ARE ALL MEN PEDOPHILES? (2013): No But They're Hebephiles\Ephebophiles\Nympholepts

Here are some highlights and lowlights from the controversial documentary 

Are All Men Pedophiles? (2013):

Studies have shown that teen sex is the most searched for type of pornography on the Internet.

The age that you first find the opposite sex attractive doesn't change, but it expands. For example, when you’re a teen you find teen girls attractive and as you age, teen girls remain attractive.  

The age of consent ranges from 9 to 20-years-old around the world. Interestingly, there’s no minimum age of consent in Saudi Arabia and Oman.

During the Stone Age, the average lifespan was approximately 30 years. And during the Neolithic age, which was between the Stone and Bronze Ages, the lifespan was 20 years; therefore, sex and childbearing couldn't be postponed for very long past puberty. Despite the fact that the lifespan of humans has increased dramatically, it’s still healthier to have a baby sooner than later.

Anthropological studies conducted by Napoleon Chagnon on primitive societies suggest that the average man finds 16-year-old females the most sexually attractive.

Mary was 12 or 15 when she gave birth to Jesus and the prophet Muhammed of Islam (صلى الله عليه وسلم) married Aisha when she was 6 and consummated the marriage when she was 9.

Bar Mitswa is when Jewish boys turn 13 and are considered men. And a Bat Mitswa is when Jewish girls turn 12 and are considered women.

As far back at 6000 BC, the average age of pregnancy was 13-years-old. Currently, the average age of pregnancy in western society is between the ages of 21 and 23.

Girls begin puberty at approximately 10-years-old and they reach maturity when puberty ends at approximately 16-years-old. However, western society has set the legal age at 18-years-old, which is when young men reach maturity. Consequently, 16-year-old girls are more sexually and mentally mature than 16-year-old boys, which is why girls seek older partners and that explains why the average woman is younger than her male partner.

Biologically, humans start experimenting with sexual intercourse at the age of 13-years-old.

The basis for the legal age being set at 18 is based on education. High school education ends around the age of 18. Consequently, underage sex is shunned, because it interferes with education.

However, western society has a fascination with teen girls, which is visible in the fashion industry and media. For example, the average age of a budding high fashion model is between the ages of 12 and 16. The average age of fashion models is 16. 16 is a special age because most women tend to gain wait upon reaching 16. New models are rarely chosen after the age of 16. We don’t need biology to tell us that 16-year-old girls are ready for sex, because the way they’re portrayed as sexual beings in the media should suffice as evidence.

Couric reported on Katie Couric's Notebook, “Half of girls between 14 and 19 confessed to having had sex at least once.”

More than 20% of American teen girls admit to sending nude photos (i.e., sexting).

Some cultures (e.g., in Africa, South America, India, etc.) that haven’t been affected by western standards, girls still get married at an early age. And in Japanese society the attraction to teenage girls is a “widespread cultural phenomenon (e.g., lolicon)” However, there is no society in the world that encourages sex with children before puberty.

There’s a difference between the general public term for pedophilia and the technical professional term of pedophilia. The public’s definition is associated with someone who’s sexually attracted to girls under the age of 18; however, the clinical definition of pedophilia is:

1. A sexual preference for pre-pubertal or early pubertal children 
2. For six months or more the person has acted on those urges or suffers from distress as a result of having the urges
3. And the individual must be at least 16-years-old and at least five years older than the subject of desire

For example, hebephilia is when a man is attracted to adolescents or girls whom are approximately between the ages of 12 to 16-years-old; therefore, high school teachers who have sex with their students are not pedophiles. Since high school students have reached puberty, it’s considered hebophilia and the teachers are hebophiles - not pedophilia. 

The number of male teachers in one European country is a meager 1 in 8. The dropped is attributed to a fear that many male teachers will be accused of pedophilia. The misunderstanding between pedophilia and hebephilia has caused an unnecessary backlash against men. Men are not allowed to sit in playgrounds alone [e.g., A park that I frequently pass in Manhattan has a sign posted that forbids adult men from being in the park if they’re not accompanied by their own children.]

In an attempt to discourage pedophilia, Australia’s government has "banned" adult publications and films that feature women with "small breasts".

Child pornography is a $3 billion industry. 20% of all Internet pornography involves children under the age of 18; thus, since almost all men watch pornography, many men have been exposed to child pornography. However, it’s not considered child pornography when the images are used in the high fashion industry [or mainstream movies and high-brow art].

A 14-year-old New Jersey girl was accused of distributing child pornography after posting 30 explicit nude photographs of herself on the Internet.

Two Pennsylvanian girls who posted pictures of themselves in pajama bottoms and bra tops were charged with possessing child pornography and the distribution of child pornography. 

But 20% of teenagers in Western society admit to sexting, which translates to over 50,000,000 teens. That content could be considered child pornography even if the teen isn’t nude. In other words, any sexual activity, lewd conduct or erotic behavior that is exhibited by teens even when they're fully clothed could be considered child pornography. However, the average teen has no idea that they’re breaking the law. Consequently, 36% of child sex offenders in America are children.

Pedophilia will never be accepted by society, because it harms children, but sexual relations between adults and adolescents may eventually become re-accepted by modern society. 

Lastly from the documentary, we learned that hebephilia isn’t listed as a mental disorder, because finding teens attractive is normal and girls in puberty can understand lust unlike pre-pubertal girls.

Why Teens Indulge in Risk-Taking e.g., Teen Girls Gone Wild Videos...

The New York Magazine article The Collateral Damage of a Teenager that was excerpted from Jennifer Senior's All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood reiterated what I wrote in The Allure of Nymphets and on this blog about the history of childhood in America. 

The article states:

Yes, it’s a physiologically distinct phenomenon, too, accompanied by discernible biological changes. But it was “discovered” in the middle of the Progressive Era (in 1904, specifically, by the educator Stanley Hall), which happened to be the same moment the nation was passing myriad laws to protect its young. For the first time, parents were obliged to shelter and support older children, rather than rely on them as wage earners. And what they concluded, after observing these kids for extended periods of time at close range, is that their teenagers were going through a terrible period of “storm and stress.”

And that “storm and stress” can have dire consequences for the parents and the children. As for the children, the article states:

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that adolescents might be more disposed toward risk. Human beings need incentives to leave the family nest. Leaving home is dangerous. But here’s a historical point to consider: Maybe adolescents would be less inclined to jump off roofs and other manners of silliness if they had more positive and interesting ways to express their risk-­taking selves. That was the argument the anthropologist Margaret Mead made in the sixties: The sheltered lives of modern adolescents were robbing them of an improvisational “as-if” period during which they could safely experiment with who they’d ultimately become. (Without romanticizing life in the past, the historian Steven Mintz notes that Eli Whitney opened his own nail factory before going to Yale at 16, and Herman Melville dropped out of school at 12 to work “in his uncle’s bank, as a clerk in a hat store, as a teacher, a farm laborer, and a cabin boy on a whaling ship—all before the age of 20.”)

As for the parents:

For parents, however, the picture is a good deal more complicated. In 1994, Steinberg published Crossing Paths, one of the few extensive accounts of how parents weather the transition of their firstborns into puberty, based on a longitudinal study he conducted of more than 200 families. Forty percent of his sample suffered a decline in mental health once their first child entered adolescence. Respondents reported feelings of rejection and low self-worth; a decline in their sex lives; increases in physical symptoms of distress.

Thus, the invention of childhood has caused negative consequences for parents and their children. Parents experience a decline in mental health and children indulge in risk-taking like making (Middle School) Girls Gone Wild YouTube videos.

GIRL MODEL (2012): Model Scout, "I Think of Young Girls As Beauty."

Dakota & Elle Fanning

There was some controversy surrounding Marc Jacobs' Oh Lola perfume advertisement that features 17-year-old Dakota Fanning and the Marie Claire spread featuring 13-year-old Elle Fanning. 

Jacobs said that he choose Dakato, who is holding a large phallic bottle between her legs, because, "I knew she could be this contemporary Lolita, seductive yet sweet." 

Interestingly, Jacobs agrees with professor and "man of letters" Robertson Davies' assessment of the Lolita as: “[...] not [about] the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but [about] the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child."

And why did Marie Claire choose 13-year-old Elle for their photo shoot? They're probably like the Japanese.

In Girl Model (2012), a documentary about the pipeline of early-teen Siberian models to Japan, Ashley, an American model scout for Japanese based Switch Models, said referring to Nadya, a tall, skinny, flat chested, thirteen-year-old blonde from Serbia: 

“They love skinny girls in Japan. And she has a fresh young face. She looks young - almost like a prepubescent girl … [The modeling] business is obsessed with youth, and especially my business from Japan. You can't be young enough and youth is beautiful, because there’s the luminosity. There's something in the skin. There's something innocent. And that's what my eye has been trained to see from Japan; so, I look at beauty and I think of young girls as beauty. 

Girl Model (2012)

Are They "Children" Or [Young] Adults?

I shared in The Allure of Nymphets that prior to The Renaissance and the invention of the printing press, there was no distinction between children and adults. Furthermore, the concept of childhood or children didn't exist. "Children," especially after the age of puberty, were considered small adults.
 

In the New York magazine article "Why You Truly Never Leave High School", which is about how high school is a sadistic institution and how new research suggests that high school may be worst possible place for a vulnerable 16-year-old mind, the following was written:

Until the Great Depression, the majority of American adolescents didn’t even graduate from high school. Once kids hit their teen years, they did a variety of things: farmed, helped run the home, earned a regular wage. Before the banning of child labor, they worked in factories and textile mills and mines. All were different roads to adulthood; many were undesirable, if not outright Dickensian. But these disparate paths did arguably have one virtue in common: They placed adolescent children alongside adults. They were not sequestered as they matured. Now teens live in a biosphere of their own. In their recent book Escaping the Endless Adolescence, psychologists Joseph and Claudia Worrell Allen note that teenagers today spend just 16 hours per week interacting with adults and 60 with their cohort. One century ago, it was almost exactly the reverse.

Something happens when children spend so much time apart from adult company. They start to generate a culture with independent values and priorities. James Coleman, a renowned mid-century sociologist, was among the first to analyze that culture in his seminal 1961 work, The Adolescent Society, and he wasn’t very impressed. “Our society has within its midst a set of small teen-age societies,” he wrote, “which focus teen-age interests and attitudes on things far removed from adult responsibilities.