You ever heard of burying somebody with lawsuits? Deluge the little company with more than they can pay their lawyers to fight and the little upstart goes under? That's pretty much what it's like here. Multiple posters gang up with much verbiage, and I can't reply to all of it. That's how the discussion that is getting deeply indented down below in this thread was going. Fortunately they're not lawsuits and I'm not going under.

But here's an accusation leveled repeatedly by someone who isn't Dante, so I'll take a shot at it.

All of Ethan's statements are that we think with our dicks more so than teleios do.

I'm trying to think when I've ever said that. I'll wait for the citations. All I can think of at the moment is that you're interpreting something else I've said as implying that. Apparent differences have to do with the different people who they are sexually interested in.

One way of applying this is at the level of an individual man with an individual girl.

I don't think I've ever denied that teleio men rape women and engage in sexual harassment a great deal. I don't recall offering an opinion on it before, but if you define the relevant crime as "doing something sexual when the other person is clearly struggling or saying 'no'", then I bet teleios do that at a much higher rate than pedophiles.

Do pedophiles engage in sexual activity with prepubescents when they know very well that it is highly illegal at a higher rate than teleios commit such highly illegal acts? I bet they do, though good data will be very hard to find. The inability to have legal sexual encounters is surely an explanatory factor.

The other application has to do with opinions about social policy. To the extent that teleio men resist laws on sexual harassment, marital rape, date rape, and ease of rape convictions, that is perhaps thinking influenced by sexual self-interest. Women on the other side could be interpreted as them thinking with their personal sexual self-interest in anti-sex directions... These both count. Gender differences on those issues measures this.

The debate about the laws regarding prepubescents consenting to sexual activity is an odd one because it is in a sense pretty theoretical. Neither side thinks it is OK if the child is objecting. The debate has to do with factors that are not so easy to observe, such as what a quiet child is actually thinking, whether she has been manipulated into having those thoughts, and the relevance of her re-evaluation of things as she gets older. At least for most pro-contacters on GC, it is also theoretical in requiring some transformations in social attitudes and laws before they say it's OK. With so many intervening levels of indirection, the way is open for interpretation to diverge.

As I've said, it seems that the theory of this is important to pedophiles' self-concept and feelings of self-worth more than to their actual desire to get off with a kid. This isn't "thinking with their dicks" but it is still self-interested.

When I say that I think pedophiles are influenced by their self-interest to adopt a pro-contact stance, I'm not saying anything one way or the other on what teleiophiles would do if they were in a similar circumstance.