There are a lot of pedophilia-adjacent paraphilias. It’s not just size difference.

There’s the fantasy of having a partner who is innocent and easy to dominate, as per the born sexy yesterday trope. Entire movies have been made about this.

There’s an intrinsic sexual attraction to youth, advantage of which is taken by the fashion industry, using children in compromising poses to market their wares. Underaged kids presented as sex objects has been an unregulated marketing tool for over a century now.

There’s interest in teen coming-of-age scenarios, cinema of which was rampant in the late 1970s to 1980s, which did not shy away from sexuality. Mass market erotica in the 1970s featured teen sex, which became more regulated in later years.

There’s those interested in child sexual experimentation. Children explore their sexuality with their peers, and this is regarded as normal and even healthy according to pediatric consensus. Here in the states, though, we’re puritanical AF, and it’s commonplace for parents to freak out when they catch kids (their own or otherwise) fooling around or exchanging peeks at their bits.¹ I can’t speak for causality but the US has an ageplay community that occupies its niche in the kink sector.

By far, (according to the very few studies we have on the subject) most people who have an interested in child sex or teen sex scenarios either don’t pursue to explore it at all, or do so with deliberate care to avoid harm and wrongdoing. Since the 1990s, the public has become more aware of the harm that can be caused by sexualizing children and teens before they are autonomously ready, and most folk instead seek to explore their own fetishes in safety with consenting adults. Sadly, there are predators out there, but like other violent criminals in the population, they’re the exception and not the norm. (At the same time, our society struggles to be sufficiently concerned about children’s welfare in general, with food insecurity, family insecurity, housing insecurity and healthcare insecurity being at critical highs in the US.)

Incidentally, for a while now, Twitter’s CSAM problem has gotten worse since Musk turned it into X. And xAI’s CSAM problem is significantly worse than those of competing AI services. Musk isn’t willing to correct either matter with additional safeguards or human moderation, rather just yells at his user base and points to the xAI ToS. And also Musk’s disclaimers about his acquaintance with Jeffrey Epstein being only brief and casual are not convincing, and smack of protesting too much and too prematurely. (Kinda like Melania Trump’s disclaimer.)

¹ In the age of cell phones, police and courts of law will bust, convict and imprison underaged teen lovers who are caught sexting each other for creating and distributing CSAM, especially if those images escape into the public. Even if it’s of themselves. Even if they were originally intended to be private. A few states have since passed legislation to allow teens to sext each other so long as they show reasonable caution to keep their pics private, but in most states, police and school administrators still freak out over personal phone snaps of naked teens.