Scientific American reports:
Michael Jackson probably wasn’t a pedophile—at least, not in the strict, biological sense of the word. It’s a morally loaded term, pedophile, that has become synonymous with the very basest of evils. (In fact it’s hard to even say it aloud without cringing, isn’t it?) But according to sex researchers, it’s also a grossly misused term. If Jackson did fall outside the norm in his “erotic age orientation”—and we may never know if he did—he was almost certainly what’s called a hebephile, a newly proposed diagnostic classification in which people display a sexual preference for children at the cusp of puberty, between the ages of, roughly, 11 to 14 years of age…Based on this classification scheme of erotic age orientations, even the world’s best-known fictitious “pedophile,” Humbert Humbert from Nabokov’s masterpiece, Lolita, would more properly be considered a hebephile.
I have a theory that we are so alienated from our own innocent sexuality –that is, the eroticism of our childhood– that our society has only given itself permission to access this feeling tone by leering at so-called ‘child-molestors.’ Of course the leering is disguised as ‘disgust’ and ‘condemnation’ and ‘punishment.’ But it is, nevertheless, organized mayhem that can’t wait to move in for the clinch…