If you’re a regular BFD reader, you’ll be well aware of the insistent, creepy push to normalise and ‘de-stigmatise’ paedophilia. You’ll also be well aware that a sleazy roster of academics are trying to re-brand paedophilia as “minor attraction”, just another “sexual orientation”.
One such academic is a professor of ethics (seriously!) at Oslo Metropolitan University in Norway. Ole Martin Moen is a gay man who identifies as “queer”, and currently serves as a member of the advisory board on Norway’s Patient Organization for Gender-Incongruence (PKI), a social and political lobby group for trans rights.
He also wants to legalise AI-generated child porn. His paper “The Ethics of Pedophilia” argues that “pedophilia is bad only because, and only to the extent that, it causes harm to children”; therefore, AI-generated child porn isn’t bad, because no real child is actually harmed in its making.
On the face of it, Moen’s argument might seem plausible, even if it revolts our moral senses. After all, a great many people were once morally revolted by the very idea of legalising homosexuality. And at least “virtual pornography” doesn’t involve any real acts.
But then, Moen’s real agenda is horrifically obvious.
He further argues that “adult-child sex is not categorically very harmful”. He outright denies that children cannot consent to sex from adults.
But perhaps most disturbingly, Moen has called for information on pedophilia to be taught in schools, suggesting “a certain percentage” of high school students have an innate pedophilic sexual identity.
The BFD
Moen even makes the bizarre argument that anyone who was attracted to someone their own age as a child or young teen, “was a paedophile”.
But, just because an obviously creepy rockspider makes a particular argument, is it wrong merely by association? Where, after all, is the harm in AI-generated child porn, or, by extension, child sex dolls? Don’t they provide a safe outlet for “minor attracted persons” to, ah, relieve their proclivities?
Child sex dolls are life-sized, anatomically correct dolls that are made to look like infants, toddlers and children. They are designed with primary and secondary sex characteristics that can be tailored to fit personal preferences in victim-type and are made to resemble real children. Child sex dolls market non-consensual sex as a commercial product and facilitate encounters where children are viewed as a commodity […]
Child sex dolls are manufactured by a transnational industry found in overseas markets, such as Japan, China and Hong Kong, where dolls are shipped to customers around the globe.
OK, no doubt any of us who knew someone who purchased such a doll would run a mile away from them – and certainly never let them around our living, breathing children. But, are they still a harmless outlet for an innate, helpless “sexual orientation”?
When child sexual offenders are arrested, law enforcement often finds and seizes collections of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) (Palermo & Farkas 2013). CSAM may include images, videos and stories of graphic and lewd depictions of child sexual abuse […]
For a pedophile, child sexual abuse materials bridge a gap between fantasy and reality. It not only gives vision to the fantasy, it also fuels it and, similar to operant conditioning, imparts a compulsion to act. When child sexual abuse materials fail to provide the emotional and cognitive needs of the pedophile, distorted behavior escalates.
We know that certain types of deviant criminal, such as serial killers, ‘start off small’, both via fantasy and by inflicting cruelty and torture on animals. Where they begin to practise violence against humans, behaviour almost invariably starts off well short of rape or killing, but slowly and inevitably escalates.
Do child sex offenders follow a similar pattern of escalation?
In a paper written for the Australian Institute of Criminology, Brown and Shelling note:
From reviewing the cases of 136 online child sexual offenders in Australia, Davis, Lennings and Green (2018) concluded that the preference for more extreme material increases as the medium moves from photographic to video. Offenders who viewed only photographic CEM images were less likely to have a preference for more graphic and explicit images (as graded by the Combating Paedophile Information Networks in Europe, or COPINE, Scale) than those who viewed video content. Houtepen, Sijtsema and Bogaerts (2014) noted that heightened online engagement can lead to a need for more extreme material to reach satisfaction.
Video, notably, is more ‘real’ than still images. Dolls are even more real.
Michael Bourke PhD, for the United States Marshals Service, who has worked with sex offenders for a decade in the federal prison system, says this about using dolls as substitutes for real child victims:
“These dolls make the sexual fantasies of pedophiles more real. And making their fantasies more real is precisely what we want to avoid.”
One could be forgiven, though, for suspecting that that is exactly what some activists and academics do want.
In fact, allowing paedophiles access to child dolls may make things much worse.
Distorted cognitions may derive from child sex doll use, where sexual abuse by proxy desensitizes the abuser […] This feeds into a fantasy perception, a reinforcement, that departs from the reality of child sexual abuse. The fantasy of sexual abuse is supported by the lack of negative feedback received from a doll.
If the doll doesn’t cry, scream or fight back, well… that means that a real child will probably enjoy it, too.
Child sex dolls desensitize the act of child sexual abuse, reinforcing rather than reducing urges, associated thoughts and behaviors. This is the danger in fantasy enactment, as it pertains to cognitive distortion. The pedophile rehearses the act of child sexual abuse and is subsequently rewarded through sexual gratification […]
Finally, there is a risk that child-like dolls could be used to groom children for sex, in the same way that adult sex dolls have already been used.
The Public Insight
So, yes, it seems undeniable that our revolted moral instincts are right on the money: giving pedos child sex dolls and virtual child porn really are very, very, bad ideas.
