Cahokia writes:
Is Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert a pedophile? Obviously, he’s just a literary figure and the author was extremely resistant to political interpretations of his work. Nevertheless, in Lolita the narrator expresses a clear preference for girls just on the cusp of adolescence.
I say the protagonist is not a pedophile, despite his distaste for older teenage girls and young women. A Lolita based upon a genuine pedo would not have been palatable enough to become a hit.
Humbert clearly is a hebephile. I always wondered about Nabokov. Teenage girl heartthrobs and the older men who are obsessed with them are woven all through his work. I wonder if he was a bit of an ephebephile himself.
- Preference for minors 12-under = pedophile
- Preference for minors 12-14 or 13-15 = hebephile
- Preference for teens 15-19 or 16-19 = ephebephile
Michael Jackson was clearly a hebephile. He liked boys right around puberty, 12-14. I would wager that a lot of so-called pedophiles are actually more properly called hebephiles. A preference for actual children 12-under must be rather rare I would think. There can’t be too many folks like that around.
Note that it says preference for, not attraction to. This is one of the major pitfalls in definitions of these terms. Studies show that even high attraction to girls aged 2-12 is quite common among normal men, as 26% of normal men are aroused by girls 2-12 the same or more than they are by females aged 13+. I assume the vast majority of these men are not pedophiles. They are probably aware of some attraction to girls, shrug it off as nothing and something they do not want to investigate in their sex life, and as long as they have a high attraction to mature females, they just focus on that and forget about the girls.
A true fixated pedophile is obsessed with young girls and has been since an early age, often as far back as they can remember or at least since puberty. They often have little or no interest in mature females, but some are nonexclusive and are attracted to mature females too.
Fixated pedophilia cannot come on later than age 14, as apparently it is not possible to become sexually fixated after that age. Any interest in young girls developing after age 14 would not be the fixated variety and would instead be the “sexual smorgasbord” or “trysexual” variety. These are men who are turned on by just about anything sexual. Let’s just call them perverts. However the vast majority of their interests are experimental or exploratory in nature, are not fixated and can be dropped or changed at any time. These men are developing these interests out of pure choice, which is surely not the case with the true pedophile.
The true fixated pedophile typically states something like,
I don’t know. All I know is that I have been crazy about little girls for as far back as I can remember, and I have been crazy turned on by them and masturbating all the time thinking about them ever since, and that’s all I know. That’s all I can tell you about why I feel this way.
They often use child pornography. Their fantasy life will be rich and often exclusively about young girls. They will spend a lot of time masturbating to fantasies about young girls. In other words, young girls drive them crazy.
As this is something that they love, they are often not particularly upset by it. Instead the relationship is similar to an addiction to say drugs, gambling or pornography. The addict absolutely loves his object of choice, but sometimes they feel out of control and like they can’t control their desires or urges anymore.
Although there is usually little guilt going on with true fixated pedophiles, many report that after they have an orgasm from masturbation, they feel very guilty. This is common to many other paraphilias and deviant sexual interests also. Men who fantasize about rape and murder of women often report intense arousal followed by serious guilt after orgasm. The guilt is often most intense in the early phase of the paraphilia and is particularly common with teenage boys with a paraphilia.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why any man past his mid-20’s would actually prefer a 13-14 year old girl to a grown woman. Sure, some of them are attractive, but are they more attractive than a grown woman? And talk about immature!
I can’t even understand ephebephiles, although obviously ephebephilia must be quite common. You mean you actually prefer teenyboppers to a grown woman? Once again, I cannot fathom any man past 30 feeling this way. It’s ridiculous. Sure you can legally have sex with an 18-19 year old girl. I will probably never do it again, but I did it many times in the past. But the main question is what are you going to talk to her about afterwards?
And why would an 18-19 year old girl be better than a grown woman in the first place? At my age, teenage girls are ridiculous, and they seem more empty-headed and silly with each passing year as a man ages. I am ashamed to say that even most college girls strike me as airheads, and it wasn’t always this way.
