Today’s Wall
Tierrechte Messel, draft 24.09.2026
An appeasement of prevailing attitudes might inhibit making visible how social myths shape social realities.
In the case of pedophilia:
The problem is not only when an adult desires a child, but when a child can be incorporated into an adult system of meaning in which the child becomes legible as a sexual object. When this happens a more fundamental question needs to be asked, like: what kind of conception of the human makes sexualization such a powerful mode of interpreting persons in the first place?
Sexuality does not merely exist as a private human drive. Anthropologically it plays into notions of social roles, identities, emotional expectations, all kinds of norms norms and distinctions that can become so familiar that they appear self-evident. The assumption that sexuality constitutes a natural, almost unquestionable organizing principle of human existence is itself historically situated, shaped by particular histories in particular of patriarchy, belief, family organization, reproduction, gender and social power. What can appear to be an eternal “God-given” rule of human nature may therefore be a historically produced conception of the human.
The critical question is really whether the sexualization of human identity has become so conceptually dominant that in context with pedophilia adult sexuality is seen to be projected backwards onto childhood, making aspects of the child intelligible through a meaning-system that is not the child’s own.
The problem, then, is not simply sexuality, but the tendency to draw another person into the narrow field of meaning through which we understand ourselves.
And the difficulty begins even before we ask what counts as “sexual.” The very assumption that sexuality constitutes a special domain of human existence already funnels human experience into a particular system of thought. It presupposes that certain forms of sensing, feeling, or typically intimacy, desire and embodiment, though it can basically be any feelings, belong together as a distinct category – “sexuality” – and that this category deserves a particular psychological, social and identity-related significance.
What is presented as a neutral description of human nature is therefore already an interpretation. Once sexuality has been constituted as such a special domain, the experiences assigned to it can be highlighted, interpreted and made into markers of identity. The category begins to organize the person rather than merely describe overall aspects of experience. And because this model is culturally powerful, it can be projected onto others; ultimately onto children in their given societal role […]. The problem is therefore not only what we call sexual, but the prior decision to make “sexuality” a special kind of thing at all in a way which probably needs more questioning.
Which various normalizations are involved in all the scales of “sentiments”?
What if the sexualization of childhood is therefore not merely an isolated aberration, but an extreme manifestation of a culture that has made sexuality one of its primary definitions of what a human being is? And what if this reveals a more general problem: instead of allowing the other to remain other, we continually advance ourselves into the other and pull the other into ourselves?
Today’s wall may therefore be precisely the difficulty we face in questioning the self-imposing privileged position of sexuality in the definition of the human, that we all are supposed to accept by definitory standard.
The open question for us could be: Could a supposedly private sexual inclination also constitute a form of prejudice – a way of perceiving and interpreting another being through categories that originate in oneself and are then projected onto the other? The problem doesn’t end with distinguishing thought as categorically not being identical with an act, but with the kinds views that are contained in the projection which can already be harmful to the being who has been made its object. Since where does the social view on the other start and end in society when it comes to the adult and child relations, the generational situations.
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