[14-Oct-2004: In response to some recent emails and LiveJournal posts by people who claim to espouse the Furry creed of Tolerance, but who wish all pedophiles would just conveniently drop dead.]

[18-Mar-2005: Edited somewhat in response to complaints from conservative Christians—though I expect they still won't like it.]

In Defense of Pedophilia
(Pedophiles are people, too)

If you were raped as a child, you might arive at adulthood to discover that you now find it titillating to think about children having sex with adults.  Such excitement does not mean that the Devil has stolen your soul, or that you will be denied entry at the Gates of Heaven no matter what you do with your life.  Pedophilia is just a fetish, like any other.  A plushophile likes fur; a pedophile likes children.  Perhaps you've sought treatment from a psychotherapist, but were disappointed that the only effective treatment is castration.  Perhaps you've even contemplated suicide to ensure that you never "lose it" and hurt a child.

     In the Furry Fandom we have many people who find it exciting to think about having sex with animals, because they were once treated like an animal or for one of many other reasons.  We do not banish them from our company for having such thoughts, or for looking at cartoon depictions of human-animal love, or for reading and writing stories about having sex with animals.  A zoophile fur can go too far, of course:  an autobiographical piece about raping an animal would probably cause the author to become persona non grata for many Furries.  While most art servers refuse to store cartoons that depict bestiality, for many of them this is because they are afraid of the authorities in the current far-Right political environment, rather than because they necessarily think such artists are evil and one must shun all contact with them to avoid being infected.

     If, because of bad things that a person was forced to go through as a child, he now finds that looking at computer-generated pictures of adults having sex with children helps him to jack off in the privacy of his own home, I do not see what I should be calling the police about.  He is not hurting me.  The computer-altered photos did not harm the children they depict.  Some people, subscribing to the view that pedophilia is a fetish that can be acquired as an adult, might believe that looking at pedo-porn will cause a person to rape a child, but I think such evidence as there is actually points in the opposite direction: societies in which pornography is not considered a crime (such as Japan) have much lower incidence of rape.  Perhaps looking at such pictures can act as a "relief valve", allowing pedophiles to flex their kinks without actually hurting any kids.  Laws should be written to minimize crime, not to express our disgust with deviants.  A law to "save the children" that criminalizes safe expressions of pedophilic thought, leading to an increased frequency of actual child rape, does not belong in an enlightened democracy that actually cares about the safety of its children.  Such a law belongs only in a theocracy, whose main concern is the torture of the pedophile's immortal soul.  Unfortunately, the United States has become a country where a pedophile can be jailed for seven years for a fictional story he wrote in his private diary.  It doesn't seem that actual harm to actual children has anything to do with the current Holy War against the pedophiles, the gays and bestialists, etc.  Some believe that this War on Sex is just a cover-up for the ruling party's own sexual deviance, or for its bizarre eagerness to conscript our children and send them to their deaths in Iraq.

     When I first heard about the US law (currently ruled unconstitutional, but new judges for the the Supreme Court will be chosen soon) making it a crime to construct a picture containing both "child" and "sex" as elements, I fantasized about creating a PhotoShop image with a leering toddler, a lollipop, and a bull being milked for semen.  The bull would be artfully placed so the child's line of sight to the lollipop passes through the bull's nether regions.  Since I have no talent, the picture would obviously look "Photoshopped".  Under the law, such a picture was contraband, even though (a) no child or animal was harmed; (b) no piece of crap I designed could possibly arouse anyone; and (c) the piece has artistic merit as a form of political protest.  It was a crime punishable by imprisonment to transmit such a picture from a US-based computer, even (a) over a private phone line to someone who knows what they're getting; (b) without exchange of money; (c) to a rabid anti-pedo who only wants to see it so he can complain about what a disgusting travesty it is.

     In the United States it is a crime to bring a gun into a school.  In many schools, under the "Zero Tolerance" policy, it is also a crime to *draw a picture of a gun* while in a school.  But pictures are not considered dangerous in democracies.  Only totalitarians are afraid of them.  Didn't we used to make fun of the Soviets when they imprisoned people for "thought crimes"?  Having vanquished our enemy, we have now become them.  I was so glad, back in 1984, that things seemed to be going fairly well at that time, but George Orwell's chronology was just a little off, by twenty years.

-- Pyesetz the Dog


Further commentary on this essay is available on LiveJournal:
• 2004-10-14 - original post
• 2005-02-05 - reply to CrushYiffDestroy's thread

This essay has become widely read!  See further discussion of the phenomenon at
• 2005-03-08 - "The Search-engine users".