Every healthy human being has a sex drive, which appears with the onset of puberty. While girls typically enter puberty slightly earlier than boys, the male sex drive is typically more outwardly expressed.
Young and old, male and female, can keep a lid on their sex drives. Keeping a lid on it means keeping it to oneself.
Up to the 19th century, boys were often physically punished when discovered masturbating. Repeat offenders were sometimes placed in physical restraints or straitjackets.
The primary effect was that most boys found ways not to be caught. They never talked to anybody about it and would swear they never did it.
Many priests are like those boys. It is questionable whether they truly believe in God. But being a priest can provide a cover for a comfortable life, and potentially even a sexual one.
Historically, the Catholic priesthood has been criticized because it provided a convenient cover for individuals with pedophilic inclinations to engage in clerical sexual abuse.
Men with forbidden sexual inclinations can be quite imaginative in finding covers for sexual satisfaction without having to fear punishment. That is why some businessmen seek opportunities internationally (though perhaps not in strictly regulated environments like Saudi Arabia), and why reports suggest that sadistic behavior may be disproportionately higher among certain prison staff than in the general population.
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When certain sexual acts are prohibited, humans with an inclination toward them will seek alternatives where the dangers of severe punishment or incarceration are reduced. That is why pornography exists. And when pornography is prohibited, people still have their fantasies.
Who wants to guess how many people imagine something different when they have intercourse with a spouse?
Many people want more than just their fantasies. Some at least want pornography. And those who derive arousal exclusively from child pornography will go to great lengths to set up an appropriate cover.
For those who derive pleasure from looking at child sexual abuse material, posing as a police investigator specializing in child pornography could theoretically serve as a perfect cover.
Of course, not every man who realizes that being a police officer on that beat would be the perfect cover will be able to join the police force. Typically, if one doesn’t decide to become a police officer in one’s early 20s, the chance for that kind of career has passed.
But then, one can still become an anti-child pornography and anti-child prostitution activist. Or even better: a private investigator focusing on child prostitution and child pornography in an exotic land. It is the dialectic of being able to be a preferred consumer of the very thing one pretends to work against.
Critics might ask what goes on in the mind of a Catholic priest who migrates from Europe to Southeast Asia to work with minors in the sex trade. Sexual stimulation and satisfaction do not require physical contact. Some men can derive significant psychological or sexual stimulation simply from being in an environment that matches their inclinations, even if they always finish by masturbating alone.
For a man with such a psychological architecture, nothing would be more suitable than being a priest working with these youths in Southeast Asia. Such an individual could ask minors to recount their experiences in detail, potentially even eliciting visual demonstrations. Under the pretext of building legal cases, he could request that the same story be told again and again, with ever more colorful detail. He could also set up a shelter, ensuring that he has the victims around him for much of the day.
While a large number of child sexual abuse cases have been uncovered in orphanages and shelters for children, a priest might consider it too risky to physically touch the minors he has "rescued." But then, one also cannot physically touch the girls shown in child pornography. And who is to say that having a 12-year-old girl in front of you, recounting her trauma, would be less stimulating to a man whose sexual fantasies thrive on such narratives?