False Equivalence and Cognitive Avoidance

Roxanne

I was... uh, I was looking at this transcript from a 2023 journal entry, and it honestly... it just completely stopped me in my tracks. It's this... this incredibly chilling moment where the speaker is trying to rationalize, of all things, a preference for the physique of a... a twelve, ten, or even a six-year-old child. And the way they try to do it... they, they point to the anti-aging industry. They say, well, it's a multi-billion-dollar business, right? People get plastic surgery, they buy creams because they aren't comfortable with their bodies, so... so how is wanting a child's body any different? It's- it's this massive, deeply twisted false equivalence. They are taking a commercial cosmetic trend and using it to try and normalize something incredibly dangerous.

Roxanne

And it... it doesn't stop at the skincare comparison. They actually try to co-opt the language of modern wellness and identity politics. They bring up transgender transitions, and then they... they literally invent this term, "boysexual." They claim it's just a... a "preference," like rejecting a man's mature physique, like chest hair or whatever, and wanting a younger, pre-pubescent look instead. They are trying to wrap pedophilic attraction in the vocabulary of body autonomy and personal aesthetic choice. It's a deliberate, highly calculated attempt to strip the predatory nature out of the behavior by framing it as a... a harmless identity, a- a natural biological phase that they just want to "park" in.

Roxanne

But then, in the same breath, they're complaining about the reaction they got. They talk about this "pumpkin pie" journal entry where they hired people of a very specific age, gender, and physique, and then they're utterly bewildered when people like Jenny and Craig accuse them of grooming and predatory practices. The speaker's defense is basically... "Well, I never mentioned sex in the audio, so how can it be predatory?" It's a complete, deliberate blind spot. They think that if they just scrub the explicit mention of sex from their words, the highly specific, deeply alarming pattern of targeting a certain age group somehow becomes totally benign. They genuinely seem to believe they're just being bullied by society's "stereotypes."

Roxanne

To make their own desires feel "normal," they start clustering all these other disparate anomalies together. They bring up a show they saw on the Discovery Channel about adult men who live as infants, and then they suddenly pivot to their own occasional desire to have a "Black, brown, or Mexican" body, saying they'd get surgery or take medication for it if they could. It's like... if they can lump everything into this giant, chaotic bucket of "human preferences," then nothing is abnormal. But what's really fascinating—and terrifying—is their explicit refusal to look at psychological history or diagnostic manuals. They literally say they don't want to look back at old DSM guidelines because it might expose them to "more discomfort" about their own identity.

Roxanne

They actually argue that curiosity is "dangerous" if it "flows in a negative direction"—meaning, if self-investigation leads to clinical facts that shatter their fragile self-image, they have to "back out of it." This is textbook cognitive avoidance, a total defense mechanism of willful ignorance. Their mind is actively blocking out clinical psychology, blocking out the DSM, because deep down, they know what those diagnostics would say about them. It's easier to stay in the cave of their own rationalization, claiming society is just "bullying" them, than to face the actual clinical reality of their thoughts. They are choosing comfortable delusion over painful self-awareness, and that... that is a very dangerous place to park.

Roxanne

Anyway, that's... that's the thread I've been pulling on today. Talk soon.