I’m no expert here but I’m going to guess that equivocating gay people and pedophiles is not the best starting point to understanding pedophiles.

Do you agree that 'adult-adult-hetersexual' is the only orientation that has obvious evolutionary benefit? If so then every other orientation does not. There is no 'equivocation' there is only 'why would anything else exist?'. My contention is 'who knows?', but if you accept that one orientation without evolutionary benefit exists, then why would you be confused that another different one also exists? It is not 'homosexuals and pedophiles are the same'.

I like this question because you explicitly ask me to agree with your premise that pedophiles and gay people are equivalent within your framing of this discussion and then follow it up with “my contention is something other than what I’ve clearly explained”

Ok. I am addressing a very specific question by a person above me. I am trying to illustrate that if non-normative sexualities exist in one instance, then why be surprised in multiple instances. Take that as you will.

I appreciate you clarifying that your reason for positing that pedophilia and homosexuality are equivalent is that you were responding to something that you saw online.

> Do you agree that 'adult-adult-hetersexual' is the only orientation that has obvious evolutionary benefit?

This shows a profound misunderstanding of evolution and natural selection on your part. "Evolutionary benefit" is impossible to divorce from circumstances. It doesn't exist as some right/wrong answer, or something you can divine through logic.

For instance, same-sex attraction could absolutely be advantageous to a species that is nearing the peak of sustainable population numbers. All species (who can fuck) wanna fuck, and will do so no matter their surrounding circumstances. The difference between one species keeping sustainable numbers, versus another species seeing runaway population numbers causing food source exhaustion and population collapse, could come down to lower procreation rates, in which circumstance strict heterosexuality may not be advantageous.

Point being, stop trying to use bad, dime-store "science" to justify your bad opinions about homosexuality.

Ok. I am addressing a very specific question by a person above me. I am trying to illustrate that if non-normative sexualities exist in one instance, then why be surprised in multiple instances. Take that as you will.

A huge chunk of the GP’s post was disclaimers (“I think child molesters are despicable”, etc.) precisely to avoid their point being misunderstood in this way, which apparently didn’t work.

It's not equivocation, it's a categorization of heteronormative and not-heteronormative.

Personally I suspect the issue here is that incest is the only form of sexual activity that we have a natural proclivity against, probably because of evolutionary pressure (as in, hard-wired into our DNA) against fucking blood relatives. Because a consistently-inbred population will breed itself into oblivion. People who fuck kids can still successfully reproduce and society trundles on.

I think your starting point is still kinda skewed, because "heteronormative" is a made-up thing by society rather than an actual thing someone can be.

There's a traditional view of sexuality that men are only sexually attracted to women, and vice versa, and that's normal and everything else is not normal (kinky). The more we learn about sex (and gender) the more we learn that there are very few completely "normal" people out there, and a lot of people who are a bit kinky in one respect or another. I think it's now accepted that the hetero-homo thing is a spectrum rather than a binary state, and the primary reason people of the same sex don't have sex with each other is societal pressure rather than biological attraction. e.g. women tend to experiment more with this because society has a more lenient view of "girl-on-girl" than male homosexual sex.

My personal opinion is that evolution "wants" everything to fuck everything as much as possible, just to see what happens. The best reproducers are the ones who did the most fucking, after all. But we're getting into Oglaf territory here.

> I think your starting point is still kinda skewed, because "heteronormative" is a made-up thing by society rather than an actual thing someone can be.

It's a term rooted in the conditions that make sex a reproductive act and not just something that feels good

Which is getting back to the religious crap of "sex is only for reproduction, between a married couple". Yes sex can result in reproduction, but I think making that its primary purpose misses the point. We experience a desire to fuck, separate from our desire to reproduce. They're two different things that are only related in a tiny minority of circumstances. Classifying someone's sexuality by its possible reproductive outcome is like classifying their tongues by the ability to curl into a tube: kinda valid, but not that useful.

No, it's not. You are reading into things. There is no elevating one modality above the other, they are related but different.

Why are you projecting your own biases into my statement? Call a spade a spade. What you take away beyond that is on you.

> There is no elevating one modality above the other, they are related but different.

You grouped all sexual activity into two groups: "normal" and "not normal". I think if anyone is projecting bias, it's that.

No, I used the word 'heteronormative', which has a specific, clinical meaning.

>it does not exist in any particular way as an obvious evolutionary benefit except for adult-adult-heterosexual.

it's not unique to nature. You're in heat, you want to mate with anything that looks attractive. What's attractive will vary immensely based on societal and personal experience, for reasons we still cannot fully understand as the human mind is still a huge secret to unlock. It's not perfect in the same way that few parts of nature are perfectly optimized. Remants of old patterns or general heuristics on "what is good enough" will remain and they can persist for very long times.

The only unique-ish thing about humans is that we have no "mating period". We are continuously in heat compared to most of nature, so that urge remains around consistently. Virtually every form of society has evolved some sort of culture to control these urges (as well as ways to control sexual conflict, which is another topic entirely) in order to advance as a civilization otherwise it'd be non-stop mating

> What's attractive will vary immensely based on societal and personal experience, for reasons we still cannot fully understand as the human mind is still a huge secret to unlock. It's not perfect in the same way that few parts of nature are perfectly optimized. Remants of old patterns or general heuristics on "what is good enough" will remain and they can persist for very long times.

Is it generally accepted that someone may not be born either straight or gay?

I honestly don't know and that's yet another can of worms to open.

I can somewhat sidestep that issue and say that societal factors can make you think you are exclusively heterosexual, even if we agreed that sexuality is an internal factor and you were infact born bi/homosexual. Similar to how you can force a left handed person to become right handed.

I think that there's a fairly standard distinction, that doesn't require any consideration of psychological mechanisms. Homosexuality can be practised consensually and nobody else needs to care, because nobody is harmed. Paedophilia can't be practised consensually because children are below the age of consent, and can be harmed.

Hence, paedophilia is classified as a mental illness, but homosexuality no longer is (in most Western countries, at least, I believe).