I genuinely don’t understand how someone can get off sexually to underage characters and not be a pedophile. Like, people who get off to Ciel Phantomhive. How is that not reflective of their paraphilias?

fiction-is-not-reality:

Ok anon, I’ll try to walk you through it, feel free to stop me and ask questions if something is unclear: 

Pedophilia has a specific definition with a specific set of criteria that needs to be fulfilled in order to be “diagnosed” (putting it in quotation marks because DSM-V doesn’t see pedophilia as a mental disorder, while ICD-10 does). It’s important to stick with what words mean, and what the scientific community agrees on. 

Pedophilia: primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children. 

“Primary or exclusive” means that it’s either the main thing that gets you off and everything else pales in comparison, or it’s legit the only thing that gets you off.  

“prepubescent children” means that they’re under the legal cut for puberty arbitrarily set at the age of 13 (if the child reaches puberty before they’re 13, that’s a case by case scenario). 

Now, in order to be “diagnosed” with pedophilia (following DSM-V): 

1) Must be at least 16 
1.5) If 16, the AoA (age of attraction) must be at least 5 years younger. This means that if a 16yo is attracted to a 13yo it’s not pedophilia. If they’re attracted to a 12yo it’s not pedophilia. If they’re attracted to an 11yo and below, they might be. 
2) Must have been experiencing recurrent, intense, sexually arousing fantasies,* urges, or behaviors** toward prepubescent children for at least 6 months. 

*And here you might ask: but if recurring fantasies for more than 6 months are enough, why aren’t lolicon and shotacon pedophiles?
Well, because we’re talking about real children, not lines on paper that might and might not even resemble the actual proportions of a child, let alone be one.

**“behaviors” is unspecified but as it’s a separate criterion from the one identifying pedophilic disorder – 3), the one you’ll read in a moment – it’s implied that these behaviors don’t directly involve children.   

Given 1) and 2):
3) If the person has also acted on these urges, and therefore has committed CSA, and/or has experienced distress and/or impairment because of these, then the diagnosis is of pedophilic disorder (pedophilia alone does not require clinical intervention). 

The distinction between what one might find arousing in hentai and then in real life is self-evident with things like tentacle porn, gore, vore, and a looooong list of things that I’ll spare you from imagining. Why can a person find tentacle porn a turn on without everyone expecting them to pop a boner or inundate their panties at the fish market, but suddenly with loli/shota one is 100% a certified pedophile? 
Have you also thought about the fact that one might find loli/shota arousing because they self-insert in the loli/shota character? If hentai perfectly mirrored real paraphilias (it doesn’t) then you’d have to change from pedophilia to autonepiophilia. 
Or maybe the focus is on the characters, their personality, and their interactions, with their age only counting so long as it gives an interesting power exchange dynamic. All variables that can perfectly sustain themselves when shipping in fiction. 

If you want a little brain tease, you’re not a pedophile even if you genuinely but rarely find some kids sexually attractive, or if you have a couple of misleading wet dreams. This because the brain is a marvelous organ that we still don’t understand fully and sometimes fires action potentials at random, and sexuality is only one of the fields where things get easily messy. Because pedophilia requires specific criteria, and because CSA is an action independent from the presence of a defined pattern of sexual attraction (aka one doesn’t need to be a pedophile to commit CSA), majority of child molesters indeed aren’t pedophiles at all. 

Last but not least, fiction is not reality. What one finds arousing or enjoyable or interesting or amusing or terrifying to engage with in fiction doesn’t reflect their real life stance on…anything, really. 

So no, I can assure you that there aren’t 1.106.373 pedophile viewers on this sebaciel video. 

For more talk around loli/shota, scroll through my tag. For its relation to sim cp**, scroll through that other one. 

**sim cp is not synonym with loli/shota, as we have plenty of loli/shota characters who are not just non-erotic, but also not fictionally children at all.