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Looking back, it was there from puberty, but I was interpreting it as the fondness many adults feel for children.
Ethan Edwards is the co-founder of Virtuous Pedophiles. Blog posts reflect his personal views, and are not statements from the organization.
This post was originally written as a response to a question on Ask the VirPed panel. The questioner asked: "For pedophiles who discovered or accepted their pedophilia later in life, why do you think that is? Was it due to a conscious suppression or other reasons?"
I first discovered my pedophilia when I was 54 years old. I am now almost 70. Looking back, it was there from puberty, but I was interpreting it as just a strong case of the fondness many adults feel for children.
I am a highly non-exclusive pedophile, meaning I have had strong attractions to women my own age up through my 20s and 30s. I eagerly sought sex with partners when I could and masturbated while fantasizing about them when I couldn’t. As it turns out, my sexual attraction to young girls is even stronger. Baked into my world view was that thinking sexual thoughts about young girls was forbidden, and I was not even aware of the thoughts. Perhaps this accomplishment was helped because I am quite a controlled person, deeply committed to doing no harm to others, and not at all impulsive. It helped that I had a strong sexual desire for women my own age, hoping to find one I could marry (which I did, and we had 3 daughters before divorcing). It helped keeping the sex drive controlled by frequent masturbation. Somehow I hid from myself the sexual component of how I felt about small girls.
Like most boys I was attracted to girls my age growing up. As I passed into my older teens, I retained my attraction to girls as young as age 13. But I thought that was just normal. The men who deny any attraction to that age group were fooling themselves, I thought (and still do). When in my 40s I reflected that 8th grade girls were about the sexiest ones around, it didn’t strike me as unusual. My few male friendships rarely included talking about what classes of females we found most alluring. But today I do think that finding 8th grade to be the sexiest age for girls is unusual – but still think that straight men denying any attraction at all to that age are fooling themselves. But I always believed that attraction to prepubescent girls, of age 10 or below, was “sick” and that surely didn’t include me.
I was really fascinated by some young girls, but told myself that adults often felt a delight in children, and I just had a stronger-than-usual dose of that. If a girl actually took my breath away, that was just part of the stronger-than-usual dose, right? I (and everyone else) is eager to know how I could have this strong underlying sexual attraction but not feel it. Who else might be confused on this point? Compare how teen boys and girls react to each other in certain cultures where they have no idea what sex is. Unless they “make out”, there might not even be any arousal or erections – just a strong infatuation with the other. That is how I felt towards my favorite small girls.
I liked young children (mostly the girls) and was often their favorite grown-up, finding things they liked and conveying to them just how wonderful I thought they were. I started volunteering naturally with children when my own girls were that age. But I kept volunteering with younger ones even as my own girls got older. That ended when I was 50, four years before my pedophile realization. When my youngest daughter was 14 years old, it was a stretch to justifying working with the 3-year-olds based on being “one of the daddies”, and society (circa 2004) was getting more suspicious and vigilant overall about older men volunteering to work with children. I knew to be worried about being tagged as a weirdo and potential molester, even before I knew that I had a key attribute (but just one) that could make me a molester. I haven’t volunteered with children since.
For most of my life I masturbated with my eyes shut, based on memories of girls in my life. Pictures were only rarely involved. But around 2006 I discovered the vast variety of pictures on the web. At first this was mostly soft-core porn of adults. Later, it extended to sports teams, parties, and family blogs. The closest thing to an “aha!” moment I had was looking at a family of girls in bathing suits, let’s say ages 14, 10, and 6. While entertaining a fantasy about the 14-year-old, there was nothing to keep my eyes from straying to the younger ones and nothing to keep my arousal from continuing or even strengthening. The usual barriers of “don’t think sexual thoughts about young girls” were down, and I could experience directly the effect of those young girls’ bodies on my arousal. And I soon realized those were the girls who really turned me on most. I never had the slightest temptation to act on those attractions to the girls, before, during, or after the realization process.
Around this time I finally accepted that I would never remarry and my sex life with other people would soon be at an end. (Partly this was because while I am highly nonexclusive, my attraction does not extend into women in their 40s). Giving up on future intimacy was the biggest disappointment, but the dwindling of partner sex was bad too.
Sexual satisfaction is one thing that makes for a good life, and if was to be only solo, I wanted it to be as satisfying as possible. I developed a strong interest in legal pictures and erotic stories involving young girls. While the sex had to be solo, I had an interest in sharing this side of myself with other adults who felt the same way. But I ran smack against the wall that it was unacceptable to talk about it in my normal social circles.
Unlike the majority of pedophiles who discover their attraction when they are adolescent and full of self-doubt, I felt solid and sure within myself and my anger was directed outward and squarely at the society I live in. I had long before adopted a framework knowing that it is actions that are morally right or wrong. Feelings can be complicated, sometimes a mix of “good” and “bad”, but have no moral status and just “are”.
I found anonymous communities online where I could discuss the attraction, but was turned off by the predominant view that man-girl sex could be just fine if only attitudes and laws changed. I was completely clear that such sex was deeply wrong and always would be, and this mismatch made those communities a poor fit for me.
I needed to find a community of pedophiles that had the sensible, correct, and obvious view on that subject. Unable to find any existing communities, someone needed to start one. I found one other guy with similar views and together we set about creating Virtuous Pedophiles.
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