The seed of this article was born back in 2001, when I was looking at some of the things people said in response to a thread on the message board regarding dreams, and noticed people saying they felt ashamed to have "those" dreams because they felt they were perverted.

I didn't really understand this, and still don't.

For a start, "those" dreams are a natural process. It happens. It doesn't make you a pervert. It's just your body doing what Bill Gates and Micro$oft should try doing a lot more of - "testing the system". ^-^ And when I thought about that (and Mousse's claim that a CCS pic was "dubious" because it involved two ten-year-old girls ballroom-dancing in their nightclothes), I started to think about what that oft-used word "perversion" really means.

I personally define perversion as committing, or seriously considering committing, an act for your own gratification which would cause any sort of harm, pain, discomfort, emotional distress etc. to one or more of the people involved, and which is carried out without their full adult consent.^[1] (An ideology that doesn't take into account any religious factors, for claiming something to be perverted based on your own faith is imposing the moral standards of that faith onto a person who may not share it - or in other words, "because I'm [x] religion and [x] religion says this is bad, it's bad universally".) Perversion, IMHO, is deviance from what is morally right, not from what society defines as its norm. (Almost any dictionary will probably tell you otherwise, but if deviance from social norms makes you perverted or abnormal, then all geeks, otaku and other fringe groups are abnormal - which I know is what "mundane" society has been trying to tell us for years, but I flatly oppose the idea that if you differ from the "standard" in any way, you're a subhuman being worthy of discrimination. That line of thinking is the stuff that pushers of complete homogeny and compliance in society - i.e. dictators and tyrants - rely on.) For example, most people would call you perverted if you got turned on by, say, leather - but is your fetish harming you or anyone else? (Apart from the animal that had to be killed to make the leather, but animal rights is a topic I'll probably come to sooner or later in another rant.) They are branding you a pervert based on their social norms, not any sense of "right or wrong" - I've never once heard anyone argue that it's wrong to have a leather fetish because it's cruel to animals. The general attitude in "civilised" society today (which prides itself on being oh-so-"civilised" because we've made it illegal for those subnormal perverts to do each other up the ass in many sectors of it, but when it comes to two governments deciding to blow the hell out of each other's innocent citizens to solve some petty dispute, it's all fine and dandy) is that sex is bad, and any deviance from the "vanilla" formula (i.e. straight, no-kinks, missionary-position stuff) is downright obscene; but I'll get to that later.

Now when I say "seriously consider committing", I look at it in the same way as the law. Say someone really pissed you off. You really want to kill them. You can really visualise killing them, act it out in your head, even enjoy the thought, but don't actually entertain the thought of really doing it IRL because you know it's wrong. You can't be arrested for that. What you can be arrested for is setting out with the serious intention to kill the person IRL, whether you actually succeed or not. You can, needless to say, also be arrested for actually committing the act.

So let's say you have a fantasy about - for an example - sleeping with 3, or 10, or even 30 women (or men, delete as applicable) at once. You can think about this and it's not going to hurt anyone. You're not a pervert. And, provided you had the full consent of everyone involved and you weren't harming them in any way, you could actually do this and it wouldn't be perverted. Why should it be? If everyone agrees, everyone enjoys it, you take full precautions and no one gets hurt, why not? It's not something I'd want, personally, but like they say, whatever turns you on.

Thoughts about sex do not make you a pervert. Sex is not perverted. It's a natural expression of emotions towards another person, and/or a way of attaining physical pleasure (and if you still think the latter is "perverted", eating chocolate, working out and riding a rollercoaster all produce physical pleasure, which is biologically the same, if not as extreme). The only time it's perverted - i.e. morally wrong, because IMHO that is the only proper use of the word perversion, not as a catch-all term for "eww, this freaks me out" - is when your actions hurt the other person. Sex and sexual thoughts by themselves are not some separate entity, a "beast within" that must be "tamed" and suppressed, its existence denied as anything other than a feral, primal emotion which no longer has a place in any "civilized" society. This isn't some ideological struggle between the Good that is a clean, non-sexual mind and the Evil that is temptation (unless you follow Christian doctrine, and I already stated that this article takes a standpoint based on societal values of morality, not religious ones - although in most of the world the latter does have an increasingly strong grip over the former, a viewpoint which I'm attempting to challenge with this article and the Christianity one). Anyone who claims to have a "beast" within them is either a criminal trying to excuse the actions that they carry out, or someone who is denying and repressing a part of their human nature - because they think themselves to be "better than that" and/or because society has drilled it into them that having sexual instincts is wrong. Of course, going to the other extreme and letting basic instinct dominate - i.e. going out and doing whatever the hell you want without caring for the consequences - is immoral, but as long as you have a clear sense of where the boundary line between fantasy and real life must be drawn, mentally (and physically, with care and consideration) entertaining your fantasies doesn't make you "debased" or "corrupt". It just makes you human.

Okay, so let's get into the argument that sex should only be enjoyed within the sanctity of love. (Yes, that phrase would more commonly end with "marriage", but I'm not going there. I don't believe in the concept of "no sex until you're married", nor the Christian concept of marriage, period. End mini-rant.) I'm a strong believer in sex as an expression of love, and even the thought of sleeping around personally makes my blood run cold (as explained further here). But there are kinds of sexual expression that fall into neither of these categories; "solo sex", cybersex, experimentation between platonic friends. And with a willing partner, there's no reason why your fantasies need to be indulged outside of love. They can be a part of that love (and they can be so even if your partner isn't directly involved, or isn't into that sort of thing - no need for them to actually take part for you to fantasise about them ^-^).

So let's talk about pedophilia, the crux of this article. Thorny topic. You can't have a romantic, consenting relationship with a child. Children are not biologically or emotionally ready for sex with an adult. To attempt to perform such an act with them, even with their "consent" (children can't give full consent because they don't know what they're consenting to - while they may understand what sex is, they simply cannot be made fully aware of the future impact it will have on them regarding both their feelings about themselves and how they will be looked upon in society - which is why all countries have a legal age limit for sex), would be harmful to them emotionally, and possibly physically. Therefore, it is perversion under my definition.

However, this is a little bit different from having a crush on Sasami.

Animé characters are cute, especially the young ones. They're designed to be that way. People get attracted to them. And I don't think having a crush on an underage animated character, or any animated character for that matter - be it Sasami, Misato, Pikachu, Bugs Bunny or the Brave Little Toaster - is going to hurt anyone, as long as you acknowledge that such things must only happen in your head, and you can't transfer your actions to real life underage people (or rabbits, or toasters - well, I guess the toaster wouldn't mind, but you'd have a hard time explaning it to the casualty department). Therefore, if someone had a crush on Sasami, or Shinji/Asuka/Rei (remember, they're underage by the laws of most countries I know!), I wouldn't call it perversion, as long as they understood that actually carrying out their sexual fantasies IRL, with a real underage person, is wrong. (Note: I'm applying this under the assumption that the person having these thoughts is an adult, not the same age as the object of the crush. Childish experimentation amongst equal-status peers is another way of "beta-testing" those feelings, and besides, I can't be the only one who thinks two ten-year-olds having the hots for each other is one of the cutest things in existence. ^-^) I term this "moral pedophilia" - the full understanding and acceptance that performing sexual acts with minors is wrong, and therefore abstaining from doing so, but also accepting that for whatever biological reason, you find entertaining these images in your head is pleasurable. Everyone has their fantasies, whether it's stomping all over someone in 6-inch stilettos or being raped by tentacled demons, and finding little girls (or boys) cute, especially as they're portrayed in animé, is hardly that weird on the scale of things. There are far worse things out there than Sakura and Tomoyo hentai. (Sakura and Syaoran hentai, for example. ^-~) That said, I'm not applying this to real child porn, since children are actually abused in order to make that material and IMHO viewing it is supporting that abuse. Drawings, on the other hand, aren't real - they don't even depict real people, since let's face it, animé ten-year-olds are nothing like real ten-year-olds, who typically don't have magical powers, aren't happy and genki and cute all the time and in this day and age are largely such foulmouthed, whiny, egotistical little buggers that I don't quite see what the attraction is - and nobody has to be hurt in order to produce them.

In short:

If you go out and hang around outside an elementary school with the intention of picking up kids, that is WRONG.

If you actually commit a sexual act with an underage person, that is WRONG.

But fantasies in your head that you know will never happen, and fully accept can never happen outside the confines of your mind?

As long as you have those boundaries there, I don't see why you shouldn't think what you want. You can't hurt people with what's in your mind, until the day when neural implants make everyone telepathic, anyway. As long as you remember it isn't real, I don't call it perversion, whether the object of your infatuation is a fictitious animated schoolgirl, a Barney the Dinosaur plush (actually, I'm of the opinion that if there's any entity in the universe that deserves to be placed in permanent bondage, it's Barney) or a pool cue. And if you can show me one Eva fan who hasn't looked at either Shinji, Asuka or Rei and thought "kawaii!" - even for the merest of split-seconds - then I'll show you a Goddess-damned liar.