If you’re reading this after the intro, and parts 1-3 of “Not a Monster”, the intermission, and finally here…congratulations, you are among the strong who can look into the abyss. In “I’m a Pedophile, but not a Monster,” Todd Nickerson attempted to make the claim that just because he was sexually attracted to children, he wasn’t a monster or even a bad person. He did this with a lot of sob stories about how hard his life was, and a thinly veiled threat that ostracizing pedoes made them more dangerous to children, so society should accept pedoes into their midst.

However, as can be expected of anyone who wants to taste the smallest fruits and expects society to love him for who he is…Nickerson got the non-suprise of having a lot of people take issue with his idea that we should accept pedophilia in society. So in response he came up with the wonderful title to his article:I’m a pedophile, you’re the monsters: My week inside the vile right-wing hate machine

That’s right, ladies and gentlmen, get ready to be labeled pedophobes and bigots because you don’t support sexual adult-child attractions or love. After all, wanting to have sex with children doesn’t make you a monster. But being “right wing” and saying no to people who do, well, that does make you a monster.

My article “I’m A Pedophile, But Not a Monster” was published last week and it has been a whirlwind since. I’ve spent days doing radio interviews, even an appearance on TV (HLN’s Dr. Drew on Call), but mainly just answering the hundreds of emails that have poured in. Yes, the vast majority of them have been supportive.

My intitial reaction to reading this was “why are they giving this guy a voice?” A very real part of me wants to shut him up and deny him any forum for his pushing of pedophile acceptance. But then I stop myself, because it is when it is hardest that we must stand by our principles. In this case, liberalism and free speech. I know why Nickerson is being given press space, it’s going to generate a lot of views and a lot of money. So we merely have to accept that he and those like him are here now. What we have to do is not allow them to silence those of us who do not support their pedophilic desires.

While there has been a visible backlash, predominantly from the political right, in private it has been a different story. This piece has generated debate and controversy all over the world, well beyond my wildest imaginings. When I first approached Salon with the idea, my editor was receptive, but throughout the process of refining the piece, she asked me if I really understood what I was getting into. Her concern was palpable. I assured her I did, which was mostly true; I had no idea it would blow up as quickly as it did, and the bigger it got, the more of a tempest it became. Even so, I have no regrets. I knew when I wrote it that it was going to be an important piece, something unique and necessary. And so it was.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that the “political right” here is anyone who has not openly accepted Nickerson’s argument and feels that pedoes should be given full acceptance in society. Mostly because I follow a number of “Left wing” people who completely stand against pedo-acceptance.

Also, I’m not sure Todd fully knows what he’s getting into. Like it or not, he has dragged pedophilia into the spotlight and championed it as the next “civil rights movement” the same way that homosexuality had happen so many decades ago. No doubt, Nickerson has seen the success of the gay community and hopes the same level of success for his people. What he’s failed to realize is that where as most people will go “What two adults do in private isn’t any of my business,” nearly everyone is going to go “what an adult does to a child in private is exactly my business to stop!” And given the amount of stuff that came out in the week after publishing and the fact I don’t think it’s slowing down…Nickerson didn’t open a can of worms and right wing hate. he’s opened a damn oil drum.

I love how he also says it was “unique and necessary” to write this. No doubt he has visions of going before the UN human rights commission to speak on this matter. I can only imagine that Boko Haram and ISIS will be happy to support him.

First, the positives. Of the hundreds of emails I’ve received, somewhere on the order of 95 percent of them have been thoughtful and respectful. Interestingly, perhaps 70 percent of these have been from women, many of them survivors of abuse themselves, who have pointed out that my article has helped them understand the issue better and even to make some peace with their past. Here’s an example (and yes, I have her permission to reprint this):

“Having survived sex trafficking, molestation and rape all at the hands of people I knew and trusted starting at age six, I am a very aggressive defender. I was drugged and trafficked by my biological crackhead father as a young child. Yet I am compelled to thank you. For your honesty and bravery and not going the other extreme creating more victims. It took a lot of courage for me to come out with my pain, and as you have never made anyone else suffer at your hands, I respect your honesty and struggle.”

Rapidly loosing faith in humanity that there was a positive response rate to this guy of 95%. I’m really not sure what to say to that. The fact that it was women mostly responding doesn’t surprise me, Salon.com is not really a magazine for men. Hell, I wouldn’t have known about this if not for twitter rage. I suspect that if more men had read this article, perhaps the responses would not have been so kind. But we might get to that in a minute.

The fact that he chose that response to show the “positive.” “You haven’t hurt anyone, so I respect you.” is hardly the glowing praise one would expect. More neutral than supportive, my personal take.

Most notes were from people thanking me for my willingness to shed light on a little-understood issue that few scholars or experts want to approach. A few people admitted to me their own secret attractions for children, how they felt alone and uncertain how to process their feelings. I directed them toward VirPed; membership growth, which has been fairly steady since I joined over a year ago, has swelled over the last few days. What really surprised me was how many women confessed pedophilic desires, which is often thought to be an exclusively male predisposition. Others have contacted me to work with them on anti-child abuse and pedophilia-related projects. All necessary steps toward what I set out to achieve: a bridge between the celibate pedophile community and the non-pedophile population, setting an example for pedophiles who may not realize they aren’t doomed to molest kids, and creating an environment where we can all work together to end child sexual abuse.

Geez, I wonder why few scholars and experts want to study this. Maybe because study would mean subjecting children to pedophiles and even as morally bankrupt as Science tends to be, well. Even Satan has his limits of behavior.

And oh, yay, more pedoes are coming out of the woodwork. And a lot of them were women, apparently. Not to mention Nickerson being invited into child related projects. All to join the celibate pedophiles to society.

Look, honestly, I’m not going to be objective here. Nickerson shot that around part 3 of my response when he basically said “let pedos free or pedos will rape your children.” And frankly, i’m not sure with him that “ending child sexual abuse” doesn’t actually mean “Stop defining pedophilia as child abuse.”

But maybe I’m just being paranoid.

What I want to focus on now is the continuing misconceptions, prevailing fears and willful ignorance I’ve encountered because of this, both about pedophilia itself and about Virtuous Pedophiles as an organization. My experiences doing the Niall Boylan Show (Irish talk radio) and the Dr. Drew on Call TV show taught me that pedophilia is still largely a gut-level issue for a lot of people. One caller to the radio show said that she didn’t want to know what pedophiles think and lambasted the show itself for even giving me a platform. I told her that no problem was ever solved by refusing to understand the issue. We’ve been in that mode for a few decades now—has it fixed the tragedies of child abuse and child porn? Nope. If anything, this attitude has only increased the problem, since pedophiles at risk of offending are unlikely to seek help in this severely hostile environment. This caller fancied herself a reasonable person, but she decided this issue was beyond any reason. Unfortunately, this viewpoint is all too common.

Actually, on a historic level, some issues have been resolved by refusing to understand the issue. Quite a number have been solved by killing those causing the issue without understanding them. Now I’m not suggesting camps (and Gods there are so many nazi jokes I could have made through all this), but let us be honest. Understanding doesn’t always breed resolution, nor is it required.

Also, this idea that accepting and understanding pedos is going to end the tragedies of child abuse and child porn…it’s pretty stupid. That’s like saying accepting and understanding heterosexuality will stop rape. Clearly, heterosexuality has been accepted for thousands of years and understood fairly well during that time…and even dolphins rape. Understanding and accepting do nothing to prevent abuse. Passing laws and enforcing them can do something to prevent abuse, but as long as there are assholes of any gender who think that they should have what they want regardless of society’s views, there’s going to be abuse.

And frankly, I can sympathize with this caller deciding pedo acceptance was beyond any and all reason. Morally, you have to draw the line somewhere. Even in modern Paganism, which is pretty open morally, we draw the line at pedophilia. And on one hand, yes it is good to be reasonable about things, but is it really that bad to draw a line and say “no further than this.” Maybe, for once, being religious has a benefit. After all, at least I can point to a bunch of Gods who say “Thou shalt not diddle the children or else” and feel pretty comfortable with my anti-pedophile position.

Another point that arose on Dr. Drew was that pedophiles are by nature compulsive. This opinion comes from the extant data, almost all of which is based on people who’ve been arrested, since non-offending pedophiles tend not to self-identify or participate in studies. What do you think that data is going to show? Yes, criminals are often compulsive, but this data says little about people like me, who haven’t offended. This point should be obvious, but these kinds of statements demonstrate the dearth of levelheadedness when it comes to this issue. Logic gets chucked out the window. Dr. Drew himself even suggested that, because I was using hydrocodone, I might’ve abused kids without knowing it. First off, I never took more than two or three pills a day, well within what is generally prescribed, even though they weren’t being prescribed to me. I never blacked out or even came close to being out of touch with reality. I’m neither stupid nor a massive risk taker. And being a doctor, he should’ve known that opiates pretty much obliterate your libido anyway.

The data lies. Of course it does. Todd almost seems to be trying to go into “no true scottsman” territory here. “Well not truly good pedo would touch children, so the date doesn’t reflect how we “true” pedoes are!”

Now who is chucking “levelheadness” out the window. Look, the numbers might be skewed, but I doubt they are by that much. And most human beings are compulsive creatures, certainly when it comes to sex. I mean, we’re all kind of compelled to have it (except maybe asexuals). And frankly, Dr. Drew did have a point. Todd can claim he’s never blacked out, but the funny thing about black outs is you tend not to remember them. And if one went to bed, blacked out, and woke up in bed…how would one know they had done anything other than sleep. Now part of me wants to take Todd at his word here for the sake of argument, but also for the sake of argument, he is basically saying that a trained medical doctor doesn’t know his medical shit.

Nearly all of the callers suggested I seek professional help myself, as did Dr. Drew. Well, I already tried that . . . more than once. My counselors were nice guys, but there was little they could do for me. They knew they couldn’t “cure” me of my sexuality—that doesn’t workon anyone and it won’t work for us. All they could do was lend a sympathetic ear. Another caller said I should do whatever it takes until I’m rid of this. For those of you who feel this way, question: are you going to foot the bill for that? In case you missed it from the first article, I am quite poor. I can’t afford that, and my state, Tennessee, is one of those that turned down the new Medicaid funding, leaving me without medical insurance. I am far from the only pedophile in this situation. And again, even if I could afford it, what could they do for me? As well, a lot of pedophiles are afraid to seek medical help because of the mandatory reporting laws, fearing that they could be reported even if they’ve done nothing wrong.

Honestly, not much to say here, except more self serving whining and excuses. “pity the pedoes, pity us!”

As for VirPed, one of the panelists on the Dr. Drew show suggested that our forum was dangerous because we lacked oversight. I didn’t get a chance to respond to this (nor to several other accusations leveled at me, since everyone pretty much just talked over each other and I politely stayed quiet until addressed directly by Dr. Drew himself), so I want to answer that point here. First off, it isn’t like we are operating in secret. Membership is open to anyone, including non-pedophiles, providing they follow our rules and aren’t just there to make problems for us. We’ve also worked with notable experts in the field, most prominently Dr. James Cantor, who holds a membership on our forum. And there’s nothing stopping the authorities from joining our forum either; I have little doubt that they are there, looking over our shoulders. So we do have some oversight. Besides, all those pro-contacter forums we’re competing against have no oversight either. Should we shut our digital doors while those forums continue to operate, until we get an official stamp of approval? Remember: when it comes to anti-contact pedo forums, we’re the only game in town. That being said, I am officially extending an invitation to any experts, scholars, counselors or authority figures who wish to learn from us, or even keep a watchful eye on us. We have never closed our doors to anyone who didn’t mean us harm.

So VirPed has closed the door on those who “mean them harm.” Huh. I’m flashing back to all the times SJW’s have kicked people out for disagreeing with them and “harming” them. Harm is a very loose word in these things. Should VirPed close it’s doors and let only “pro-contactor” forums exist? Not really for me to say. On a gut level, I wanna shut them all down, but that’s not workable.

But that Todd get’s so insulted by the fact that people want some oversight over potential child molesters is a bit hilarious to me. “How dare you want to make sure we don’t play with children, you pedophobes!!!!”

With regard to angry respondents to my article, the greatest amount of flak has come from the far right, who smeared Salon for daring to allow me to speak, as if silencing pedophiles somehow equates to fighting sexual abuse. I want to state for the record that the members of our forum come from all political, religious and philosophical stripes. We are a pretty diverse group, but we really don’t fight about God or politics internally—our mission is too important to get caught up in that. But according to Breitbart and company, since Salon was willing to publish my piece, it must mean they have some secret agenda to “normalize pedophilia.” The constant refrain of these folks is the old slippery slope argument, where they resort to appealing to people’s fear of a future where anyone can marry anyone, or anything. These ultra-conservatives reject the notion of pedophilia being a sexual orientation not on scientific grounds but on purely political ones. They resist the word that best fits our sexuality (which many experts are now using themselves); in so doing, they are assuming that people are too dumb to understand that a term does not justify an activity. It is merely recognition of a state of being.

There’s a lot here. First off, yes, Salon.com got a lot of flack for publishing an article that really is trying to normalize pedophiles. Second, I’m pretty sure fighting against pedophilia is fighting against sexual abuse. After all, if there are no pedoes, they cannot abuse children. Sure, a bit “final solution” buy none the less true.

As for the Normalizing Pedophilia thing, yeah, Britbart and a lot of other places have said that. Because interestingly enough, this pro-pedo article from Salon.com came on the heels of Sarah Nyberg, aka Sarah Buttz, aka Nicholas Nyberg being outed as a pedophile who had posted images of an underage rel/ative online. And the rather large group of people who arose to defend “her.” Why? Because Nyberg happened to be on the “correct” side of the #gamergate debate (namely, denouncing it as a bunch of hateful misogynists) and despite loads of hard evidence showing Nyberg’s pedophilic inclinations, Nyberg was a “Progressive” and thus needed to be defended.

So yeah, when Salon.com, a site who has done it’s share of anti-gamergate stuff comes out with an article supporting pedophiles right as a pedophile needs support and defense…people are going to see connections. Are there connections? No idea, but I do admit the timing is rather…correlated. And that’s been the gist of most of the “right wing” article’s I’ve read. Not “slipery slope” or “anyone can marry anyone,” but “hey look, pedo gets caught and progressives rally around pedos rather than admit they could be bad people.”

Nickerson then goes into several paragraphs where he responds to John Sexton’s of Breitbart (sorry, my pc is whining and won’t let me pull it up). Since most of it is a response to a response of an article I can’t get too, I’m going to skip over it. Because it’s really a “he says, I say” thing and it wouldn’t surprise me is stuff is take out of context or something, because there’s no direct quotes.

He give’s one paragraph of the same to Alex Crowder’s article, but I suspect he found less to fight against there. I haven’t seen that article either, and again, pc is being a bitch so no link. I may try for alter posts. The gist seems to be though that Crowder says he doesn’t need to understand pedoes, and Todd’s only shot back is “why not?”

My takeaway from all of this right-wing bile is the same thing I realized about the vigilante groups who persecuted us: these people really don’t care about protecting kids. They have a political investment in maintaining a hardline approach to anyone who defies their simplistic black-and-white worldview; if kids are harmed because some pedophiles weren’t able to come forward and seek help in this apocalyptic environment, well then, they’re just collateral damage. I received emails from some haters who insisted I had to be abusing kids, even though I would have to be a moron to out myself if I were. I almost think these guys hate me more for being a celibate pedophile than if I really had abused kids, because I defy their need to view all pedophiles through the baby rape filter, and thus they don’t have to bother thinking about the issue with any kind of complexity or empathy at all. If they truly cared about kids, they would realize that society is better served by an atmosphere where pedophiles are not afraid to come out and identify themselves.

Yeah, you read that right. It’s not pedoes who want to sleep with children, it’s right wingers who want children to be raped, that’s why they don’t allow pedophilia. The snake has eaten its tail and imploded.

Going through and reading Nickerson’s first article, and all his talk about preventing child abuse, it’s very fetishtic. I have dealt with “white knights” on the internet and even they do not take it as far with the “defense of the holy and pure!” thing that they’re attracted too. Honestly, the whole VirPEd thing seems to be two parts fetish, one part stopping their fellows from actually eating the cake.

But it’s the right wing people who are the monsters, who want children to be raped, who hate Todd because he doesn’t fit “their image of what a pedo is.” And maybe that’s how he honestly sees them and the world. He is the shining white knight of pedophilia, here to defend the little people he loves, and all who stand in his way are the infidels and the monsters.

As one caller to the radio show pointed out, I am putting my name and face out there for your benefit as well as mine. You now know who I am and have the option to keep your kids away from me if you so choose. It makes little difference to me. For the record, my friends and family have long known my sexual orientation, and they haven’t stopped me from hanging out with their kids. They know me, and they know that harming their children is the last thing I would ever do. But it doesn’t hurt my feelings if you feel like you must shield them from me. Even so, the fact is, most child molesters aren’t even pedophiles anyway. They are situational offenders, and many studies (one by Kesicky, Andre & Kesicka and another by Nationaal Rapporteur Mensenhandel en Seksueel Geweld tegen Kinderen, both published last year, being the most recent examples) show that perhaps as much as 60 to 85 percent of abusers fall into this category. These are people who abuse kids for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with attraction: substituting a child for an absent or sexually unavailable adult, lack of scruples plus curiosity or boredom (often combined with poor impulse control), or because they get off on exploiting their power over the child or violating the taboo itself, to name some of them. Many parental abusers fall into this category. There is often concern expressed about pedophiles having children, but the Westermarck effect tends to counteract any attraction we might have for children who are closely related to us, especially our own. Ergo, most incestuous abusers aren’t abusing because of an attraction to their child and likely aren’t even pedophiles. Persecuting self-identified pedophiles certainly isn’t going to stop these people.

Either Nickerson’s family is full of idiots, or they all have secret plans on what they’re going to do to him the instant one of their kids says “Todd touched me.” Frankly, I think them fools, but I’m not going to tell them how to live their lives.

I also love this blatant attempt to basically say “child molesters aren’t pedoes!” by Nickerson. Again, no true scottsman, apparently. Or no true pedo anyways.

So, I again want to thank those of you whose outpouring of support, encouragement and love have been an amazing boon for me and my friends at VirPed. The article I wrote isn’t going to solve our problems in and of itself, but it has made clear to me that many people—perhaps the majority—really do want to better understand this issue and to help celibate pedophiles like me lead better and more fulfilling lives. And, of course, we all have the mutual goal of keeping kids safe. For those still on the fence, I hope you come to see that I’m not your enemy. I am here to educate you and assist you in whatever capacity I can.

I’m pretty sure the majority want to understand and help pedoes. I’m sure that is in no way Nickerson’s own self delusions. But Hel, even if I’m actually in the minority of this one and think he and his like should sod off..I’m okay with that. Because morally, I’m pretty certain I’m in the right (and I’ll probably detail that in the next post). And even if I stand alone against the whole world, I have the Right of the Divine with me on this, or at least enough of the Divine that I’m willing to make that stand.

But I don’t want Nickerson’s education, and frankly, he can assist me by jumping off a cliff.