Tumblr; Doubt, and "Problematic Content"

16 is the legal age of consent in my US state. also, it's important to remember that not all child abuse is carried out by actual pedophiles-- pedophilia is an actual neurological condition. child abusers abuse for a range of reasons, usually to do with power. and not all pedophiles abuse children! some identify it within themselves, keep themselves away from kids, and get therapy. this is a distinction that tumblr ignores way too often.

and i had a dream, not long ago, about fictional teenage siblings having sex! it's nothing i ship in real life, and i don't find either attractive, they're cartoon characters for gods' sakes. but the dream was pretty hot and heavy and steamy, and i woke up feeling very O_o all day. brains are weird and dreams are weird .

 

It's not really the dream that bothers me. I've had a lot more troubling dreams in the past, where I've done a things that are a LOT worse than what I've just described. I know that it's not real.

It's more other things, you know. Relating to aspects of my other fetishes, and the fact that I still sometimes look at Homestuck porn art (simply because, well, I really like it! I enjoy things like that more when I'm more invested in the characters).

Only now I'm constantly afraid of being attracted to an "underage" portrayal, or even a portrayal where an adult character "looks" underage, and I'm still constantly searching myself whenever I see art to tell whether or not any attraction I may or not feel might be indicating any signs of... you know... urgh

 

It sounds like you need more help dealing with the mechanism. If you resolve your fear of suddenly being paedophillic you'll just move on to the next "moral impurity". I'll leave that advice to the ocd types in this thread, except to say bring it up with your psych.

I will continue trying to reassure you about the particular fear here:

I said this as a csa survivor bro. Even if you were attracted to minors (and you very much don't seem to be) you are a decent human being who would not do anything about it. Subjecting yourself to this minute inquisition is exhausting and unnecessary.

 

Hey I don't have like any experience with your experiences, but so far CBT has really helped me and your mental loop of guilt and examination sounds like depression brain logic in me inspecting how I react to my reaction to see which is the true reaction that determines what is honestly me but what if I am pretending on some level this reaction to feel a bit better and thus... Etc. so I'm just gonna share some of the stuff I'm using to identify when my brain is lying to me.

The first thing my therapist had me do was differentiate my feelings from my thoughts. Not like "I feel that I am a horrible person" because that is actually a thought... So one separates that into "I think I am a horrible person for x, and this makes me feel guilty and furious and dirty at the same time"
And sometimes just writing that in sequence helps observe ns detach a bit from the obsessive loop, but it doesn't always. What it does is it starts getting you used to identifying the differences for the next step. At the very least you can show a list of all these thoughts and emotions to a therapist to help them with diagnosing.

Also from the point of view of someone pretty neurotypical (is that the right term anymore?) apart from the dysthymia, you sound like you are living hell. Like even if your experience is only 1/10th of what you have described, that is serious enough for help. And what matters more than the label is finding something that works. It isn't about appropriating the experiences of someone in the label, the label is a human category that doesn't match to complex reality. The label exists for humans and to help them. So whether you are ocd or a different obsessive or something, if the treatment and help from that diagnosis or label helps you, that is what matters.

Um if you find the writing feelings and thoughts silly, sorry. In the end what matters most is professional helip because even if we are wrong about it, checking in with a few or several professionals is the responsible thing to do to take few chances that you are wrong. It's like how scientists have to look and compare their sources and then independently verify via testing. The hypothesis is given, now comes testing it with reliable methods (professionals) several times if necessary. This doesn't mean you aren't paying attention to other opposing arguments it just means you are testing one thing first so you can build a good and more objective base of knowledge.

 

Additionally, "both sides" of this issue are not equal. Look at the quality of the evidence given by seebs & Co from reasonable sources vs the plain fear and shame based rhetoric of callout culture.

 

If you do seek help and tell them about this, it's not going to be some bizarre thing they've never seen before. They'll have had people come in going "but what if I'm actually Bad Thing???" with lists of evidence and all. They will recognize it as the symptom of a problem and know how to help.

 

Guys, how do I know I'm not using the potential of mental illness as a cloak to ignore the fact that in actuality I'm just a bad person? Not necessarily just with this but in general also.

 

Because if you were, you wouldn't be worrying about it so much.

 

"bad" people -- as in, people who use/hurt others, but even then they're never entirely no-good and can learn to behave better toward others imho -- just... you have to remember, they think what they're doing is right, or it's fair, or they're unfair to others because others have been unfair first. or they don't want to bother figuring out why some other person would be hurt by their behavior, they just know that dealing with negative feelings is not something they want to bother with and refuse to engage/accept, to the point that they feel attacked when presented with the facts and then retaliate.

so if you're a nervous wreck thinking that maybe you did a bad thing and that means you're a rotten person forever...

this is very similar to the thing where two groups of people self-report to be very skilled at a thing -- say, art: people who are indeed extremely skilled and practiced (and probably not bothered by imposter feels) and can therefore judge accurately, and people who are so horrible at it that they can't judge themselves or other people worth a damn.

you keep worrying about how other people might possibly perhaps perceive you even in the absence of obvious signs of sadness or hurt. i think we can say with a certain degree of confidence that you are not deciding to behave selfishly and disregard any distress because only what you want and what you feel entitled to matter. i think the problem is that it's exactly the opposite.

so long story short, like eulers said, if you were, you wouldn't be worrying so much.

 

I think I'm doing the right thing but how can I know? I'm just going by what others are saying but how can I know who to trust? There are posts with hundreds of notes saying that I'm a paedophile, a potential rapist, a criminal, that I'm hurting children and am the scum of the earth. There are thousands of people who literally believe all of that, how can that many people be wrong about something so fundamental? Am I just clinging to a false truth so as not to confront what an awful being I've become? How can this be resolved, how can I ever be sure?

 

Are you raping children? then you're not a criminal pedophile. that's pretty much the only definition that matters.

Most of these people don't actually believe it left to their own devices. The thing about echo chambers like tumblr is that
1) moral indignation feels good!
2) it tells other people that you're The Right (and Righteous) Kind Of Person therefore you get all that admiration and agreement and positive reinforcement to keep mashing that button to keep getting more approval
3) any sign of nuance is attacked by other people trying to show off that they're Righteous as being a mark that you're trying to Justify Evil, therefore even when you internally doubt (and a lot of people internally doubt this) you really don't want to be seen as SAYING so. Basically, if you don't join in on the dogpile eventually you will be the one dogpiled on.

So this is a system that rewards people for making more and more definite, aggressive, self-righteous claims with social approval and a feeling of importance and relevance, and at the same threatens them into staying inside it with the threat of all those "friends" they made there turning on them with the same aggression should they ever rethink their stance to include some nuance or empathy for the side that was previously defined as The Evil Enemy. And this system is therefore going toward more and more extreme claims -- and tends to dump inconvenient real-life facts and situations when it gets in the way of it, because what matters is not facts, what matters is what they can be seen yelling angrily about, and how much other people can be impressed/intimidated by it.

This is a vicious cycle. It doesn't stop getting worse.

A huge proportion of these people are young and/or have a weak sense of self, or feel adrift and pointless. They're looking for something that makes them feel worthwile and important, therefore they're throwing themselves at the first crusade that passes by without considering it in depth. And being online, it's really easy when you don't have to look someone in the face and watch their expression crumple in hurt and betrayal when you spout out cutting "comebacks". those people just get to concentrate on how smart and sharp their wording was, and collect laughs and approval from their friends without activating their empathy or thinking thoughtfully about all sides of the issues -- they chose a side first, so every argument that mentions it's maybe not that simple is dismissed out of hand without even a single thought.

Some of them are total assholes who are looking for an excuse to slam people. That's the thing about rage, it's addictive. (that's not just me saying it. there have been many studies. the brain changes. here's the first article i found about it. not super in depth but there would be others.)

White and black thinking is extremely attractive because it's EASY! There's only two possible answers. They don't have to think about real people going through complicated or ambigous situations, they just have to stuff situations into quickly defined boxes and slam down anything that sticks out. They don't have to care that they're hurting real people with that aggressive behavior if they can tell themselves they're doing it for a Good Reason. They are doing the opposite you're doing, which is they're seeing people as arguments to dismiss with extreme prejudice, not as anyone having real feelings to give polite consideration to. (Meanwhile you are taking theoretical "maybe this might contribute to some possible harmful climate (that thousands and thousands of people are unconsciously participating into)" as "i am actually personally taking a hammer to an innocent child's genitals right now, how could i." :p)

The problem is that they think being Good or Bad is something a person is innately, therefore they're super involved in finding reasons why they're good and other people are bad, because if those people are different yet there's Only One True Way to be good, it means THEY are the ones who are bad! Gasp. That can't be true. Quick let's do some mental gymnastics to cast Different as Bad before we can RETHINK our POSITION, that is the same as admitting we were Wrong, therefore rethinking is forbidden! And in the process they say aggressive, hurtful, sometimes even abusive stuff, but since they tell themselves it's to protect Good then it somehow doesn't count. (I invite you to think about this quote: "cool motive, still murder." Sometimes shitty things must be done, but that doesn't mean the person didn't in fact do something shitty. When people are over-involved in explaining why it was omg so not shitty, or flipping out and attacking to avoid having to admit it was, indeed, shitty, it's very, very, very likely that it was not in fact something that "must" be done; it was just the easiest way for them to avoid having to examine their beliefs, and now they're angry to cover up how scared they feel of this clash tearing out their whole made-up belief system and their "conditional-support" group.)

Good and bad are things people do, every day of their lives.

Even if you had the misfortune to be attracted to real-life (not drawn or written, therefore heavily stylized and conceptualized and unrealistic) children, i would feel bad FOR YOU, because that is a really shitty thing to have your sexual orientation misfire on and it's an awful life to live. I would not tolerate you acting on it because children cannot meaningfully consent. Bad is a thing you do. It's also a thing you can choose to stop doing.

There's so many of them because they're lost and confused and that makes them scared, and being angry means they don't have to feel their fear, and it makes them louder, therefore you feel there are even more than there are, and the milder peopleon the friges are sometimes forced to nod along to avoid conflict. That doesn't mean they're innately right. There were a lot of angry people who honestly believed Jews were stealing their well deserved riches in Germany and who were righteously satisfied when they got "taken care of" during world war 2.

For what it's worth I, personally, also think you're doing things right. I think your instincts are right, and your brain is shooting you in the feet and doing its best to trip you up. But even if you did misstep? You could still make it up.

Just don't fondle a kid, and if you come across photos of a real life kid being fondled report them, and you're basically fine. :p

 

Thank you, that was really powerful to read.

My next question, of course, is how do we know that everything you just said does not also apply to our side? What if or rejection of their claims is just as irrational?

 

This is rapidly getting into "But how do we know anything is real" territory.

Generally, it's wise to give more weight to claims about phenomena made by people who can explain their logic, display a sense of perspective, and cite their sources over claims made by people who are who's really young, Really Mad, and can't cite even the most basic of sources.

Ultimately, though, you can't outsource your morality. No amount of chasing your tail here is going to get you the Big Answers - eventually, you have to make up your own mind based on the information you've gathered. If you can't do that and can only keep chasing your tail with endless what-ifs... well, this is why we keep advising you to see a professional therapist, because there's only so much help we can reasonably give you.

 

Ask yourself "who gets hurt".

the trick of course is you can't just rely on fear and doubt and MAYBE they would get hurt, you have to use reason and research and proof. (the second trick is that the harm done to yourself and your sense of self-trust and your nerves also count as harm.)