Excellent post, Seth!

I keep opening your posts expecting anti-clutter, and I always finish reading them knowing you're working on a high level of thought. It's refreshing when I catch posts like yours. I wrote this reply, but I was pretty tired so it might wander a little. Hope I addressed most of what you mentioned though:)

I am very impressed by where you delve into the subconscious dialogue they are participating in with adults. I strongly agree.. they are keenly aware "at-some-level" not fully conscious, of the sexual tension adults feel around them. I am not speaking of child lovers now.. I mean adults generally. The joke is on all adults, because despite the delivery of the "kids and sex" message in a negative light, the connection has been fostered so many times (daily for many nons) that they automatically think of sex when they see a child now. Most won't admit it, but they realize it's the truth. Sex is not all conscious. So much of it is below the surface, as you say.

On the idea of power and empowerment, on a mass social level, I think the very negative acknowledgment by adults of child sexuality, child sensuality, is the only possible way the increased awareness could have shown itself, since the very idea of it produces such shame in historically Christian sex-negative societies. I've come to believe that as societies (empires?) become completely corrupted, adults begin to value, long for, crave... the idea of freshness, innocence and simplicity, but in the form of other human beings. Children embody all the things which so many adults now feel are missing in their own lives and within the environment around them. These feelings in adults can be not only overwhelming, but very romanticized in various directions. They can also be very latent and/or redirected into nonsexual or anti-sexual pursuits of children, though their focus on children remains. This is my opinion.

Now it's curious, but while I believe the desire is shared by many, the different expressions of that desire can take on manifestations which appear vastly different. We all know that for some, the desire is fully recognized, to the point of emotions so strong that even the sexual element is accepted, if not readily then with much "soul searching" just as with losing or changing one's religion despite the guilt and fear of the unknown it may stir within them. In others, in my opinion, the desire is more latent, and I feel many of these people are grappling somewhat with a degree of learned guilt. To me, these are exemplified by the people who claim only an aesthetic appreciation, though it is still apparent they spend quite a bit of time dwelling on children.

At the extreme end, in my opinion, are those who spend a LOT of energy redirecting their strong romantic feelings for children into ideas such as "protecting" that innocence from sex. Sex is something shameful and dirty to them, especially when they view their own fetishes and secretive urges. And so to compensate for their own shame, they "fight" on behalf of kids to keep them sheltered from all depictions or talk of sex. In many cases, these people are actually engaged in a battle with their own feelings, by first projecting them onto others. If they are fighting so hard against what they feel themselves, then they can't be such a horrible person.

Overall, I think you're so very correct. Kids today know so much MORE about sex, are more aware of it than ever before. And while a solid comprehensive and age-tailored sex education is ideal for these new times, they don't actually need to understand the details of their sexuality to understand its effects and the emotions it causes in others and in themselves. And you're right, I think many of them are testing it out more than ever before at earlier ages, and that the extreme paranoia merely works as a spotlight for them. No matter how you phrase "kids and sex" in any negative light, the result is a society-wide preoccupation of "kids and sex" paired together in everyday thought. "Kids and sex, kids and sex, kids-sex."

It's easiest to see the changes in things such as art or photography, young children in the nude. Just thirty years ago, before society really started to yearn for more innocence generally, most of these images were accepted by virtually all adults as very pure. Does anyone remember the Coppertone girl? If that same image were placed on a billboard today, it would be gone within minutes, declared to be pornographic, and the artist might even be arrested. What changed? The cartoon image is still the same as it always was. People themselves have been changed, in my opinion, by having so little to believe in anymore that they become cynical. Everyone starts to see the bad in everything, because they are always on guard and searching for it. There was a time you could be slightly naive and easily trusting, and still not many people would try to take advantage of you for it. Today, most adults no longer feel this way. They feel like there are forces out to take advantage of them, and is there a more poetic example of projecting this fear they have than declaring that the "pure" ("nonsexual") child is being attacked by invisible monsters out to use them sexually?

Today, taking the top-down examples we see in government, limitless corporate greed, politically hijacked religions, glorification of shallow materialism, and the resulting intense cynicism (to which I am certainly no stranger), as a general rule we now prefer to decipher some sort of evil in things which we used to know in our hearts to be true and good and beautiful. A little girl's behind... what is more beautiful? And it WAS considered beautiful.. not just by those evil pervs to which society has now relegated it.. but by all people. So what happened?

At some point, adult society decided such depictions in art or photography or the written word meant the messenger and intent of the depictions could no longer be trusted. And at times I think the nurtured obsession by mainstream media to make adults fear for the purity and innocence of their children.. has been little more than a smokescreen to keep adults themselves ignorant of just how much of their proverbial souls they have sold to a new kind of devil. It is an extreme materialism which has made them bitter, empty, made them long for their own former naivety, their best (and idealized) memories of their own childhood, leaves them hollow inside.

Everything negative they feel on the inside is easily blamed on the individual who is honest enough, self-accepting enough, to admit to him or herself a desire for manifestations of what they no longer may feel in themselves or see in the society around them.. human manifestations, which appear in the form of the youth. Their uncluttered thinking, their ability to love freely, their insecurities unhidden, their lack of harsh judgment/cynicism, ability to cut through the BS, and yes, even their young healthy bodies.. all exhibit the tangible qualities of what so many adults now feel is missing in their own lives. And while I don't believe pedosexual feelings are all nurture, I do believe that dissatisfied times such as these, as a matter of course, tend to bring some of the more latent desires for "untainted individual human manifestations" of wholesomeness into the foreground. I think the New Age-ish idea of "indigo children" and similar are less pedo-ish examples of the same longing desire to have what children possess enter back into our corrupt environment. Each child is an individual representation of what most adults yearn for in themselves and the society around them. It should be little wonder then that as a society we seem to have such a love-hate relationship with the human child.

Anyway, the children of today are far more intuitive and silently understanding than I ever remember, and I am not that old. I think they had to be, by necessity, as a means of self-preservation in this quickly changing and confusing world. They know. They know earlier than ever before that they have sexual power. Empowerment, however, comes by the understanding of what to do with it. And in my opinion, this is exactly why sex ed is a big and needed piece of the puzzle. The result will be more empowerment and far fewer victims of sexual ignorance.