I have noticed something funny. Outside of my own blog, The Anti-Feminist, Holocaust21 and Steve Moxon, there appears to be more activism for pedophilia than hebephilia and ephebophilia. Isn't it funny that there are more people extolling the virtues of attraction to 7-year-olds than 17-year-olds, if my impression is correct? Despite this kind of attraction being so normal that no one can tell the difference on a blind test, someone who goes to jail for sex with a 17-year-old or a picture of a 17-year-old gets almost no support, except from the four MRA blogs mentioned and what exists incidentally on pedophile forums.

But I think I know why. Hebephiles and especially ephebophiles are just normal men who are arbitrarily criminalized, so they lack an identity of their own for the very same reason. Even the words used here to describe them are not in common use, because there is truly no good reason to set them apart. Why should someone who is the victim of an arbitrary age of consent, or even more arbitrarily being four rather than three years older than his 15-year-old girlfriend or something like that, have an identity? The only thing they have in common is blind criminalization, so no wonder they feel no unity. Pedophiles, on the other hand, with their attraction to prepubescent children truly are different than the majority, so it is not surprising that they form communities of the like-minded, whether they are politicized in favor of legalization or of the "non-offending" variety.

This brings me to the question: should pedophile rights be an MRA issue? I don't have the energy to answer this question definitively right now, but suffice it to say that we wouldn't have a movement to speak of without that kind of activism. Someone like Tom Grauer would not exist or be interesting beyond the hard core of MRAs without the inclusion of pedophile rights. And I did proclaim him our new leader for a reason. I invite further discussion in the comments.