i'm kind replying to both of you here. i agree w/ everything you say islander46. it sounds like you've had very similar experiences to me, attracted to 4yo girls when you were eleven. that sounds very familiar. and for me it was love, quite spiritual and romantic, not some displaced sexual curiosity.

Seamus, nothing you say really resonates with me, but i just wanted to make the point that there's a tendency to assume that 'pedophilia' is a single phenomenon with a unique set of causes. you only have to look at the semantic confusion in the everyday use of the word to realise that its many things to many people. beyond that, even if you define it as sexual/romantic attraction to prepubescents, as i usually do, then i think there is a whole universe of different manifestations and experiences and causes that fits under that definiton.

altho my impulse is to say 'huh? how can you suddenly become a pedophile at 45?' i think its better not to get into debates about what is a 'true ped' and so on. i know which people here feel and think similarly to me, and which don't, but i'm still interested in the experiences of others, even Moth's. female GCers almost certainly have very different experiences and developmental histories to males, but they are not questioned about how true their pedness is.

Much of this is the same attraction that parents feel for their children, which may have much to do with the prevalence of incest in many cultures.

it isn't that prevalent, except among aristocratic classes, for political reasons. a lot of experiments show that parents are less attracted to their own children than to other peoples, and many of them find the smell of their own children slightly unpleasant.

also, among other animals there seem to be a raft of mechanisms to discourage mating with immediate family, most of which involve histocompatibility & pheromonal signals.

counter to this, there is the 'close stranger' phenomenon, often found when people are reunited with sibs or birth parents who they have been separated from since birth, and for whom they experience intense emotional and sexual attraction.

basically, people and other animals are typically sexually attracted to mates which are similar but not too similar.

Personally, I think that there is more to it than simply 1 gene.

oh yeah! i can agree with that! :D