Re: Westermarck and 'consideration'

In listening to people and thinking about these things over the past few years, I've decided that people mean different things by "attraction". I think you and I tend to use it the same way, but another meaning of attraction includes more than a gut reaction but a formulation of something you might act upon, and I suspect that's what Rascal is talking about.

I also sometimes hope that this is the difference between people who say it's terrible and sick to be attracted to young teen girls. Surely as you and I mean it, they must be out of touch with reality for 90% of men. But in the other meaning, if attraction means formulating plans and thinking seriously about how you might be involved, then we and those holding such views could find common ground there.

This is another reason I think that Ethan's desire to eliminate the discussion of contact is so dangerous. It leaves those who were left out of the debate over the ethics intellectually unprepared to think about what they were never supposed to be experiencing.

The discussion we don't have at VP isn't about contact, it's about whether contact might be OK in society some day. We don't tell people they shouldn't feel attracted to children -- if they think they can handle it, we even encourage them to feel good about it. If you're talking about feelings when you say "what they were never supposed to be experiencing", that's not us at all. Maybe that would apply to some religious "don't lust in your heart" approach, but that's not us. If you're talking about someone suddenly finding themselves actually experiencing sexual contact with a child, I don't see as a prior background in thinking about just why it's wrong and whether it might change some day has any positive bearing on how to avoid getting into that situation and how to get out of it gracefully and quickly.

If someone's anti-contact message included, "children are never sexually interested in adults", then I can see that suddenly finding a child (most commonly one who is 12+) sexually interested in you could throw into doubt everything including your brakes on action. But we don't say that. I can't think of anything in our message of why to abstain that could be contradicted by actual experience with a child.