I said it’s not a disorder for men to have sex with teenage girls. It’s not DSM-5 Pedophilia. Not only that but it is not any disorder at all in the DSM. There’s no disorder in the DSM called Adult Sex with Teenagers yet. Not yet.
If someone comes to me and says they had sex with a teenage girl, if I dx them with DSM-5 Pedophilia, I am committing malpractice.
That’s how anti-scientific this conflation of normal male sexuality with child molesting and pedophilia is.
I also said, not only is it not disordered behavior, it’s not even abnormal! This is true and you will find little argument about this among clinicians.
The argument against adult-teen sex is a moral and legal one, not a psychological one.
Adult-teen sex boils down to a moral matter. Perhaps it is immoral. Perhaps it is not. Society has decided it is immoral. That is their right. As for whether it is or not, clinicians leave that up to the moral philosophers, sociologists, and society as a whole.
We don’t get involved in things that are only right or wrong or even crazy or nuts because society says they are. In fact, in many cases, presented with what looks like psychosis, if it is normal within their culture to present this way during stress, we say they’re not psychotic. In fact, they are normal. Perhaps an Adjustment Disorder. If someone from our culture displayed the same symptoms, we would absolutely dx some form of DSM-5 Psychosis.
This is where, in a small sense, the anti-psychiatry people are right that the whole thing is a crock. It’s not a crock, but it is definitely true that what is normal and what is abnormal is in many cases constructed by society.
In fact there are complete psychological syndromes unknown in the rest of the world that have long histories, and even special names in certain countries or regions. There is a particular type of psychosis peculiar to Norway and the Scandinavian countries. It’s not seen outside of there. It has its own name, history, studies, on and on. This is simply one of the “appropriate Norwegian ways to go crazy.” Yes, even when people go nuts they don’t to do so in societally constructed ways!
Furthermore, clinicians don’t get involved in crime or moral questions of right and wrong. As I said, we leave that stuff up to the moral philosophers. You guys do it. We’re out. Stealing, rape, mugging, burglary, wife-beating, Hell, even murder or serial murder is not diagnosable under the current system. Most of these people are not the slightest bit nuts anyway. They’re completely sane. They’re just bad people. It’s a question of right and wrong, good and bad, not sane or crazy.
We might not even say that those crimes are abnormal behavior. I can think of circumstances where it would be just fine to commit any of those crimes. We probably wouldn’t say whether it’s normal or abnormal. Obviously it’s not adaptive and any society that allows that to go on willy-nilly is not a healthy one. But it might persist anyway. Last time I checked, Nigeria is still on the map. Instead we would just say that these are moral and legal matters, not psychological ones, and clinicians don’t deal with that sort of thing; instead, they deal with crazy and sane.
Furthermore, these matters, like teen-adult sex are legal matters. Society has decided that they hate it and that they wish to punish men who commit what they see as an immoral act. As far as whether these things should be illegal or not, clinicians throw that over to the lawyers, legislators, politicians, legal theorists and Hell, even public intellectuals because these are the people who, with input from the public, decide what is a crime and what is not. Whether something should be illegal or not is not a psychological question, nor should it be.
