Yeah, another one of those.

[aadler]

I love words. I especially love when language allows you to express specific points that can easily be glossed over by generalizations. This is particularly acute when the people relying on the generalization insist that (or persist in behaving as if) the less-accurate generalization is the actual meaning.

Today’s word is “pedophilia”.

(More than that, actually, but it’s the springboard toward where I actually intend to head.)

I was prompted to this by part of the fanfiction discussion of my 2007 Buffyfic “Walking After Midnight”. Some people found it jarring when ‘my’ Xander in that story equated Angel’s involvement with Buffy to pedophilia. I thought it was a quibble, myself, in that 1) WAM was a remix (my first) and I’d got that part, along with some other themes, from the story I was remixing, 2) Xander was eighteen years old in the story, and drunk, and 3) he was speaking from a 1999 perspective (the story was set in Season 3), and do you expect dictionary precision from someone with that personality, in that circumstance? All the same, I couldn’t simply reject the critique, because it ties in so firmly with my own persnickitiness regarding language. (I still cringe whenever I hear somebody use “decimate” to mean “wipe out”; even though I know the word has devolved to mean something like that in current usage, I can’t make myself forget that it was originally a very specific term meaning “to kill one out of every ten”.) I can’t legitimately hold my own pedantic position while simultaneously relaxing it for myself when it suits me. So, okay, it would have been better for me to find a workaround there.

That still leaves the word itself, what it means, and the way it’s used these days. In popular usage, people tend to speak of pedophilia whenever an adult is sexually or romantically involved with someone under the legal age of consent. Which is not only inaccurate, but SO inaccurate that it robs the term of its real power.

The issue comes in three parts.

First, it’s too general. Psychologists actually have three different terms. Pedophilia refers to primary or exclusive sexual interest in prepubescent children, which is very close to the meaning we all recognize. Hebephilia, however, is the term for primary or exclusive sexual interest in pubescent individuals, i.e., those who are still in the early stages of puberty; and ephebophilia denotes primary or exclusive sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents, generally in the age range of fifteen to nineteen, post-pubescent but still short of full physical maturity.

Which brings us to the second part. Note the qualifiers there: “primary or exclusive sexual interest”. A man who likes women, period, and finds himself physically attracted (irrespective of any action he takes, we’re talking about the attraction itself) to good-looking specimens from age fifteen clear up to fifty? He doesn’t fit any of the preceding classifications, because his interest is neither exclusive nor primary. The younger ones in that range are simply part of a range, and his interest includes them* but does not center on them. With these three philias, then, we’re speaking of a non-normal focus on a questionably restricted range of pre-adult individuals. (And it’s non-normal and questionable based on the person exhibiting that focus. Fifteen-year-old guys interested in fifteen-year-old girls? Normal, and frequently funny. Twenty-five-year-old guys interested in fifteen-year-old girls? Creepy, no getting around it.)

And on to the third part. So far this has all been intellectual, but I actually have an (entirely innocent) anecdote from my past to illustrate what comes next. When I was in my first few years of college, I’d hang out with my high-school-age younger brother sometimes over the weekends, which usually involved one pizza place or another. In one of these venues, I became aware of a rather striking young woman. She appeared to be in her early twenties, not just in her physical development but in her overall demeanor, showing a relaxed and confident sense of attitude that usually takes awhile to develop. The appearance was misleading, I learned from my brother that she was more than a bit messed-up and a little too caught up in recreational drugs. She was also fourteen years old.

Well, that pretty much settled that, at least as far as I was concerned. I still remember it, however, even so very many years later, because it serves as a direct illustration of my final point. I was — however briefly — sexually interested in a fourteen-year-old girl. Was that inappropriate? you damn betcha, and I recoiled the moment I knew the actual facts. Was my interest in itself improper, never mind getting into pedophilia/hebephilia/ephebophilia? No, it was not … because my interest in her was entirely based on her exhibition of such pronounced adult female attributes that I genuinely mistook her for an adult female.

So there you go. The term pedophilia as popularly used today: inaccurate, over-general, misapplied, and missing part of the overall point. Am I preaching any kind of social/sociological/moral point here? I’m not, though I could be, there are definite ramifications to be found therein. No, I just like to see words used to communicate meaning, not to blur meaning.

For those persons who haven’t nodded off, here endeth the lesson.

*(Men are attracted to young women. It’s a fact, like it or not. Society indoctrinates us with restrictions as to the appropriate limitations of that interest, for the good of the young women and for the good of society as a whole, and I accept both the limitations and the reasoning behind them. All the same, the foundation doesn’t change: men are attracted to young women.)