Debate Guide: Parenthood and pedophilia

Reaction-formation also effects parents, usually in a less direct way.

As covered in "all good parents would know", parents often feel they have a monopoly in debates concerning pedophilia or sex between adults and minors. However, this belief is strongly indicative of psychological bias/reaction-formation, as detailed by Daniel Lievre of ANU in the late 00s:

To me, it makes sense that becoming a parent would have a structuring effect upon a person’s view of what pedophilia or sexual attraction towards minors entails.

Of course, a new parent is immediately exposed to their own “good” feelings of affection towards children. But since our society dictates that a parent’s affection cannot be in the slightest way “sexual”, anyone with an erotic interest in youngsters must therefore share absolutely no common ground with the parent’s feelings. Or at least in the parent’s opinion! Therefore, in the mind of the parent, erotic interest must be characterised as something that is as far away from their own feelings as is possible; i.e. psychological pathology; “rape lust”.

At the same time, whilst the nursing mother may once have harboured sensible beliefs about what constitutes pedophilia (i.e. love for children), the sudden realisation that her good and natural feelings are frighteningly similar to her own concept of pedophilia makes the idea of classifying an adult’s erotic interest in children as sensual, far less appealing. Since the mother couldn’t possibly see her good self as one of their kind, the “truth” about pedophiles effectively reveals itself.

And what’s more, she now has a vulnerable little infant to protect from this menace. All in all, this has been a short and sharp call to hysteria, if ever there was one.

"Incestuous" feelings

Here is another way of looking at the same topic (personal testimony).

I love my son more than I love my husband. I didn’t come to this realization; it was just there one day, and it always had been there, from the day Felix was born. I know Felix’s body better than I know my own. Sometimes I’m afraid I go too far. I linger a little too long when I look at his dimpled ass. I enjoy it too much when I put lotion on after his bath. I know everybody loves a naked baby; I know that children are inherently sexual; I know it’s normal to be turned on by your infant. One fatherhood book has a sidebar that tells new dads not to get freaked out if they get a hard-on. But this is tricky territory. Is it okay to think of my baby when I masturbate? Is that just a manifestation of his all-consumingness? Babies are like a gas - they expand to fit all available space.

Lynda Marin:

"We do not speak of our erotic feelings toward those most desirable of objects, our children. We say our kids are cute, of course, or beautiful or remarkable, and we endlessly detail their behaviors and idiosyncrasies, but rarely do we acknowledge the erotic component of our own feelings in these observations of them. I say "rarely" because just today, when I was trying to explain the topic of this essay to a friend with a six-month-old daughter, she said simply, "It’s the most erotic thing I’ve ever felt. You know it’s no joke about pretending to eat her right up. I really do want to. It’s just uncontainable, this desire. But what can I do? I can’t have sex with her. Although nursing takes care of that." That’s right, I thought." (p 3).

“when I am lulled into overtime by the pleasure of our play, I sometimes begin to feel uncomfortable. "OK, I’ll be the mommy bird and you be the baby and you cry and I’ll feed you. Here, nurse the mommy," he says, pointing to his tummy. And although I’m tempted to kiss that spot as a way of playing along (I can’t even imagine pretending to nurse him—here a taboo is in full force), I often hear myself responding with things like, "No, I’m sleeping now," or "Yikes, I fell in the river." Nevertheless I let the game go on. […] Now suddenly he’s the baby and wants to nurse. I laugh him away, but he insists and pretends to grab for my breast. "Cut it out!" I say partly laughing because he’s laughing, but partly serious, too, and in this moment thinking quite concertedly about where the boundaries ought to be. "OK, OK," he says, seems to stop, and then dives towards my chest, kissing me on the clavicle. That he kisses me takes me aback. I see that he does the same thing I do -- that he doesn’t really pretend to nurse either, that he opts for that more adult vestigial gesture of nursing, the kiss. And, like someone who suddenly realizes she is witnessing an historical event in the making, I think IT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. In this moment, unlike any other that I have known, I am actually the mother and the woman.” (p. 6).

“My sister-in-law has been saying tactfully for a long time now that "most mothers curtail access to their body to their boy children at this age." She is a psychotherapist and a sensible woman/mother, so I take her advice to heart. But she is also, I always tell her, a white, middle-class American. Many people of other cultures and classes don’t operate with these same taboos, and anyway I don’t want my body to become distant, mysterious, and only, therefore, an object of frustrated desire. I want a woman’s body to be a real thing to him, with its various characterizing features and quirks, cycles and stages. […] [A]ll those normative steps to desexualizing the child’s attachment to his/her mother’s body are predicated on a split between mother and woman” (pp. 6-7).

“all love whether it be for our children, our lovers, our work, our ideas, is fundamentally the same love, is first and last, coming and going, not even erotic but autoerotic" (p. 10).