During deliberation about
H.R.4655 - CREEPER Act of 2017, Rep. Donovan, Daniel M., Jr. [R-NY-11] said (and I quote):
"Science has shown that dolls normalize pedophilia behavior [sic]."
I can only trace this claim to
a tweet made by National Center on Sexual Exploitation, which refers to
a law paper written by Maras & Shapiro in 2017.
The paper states:
"In accordance with the third tenet of social learn-ing theory, pedophiles receive two types of rewards that increase the performance of abuse and exploita-tion of children.
90 One is praise from other pedophiles when they share pictures/films and/or describe their sexual abuse and exploitation of children, therein contributing to the “normalizing” of these actions and thoughts.91 Another is from the physical arousal and pleasure obtained from watching and performing the sexual acts on children. For example, child sex dolls and robots that have recordings of pleasure sounds, when combined with the pedophile’s orgasm through sexual activity with them will positively reinforce the message that children enjoy sexual activities with adults. Child sex dolls are (and child sex robots will be, if not already) created in such a way that perpetra-tors will believe that the sex doll (or robot) is a real child."
There are a few problems with this, which should be obvious.
- The citations refer to another articles in law journals, not scientific journals. So this entire claim actually has no basis in science. It is an attempt by lawyers to interpret and apply scientific ideas that they do not understand to a topic they are arguing for (this happens all the time). They also refer to scientific textbooks that do not concern themselves with this example, but rather explain learning from a broader psychological standpoint that is not applicable to neurologically-based sexual interests like pedophilia, heterosexuality, or homosexuality.
- The first "reward" is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. We are not talking about abuse or exploitation of children, we are talking about sexual activity with dolls.
- The second "reward" has the same problem and applies its argument about sex dolls to children without making any reasonable connection between the two at all.
- An attempt to connect the two is made at the end, but anyone with a brain will immediately recognize that this is patently nonsense. When people are ordering sex dolls, they don't have a delusion that they are ordering living humans. They know they are ordering dolls. Nobody believes their sex doll is a real person.
That is the only "scientific" basis for this argument, and on top of being complete horse shit, it's not even scientific. The consensus among researching sexologists is that banning sex dolls could only increase the amount of sexual crimes committed against children, which is obviously fucking disgusting and I will blame that on everyone who votes for this idiotic bill. To back this up, I will quote the words of
sexologist James Cantor, one of the world's leading researchers on pedophilia, in an email sent to me.
"The bottom line is that there has never been a study looking directly at this question [of the correlation between child sex dolls and crimes against children] at all. That is, there has never been a study that, for example, gave out such dolls and tracked what happened. (Indeed, I’m not sure if such a study is actually feasible.)
Rather, my opinion (and those of my colleagues) is based on what we know about what causes pedophilia and makes a person more likely to act on it. People who believe such dolls would increase risk generally assume that pedophilia is something learned and therefore could be “reinforced” by pairing together masturbation with stimuli depicting children. The research is very solid, however, in saying that pedophilia is not learned and does not get stronger or weaker with reinforcement or punishment. The criminality literature suggests instead that the probability of a pedophile committing a crime goes up for the same reasons it does in other kinds of people committing other kinds of crimes—when they feel the most desperate."
This bill has already passed the US House. It is waiting in committee in the Senate. Call or visit your senators and tell them to listen to the science and not the shit that an emotionally reactionary idiot makes up. We need to protect children from the irreversible damage that this bill may do to them.
