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Notes
As well, I am compelled to address an especially unkind and incorrect point in Tozdan and Briken’s reading of my Letter, mainly because it is inflammatory, not because it is scientifically interesting. Tozdan and Briken (2018) say, “We consider it ethically inappropriate to assume a paraphilic disorder in 8–10-year-old children when they feel attracted to other children of the same age, even retrospectively.” Indeed, in my Letter, there is no mention of paraphilic disorder and I did not explicitly make such an argument. It is inaccurate to cast aspersions on a colleague’s ethical compass when an explicit, reasoned, and supported argument has not been presented for an unethical position. If I had made such a direct statement and provided argument to support what Tozdan and Briken accuse me of, then they would be correct in their statement. As it stands, they have chased a phantom in their reading of my Letter and arrived at an inflammatory admonishment. A smaller misread of my Letter is in the sentence, “By verbally separating sexual orientation (i.e., hetero-, homo-, or bisexual) and sexual interest in children (i.e., pedohebephilic), McPhail (2018) indicates that these two characteristics are mutually exclusive.” This is not present in my thinking, and again, Tozdan and Briken should comment on the arguments I do make, not imputing arguments that seem to be present.
Admittedly, almost every concept and process in this sentence has yet to be examined empirically, and research in the near future will rely on retrospective self-reports of pedohebephilic adults, which will result in a memory-dependent descriptive account of these concepts.
However, given the emotional valence of first noticing a sexual interest in children, this will be an important point in the lives of pedohebephilic adults/adolescents to examine, as Tozdan and Briken and other authors who have examined age of onset have started to do.
Admittedly, whether the English translation presented by Tozdan and Briken (2018) was used in their 2015 article is not entirely clear to me. If this is the case, it is also not clear why they would report in their 2015 article that they asked about when individuals recognized their sexual interest in children. This may be a case where the exact wording and meaning is lost in translation.
To avoid misinterpretation and being accused of making unethical arguments, I am not suggesting that we are all pedohebephiles as children.
As an ancillary criticism, perhaps it is not in the nature of things, but in the content of one’s conceptualization of and approach to the phenomena under study.
I hope Tozdan and Briken take these comments as offering alternative interpretations of what they have found and pointing out areas of complexity in interpreting their results. I do not think my criticisms harm or diminish the value of the data they have collected, but I do think my criticisms create issues for what their data are interpreted as telling us about pedohebephilic sexuality.
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McPhail, I.V. More on Age of Onset of Attractions and Sexual Development in Pedohebephilic Individuals: Response to Tozdan and Briken (2018). Arch Sex Behav 47, 2165–2168 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1302-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1302-8