that are bad but not that bad and therefore acceptable and loveable? Apparently people with autism struggle with dating and intimacy more than the general population in addition to being more vulnerable to abuse as a consequence of difficulty in reading social cues while assuming good faith. What do you think about resolving this cognitive dissonance? How do you square morality, terror, shame, prowess, pleasure, love, and disgust when sexuality seems to encompass all of these things simultaneously?

Leo often mentions things like "how do you know Jesus died for our sins?" He argued that all of Christianity fails on this point because there is nothing to back this up. I did some digging, and I have discovered the core claim as why Jesus is the Savior and how Christians know it. It is completely preposterous. Essentially, the reason Jesus is believed to be the Savior is because there was an unrelated prophecy from 700 years prior to his birth which had already been immediately fulfilled, but somehow also prophesied that Jesus would die for our sins over 700 years later despite making no such mention of this or a virgin birth or Jesus. "The young woman will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel" this is the core claim as to why Jesus is the Savior. The term "young woman" is what was originally used to describe Mary, but in the translation this term was changed to "virgin." The implication is that Mary probably wasn't even a virgin if she did exist and this story was inserted completely while serving as the core basis of the religion. If the scripture is taken on its own terms, then whatever religion there was supposed to be would be unrecognizable compared to modern translations as there was no virgin birth and there was no prophesy about Jesus. So what religion are we even talking about if the meaning can be twisted so far in completely different fan fictions? Sometimes I encounter tensions when I am in the presence of Christians. I feel like it is not safe to say what I think. Additionally, if I do speak of spirituality, I often get lumped together with this religion even though I am very far from that category. This was a problem in therapy as well when a therapist insisted I pray while imposing religious beliefs even though I made clear that I didn't believe in these things. There is also clear disdain when I simply compare different religions and point out similarities. I feel like something died inside of me. I remember in childhood, my family was nominally Christian but I didn't believe it intellectually. However, for some reason my mind kept coming back to as if it were trying to make sense of something, or if there was some emotional pull of hope that dragged my mind to it despite conscious disbelief. It is almost like a split personality in which despite my conscious disbelief, somehow part of me existed as though there were truth to what I was focusing on. I came up with positions like, "the Bible is clearly wrong on these points, but this doesn't refute the existence of God." Hence I stood by the position of God but not religion because of the fact that religion is heavily a social demand for conformity rather than any real commitment to truth. In fact, "belief" is misleading because in the context of religion it isn't meant to be held as an intellectual position, but rather as "trust" in God or Jesus rather than epistemically believe it. Religion uses the language of literal belief when meaning something entirely different. Again, this changes the entire nature of what religion even is if it was never meant to be an intellectual position in the first place. It seems to mean more like "do as you're told and everything will work out" when using the term believe. In that sense, religion shouldn't even be treated as a truth claim, but more of a fantasy narrative that sounds pretty while being built around human institutions with millions of different agendas that are divorced from reality on every level. I don't know why exactly there is this heavy feeling of sadness. Maybe it is because I know I can't seriously engage with a community that shuts down any legitimate questioning while assuming that I intend to offend people due to pointing out the inconsistencies. I prefer to contemplate things like religion on my own away from others for this reason. Although my emotions are low, I still logically prefer truth and accept whatever it is even if it for some reason feels painful. Perhaps the absurdity was deeper than I could have imagined beyond even the miracle claims that defy science. I struggle to imagine something more nonsensical than an unrelated prophecy from 700 years ago proving an unmentioned person was born under unmentioned circumstances and did unmentioned things. I feel like this closes off or collapses something. What do you think? I have a prophesy of my own. 700 years from now, something unmentioned will occur.

I remember in my case, there was a particular reason I was drawn to Christianity more than normal. Not only was this about my culture, but even more so it was about childhood sexual abuse and feeling tainted and unclean. This is ultimately what motivated me to explore the meaning the virgin Mary recently. Supposedly, virginity was meant to symbolize purity, humility, and duty bound behavior even when difficult. The problem is that the symbolic meaning of virginity was lost in the literal interpretation which in turn conflated an entire religious morality system around a biological feature with no objective moral standing. The counter examples are Christians who engage in acts other than vaginal penetration to retain technical virginity or rape victims who were physically no longer virgins even if they still inwardly symbolized everything the virgin archetype represents. In that sense the rape victim wasn't actually tainted in terms of the character the archetype represents poetically, even if they might feel ashamed or degraded because of what happened. This is the sort of thing I was contemplating when I started exploring this thread in Christianity. What I ultimately discovered is that not only was the entire system of morality wrong, but the virgin Mary may not have even been intended to be a virgin based on the translation errors. On top of that the entire prophecy on which the religion is based is logically incoherent and has nothing to do with Jesus or a virgin birth. I think the grief may partially for the child I was that believed I fundamentally bad and permanently tainted, hoping that the cleanliness Christianity spoke of might restore me to who I once was. In reality I was never broken, not even in the context of this religion where literal virginity wasn't meant to be an all or nothing adjudication of character. Much of that judgement had to do with male property laws in which women were treated as commodities. Although religion unfairly places the burden moreso on women, if the logic of the Bible were applied consistently, then there are plenty of predatory men in the Bible who would have been considered whores. There are also some ancient theologians who reached similar conclusions to me in terms of physical virginity and what it was meant to symbolically represent beyond a biological state which was often circumstantial rather than indicative of a person's true nature. Basically, you are not the body and your true nature is something deeper which cannot be physically destroyed. Ultimately, the beliefs my mind held onto as if they made me happy on the surface despite my conscious disbelief, were actually making me miserable because of the assumptions on which contempory Christianity operates. It treats a biological state as permanent condemnation rather than a circumstantial state that exists independently of ones true nature.

I noticed in myself, that I didn't intellectually believe it, but for some reason the beliefs made me happy. I did not consciously choose to hold onto these beliefs, but my mind insisted on sticking to what family and culture mentioned while glorifying it. I ended up having dreams in which I met Jesus even though I also explored many other religions aside from Christianity. it seems that it might have something to do with lacking a stable direction or identity which religion offers. The person might want simplicity if they find deep spiritual work extensive, exhausting, and confusing. Religious themes are also common in trauma narratives as Jesus offers to heal people. If a person is drawn to spirituality in the hopes of avoiding suffering, then they might revert to religion if they were ultimately not motivated by truth. I'm not quite sure I understand why, but those are some guesses.

I feel the need to tell you guys that if there were a pedophile in your childhood school, then you probably didn't notice. I can map out the details if need be, but you can intuit why this is. We were taught to trust adults and report bad behavior by other kids. A common feature in school environments with severe staff abuse is that the environment is chaotic with chronic failures of discipline. The fear of peer abuse takes up such cognitive energy that the child doesn't consider the possibility that a staff member might be a pedophile. Taking this possibility seriously as a child would be terrifying in a school environment. On top of that, the abuse would be structurally hidden through private lessons the child never visited. Surface level abuse like verbal abuse by staff might be normalized while the most severe abuse remains hidden. The surface chaos hides the underlying disturbing reality. In the case of my school it was later found that one of the staff members was a drug addict which at the time I wouldn't have guessed that. She did have us stand out in the rain as she yelled at us, but much of this behavior was normalized by the school culture. On top of that sexual assault was common among my peers such that it didn't register as a violation severe enough to be acted on in response when it happened to me. I was so busy navigating the school bullies that if there were a pedophile in that environment, I would not have noticed as it would have been covered and quietly hidden from sight. Although this is a real phenomenon, I'm not sure how we should teach children about how in the event their teacher was responsible for this, they wouldn't notice and instead continue trusting them as if nothing was wrong. At the end of the day, a proactive prevention focused approach is necessary for stopping institutional abuse because the structure is such that individual reporting is extremely unreliable and deeply compromised in many ways. Whistleblowers can't be counted on in this environment.

@Hojo Thank you. Pokemon is just as real and just as beautiful of Jesus.

I have been reading about people who survived extreme circumstances. I am currently reading Man's search for meaning by Viktor Frankl. I have found some valuable lessons in how to manage one's relationship with suffering. I started exploring difficult situations like these partially because I noticed discrepancies in how moral philosophy is taught in western countries. I noticed that if applied consistently, then most people would fall in line with Nazis and remain passive during a genocide. I therefore began challenging the moral frameworks with extreme scenarios that do not match western assumptions about love, meaning, purpose, morality, and existence. This included love in the darkest moments possible. I have found many interesting psychological insights that overlap with many areas of life including my relationship with death and human connection. Some of it made me cry due to imagery of a parent holding their dying child while singing a lullaby about how precious the child is regardless of circumstances. I found that these lessons in love and resilience are relevant for me when I navigate darkness largely alone. I have found secular frameworks that offer equivalent benefits to religion without requiring faith in a supernatural entity or Savior. Love is something that cannot be taken away even in death as the being lives forever in your mind and heart along with the warmth they gave when alive. It is something that gives a person the will to live even when all else is lost. This relates to an abusive situation I try to navigate with my family. I'm looking for psychological tools to prepare myself to potentially become split from an abusive family forever and find new meaning outside of the narratives they imposed on me. It is something I face largely alone and sometimes it contributes mental health problems by undermining my will to live. Much of my research focused on perpetrator psychology as in my previous thread, but the deeper problem is how perpetrators have impacted my relationship with meaning, life, purpose, love, and so forth. So what is the will to live? Personally, when my family was cruel to me, I felt my reality fall apart along with my identity. The identity crisis never fully resolved. Part of me knew that my family was feeding me lies as they had no real moral philosophy. I sought to ground myself in truth, believing that the truth is what I live for. If I reject truth, then I reject myself, making self love in a sense impossible if I must be erased and live a lie such as a false identity. I came to spirituality partially because of seeking the true self. Learning was a method of seeking truth while using epistemology as a survival strategy. It seems that the will to live is not merely a cost benefit analysis based on the pros and cons of staying alive. The consequentialist philosophy which western education is biased toward might guide someone toward this kind of assumption. There seems to be something prior to any rational or irrational cognitive layer that can be bypassed through love and without needing to argue with the content of the mind such as the exact right answer when struggling to find the words for experience. I seem to be leaning toward a detached, arational relationship with the mind, seeing that rationality or irrationality can be bypassed toward a deeper and more present being. The will to live does not seem to merely be hope that things will get better. It seems to be a core self that refuses to be erased. Is this ego survival? Or is it something different? Why does it refuse to be erased? It seems to desire unconditional love, both offering and receiving. Maybe it is the work of some spiritual force, or maybe it is the structure of human survival, or maybe it is both. I don't really know what the will to live is or why it operates in this way. It is like a creative force seeking expression no matter the content of experience. A relevant thread of this inquiry may be what is will. As for the will to live, what is it at it's core? It seems to be a creative force of love seeking truth to know itself. This seems to be at the heart of my will to live and why I haven't killed myself. What do you think?

I remember that there is a similar objection to the Republican party prioritizing compassion for a school shooter over all the kids murdered. My approach seems to be to treat offenders as objects of study in many cases, seeking insights into human psychology. Oftentimes this information can be used to inform prevention, thereby protecting future victims. Once I apply a framework that does not separate understanding, compassion, and prevention, it seems that from that point of view compassion for victims is inseparable from compassion for offenders. For example, we can look at institutional abuse with massive sex scandals. The psychological pattern in humans is common enough that entire churches can become overrun with child molesters. Finding the commonalities across such individuals by treating them as fundamentally human rather than monsters informs us on how to structure society to best address these vulnerabilities. I wish this information on prevention wasn't restricted so much. Some research should be restricted, but not this part. Leo maintains that it is less about prevention and ultimately about realizing you are God. I'm not there yet. Meanwhile, I maintain that most people who abuse children are motivated not by pedophilia, but by many other factors. This is why pedophilic framing can be misleading, granted that pedophiles target a disproportionate number of victims as is the case for preferential offenders, similar to sadistic offenders. Ted Bundy is an example of a preferential sadistic offender.

https://actualized.org/insights/where-i-agree-and-disagree-with-feminism I have some positions around feminism that might add nuance to the bullet points Leo listed. I believe there are some complications that are commonly overlooked. In terms of agreement, all of it looks like common sense. However, there is one point "Women should be paid equally well for doing equal work. (But only if they truly do equal work.) This comes after "Women should not be discriminated against in the workplace." These two go hand in hand. One complication is that using methods to measure gender inequality such as wages is that if you account for the exact positions, then the pay gap largely disappears. The problem is that workplace discrimination also places men in positions that women should be able to reach, thus causing unequal pay due to position access. It can be a qualification problem or discrimination preventing a woman from gaining the opportunity to do equal work to a man and therefore remain in a lower pay range with both men and women, thereby seemingly erasing the gender pay gap. This is a problem with measuring the phenomenon through broad standards as it misses these scenarios. All other points of agreement seem straight forward with my main concern being the tension between equal work, equal pay, and ongoing discrimination preventing equal work and therefore creating a wage gap or not depending on the frame of reference in terms of measurement. Leo mentions later on that inequality cannot simplistically be measured, which ties into what I am describing as measurements can obscure inequality or make it appear more prevalent than it actually is. In terms of disagreement, I see more tension. Firstly, "men's objectification of women and men's psychology is merely bad patriarchal social conditioning." In this case, I partially agree but at the same time conditioning is a huge and possibly the main factor when it comes to objectification. For example, there is a long history of relational status being used to confer consent. This gives historical precedent to the entitlement worldview in which women were systematically treated like objects with no right to say no. Marital rape wasn't fully criminalized in the U.S. until 1993, meaning that many men alive in America today are still operating from a worldview in which it is not rape if you use force to make a woman in a relationship have sex with you. This is a strong sign that conditioning plays a huge role in objectification and may be the main factor in this male behavior. The part that gets more subtle is that although conditioning is important for describing male behavior, there is still an internal sexual attraction that has elements of objectification. This may be what Leo refers to with "merely bad patriarchal social conditioning." It is definitely a factor, but not the only factor. It can be greatly reduced, but likely not eliminated entirely. In terms of Women needing to be responsible for being attracted to abusive and corrupt men, this could be deeply problematic. When dealing with someone like a psychopath or a serial rapist who puts on a convincing persona with many layers of lies that are difficult to uncover while tailoring his psychological strategies to target a woman's vulnerabilities, it is hard to blame women for being attracted to corrupt and abusive men. In some cases women go on a date with a man who seems completely normal. They then go to his place where a gang then pulls a gun on her, kidnaps her, rapes her, and possibly kills her. I know women who have been in situations like these and it is hard to blame them for being tricked by organized criminals of sex traffickers who threaten to stick a coat hanger inside of you if you don't let them gang rape you. Sadistic offenders are the rarest typology in sex offenders, but it is also genuinely difficult to distinguish a seemingly normal man or woman from gang members involved in organized criminal activities planning to set you up and jump you. In terms of women being partially responsible, many organized criminals use women for specific roles such as targeting caregiving roles or making people feel at ease or lower their guard while they are kidnapping children to sell them to rapists while posing as relatives. There are documented cases and I have witnessed this behavior. Leo's frame of reference for women being attracted to abusers is probably that there are women who like "bad boys" but then end up getting treated badly. Given that frame of reference, it sounds like we might be screwed in terms of preventing abuse. There are bad boys and women who like bad boys, so I don't see what can be done to stop this dynamic from creating abusive situations. Maybe the only realistic way to stop this dynamic would be to generally raise the consciousness of mankind such as through education in relationships, boundaries, empathy, self-reflection, and other areas. Otherwise if there are bad boys and women who like bad boys, I don't see how else to stop abuse. Is it the case that telling women to take responsibility is about as helpful as telling men to take responsibility? Most low conscious actors tend to just deflect responsibility anyway even if it were true that they are not being responsible. What system could we create that would make men and women more likely to take responsibility rather than taking the path of least resistance which is typically to blame someone else? A point that jumps out at me is in regard to feminizing men. This has been a big problem in my life. Feminization partially happens when a son is fatherless. In my case, my father was a criminal and I grew up as an only boy with a mother and sisters. On top of that, my maleness was seen as threatening and the people around me were trying to mold me into being gender non-conforming. They made it seem that gayness was almost desirable. This was combined with perpetrator projection linked to assumptions about my nature as a male. I have now become deeply traumatized and conflicted about my sexuality while my father was a heterosexual male who engaged in actual predatory behavior. his gang also did have a woman in it though and she would participate in drug deals and sometimes blackmail people with rape accusations as a means of coercing them for money. Female criminals seem to commonly have male partners in crime as they like to place more distance between themselves and the direct act while manufacturing social situations more indirectly to set people up and manipulate them into vulnerable positions. There is a point about gender roles and whether or not they should be changed or equalized. I think gender roles probably should be changed such that men do some childcare as well. The logic is simply that it is no longer possible under the current economy for a man to provide for the household like the nuclear family model. A woman must work and often times the economy is such that couples are required to be financially codependent as housing is otherwise too expensive. If women must also work, then it seems unfair to say women should do equal work to men in the workplace, and then women should do more childcare than men. In this case, it seems like it makes sense for men and women to split childcare more equally if women are overburdened due to being expected to maintain traditional gender roles which are simply impossible depending on how the economic situation changes. If traditional gender roles were such that women were restricted from working outside the home, then it seems that society has already drifted very far from traditional gender roles anyway. It seems to me that gender roles are not merely a social construct, but rather they are largely an economic construct as well, beyond our individual attitudes which then adapt to the environment. As economic incentives change, they seem to change gender roles by necessity as women can't stay at home and be only caregivers in many cases now. Overall, I think the points seem mostly solid. I thought it would be worth adding my perspective to try to stress test some of these points and see what you think.

I haven't considered the possibility that I may have developed inappropriately high moral development. In my case I was about six years old when I had a developmental disruption leading to hyper empathy for victims of child sexual abuse. It was a consequence of having feelings like these myself and it created an imbalance in terms of where my moral standards were and where the rest of the kids at school were. The other kids would frequently sexually harass or assault others even though I recognized this behavior as a possible trigger for someone who was abused. On top of that, since my parents were criminals I felt the need to reject their way of life and develop an autonomous moral philosophy. I didn't believe in religion, but I simultaneously was drawn to it because it represented love and goodness while committing mass genocide in the name of "love thy neighbor." I was wrestling with questions like these from a young age and it may have been developmentally inappropriate. There was also a need to compensate for the failures of my parents when my younger siblings were endangered by them. Sometimes I go to boundary classes and apparently every boundary that isn't supposed to be crossed in childhood was crossed in my case. It can lead to parentification or some other disrupted developmental trajectory which creates a discrepancy between someone like me and everyone else around me. Autism adds to what makes me seem even more foreign. Are you able to think of examples of situations with inappropriately high moral development and how to manage them? One example I can think of involves children who are overly obedient to the point that it is abnormal. This is often achieved through threats and coercion. When police officers notice this at airports it is part of what signals to them that these kids are being trafficked by people posing as their relatives.

I think part of the asymmetry I noticed is that at first I was a normal kid just like all the other boys. After severe harm, I now had a reference point that nobody else had. I could no longer look at typical kid behavior the same way anymore. My reference point had made me more of an alien to everyone else who was fine with grabbing my private parts. Meanwhile, men who experience severe sexual harm seem to be more likely to act outwardly, though it is not always the case. Some become hyposexual rather than hypersexual as in my case. It seems that part of the problem is that I confused this reference point for severe harm for who I am. It seems the jovial nature of a child exists in the absence of this reference point. Once I label this a reference point rather than being enmeshed with it such that an entire identity is spun around this pain, it seems to allow self love to become easier. I'm not really sure who I am if not a reference point around which an identity forms, but I seem to be that which identifies with the point. There was an identity disruption caused by severe harm and the construction of an identity that was crushed before it could form is the project I never quite worked out. I never even managed to get a therapist who specializes in both autism and childhood sexual abuse, meaning I have been required to figure out all of this without professional help. The professionals are compromised by our terrible educational system in America.

I have an idea for testing this point. What would it look like if the gender roles were reversed? Suppose there was a man who was attracted to a toxic woman. This woman was then severely abusive such as by damaging contraceptives (which men might also do) or she could be psychologically, financially, and physically abusive. The man is afraid to leave her because of things like financial entanglement or maybe he is emotionally attached to her, hoping things will get better if he just tries harder. What would we say to a man in this situation? Would we apply the same standards that we would apply to a woman? How responsible is the man for this situation, and is it the same as a woman who sleeps with a man who secretly sabotaged contraceptives to cause a pregnancy? When a man is attracted to a toxic woman, how does it typically work? Is it because he is in the moment turned on by bitchiness which he later comes to regret when he gets stuck with her? There probably are men who are attracted to bad girls ending up in these situations.

@Human Mint I have met a pedophile. This was a person in a mental healthcare center who was on medication for dissociative disorders. This was a trans woman and she said that she hates herself because she is a pedophile and she doesn't want to have these fantasies about kids. It makes her feel like a monster and she doesn't want to act on this sexual desire because of the harm it would cause. She seemed to have multiple personalities which is sometimes the result of childhood sexual abuse which both makes someone fear becoming a perpetrator and sometimes causes intrusive fantasies in which the power dynamic is reversed while having confused boundaries as to what is and isn't okay. Most pedophiles never act on their sexual desire because they also have empathy for the child and don't want to harm them. I want to be clear that most child molesters are not pedophiles. Pedophilia is one disproportionate motive for offending, but it is not the most common psychological profile. The most common profile is the opportunistic or situational profile. This one is more common in institutional abuse and incest. Situational offenders often have the vulnerability of social isolation, such that if they have anti-social peers then there is a chance that their peers will change their perception of what behavior is acceptable, ultimately because they want belonging which can include illegal sexual activities. This happens in gangs and institutions. Most of those offenders are not pedophiles and their psychological vulnerabilities are systematically predictable given how the environment we created in this society has created social isolation. This is a vulnerability that would predictably increase the likelihood of someone becoming a sex offender. Dysfunctional families are an additional layer, leaving individuals more prone to peer pressure depending on what groups they end up with by chance. The moral judgment is very simplistic and it obscures many important truths about human nature and what factors lead normal people to becoming child molesters. Remember, as human beings we have more in common with child molesters than we have differences. This is the core truth being denied when we demonize child molesters as if they are fundamentally different from us. Deep down, many of us are afraid to self-reflect and see the similarities which is actually important for prevention. Does anybody want to argue that as human beings, child molesters are fundamentally different from us? Are there really no similarities between child molesters and all other human beings in terms of how their psyche and circumstances shape their behavior? I have thoroughly deconstructed the monster narrative in a separate thread for those interested. Under sufficient scrutiny, the monster narrative simply does not hold under strong empiricism backed by a lot of research into sex offenders. They are not fundamentally evil, they are fundamentally human just like us.

@Willy Phallicus I have covered this thoroughly. By having empathy and understanding of sex offenders, we can see not only their humanity, but also the psychological mechanisms which led them to offending. This informs prevention in terms of how institutions should be structured, what oversight would prevent this, and what psychological vulnerabilities do we have that might make us prone to offending under specific circumstances. If they are fundamentally human, then given their set of psychological problems, others would likely behave in a similar way. This is not to excuse their actions, but practically this is important as demonizing people doesn't actually stop them. In fact, demonizing pedophiles makes them even less likely to seek help. This is why Germany has a very different policy for handling sex offender prevention compared to America. Germany is much more effective at protecting children by comparison because there are systems in place for people in that position to prevent harm. Empathy for sex offenders is critical in criminology because it informs the models of criminal motive and therefore possible mechanisms for prevention and protection. I extend this to all kinds of offenders beyond just sex offenders. The moral outrage is tempting, but practically it is not the best way for protecting children. Seeing the full picture including the perpetrator's point of view is necessary if our goal is to protect the vulnerable be they children, women, men, or animals.

@Basman There were definitely male witches. Later on people started calling them wizards, but they were put under the same category of witch and it had no gender distinction early on. And yes, there was definitely paranoia over black people being rapists. What happened was the slave owners noticed that black men had bigger genitals than them. They therefore figured it was because black people raped constantly due to the belief that they were closer to animals than humans. There are all kinds of political enemies that get labeled rapists to radicalize people through the moral panic. It could be Hispanics, undocumented immigrants, Nazis, Russians, LGBTQ, blacks, Jews, Muslims, or literally anybody else. Governments are no exception Institutional abuse can happen with any group including the CIA, law enforcement, and so forth. The CIA had some huge sex scandals due to their attempts to torture and psychologically break people. There is also sexual abuse perpetrated by other youth. This is not well spoken. It is actually very serious, potentially even more common than parent-child sexual abuse is sibling sexual abuse. We seem to have a hard time calling children child sex offenders, although sometimes this is the case. A significant portion of CSA is perpetrated by youth.

@Rafael Thundercat in the case of trump and Epstein, I don't think it is accurate to call them pedophiles. Although they raped children, their motives were not that of sexual attraction to minors. Most child molesters are motivated by power, opportunism, gang status, or money. Trump is known for raping adult women as well, not just children. Therefore Trump is more like an entitled narcissist who sees other humans as objects that he can use for his own gratification. He applies it to women and children. In the case of Epstein there was also a profit motive, which is not the same as pedophilia. Epstein and his associates operated off of similar gang dynamics such as peer pressure that alters a person's perception of acceptable behavior such that they become preferential offenders over time. Given that Trump is a serial rapist who targets multiple groups, it makes me wonder if he is a sadistic preferential offender who gets pleasure off of his victim's pain and suffering. This profile commonly rapes animals as well. I don't think Trump is a pedophile. I think his motives are technically different from sexual attraction to minors. He is probably even more dangerous than a pedophile as serial rapists with many victims across many groups often are. If he is sadistic, then he might be the most dangerous profile of all, even beyond pedophiles.

@Basman about the witches. In biblical times, the witch included people who made substances from the poppy plant. After turning them into drugs, they would use it to knock women unconscious and rape them. Witches were terrifying partially because they made date rape drugs that they would use to violate daughters. The outcome is that Christians hated witches and they were very hysterical when they suspected that someone was a rapist or pedophile and using drugs to achieve their goals. The mob would hang you for this. Meanwhile, the Christians did commit many genocides which they felt justified in doing if they killed rapists. Another parallel is Nazism. Nazis were terrified of Jews raping Nazi women. That is part of why they felt justified in killing them all in a genocide. In reality, the Nazis raped countless people, not the Jews. The pattern seems to be that because sexuality is linked closely to survival, it triggers an equivalent response to a life threat. Therefore, genocide feels like self defense and completely justified from that point of view. Politicians exploit this constantly at many points throughout history because people who were abused become vocal and hysterical out of their desire to protect others from experiencing their pain.

This thread is relevant for developing empathy for people we consider monsters. I did this to learn how to love myself. If even a monster deserves recognition of their core humanity, than surely I do too.

I deconstructed monster narratives in a separate thread. I understand all kinds of sex offenders including preferential offenders. From their point of view, they are acting from love because they believe a child can consent or needs that kind of love. It is a similar pattern to incest perpetrators and zoophiles who don't think that the child or animal is being harmed or traumatized. They have a very different worldview and it is incompatible with the values of contemporary society. This doesn't make them evil, but there is a way to handle this. Germany had a much lower stigma around pedophilic attraction. There are more people who seek help due to the reduced stigma. This in turn translates into reduced sexual violations. There is Stop It Now in America, but the stigma prevents people from using this resource when they have a thought or desire to commit a sexual offense. By recognizing the basic humanity across all types of sex offenders, it becomes possible to serve prevention and thereby protect children which is virtually impossible through the justice system, punishment, and moral condemnation. Understanding the psychological vulnerabilities that lead to the offense is key to prevention, but the research is overly restricted. I have mapped out the profiles and it would serve to protect us well if we knew what to look for and what action to take in preventing sexual violations of all kinds including against minors by pedophiles, but also opportunistic offenders like priests and parents who rape children, grievance offenders who rape and murder their intimate partners, and sadistic offenders who torture and rape dozens of victims for their pleasure. Compassion for human beings including sex offenders is part of what can serve prevention by allowing people to seek help rather than pushing sexuality underground where it remains dysfunctional. Of course, this doesn't excuse their behavior if they do offend and they should be held accountable if possible, although in most cases it isn't possible do to evidentiary standards in courts, hence prevention is key. The "compassion" framing is probably problematic though because it triggers people who were raped. We should definitely have compassion for them as well and do what we must to protect them.