Re: how vulnerable are children to 'methods'?

that any pedophile that uses certain methods can bypass all of their 'immature defenses' and 'get into their pants.'

That denies individuality. No two children are equal, and no two adults are equal either. That alone disproves it. I am very sure that the best pickup line and method a paed has ever come up with, would fail for a Muslim paed with the Jesus Camp girls; or for a non-White paed with the Gaede twins. For instance.

The point is that it's all a facade, put on for the express purpose of attracting a sex partner.

And that's different from what adults do to each other all the time... how???

Most women have some experience with men who will say anything to have sex with them, and so they throw 'shit tests' to try to get the man out of character, to break through the method and see if their personality is actually different from how they're acting.

And most women will also act different in order both to get a man more easily or to reject a man without having to say No.

I think we can agree that using a method is dishonest if not immoral,

Yes, and that's one of the reasons for my contempt for the mainstream adult dating market.

but how much should their use on children be prevented?

It still shouldn't - because it's life experience that they won't be able to learn otherwise than through living it. That is the major single reason, imho, why sex-repressed girls grow up to become misandric women.

And how vulnerable are children to methods, compared to adults?

I would think their lack of experience would be matched by their lack of identical expectations and social conformity.

would this fact make it unacceptable for an adult to have a sexual relationship with a child?

No more that it makes it unacceptable for adults to f* each other.

Wouldn't using a method have an impact on the capability of one to consent?

Which is why, beyond physical coercion, use of authority, blackmail or mentally impairing substances, the only valid question is "did you feel like it at the moment?"

Children could be educated, as part of sex education, on how some people purposely use facades in order to convince potential mates that they are a better person than they actually are. But how young of a child could understand this well enough to use critical thinking and consider this possibility when confronted with it in reality?

Not really. People pretend all the time for many reasons other than bedding someone. And you should teach children that since they start interacting with people. Children who have been exposed to such scenarios can learn this very young, and children who are taught them can also learn them rather young. Of course, by shielding them from the fact that people lie and pretend, you're only setting them up for larger falls whenever they happen to encounter them.

I'd think it at least requires one to feel empathy, in order to understand it; that comes around age 7, IIRC.

No. It only requires understanding incentive structures - particularly, incentive structures favouring deception and other forms of withholding of information. That can be done by a 3 year old. I have seen it.

Perhaps the harm is, like rape, not caused by the act itself, but by one's interpretation of it. If one believes or is told by another that they were 'tricked', then they are likely to feel foolish.

Likely.

The extraordinarisation of sex, which I think an evil in itself, contributes to this.

how much more vulnerable to methods are children, related to adults?

As I said, I think probably more, but certainly not much more.

How much do methods impact consent?

As I said, not so much that they should be the basis for preemptively banning contact.

And how much of a real and perceived problem is this (perceived according to us, and to antis)?

It's certainly utterly irrelevant for all those of us who don't intend to have contact as long as it's illegal - so it's not a problem at all.

And I don't trust in anties' intellectual honesty so much as to trust that any argument that they advance and that sounds flawed in premise is actually a sincere misperception rather than an intentionally deceptive or misleading rhetorical trick. Shit test you can call it.