Personal story time: growing up, I thought for years I was a pedophile. Turns out I'm not, but the weird way our society keeps treating pedophilia made me convinced I was one.
So. I developed an interest in sex and sexuality at a pretty young age. And I've always been sexually interested in people around my own age. Around being the operative term here, as I had crushes on my classmates... but also their older and younger siblings. Then, I don't remember exactly when but I think it was around age 12 or 13, I read an article about pedophilia which stated that most pedophiles start fucking children before they turn 18. I was worried. Then, when my classmates also start getting interested in sex, they mostly talk about being attracted to adult celebrities. This seemed to further confirm I was their weird one who was a danger to (younger) children.
Now of course, in hindsight I have no idea of the credibility of the article. Nor what exactly they meant, as obviously if you're underage and having sex with another underage person, then you kind of "fulfill" the requirements of being under 18 and having sex with a child.
I eventually realised that no, I'm not actually sexually attracted to kids when, some time in my early 20s, I accidentally came across actual child pornography online and my immediate reaction was repulsion. Looking back, I've just always had a "window of attraction" centered around my own age. When I was a teenager, I was attracted to other teenagers (and sometimes their pre-teen siblings). Now that I'm 41, I'm attracted to people in their 30s and 40s. I presume that by the time I'm 70, I'll be a regular subscriber to some granny porn website.
A further thought I only realised when formulating this reply is that the way pedophilia narratives are (or at least were) told in the media further reinforced my weird conviction that I was a pedophile. Media coverage of pedophilia was usually sensationalist descriptions of brutal dominance over the children by their rapists. I'm into bdsm, particular as a dom. I didn't know that at the time, I didn't even have words for these kinds of things, but the stories were the only media I had ever had access to that had any kind of dom/sub dynamic going on (albeit a very twisted one). I was turned on by them, and I am perfectly willing to admit this was fucked up. But in hindsight, it was not aroused because of the pedophilia aspect, but rather the dominance/submission aspect. If we had had some kind of proper sex education that also covers kinks, I maybe would have realised this sooner, rather than it clicking (literally) today.
To be honest I'm not sure why I'm writing this. Maybe I just needed to get it off my chest. Or maybe it's to make a point that if the way society treated pedophilia and kinks was less moralising and fearmongering, and we gave minors access to proper sex education, we wouldn't end up with people believing for a decade that they were a pedophile, when in reality they were just a kinkster attracted to their peers.
