Hi. Several years ago I decided to make an extremely, extremely incendiary post in a non-reddit forum about the issue of pedophilia. Of course for the sake of laughs and giggles I exaggerated my opinion from “theoretically and under very particular and unrealistic circumstances a certain and very limited degree of non-intrusive contact between fully consenting individuals regardless of age is possibly alright” into “pedophilia is great and a few bad apples aren’t representative! wake up people!”. Needless to say I had a lot of fun playing a combination between devil’s advocate and making people insane simply by defending an extremely unpopular position! The problem was that someone called the FBI and that I had to use a proxy after that, yet it was the largest thread in the forum with over a thousand comments over the span of several months (the admin refused to put it in the list of most popular threads though). So this time I’m going to be fair and try to defend a reasonable position, so I wanted to ask you beforehand if you would consider appropriate to discuss this possibly extremely incendiary topic. My actual position states that a society where light forms of pedophilia existed is both conceivable and within the realm of the ethically acceptable under very strict and unrealistic circumstances, and that the age of consent should be eliminated and consent re-defined as “a situation where both participants are willing to commit the act and and at least one of them takes responsibility for any harm done as a result of the act”. That position might seem insane but it’s actually just a little step towards sexual liberation, I don’t defend under any circumstance pedophilia in real life and consider than in essentially every case a person under 13 years can’t possibly consent to sexuality with a much older person even when there’s no harm done. Real life is not like theory, but still I’d like to discuss my highly theoretical and extremely incendiary (and misunderstandable) position here someday, and I’d like your approval beforehand. Thanks for your attention 😀 1) Well mine became the most insanely controversial topic in that forum ever, so it might be common but I certainly had to have a nice touch to make it burn so much! 2) Some people actually agreed to the watered-down position I exposed after the first few hundred comments so I think it wouldn’t be such a bad idea really 😀 The exaggerated one certainly not! But what I called “my actual position” then yes, but only because I repeatedly emphasized how it only works in theory and under very specific and unreal circumstances. Let me show you how this works. Hitler was right in theory and under very specific and unreal circumstances. And these very specific and unreal circumstances could be, for example, if aliens had visited him and told him that they were going to invade the Earth and kill everyone if he didn’t start world war 2. Insane? Yeah, but my point is that anything, no matter how stupid it sounds (such as Hitler being right), under very specific and unreal circumstances it could be right (note: i think Hitler was wrong, that was just an example to show my point) In the case of my argument about pedophilia, these very specific and unreal circumstances would be, for example, that all adults were incredibly responsible, that there was a clear way to check whether a child is actually consenting or not, that children shown perfectly what they’re feeling about anything at all times, that society doesn’t frown sexuality in any way, that there are strict medical and psychological check-ups, that there’s no physical harm done through any of the acts, that child’s psychology is completely unaffected by sexuality… the list goes on and on, that’s why it stands in the realm of the “theoretical” since in real life it’s impossible for every single condition to be met, but my point stands that if they were, then yes, pedophilia would be ethical. Just consider this a very, very incendiary thought experiment 😀