Sasquatch, an adult who watches porn will not, in most cases, become a rapist. Chances are they can find another adult to have sex with without having to rape them. Hell, most porn sites I've ever been on are plastered all round the edges with women wanting to have sex with me in my area.
It's different with child pornography. Without exceptional circumstances, a paedophile can't just take to the streets and quickly find a willing child. For adults, the outlet for sexual fantasy and desire is other adults, maybe even prostitutes, who usually aren't too hard to find. With paedophiles, their outlet is much harder to come by. The fantasy can't be lived out quickly, and the intensity of the desire may grow to the point where they do end up harming a child. I'm going out on a limb here, more for the sake of argument than my own belief. I'd like to see your argument against it.
I don't think there is any difference between the kinds of sexual preferences you mentioned beyond how society interprets them. Each is a deviation from the norm and from the biological imperative. Homosexuality is between consenting adults who both gain gratification, so that's okay. With beastiality, well, nobody can say for certain whether or not donkeys enjoy being ****ed by humans, but no humans are harmed so we can leave it. Necrophilia is similar, unless you count the defiling of someone's memory.
Paedophilia is different because someone will always be harmed if we stick with the definition that paedophilic acts are carried out upon children of prepubescent age. It is a person's right to be aware of what is going on the first time they engage in sexual acts (unless you're steaming drunk your first time, which is probably your fault). They have the right to be old enough to fully understand, to fully comprehend, the situation. A child cannot do that, and the adult must take advantage.
This has been the one point that's bugged me throughout the thread.
The law, when it comes to children, is not arbitrary. It is designed to protect them, because their brains physically cannot process what is going on. It doesn't matter if you had orgasms when you were 7, for you are not a majority. The law can't be tailored to the preferences of a minority, because that leaves most people stuck with a law that does not fit them. The legal term 'minor' came about because it is clear to most people that children are innocent and thus bereft of sexual impulses, and that it is their right (yes, their RIGHT) to have this innocence maintained until their bodies tell them that it's about time to start kissing other people.
On top of that, their nature makes them infinitely suggestible. Unless someone has corrected him, my 6 year old cousin still believes that the slime on slugs is highly poisinous. I told him this when babysitting to keep him away from the kitchen cupboard where slugs kept getting in (which, of course, was the most interesting place in the world as far as he was concerned) because it was filled with cleaning products I would rather he stayed away from (he was four at the time). When I told him that slug slime melts your fingers he screamed, but believed me completely when I said that he could keep racing snails because snail slime is safe. He didn't need me to say that slugs and snails are different, he didn't ask why. He just took my completely falsified information at face value and proceeded to hate slugs and love snail-racing.
Do you see where I'm coming from here? A friend of mine believed that God literally peeled the night sky away to reveal daytime, only he did it really slowly so we couldn't see, until she was about 9. While we're on this point, Santa Claus. Tell an adult who has never heard of Santa that on the 24th of December each year a guy and 12 reindeer round the entire planet on a magical flying sledge with presents for everyone except the Starving Millions. Unless they're on something, they probably won't believe you, and even then they'd ask questions about it. A child will not. A child is perfectly okay with the fact that Santa does this, and they like it even more because they get presents out of the deal. Same with the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, and so on.
This suggestibility means that every adult has a responsibility with children. If you tell a child that railway lines are safe, they'll probably believe you unless they've been told otherwise. As such, adults have the responsibility not to tell kids that railway lines are safe. We also have the responsibility, and this is mainly my point, not to take advantage of their inherent suggestibility and their trust.
Of course, this amazing (and, in my opinion, absolutely wonderful) capacity for suggestibility and imagination is usually gone by the age of 8 or so, as this is when rational thinking and question-asking starts to grow. Before that they have absolutely no clue. And even then, they still have years before they can come close to understanding what sex is and what sex means.
Children who are sexually abused by adults in early life end up needing years of treatment to help them with the memories and the pain. Does that not say something to you? At the time, they did not understand what was going on, but in later years the memories come back to haunt and hurt them, when they are old enough to understand just what was done to them.
The law does not remove children's rights. It protects them. Fundamentally, every child has the right to be a child. That means playing, believing in crazy shit and making even more crazy shit up, having food, water and shelter provided for them as they grow, and being protected from sexual and emotional stress that they should not have to endure. When was the last time a five year old girl, of her own volition, approached a 30 year old man for sex? Or even the last time a ten year old did? I admit, they're wearing more and more makeup, but that's media influence. And parents who put earrings on five year olds. I mean, come on.
Also, I remember that Fluffy wrote that he experience sexual pleasure while he was 7, and that in girls "it is no different than in women". Without getting graphic, as a young girl you do explore a little bit. I thought the bit at the top looked weird and that the bumpy bit in the middle was pointless. From experience, I can tell you that that is not how I view my genitalia as a 19 year old woman. As a child I had no clue about the various uses of it as there were more important things to do like make snakes out of salt-dough with my brother. As a note, we bathed together until we were seven and five. I knew his bits were different, but that was because he was a boy. And that was exactly as far as my line of enquiry went, because I was a child.
And completely off-topic, I noticed that someone, I think it was Silver, kept asking what was normal and putting the word normal in quotation marks. Normal is easy to understand - normal is the majority. It is a word used to denote habits and preferences of society at large. It's not a volatile word, it just describes something. It is a scale of the preferences of the majority, nothing more.
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