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A well-studied cognitive bias is the .If the usual price of something is presented as $10 and it's on sale for $9, people will feel good. If the usual price of the same thing is perceived as $8 and it goes up to $9, people will feel bad. This is behind the common marketing practice of setting a high list price for something, so that the actual price can be framed as a discount.
If you are healthy face the prospect of months of debilitating treatments and hospital visits, that is pretty terrible. If you have been diagnosed with a potentially fatal cancer, finding that you will endure those months of treatments and then be cured will sound very good. The first frame is, "my life with its usual ups and downs", the second frame is "am I going to live or die?".
Now let's consider a psychotherapist hearing a man's complaint. He doesn't have much interest in opposite-sex partners, his dates do not go well, and he's never had satisfying sex. He despairs of ever knowing love or of being partnered or becoming a father. What's more, he has a terrible secret he can't tell anyone. The therapist will agree that most people who see their lives that way would be very unhappy. On an imaginary scale of outcomes the question is whether he would stay at -2 happiness or with therapy progress to +2 happiness.
It looks highly likely to the therapist that the man is gay but doesn't want to accept it. A plan of therapy comes to mind. Get the patient to feel comfortable sharing his secret with the therapist, help him get comfortable with his identity, and help him live as a proud gay man. His prognosis is excellent. If he can't progress that far, the therapist will continue to feel bad for him.
But let's suppose that the therapist is in for a surprise when she coaxes the terrible secret out of him. It's actually 10-year old boys that attract this man, and he has no interest in other adult men. The therapist will be shocked. Hopefully she will not just terminate the man without a referral, but will struggle through her own preconceptions to try to help him.
Her immediate concern is (rightly) whether he is a danger to children. The problem has been reframed to include something much more serious. Hopefully her probing reveals that he hasn't abused any boys, does not think he ever will, and does not have ongoing contact with any boys that age.
We initially set the client's private happiness range at -2 to +2. Of course the happiness of other people comes into "net world happiness". Let's say his abusing children would add a -100 (whereas if he won't it remains zero). The -100 has been averted, but what has happened to the frame? If we're in a framework that accommodates a -100, a pedophile's private happiness going up or down a point will likely seem insignificant.
That's true unless you're the pedophile himself. To you, it still matters a lot whether you're at -2 or at zero. No, you can't make it to +2 because you have to leave the 10-year-old boys alone. You might possibly make it to zero if you accept your attractions and feel at peace with them.
Some pedophiles in sharing their experience with therapy will say that as soon as they revealed their pedophilia, the therapist viewed them as nothing but a molester, potential or actual. We can condemn that attitude on the grounds of plain prejudice, but the framing perspective allows us to make sense of it without assuming prejudice. From that perspective it is just the natural cognitive biases that we are all subject to, and we can combat it by pointing it out.
This framing effect is not specific to therapists. Others too who discover a man's pedophilia should be willing to look at how life looks to the pedophile himself, to reframe a second time from the -100/0 back to the -2/+2 framework.
1/29/2017
Review of Erotic Innocence by James Kincaid
I first read this 1998 book a few years ago, and have just finished reading it a second time. The first time, I was very impressed and figured he was right about everything. This time my reactions are mixed.
When he documents how our society is obsessed with sexual harm to children and argues that our concern goes way too far, I am with him.
When he posits this as part of grand social currents running back into the 19th century and beyond, it doesn't ring true. When he argues that our society has transformed children so that just about everyone finds them erotic, and the hysteria against pedophilia is in part a fierce reaction to horror at the prospect of recognizing it in themselves, I am puzzled. He proceeds to list a variety of movies where we can see this eroticism, including Shirley Temple movies and Macaulay Culkin. I rented the original Home Alone to check, and I just didn't see the erotic aspects of the portrayal of the kid.
He describes the long battle between those who claim to have recovered memories of sexual abuse and those who claim they are false memories. He describes them as both locked in a common narrative from which they cannot escape and urges a different narrative. But this conflict doesn't seem unsolvable in the way a religious debate is. The camps are arguing about what actually happened in the real world. If we found that every interaction between the parties had been captured on hidden video cameras, we could resolve the issue. One party was right and the other was wrong. Actual incestuous rape over the course of years is a huge deal to the people involved.
Now, I am convinced that very few of those video cameras would have captured the abuse that is alleged. So therapists should not go looking for it and it would become a serious problem for the few people who have it, much like, say, auto-immune diseases.
In the end (pp284-285) Kincaid has a list of bad habits we need to lose. The first is to "stop looking for monsters and their victims". I support that, but would broaden it to say, "stop sensational reporting about very rare people doing horrible things". I would include stories of gruesome nonsexual murders, very strange diseases and bizarre accidents.
He also says, "Stop tracing everything backward, looking always to the past for sources, explanations, and excuses." That is a reasonable approach to therapy and mental health. It is behind the move 50 years or so ago to give up on Freudian analysis and move more towards present-centered therapies such as cognitive-behavioral. But its relationship to the purported erotic innocence of kids is far from clear.
Why did I accept all his arguments the first time? I have a hole in my understanding of grand assertions about the hidden structure of society — what feels like a blind spot. Foucault's claims comes to mind, as do patriarchy and postmodernism. (Hopefully I'm conveying a basic idea, even if those things are different). Maybe those who do feel comfortable understanding such theories and evaluating them could weigh in on how Kincaid's claims stack up.
When at the end Kincaid briefly touches on how we should actually view children if we erased this erotic innocence, he emphasizes that they have agency — opinions and beliefs, and we should listen to them. They may also have some sexual feelings of their own. This all seems straightforward to me. When I was raising my three girls, I put a high priority on listening to them and relating to them as they saw the world, and above all respecting them. I wasn't attracted to any of them, but I didn't feel hampered in seeking to understand and respecting their attractive friends the same way on the rare occasions when that made sense.
If Kincaid is wrong about the grand societal forces that have made us all see children as erotic, why did he go astray?
He has admitted elsewhere that he is a "theoretical pedophile". Our sexual preferences are largely immutable. A straight man can't really explain why he finds women hot, and a gay man can't really explain why he finds men hot. And to some pedophiles who find children sexually attractive, maybe they can't remove that filter and see the kids the way most people see them.
He thinks we should go back to hugging kids and playing with them without worrying obsessively about the chance for some contact that might be construed as sexual. I'm all in favor of that. But he then adds, curiously, "if you find yourself getting too excited, going too far, wanting to incite or not to stop — then stop. If you are hard-pressed, then indulge in voyeurism, which is child abuse only by elastic standards". This is good advice for pedophiles, especially ones who like him (I'm speculating) cannot see children as not erotic. But I honestly don't see how it is relevant to most people.
Given my tastes, I don't find any boys erotic, but I also don't see that girls in movies are presented as particularly erotic either. They're often adorable, and sometimes they have an erotic effect on me, but I think that is inside me and not an aspect of them. I suspect the vast majority of the world who are not pedophiles would be even less likely to see erotic children. Whose reaction is more common? It should be a question that's easy enough to answer empirically. Among people who would not be horrified to find they had a forbidden attraction, do they find children as portrayed in the West today erotic or don't they?
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