Should Hebephilia Be Reclassified As A Psychiatric Disorder? [Part 1]

A.  Introduction

When my mother and I were vacationing in Jaco Beach, Costa Rica so many years ago, we met a family in which the father was Dutch and the mother was Costa Rican. The parents in this same family had several kids. They had a 21-year-old daughter who resembled actress Molly Ringwald as she looked back when she was in the movie titled Sixteen Candles. They had a little girl who looked to be about 8 or 9 years old. They also had a 13-year-old son named Hans. 

Hans was an interesting boy. He spoke both fluent Spanish and English. I noticed that he had kept checking out all the collegiate-age women at the resort. In a conversation that he had with me, he told me that he believed that he could learn very much about life in having sexual relations with women in their late teens and twenties. He initiated the conversation with me by asking me if I knew what it meant to “ride the bicycle.” I responded to him that I remembered a term in English literature called “ride the horse,” and I asked him if it meant what I thought it had meant. He gave me a positive response. Then he told me about his intentions to learn about sex from bedding women 18 years old and beyond. I was barely out of high school at the time and still young enough to keep an open mind about the conversation, but even I was somewhat shocked at what he had just told me. I then chuckled and said, “Hans? If you keep talking like that, you’re going to have your father oiling his shotgun.” Hans then grinned at me and said, “Oh, my father is all for it.” I then laughed in disbelief. On the other hand, he never told me how his mother would have felt about his having sexual relations with significantly older women, and somehow I got the distinct impression that he and his father never had discussed the matter with her. I never really found out what the legal age of consent was in Costa Rica. However, it appeared obvious to me that the authorities never zeroed in on a forbidden relationship between an adolescent and a young adult unless one of the adolescent’s parents blew the whistle on the situation.

During my vacation in Costa Rica, I took this one young lady out to dinner one evening. Her name was Maricela. Don’t worry. She was nearly the same age as me and was barely out of high school like me. As we were both sitting down and eating at a restaurant that same evening, we somehow got onto the subject of forbidden relationships between adolescents and adults. I told her about a teacher named Mr. Greer that I had in the twelfth grade. Shortly after I had met him, I had found out that he had become involved with a 15-year-old girl when he was 38 years old and had married her three years later. By the time I had met him, he was in his early forties and his wife was 19 years old. Maricela told me that she thought that it was no big deal, because she had a friend who at the age of 17 had become involved with a 35-year-old man and then eventually married him. Of course, girls between 15 and 17 years old hooking up with significantly older men raise fewer eyebrows than girls between 12 and 14 years old hooking up with significantly older men. Overall, Maricela made it clear to me that people in her country didn’t get as excited as Americans did about adolescent girls straying outside their age circles to find romance.

A month later, I traveled to New York City to search for a place to live inasmuch as I had secured a transfer there with my employer. While a co-worker and I were on a ferryboat traveling from Staten Island back to Manhattan, I overheard a conversation of a middle-aged couple standing behind my co-worker and me. The man was telling his woman about a 26-year-old man whom he knew and whom people accused of being a cradle robber inasmuch as he had a 13-year-old girlfriend. At first, I had thought that he was joking. However, after I listened to the conversation in further depth, I soon realized that he was serious about what he was saying. Interestingly enough, I found out later on that the statutory age of consent in the state of New York was 17 years old. However, whoever this 26-year-old man was that the middle-aged couple was talking about, apparently he did not seem to care about it.

Toward the end of that same year, I hired a repairman to fix my desk inasmuch as it had gotten damaged while the movers had transported it up the East Coast to my apartment in New York City. This gentleman was 30 years old, and he had obviously lived a very interesting life. He told me that he had multiple jobs inasmuch as he had aspirations of becoming rich someday. He then told me about his adventures down in Brazil back when he was 22 years old. He said to me that he had lived with a tribe of indigenous people in the Amazon jungles. Then he admitted to me that he had engaged in sexual activities with girls as young as 12 years old in that tribe. He described these girls as having the physiques of women in their late twenties. I began laughing inasmuch as it felt so odd that someone would be having a conversation with me concerning something so personal and so taboo in our culture.

Of course, at the time, the United States of America had no extraterritorial laws in which American citizens could be prosecuted for having sexual intercourse with adolescents under 16 years of age in foreign jurisdictions. Whatever the statutory age of consent was in a foreign jurisdiction was the law that applied to everyone who resided in that country or visited that country. Then, of course, along came former Congressman Joseph Patrick Kennedy II (“former Congressman Joe Kennedy”) with his bright idea to export the age-of-consent laws from our nation to all over the world for any American citizen traveling or living abroad. Eventually, he got this bill signed into law on a Federal level. In an interview with the media before the bill was ratified, he gave a chastising speech on how wrong he felt it was for adult Americans to go traveling to foreign countries with low ages of consent to have sex with teenagers who would otherwise be jailbait in our nation, as a way of circumventing the American age-of-consent laws. However, after his brother, Michael Lemoyne Kennedy, was accused of having an affair with a 14-year-old babysitter, former Congressman Joe Kennedy was all ready to move mountains to keep his brother from ever seeing the inside of a state correctional facility. What a hypocrite he turned out to be. Then again, Congressman Joe Kennedy is not the first and only politician in our nation ever to live by double standards.

All of the above-described events happened in a time era when very few people had ever heard of the terms “hebephile” and “hebephilia.” The terms “ephebophile” and “ephebophilia” were equally obscure at that time as well. If you want to know the detailed history and background of hebephilia and ephebophilia, you can find it in Part H of my Steemit article titled “The Great American Controversy Over Underage Marriage.” However, in this Steemit article, I am going to focus on hebephilia and where it stands on the psychiatric spectrum of age-related attractions, so to speak. In a nutshell, hebephilia is the sexual attraction that an adult has to an adolescent between the ages of 11 and 14 years old.

It is no secret to anyone reading this Steemit article of mine here that the Internet, especially YouTube, is overwhelmed with a cesspool of self-appointed pedo-experts, for a lack of a better term. As I described in my previous Steemit article titled “California Proceeds With Caution Regarding Underage Marriage Bill,” these self-appointed pedo-experts are like fanatical child advocates who believe that they can accuse anyone of being a pedophile and somehow magically that person becomes one. However, they do not live in the real world inasmuch as it does not work that way. Before someone can be deemed to be a pedophile, that person either has to be diagnosed as one or admit to being one. Otherwise, any accusation that anyone makes against that individual of being a pedophile constitutes defamation of character. These self-appointed pedo-experts do not speak the gospel truth on this topic regardless of how adamant they may be in believing that nothing they say can be refuted.

Not only are these self-appointed pedo-experts so quick and ready to slap others with false accusations of pedophilia for something as simple as merely disagreeing with them on a juvenile-justice-related topic, they do not take the time to do their research or even look into any statements that others make in contradiction to theirs. They are as stupid and ignorant as anyone can be, and they believe themselves to be on a crusade to save all the kids of the world from the evil clutches of every child predator out there; but they are really individuals whose lives are so devoid of any meaning or rationale to the point that they have to engage in their do-gooder, busybody activities to make themselves feel whole and complete. Their favorite line is, “You are a pedophile, period.” At the same time, it becomes apparent that most of these self-appointed pedo-experts are the way they are inasmuch as they have deep-seated insecurities and fears about their own sexuality and falsely accusing others of being pedophiles is their only way of dealing with it, to the best of their knowledge and ability. At this point, I’m sure that most of you realize that these self-appointed pedo-experts have no idea what the definition of hebephilia is. They just want society to believe that there is no difference between pedophilia and hebephilia. However, their assertion in that respect could not be any further from the truth than it is.

B.  Hebephilia’s Legal Status And Societal Status Do Not Make It A Paraphilia

A paraphilia describes a sexual interest and is a necessary but not a sufficient predicate for a paraphilic disorder diagnosis. A paraphilic disorder is a paraphilia that is currently causing distress or impairment to the individual or a paraphilia whose satisfaction has entailed personal harm, or risk of harm, to others. The term “paraphilia” is regularly defined as a psychiatric disorder of sexual deviance. Therefore, for the purposes of this Steemit article of mine here, I am only going to elaborate on what is and is not a paraphilia. I will not make reference to paraphilic disorders inasmuch as that will be another Steemit article of mine for another time.

From the time I was a little kid, I remember this one short story titled “The Lottery,” which was about a town of people who held a ritual from time to time in which each of them selected a slip in a gathering. Whoever ultimately selected the marked slip was stoned to death. The reason for this ritual was for the sake of tradition. Anyone who ever read this short story might view it to warn society about allowing for social taboos and laws to remain in existence long after those same social taboos and laws have outlived their purposes. Also, anyone who ever read this short story might have viewed it as warning society that perhaps there were social taboos and laws that never served any purpose in the first place and had no reason to remain in existence. Unfortunately, the United States of America has not completely wised up to this same school of thought, and our nation’s laws and our society’s attitudes reflect this problem quite blatantly.   If you read the comparison I made in Part D of my Steemit article titled “The Great American Controversy Over Underage Marriage” between the American film titled Hard Candy and the Italian film titled Ginger and Cinnamon, it becomes very clear that the American culture frowns upon hebephilia despite what any other societal perspectives of it may exist in different cultures throughout the world. At the same time, what makes it all so interesting is that most men over 21 years old who have ever had extra-Platonic feelings for adolescent girls in the 12-to-14-year-old age bracket do not wish to be identified or labeled as hebephiles in the same sense that most Asian-Americans do not wish to be called “Orientals” and many Mexican-Americans do not appreciate being called “Chicanos.” These terms are taken as negative connotations.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (“DSM-5”) defines a pedophile as someone 16 years of age or older who is sexually attracted to a prepubescent child generally 13 years old or younger who is at least five years their junior. However, what the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.) appears to have done is classify adults who are attracted to youngsters between 11 and 13 years of age who have actually started going through puberty or have almost completed puberty as a separate class of individuals known as hebephiles. Also, even though a 14-year-old adolescent is excluded as a prospective object of pedophilia according to its definition in the DSM-5, the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.) also defines adults who are sexually attracted to 14-year-olds as hebephiles. Self-appointed pedo-experts on YouTube insist that “hebephiles” have internal wiring in their heads that is no different from that of pedophiles. In the YouTube video below, YouTuber Dead Spinster, who is apparently not an American from the sound of his accent, criticizes a video that YouTuber Jenn posted about “kids” having sexual intercourse with adults.

Although I agree with YouTuber Dead Spinster’s disapproval of YouTuber Jenn’s video only insofar as she did not specify in it whether she was talking about prepubescent children under the age of 11 or adolescents 12 to 17 years of age and, therefore, she caused a great amount of confusion among her viewers, I must denounce YouTuber Dead Spinster’s cheap and prejudicial attempts to blur the lines between pedophilia and hebephilia in his YouTube video above. Pedophilia and hebephilia have nothing to do with each other despite all the propaganda and Puritanical rhetoric he spewed in his YouTube video to mislead his audience to believe that they were virtually identical to each other. Overall, he presented himself in his YouTube video as someone who grew up in a sheltered environment and currently lives in a white picket fence fantasy world in that he made no distinction between toddlers and adolescents, even though reality has it that we live in a country where *boys as young as 14 years old are forcing adult women at gunpoint to fellate their own 12-year-old sons, and girls as young as 13 years old here in our nation are misrepresenting themselves on Facebook to be over the age of majority to get young adult men into trouble with the law. (*Note – see Parts F and G of my Steemit article titled “The Great American Controversy Over Underage Marriage” for details of such events.)

YouTuber Dead Spinster even made the mistake of showing statistical information concerning the “sexual abuse” of minors from 1 year of age to 17 years old in the United States of America in an unsuccessful effort to support his assertions, even though these so-called statistics never specified whether these minors’ victimizers were older adults or juveniles the same age as them. Moreover, the definition of “sexual abuse” changes so drastically for a minor from the time that he or she is a toddler to the time that he or she is about to graduate from high school both on a legal level and a societal level that it does not do justice to bundle them all together as one single research study. YouTuber Dead Spinster sailed blindly through a labyrinth of conjectures and suppositions in his video, and just about everything that he stated in it was debunked in Dutch movie producer Jan Willem-Bruere’s film titled Are All Men Pedophiles? You can see this same film below.

Luckily, there are also content creators on YouTube like Girl Buu who have actually done their homework on this topic. If you watch YouTuber Girl Buu’s video below, you will find that she emphatically makes an educated distinction between pedophilia and hebephilia.

Nevertheless, my main objective herein is to answer the question that many of you are asking on whether hebephilia should be reclassified as a psychiatric disorder. I’m already well aware of how the law treats hebephilia here in our nation and what American society thinks about it. However, those two aspects are, for the most part, lateral in relevance. Currently, the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.) does not deem hebephilia to be a psychiatric disorder known as a paraphilia, whereas they do deem pedophilia to be so.

C.  Expert Opinions Lean Toward Hebephilia’s Exclusion From Being Deemed A Paraphilia

There are two different Bibles for mental-health professionals throughout the world that provide the definitions of pedophilia and hebephilia and distinguish whether or not they are psychiatric disorders. The American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.) publishes the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders periodically, and according to the fifth edition of this same publication (“ DSM-5”), pedophilia is a psychiatric disorder known as a paraphilia inasmuch as, in part, individuals who fit this description may pose a danger to prepubescent children if they are unable to control their urges. However, according to the DSM-5, hebephilia is not a paraphilia, and hebephilia is normative behavior despite that our nation’s laws and societal attitudes do not readily embrace it.

On the other hand, the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) does not appear to share the same opinion or interpretation of pedophilia and hebephilia as the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.). The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) periodically publishes a manual titled the International Classification of Diseases, and the tenth edition of this same publication (“ ICD-10”) contains its own definitions of pedophilia and hebephilia. According to this same publication, a pedophile is an adult who is sexually attracted to either a prepubescent child or a youngster in the early stages of puberty. That is, according to the DSM-5, a 20-year-old man who finds himself developing extra-Platonic feelings for a 12- or 13-year-old girl who has entered into puberty would be defined as a hebephile and deemed to have normative behavior, whereas, according to the ICD-10, that same young man could be branded as a pedophile. In other words, the ICD-10 ultimately defines hebephilia to be a psychiatric disorder in that it makes no distinction between pedophilia and hebephilia.

Some experts adhere to the ICD-10 on whether hebephiles suffer from a psychiatric disorder. A mental-health organization from Germany appears to view hebephilia in the same light as pedophilia in the YouTube video below.   

It greatly bewilders me why any mental-health organization in Germany would adhere to the adverse definition of hebephilia that appears in the ICD-10 rather than the benign one that appears in the DSM-5. Unlike the United States of America that has statutory age-of-consent laws that impose an environment of austerity against adult-adolescent couples, Germany appears to show a much greater magnitude of tolerance toward adult-adolescent relationships than our nation does in that their age-of-consent laws virtually mirror those of Argentina in the way that I described in Part G of my Steemit article titled “The Great American Controversy Over Underage Marriage.” 

Nevertheless, at the end of the day, most mental-health professionals in the United States of America as well as in many other countries adhere to the DSM-5’s definition of hebephilia rather than the ICD-10’s definition of it, and they deem it to be normative behavior despite that laws in their particular jurisdictions may require them to turn any patient into the authorities who engages in such behavior in an unlawful way. The ICD-10 is the less popular and less credible publication of the two. Therefore, most mental-health professionals here in our nation do not pay any mind to what the ICD-10 reads about pedophilia and hebephilia. However, there are charlatans and spin doctors, mainly in the criminal justice system, here in North America who have attempted to misuse the excuse that they would like for the definition of pedophilia in the DSM-5 to mirror that of the ICD-10, in order to convince the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.) to reclassify hebephilia as a psychiatric disorder.

D.  A Fierce Tug-Of-War Has Pervaded Among Mental-Health Professionals On Whether To Reclassify Hebephilia As A Psychiatric Disorder

Back in 2009, Dr. Raymond Blanchard got this bright idea in his head, so to speak, to round up a legion of spin doctors and devise a research study in support of an overall objective of his to expand the definition of pedophilia to include adults who are sexually attracted to adolescents between the ages of 11 and 14 years old. Among that same legion of spin doctors was Dr. James Cantor, of whom I have never had a very high opinion inasmuch as he engages in the same unorthodox practices as Dr. Blanchard. I make mention of both Dr. Blanchard and Dr. Cantor in Part H of my Steemit article titled “The Great American Controversy Over Underage Marriage.” Believe it or not, Dr. Cantor has actually proclaimed himself to be an expert on pedophilia. That proclamation of his will have me laughing all the way to the grave between now and after I take my last breath.

Dr. Blanchard assembled a legion of spin doctors of mainly mental-health professionals, so to speak, in the criminal justice system who have treated adult sexual offenders whose victims were between the ages of 11 and 14 years old. However, to the best of my knowledge, neither he nor any of his colleagues in this legion of his have ever examined any adult men who were legally and happily married to adolescent girls between 12 and 14 years of age or had significantly younger adult wives who were in that same age bracket when their husbands wedded them, which do exist. My response to his actions is that if he and his colleagues seek to scrape the bottom of the barrel, they are only going to get the results that they are looking to obtain for their Puritanical mission to demonize every adult man on the face of the planet who has ever had extra-Platonic feelings for adolescent girls. There were so many characteristics of this same so-called research study of his that simply stunk to high heaven and could never have given the public at large any kind of accurate findings.  It is no different than if Dr. Blanchard had conducted a research study on gerantophiles and only examined men who had broken into homes and had brutally raped little old ladies. He could misuse the results of that so-called research study to fool the world into believing that all geratophiles were serial rapists.

To make a long story short, Dr. Blanchard pieced together a proposal to revise the diagnosis of pedophilia and to include hebephilia as a subset of “pedohebephilia,” and he eventually presented it to the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.) for inclusion as an adverse diagnosis in the DSM-5. If Dr. Blanchard had gotten his way about it, this same diagnosis would have been included in the DSM-5 as a paraphilia and any adult who was sexually attracted to an adolescent 14 years old or younger would have been deemed to have suffered a psychiatric disorder that made him or her a danger to society. Luckily, there were mental-health professionals here in our nation who saw nothing positive resulting from this action of his, and Dr. Bruce Rind was one of them.

Dr. Rind is a mental-health professional who hails from the east coast of the United States of America, and he has challenged the establishment of his very own profession on numerous such matters. Dr. Rind was and still is of the school of thought that a young man’s sexual attraction to an adolescent girl in the 11-to-14-year-old age bracket may follow him well beyond his own adolescence without that same man ever developing a psychiatric disorder or a paraphilia. As I stated in Part J; Section 1 of my Steemit article titled “The Great American Controversy Over Underage Marriage,” parents and society here in our nation make the mistake of teaching male youths when they are, say, 14 or 13 or even 12 years old that when they approach their twenties, a light switch is going to grow on their bodies that they can easily flip off to put their hormones in check every time a middle-school or high-school girl smiles at them and says “Hi” in a flirtatious manner. Especially if she looks as though she could fit right in with a group of college women as for her physical and cosmetic precocity. Dr. Rind is clearly one of the good guys in the mental-health profession. He and others like him warned the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.) on how Dr. Blanchard’s proposal, if ever adopted, would have opened up Pandora’s Box to a whole myriad of problems that would be detrimental to society in the form of abuse of police authority, prosecutorial misconduct, and unjust civil commitment, among other things. This debate between both the proponents and the opponents of this same proposal became a fierce one right up until the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.) published the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (“DSM-5”) in 2013.

Now, I completely get it. Some of you out there may be parents who have daughters who fall within the 11-to-14-year-old age range, and you find Dr. Blanchard’s proposal to be attractive. After all, most parents absolutely freak out whenever they discover that their 13-year-old daughter has been having a sexually charged conversation online with a significantly older man or that a schoolteacher is pregnant with their 14-year-old son’s baby. It is simply the way many of us Americans have been indoctrinated to think despite any facts that are sent our way to question our standards concerning the safety of adolescents, so to speak. Even videos posted on social media vilify any adult man who exhibits any sort of extra-Platonic interest in a pubescent or adolescent girl as being a sexual predator whose only intentions for a girl that young are dishonorable ones. The YouTube video below does nothing to hide such paranoia that currently exists in American society.

It amazes me how much energy content creators put into playing on the fears and insecurities of the American people regarding incidents in which adult men pursue relationships with adolescent girls, whereas such an industry remains virtually oblivious alongside our society as a whole to the much realer problem of the epidemic of deadbeat teenage fathers that are wreaking havoc in the lives of girls as young as 11 and 12 years old throughout our nation. There are even people in our nation who are stupid enough to believe that such sordid conduct by teenage boys is normal adolescent behavior. If Dr. Blanchard really wanted to do something constructive in his line of work, he would come up with an adverse diagnosis for adolescent boys 13 to 17 years old who get their kicks from impregnating middle-school and high-school girls and then bailing on them and even soiling their reputations before their peers.

In any event, I am just as anti-pedophile as all of you parents out there are. However, I find it reprehensible that anyone who is not a pedophile be wrongfully accused of being one; and if Dr. Blanchard is to get his way, more people than before will be wrongfully branded with that same label. Dr. Blanchard had dollar signs in his eyes when he first introduced his proposal to the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.), and he couldn’t care less about any harm that his actions may bring upon society as a whole. We all need to be leery of self-serving, self-styled opportunists like him in the mental-health profession. If you read an online article titled “Protect Your Children From Shady Shrinks” by Jason B Truth, you will see exactly what I mean.

Many of us may remember that Phillip Garrido kidnapped Jaycee Lee Dugard back in the 1990s when she was just 11 years old and impregnated her at the age of 13 against her will. He did so with the help of his wife, Nancy Garrido. It wasn’t until 2009 that Ms. Dugard was rescued from Phillip and Nancy Garrido. Probably many people who knew about Dr. Blanchard’s proposal that same year to expand the definition of pedophilia to include hebephilia in its same diagnostic realms found his objective to be quite appealing. Then when Gina DeJesus and her two other co-victims were finally rescued from the evil clutches of Ariel Castro only a matter of weeks before the DSM-5 was to be published in the spring of 2013, Dr. Blanchard appeared to look more and more like a hero seeking to benefit all humanity with this same proposal of his. After all, Gina DeJesus was only 14 years old when Ariel Castro kidnapped her and began raping her. I did not shed even one tear after I had heard that Mr. Castro had committed suicide in prison later on. Whenever any of us think of the atrocities that these two grown men committed against both young girls who were in the 11-to-14-year-old age range when both of these men abducted them and began raping them, Dr. Blanchard almost appears to be the go-to man for solving all of society’s problems in this regard. However, let’s look at the other side of the issue before any of us jump to conclusions.

When Oliver Vanetta “Doolittle” Lynn, Jr. was 21 years old, he married a 13-year-old country singer named Loretta Lynn. Some of you reading my Steemit article here may be too young to remember this same couple. Doolittle Lynn invested his time, money, and hard work into helping Loretta Lynn build her career as a musician from the time that they both got married. They both remained married right up until Doolittle Lynn died in 1996. In other words, he remained in love with her long after she was no longer an adolescent girl. By the time that he had died, she was in her sixties, which is hardly a spring chicken. If there is such a thing as an afterlife, he will likely still be very much in love with her when she gets to be 99 years old. Even if anyone could argue that he was still interested in adolescent girls long after Loretta Lynn was no longer a teenager, a cause for concern would have been completely unwarranted inasmuch as he never cheated on Loretta Lynn with an adolescent girl, after she aged on into her twenties and thirties as far as I know. Overall, Doolittle Lynn was never a threat or a danger to adolescent girls.

Some of you may be old enough to remember that Tippi Hedren starred in the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock classic movie titled The Birds. When her daughter, Melanie Griffith, was only 13 years old, Ms. Hedren had occasion to work in a movie with actor, Don Johnson, who at the time was 22 years old, back in the early 1970s. Shortly thereafter, Ms. Griffith and Mr. Johnson hooked up with each other despite their age difference. When Ms. Griffith was 14 years old, she moved in with Mr. Johnson. Ms. Hedren was not happy about it. Eventually, Mr. Johnson and Ms. Griffith got married. Perhaps their marriage and relationship were on and off. However, they both prospered in their respective entertainment careers. I believe that they would likely have been happily married to each other to this very day if Antonio Banderas had not appeared on the scene. Interestingly enough, after Oprah Winfrey invited Ms. Griffith onto her television talk show, Ms. Winfrey expressed no objection to the fact that Ms. Griffith was in her early teens and Mr. Johnson was in his twenties when the couple first became an item despite that Ms. Winfrey has repeatedly publicized her support for tougher age-of-consent laws throughout our nation. I give a multitude of examples to this effect throughout my Steemit article titled “The Great American Controversy Over Underage Marriage.”

Here is my point. When a 25-year-old man kidnaps a 3-year-old toddler from a playground and violates her body in every way possible, he may get caught and be sent to prison for a lengthy period of time. However, after he gets out of prison, he will still be the same person that he was before and he will always be the way that he is. Of course, if he seeks therapy, he may learn how to control his urges so that he does not harm another child. However, he will only attain that goal, if he truly wants to be helped. Otherwise, he will go on committing the same crime as he ages on into his mid-life and on into his twilight years. In any event, he will always be sexually attracted to prepubescent children and pose a threat to them if he refuses to seek therapy to control his urges. On the other hand, if an adult man falls in love with an adolescent girl and he eventually takes her to be his bride in a Loretta-Lynn-style marriage and he loves her right up into her twilight years, no harm has been done and it does not do justice even to imply that he has identical internal wiring in his head as a man who goes sexually molesting toddlers.

In a nutshell, if a pedophile acts on his urges and refuses to seek therapy to address them, he will always pose a danger to prepubescent children around him. However, if a man in his twenties or older falls in love with an adolescent girl and he goes through the proper channels to make their love a reality either in the form of a legal marriage or in the form of a formal courtship in which he and the young girl practice abstinence until their honeymoon night, then he is no danger to anyone. Therefore, it appears that adult men can and do outgrow their hebephiliac or ephebophiliac tendencies, whereas a pedophile will always be the way that he is; and even though a pedophile may learn to control his urges through therapy, those same urges will never go away and will always be a part of his psychiatric makeup. That is not to say that there are not adult men who are a threat and a danger to adolescent girls as young as 11 and 12 years old. There are. However, it is completely understandable why Dr. Rind and other mental-health professionals like him fought Dr. Blanchard’s proposal tooth and nail to ensure that it never made its way into the DSM-5. More harm than good would have resulted from this proposal if the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.) had approved it. Luckily, the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.) ultimately rejected Dr. Blanchard’s proposal when the DSM-5 was adopted in 2013, and the American people were spared the chaos that would have ensued as a result of that proposal making its way into the DSM-5 in the form of an adverse diagnosis of “pedohebephilia.”

I may just be a layman in my research of modern psychiatry. However, if I were to come face to face with Dr. Blanchard or Dr. Cantor, common sense would prompt me to ask them why they don’t come up with a benign diagnosis of “hebeteleiophilia” for individuals like Doolittle Lynn and Don Johnson who continue to be in love with their respective significant others from the time that they are adolescents to the time that they are middle-aged and beyond. That is, create a category on the psychiatric spectrum of age-related attractions that identifies a group of mentally healthy adult men who may just happen to develop extra-Platonic feelings for an adolescent girl within the 12-to-14-year-old age bracket and pursue those feelings in a dignified and respectable manner rather than in an exploitative and abusive manner. After all, anyone who has ever personally known the late Doolittle Lynn or Don Johnson will likely tell you that these two gentlemen could never have the same internal wiring in their heads as monstrosities like Jesse Timmendequas, Joseph Duncan III, and John Couey.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that these two names in the entertainment industry never suffered from any kind of paraphilia despite any propaganda and junk science that Dr. Blanchard and Dr. Cantor have fed the public at large. Dr. Blanchard and Dr. Cantor at least have to know that there are exceptions to every rule, even when it comes to paraphilias. However, greed is the prime motivator of these two opportunists’ actions to find inventive ways to misuse their statuses as mental-health professionals to demonize such men any way that they can. There is just way too much money to be made for them to do the right thing, and let’s face it. The mental-health profession is a lucrative industry that more often than not places profit before integrity, as much as it pains me to make this same statement about it. Fortunately, there are still a few decent people in that same profession such as Dr. Rind and other mental-health professionals like him, and they are the true champions of societal and intellectual evolution within the human race.

What is so outrageous is that opportunists in the mental-health profession like Dr. Blanchard and Dr. Cantor are not going away any time soon. It is my intuition that both of these charlatans and spin doctors are going to continue to persuade the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.) again and again to add the adverse diagnosis of “pedohebephilia” to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until it either finally makes its way into one of the editions of that same manual that get published in the future or the mental-health profession ostracizes them for their unorthodox practices altogether in the same manner that it did to Dr. James Grigson for his abuses upon the public.

If this fierce tug-of-war between opportunists like Dr. Blanchard and Dr. Cantor and philanthropists like Dr. Rind rages on in the mental-health profession over whether hebephilia should go on being deemed as normative behavior or reclassified as a psychiatric disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, what I frankly believe is going to happen in the long run is that eventually the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.) will establish a middle ground for both parties and decide to split hebephilia up into two different subcategories. That is, eventually there will exist a favorable psychiatric term that will be coined as “type 1 hebephilia” that will deem adults who are sexually attracted to adolescents between 11 and 14 years of age as being normative in their behavior, and there will also exist an adverse diagnosis that will be coined as “type 2 hebephilia” that will deem adults who are sexually attracted to youngsters between 11 and 14 years of age as being individuals that suffer from a paraphilia depending on each case-by-case situation. In other words, adult men who marry adolescent girls between 12 and 14 years of age, with honorable intentions or enter into a formal courtship with them will be defined as type 1 hebephiles, and online predators that you read and hear about in the press and the media and who e-mail lewd photographs to youngsters between 11 and 14 years old and attempt to meet them for sex will likely be diagnosed as type 2 hebephiles. It is just like the medical profession has coined the terms “type 1 diabetes” and “type 2 diabetes” to distinguish both medical conditions from each other, and it may be the only way for mental-health professionals to weed the good apples out from the bad apples, so to speak; but at least it will be a better direction to take this same fierce tug-of-war in than splicing the diagnosis of pedophilia and the sexual inclination of hebephilia together to create an adverse diagnosis of “pedohebephilia” that will definitely be more harmful than beneficial to society as a whole in the long run. In my humble opinion, I believe that the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.) should just leave well enough alone, because there is going to be good and bad in every category on the psychiatric spectrum of age-related attractions.

If I had my way, the terms “hebephilia,” “hebephile,” “ephebophilia,” “ephebophile,” “teleiophilia,” “teleiophile,” and the likes would not exist, because these clinical terms really bring nothing to the table for society but rather divide our society up into different groups of people. If a young man enters into his twenties, still feeling an attraction to adolescent girls as young as 12 years old, his inclination does not necessarily have to be something sexually adverse in any manner but rather perhaps a product of a nostalgia that he is feeling from having missed out on that one first love that every young boy wants during their adolescent years. For example, if a 21-year-old man who is still a virgin and has never had a girlfriend, should become romantically involved with a 13- or 14-year-old girl, it could very well be that he just wants the opportunity to experience that one first love that he missed out on when he was in middle school or early high school. Moreover, he may feel flattered from the experience of being that young girl’s first love as well.

It is understandable that the mental-health profession has terms like “pedophile” and “pedophilia,” because those terms actually describe people who suffer from a paraphilia that could make them a danger to vulnerable children. However, it appears that most hebephiles and ephebophiles, if you want to call them by those terms, outgrow their sexual attractions to adolescents 12 to 17 years old in that many of them continue to feel their sexual attraction toward their adolescent partners as their adolescent partners mature into early adulthood and eventually into middle age and beyond. That is, hebephilia and ephebophilia are both finite in nature in that people who fall within these categories eventually mature into teleiophiles at one point or another or their hebephiliac and ephebophiliac inclinations become dormant inasmuch as these individuals find themselves happily married for their entire life to the same significant others that they fell in love with when those significant others were adolescents. A pedophile is always going to be a pedophile no matter what direction he or she takes his or her life in. People can argue that some pedophiles are virtuous, so to speak, and do not harm children. However, it is probable that very few, if any, pedophiles will ever someday become solid through-and-through teleiophiles.

Pedophilia and hebephilia are kind of like Tijuana and San Diego. They may be next-door neighbors on the psychiatric spectrum of age-related attractions, but they are both like night and day; and comparing them with each other is like comparing apples to oranges. Of course, Dr. Blanchard and his legion of spin doctors did everything they could to misconstrue both categories on that spectrum to make them appear to be like fraternal twins. That is the reason why I always warn people to be leery of anything that this opportunist peddles to the public at large. He does not have anyone’s best interests at heart except for his own, and he as well as Dr. Cantor simply cannot be trusted as reliable sources of information related to the mental-health profession. They are both charlatans and spin doctors, and they should not be trusted.

[Article Continued In Part 2]

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