Monday, February 13, 2012

Shame, Suicide, & All That

In her speech on “Lessons in Leadership”, Mallory Weggeman does a good job of pointing out that there are a number of secondary costs which come with disability. She speaks primarily in relation to her own paralysis, though many of her statistics seem to apply quite well to the broader spectrum of disabilities in general.

Statistically, I will never hold a job. Statistically, I'll never graduate college. I'll never have a long term relationship. I'll never have a family. I'll spend most of my days in and out of various hospitals...I have a life expectancy of about fifty now because of depression and suicide...”

It is painful to listen as her voice cracks and strains with what sounds like sadness as she reads these off, no doubt in some small way encountering some of the stark realities she and many others like her must navigate. She cares deeply, and likely on some primal level still feels the fear any of us would associate with having such predictions applied to ourselves. Indeed, at one point she refers to having once thought of paralysis as a nightmare. Of course though her speech does not end on that note.

You figure out how to get along with your life. You make choices about how to fit your desires in. If there were a way to make it go away, I would probably do that. I am face to face with the heartbreaking realization that it is staggeringly unlikely that I will ever be loved...The choice I have now is to spend my life in bitter regret for the life that I could have had, or to accept myself as I am with pride.”

These are words which indicate a struggle for self-acceptance fought within a world indifferent to your strife. They speak of the need to accept yourself and your circumstance and move on, despite what staggering likelihoods may remain. They speak of two roads from which we may choose, reducible to extremes of 'life' and 'death'. These are the words of a devotee.

What is often lost in the common discourse over devoteeism, is that it's not all fun and exploitation. Indeed, for some it is neither. I haven't known a single dev who didn't feel hopeless or depressed in some fashion, for even just a moment, no matter how short lived, regarding their deviant status. The fact that joins Mallory and our quoted dev is that they both have a minority status, and the torment of searching for self acceptance.

Suffering from depression does a lot to shorten your lifespan. People with depression are more likely to suffer kidney failure, strokes, or die of breast cancer, and it can weaken your immune system meaning you'll spend more time sick or seeing the doctor. Depression can disrupt your sleep patterns (and poor sleeping habits can have a host of negative effects on their own), it can raise your blood pressure, if you're a dad your children are more likely to have behavioral, emotional, and social problems, you'll have more pain, and pain actually hurts more when you're depressed.

In fact, most suicides are committed by people suffering from depression. Furthermore, suicide is more common among the divorced and those who live alone. People may roll their eyes, but there is a link between LGBTQ suicides and discrimination. Yes there are differences, though I don't see any reason why that same phenomena couldn't transfer to other groups.

While all of this is a heavy burden to consider on its own, what is truly shocking is that the greatest predictor of a future suicide attempt is a past suicide attempt. As a devotee, you can be more likely to go there, and if you survive, you're more likely to go again.

I've been there.

 This is the rope I tried to hang myself with.

I've been there specifically because I hated myself because of my feelings, and it sucks.

 This is the shell from the gun I had in my mouth.

This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you it doesn't have to be that way and that there is hope and happiness in your future, but it all depends on whether you can bring yourself to accept and love what is. I'm supposed to tell you that you should never commit suicide and that if you ever feel like it you should call 1-800-273-TALK immediately. 
You should, but I say this with a measure of hypocrisy.

Honestly, I've never believed the “It Gets Better” campaign. It's a good strategy, and a nice sentiment, but I can't believe that the universal “it” will naturally improve with time. I was assaulted in my workplace once only because I was “homosexual”. Of course he never bothered to sit down and have a conversation with me about my orientation etc., but that I deviated from the heteronorm at all was enough to incur his wrath. It wasn't the first time. I've worked other places where I was harassed almost daily and threatened as well.

Sometimes, especially tight times like these, you can get stuck in those places. Sometimes it really doesn't get better. You can come to terms with yourself, and that's important. Though other people change on their own time, and tend to be slow and fearful about the whole process. Sometimes things just stay the same.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Devotees & The Disabled: Mutually Oppressed

I went through a long period of my life where I wanted to study the disability rights movement, and the politics surrounding ableism in society, but I felt that as a devotee it was inappropriate. I felt that this was not my, or any devotees place. My thoughts on this have shifted since then.

Currently I believe it is actually beneficial for devotees, the transabled, pretenders, cast fetishists, foot lovers, furverts, Star Wars enthusiasts, and even the disabled to study disability. I believe that there are many barriers we erect without being aware, and this is especially true for devotees.

However, the study of disability by a devotee need neither be one of self flagellation nor of some abstract sexual urge, but rather one of self-advocacy. As some have pointed out, in the West we are held back by an antiquated system of values surrounding sex inherited from the Victorian Era when the act lost its value in pleasure, and instead became one of pure procreation. This system of cultural values is largely what dictates where the devotee finds themselves relative to everyone else.

However, there is something else at work which makes the devotee perceived as more bizarre than say a balloon fetishist or a furry. I believe that in part there is a strain of ableism.

Of course, devotees are no stranger to the fact that there is a stigma surrounding disabled sexuality. Though of course devotees carry their own stigma. In Gendering Disability (which every devotee should read), there is a paper which details the experiences of one researcher who took a serious academic look at devotees. She mostly limited herself to lurking on one board for amputee devs, but what I read was unnerving.

Having grown up a child of the internet generation, I was in many ways raised into sexual maturity amongst a “culture of devoteeism”, as I imagine no person in the history of the world before me has done. I generally thought I had a very good idea of what devotees were like and what they did and did not do, yet what I read here shocked me. I do not mean to downplay the seriousness of issues surrounding the abuse of the disabled by devotees with cameras, but I had honestly suspected that, as far as the internet is concerned, it got no worse than that. I was wrong.

The group observed in this paper was fond of sharing their “sightings”. This refers to sharing stories of something as simple as seeing an amputee in the mall, or a blind person on the sidewalk. While unnerving, this seems to be ultimately harmless enough. However, there is a darker side. These people also felt that there was nothing wrong with posting the time and location of these sightings, along with detailed descriptions of the people they saw.

It is an old and sad truth, which only grows sadder with age, that the disabled are overwhelmingly more likely  to be the victims of sexual assault as compared to the able bodied. When you view the behaviors of these devotees, building the infrastructure for and even tacitly encouraging, stalking, it is easy to understand why we have the reputation we do. What I have read suggests that disabled children comprise the bulk of victims though, so this isn't a phenomenon quite attributable to most devotees.

I believe that devotees are created, not born. As such it becomes important to look at the factors which influence this. The problem we must acknowledge before beginning this is that we do not know why or how devotees are created.

Freud had a theory that as children there are certain moments where their minds become susceptible to influence and whatever they happen to observe they will become fixated on. His reasoning went that because children were often crawling on the floor around the age when this “fixation” happened, that it explained the high prevalence of foot fetishes. More recently the neuro-scientist V.S. Ramachandran, who everyone should know of by now, has made some interesting proposals regarding “neural crosswiring” along the areas of the brain responsible for mapping the body, and the area responsible for sexual function.

I realize that there are a number of theories out there, thus far none of them proven regarding acquisition of paraphilia. However, I feel that it is quite appropriate for us to understand that regardless of how a given paraphilia, in this case devoteeism, is acquired, the world in which the afflicted find themselves has an effect on how they understand themselves, and act.

The dominant stereotypes we hold about the disabled are overwhelmingly negative. These too owe their present manifestations in part to a harmful historical legacy. Things have improved since the Bronze Age when the disabled were not allowed inside Jewish Temples , or the Medieval period when they were dressed up as court jesters and abused for entertainment. Indeed we've come a long way, and yet we still have a long way to go.

The truth of the matter is that human sexuality stretches far beyond our average conception. For example, your grandmother may still masturbate. The disabled are fully sexual beings though this is quite often ignored, or even more absurdly, and harmfully, treated as taboo. 

 This image represents one of the only instances in recent pop-cultural media where the subject of disabled sexuality has been directly addressed. Also, due to reruns and syndication it is one of the most repeated, giving it greater cultural influence than others.

The mechanism through which this occurs is one of imposed silence. It would be political suicide these days for someone to publicly oppose the notion of disabled sexuality, but we have many things to say about that which is done, and less to say about that which is left undone. Ignorance is easier, and harder to detect.

In this way whatever calls to mind a positive association between “disability” and “sexuality” is met with the same, or an even harsher retribution. While things are changing, there is a large part of the world that wants to ignore disabled sexuality. This is where we come in.

In some sense you can argue that the mere existence of devotees naturally works in opposition to this repressive force. The traces we leave behind online, especially in places like YouTube, scatters the notion of disabled sexuality further. We unwittingly carry the message, though rarely in the best of ways.

It broaches the silence imposed on the subject calling it to attention. Now, much can be said for the damage likely caused by someone's first notion of an association between “disability” and “sex” being YouTube slideshow of stolen pictures, though I do hold hope that more positive efforts will counter this. Though devotees wishing to leave behind the shame they often experience for their exotic desire have an imperative to do more than this.

I have heard countless devotees discuss the issue of shame, guilt, and even suicide. I've been there myself, more times than I'd like to recall. If we do wish to one day see a new world where we may live not merely without shame, but perhaps even with pride, if we care not just for ourselves, but for our fellow devotees, and even for those not born yet, then by all means we ought to take an active role in helping create it.

This begins at the personal level. Every devotee must strive to deal with their feelings with integrity. We ought not hurt, nor take advantage of others. As I've said before this means that you can't simply take every picture and video you find. This may not sound like it is the most appealing option, but if you agree that you don't want to hurt those you love, then you won't.

This goes farther than just what you use though. Streetsie is a blog with a lot of devotee content, some of it poorly written and obviously fictional, but still of interest to the well informed dev, however, I don't go there. In addition to all the writing they produce, they have a gallery dedicated to sharing photos. Some of these are fine, but the vast majority are not. I don't give Streetsie my traffic because doing so would be supporting their community of coercive abasiophilia.

While we may work for the creation of a new world through passivity, that is not enough. We can refuse certain material, and ignore certain websites, but this is just a refusal to contribute to their project, and does nothing to stop them. We must do more.

I used to spend a lot of time pontificating to coercive devotees that their behaviors were terrible, immoral, and hurting the disabled as well as themselves, and after months and months of work it barely had an impact. I heard people parroting my arguments from time to time, but it was without sincerity. When I stopped preaching, I stopped hearing my echo.

We can not stop devotees, or anybody for that matter, from acting on impulse ignorance, though that does not mean that we can't work to reduce the incidence of it.

In my experience coercive devotees will rarely listen, though the disabled are another story. I would encourage everyone to do what I do, and take an active role in warning the disabled about coercive devotees. We are still by a large a rare topic of conversation amongst the disabled, and thus there are many who wander the net unaware.

The simplest strategy is, “If you see something, say something.”

Time and again I have seen disabled people on YouTube who unwittingly become the object of dev admiration. Sometimes they realize it, though more often they don't. Here is where you can help. Send them a message. I've sent plenty of these over the years. It doesn't have to be anything dramatic, but explain to them that they might be getting some attention they didn't expect. Let them know what they can do, and how to stay safe in the future. At the end, and this always goes at the end, add something to this effect. “Again, I'm sorry if this has shocked or hurt you in any way, while some devotees do bad things, we're not all bad people.”

It's nice and subtle like that. You are being straight and honest with them by disclosing your status as a devotee (which you
ought to do) in a gentle way, while pointing out, with your message as tangible proof, that not all devotees are coercive. Also, it's at the end. You never know what someone's past with devotees may be like. If it's bad, then they might hear devotee and head for the hills. Trust me, always put it at the end.

This part is often controversial enough. I have been on the receiving end of a very harsh stream of devoted vitriol for doing this. To be honest it hurts. I wish we could all get along, especially the small group of people who know what it feels like to live with this condition, but in the end it is worth the effort.

There is one last strategy I would encourage everyone to take up.

It is not merely enough that we warn the disabled as they are violated. It minimizes the amount of harm caused, but we must also invest in more preventative measures. If we can stop the problem before it starts, we can win the game.

I once combed through Google trying to find every Spinal Rehab center I could. Most of them, curiously, did not have any way of being contacted by email. I was too embarrassed to use a phone, but I gathered together about all ten or so I could find that allowed for email contact and sent them a message. I asked that they try to include something in their program which would help their patients understand the importance of privacy settings.

The advent of the information age has had far reaching effects and in many ways society is still learning how to adjust to those changes. In general people have a lack of proper education regarding the internet and digital media. Rehabilitation is the first place to begin explaining to the disabled that it can be wise to act cautiously.

If we act in this way our actions help us two-fold. To begin we work to quash the efforts coercive devotees, stopping their treachery as and before it happens. Further though we work to spread awareness of those devotees opposed to sexual exploitation.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Creating Good Lives

I came across something rather interesting in light of yesterday's post.

I was doing some reading about human sexuality and Abasiophilia, the technical term for devotees of non-amputation related mobility impairment, when I came across a few fleeting references to an interesting, and allegedly successful theoretical approach to helping sex offenders. The interesting thing about the “Good Lives” model is that while it was designed initially for sex offenders it has shown success in helping a diverse array of non-traditionally coercive populations, transvestites for example, appropriately manage their feelings and accomplish their goals while not hurting others OR themselves. I'm still getting acquainted with it, and, as with every theory, it does have its detractors, though I feel the general principles of the model are in line with what I've been discussing.

The devoted are, to put it gently, exotic. We definitely deviate from the norm. I'd argue that this is very likely true cross culturally as well. The common argument coming from a layman's perspective on evolutionary psychology raised by academics, the devoted, and the disabled alike is that humans have a hardwired tendency to seek healthy mates who display a capability for child bearing, and that the physically disabled are thusly disadvantaged in pairing and mating. This has led to a number of theories, some slightly more ridiculous than others, regarding attraction and mating.

As sexual minorities we're presented with our own set of disadvantages, a few of which surely overlap with those of the disabled. We all feel the pressure to meet a mold that does not fit us. It is one which ignores and in some cases works against us. The notion of a disabled sexuality, or a sexuality which appreciates the disabled is treated as a joke. Despite this, the devoted of every stripe and fancy are not condemned to a life of sexless banality. There are other healthier, safer, non coercive options available.

There is something interesting to consider in light of this though.

If we are to assume that there are outlets for devoteeism some of which are “better” than others and which do not promote coercion, then we naturally also assume that some are “bad”. Just as we do not yet know what causes paraphilias, whether coercive or otherwise, or what exactly leads someone to become a sex offender, we also do not know how to stop it. We can run as many episodes of To Catch A Predator as we want, but child sexual abuse will, sadly, still occur. Further, people will continue to fantasize about the sexual abuse of children. The same applies to devotees and literally every other possible sexual preference or turn-on. You can not stop it, you can merely change how and where it flows.

If we assume sexually coercive or exploitive behavior is wrong, then we must also assume behaviors which promote sexual coercion to be wrong as well.

So let's take your average dev. I assume that they A) have a given set of sexual desires and that B) they will seek an outlet for these desires. Generally here I'm assuming a generic person with abasiophilia. The sparse academic literature on Abasiophilia and related “disorders” points out, as anyone could have told you, that these primarily afflict men. While I certainly agree that it's silly to divide the world into only male and female, most of the population identifies as one of these two and it is a decent starting point for looking at human sexuality. Computational-Neuroscientists working within the paradigm have produced some interesting initial findings regarding the differences between male and female sexuality.

Assuming this generic dev though, there are a number of options they are presented with. There are many obvious sources for satiating this desire, and some of those involve coercion, or taking advantage of material obtained through coercion (I call this indirect coercion). There are though some factors mitigating where a given devotee will go to satiate these desires.

By now most everyone on the internet is familiar with with the “troll”, that person who engages in disruptive or outright anti-social behavior often simply because they can. Trolls are everywhere, and sexual minorities are no stranger to their presence in their communities. What I find interesting is that trolls are in a unique position to affect the behavior of devotees. They are, in some ways, like dogs herding cattle, nipping at their heels to keep them in groups.

Trolling is a latter day pass time which generally involves finding idiots, and the internet has plenty of those, and mocking them relentlessly, sometimes treading into morally and legally questionable areas. Though really anyone can be trolled. I think though it is possible for there to be, in the parlance of 4Chan (and I cringe saying this) “trolling for moralfags/great justice” This isn't really anything new. Anyone familiar with the internet at large can tell you about infiltrating websites like Stormfront. Indeed, Anonymous recently hacked a white supremacist group disrupting their operations and conclusively linking Ron Paul to his despicable history of racism.

Regarding devoteeism, trolls have the ability to provide incentives for various behaviors. Consider the following...

If you troll devotees everywhere, that means on fiction sites, picture sites, video sites, discussion groups, really cool blogs (wink wink) then there is really no difference. Sure, men will probably still gravitate toward visual media, but by and large they're going to get trolled equally no matter where they go. However, if you troll unequally, then some areas will inevitably become preferable to others. In effect there is an ability to help guide devs away from coercive behaviors and toward non-coercive ones. Again, this applies to really every sexual quirk. 
 
I'm trying to expand on a point I raised a while ago. When we are treated like trash, it is ridiculous to expect us to behave any other way. We are still responsible for our own actions and by all means ought to place a concern of others suffering over our own sexual gratification, and indeed, some devs do. Though just as we must be careful of the consequences of our actions, so too must trolls and literally everyone else. 
 
There is some evidence coming out now which finds that treating juvenile offenders on an individual basis is rarely successful compared to approaches which involve treating the entire family. This works to help alter the environment the offender is operating in, and help provide more incentives to improve.

Food for thought. 

Friday, February 10, 2012

Examining The Coercive Devotee's Process of Justification

I recently found a quote by a man on a dev group, both of which I'll keep anonymous. This was posted in response to an article by a girl, who either was abused (if so I believe electronically), and/or became privy to the electronic abuse of the disabled by devotees. What is key to note about her article is that it seeks to call out primarily devotees who steal pictures from social networking sites. As with him, she will remain anonymous.

I want to share and discuss this because here we can see, in the raw, one example of what the process of justification is like for a coercive devotee. It is key to remember that writing of any sort is not a pure record of thought, but rather functions similar to the way the splatter paintings of Jackson Pollock which, many say, provide us with a visual record of the artist's movements. We see emotion and thought processes here expressed only after being presumably filtered through the black box machinery of this man's mind. What we have is the input and the output. What we don't know though is even more.

We are not privy to the context this man was operating in, aside from what he provides us with, and even then that could be flawed information. As a point of due diligence, I do not know if the article I read had been edited, so he could be responding to an entirely different text from what I saw. Moreover, we don't know what of the information he actually absorbed, or how much he read, or how long he spent thinking about it. He may have been under the influence of drugs and alcohol, or have a series of co-occurring “disorders” which in some way remove him from the “standard” model of a devotee we each create in our mind when approaching issues such as these.

This is entry level academic hokum, but I feel it is important to keep in mind when attempting to interpret this. We can spend all day raising hypotheticals, and many of them would be pertinent, but the overall message we should acquire from this is one of modifying our approach to include caution. Normally we could hope to follow the maxim of, “Trust but confirm.”, yet here we have a quote and only a quote to dissect for meaning. All that being said, this is a personal blog, and I'm gonna let myself play it a bit fast and loose.

“I must admit to feelings of guilt about videos and photos taken surreptitiously,
some of them by me. I sort-of justify it to myself by arguing that it's no more
than an extension of a bloke admiring and watching a pretty woman, but I don't
completely convince myself, I must admit. In the end, it boils down to this: I
didn't ask for this quirk in my personality which attracts me to disabled women,
and I can't get rid of it (and believe me, I've tried: I've been through agonies
of guilt and shame when I was younger), and it does nobody any harm, unlike some other sexual - shall we say - eccentricities. I wouldn't dream of harming a
disabled woman in any way, and have had mutually fulfilling relationships with
two: my ex-wife, who is blind and has other disabilities, and with whom I'm
still good chums even though we've been divorced for 21 years, and a friend who
is quadriplegic due to spinal muscular atrophy. The latter knows all about my
attraction to disabled women, and accepts it.”


First let's condense the facts as they are presented.

He says he has felt guilt over the existence of exploitative material some of which he produces. He argues that creating a physical record of what he sees is equal to a mental one. Yet he admits that even this does not work to totally convince him.

Here we see his second justification which goes as follows: 1) I am devoted not by choice. 2) It is  an ineliminable aspect of my personality 3) It doesn't hurt anybody. He then compares it to other sexual quirks, yet hesitates to name them.

He goes on to say that he actually doesn't want to harm disabled women. He adds, as proof that he has had two “mutually fulfilling relationships” with two disabled women, one being his ex-wife, and the other being simply a friend. He clarifies that his friend knows “all about” his feelings and accepts it.

Okay, so while he says he feels guilt over the material, and that he has even produced some himself (perhaps he is still “producing”), I think it is also fair to assume that he “uses” it, if you know what I mean. We have two processes of justification for this, the first of which seems to play the role of a placeholder in his mind. He defends the act itself by equating the creation of a physical, swappable  record (and knowing devs, I think it's fair to assume he's done a bit of swapping) with a personal memory. His rather abnormal behavior is held as equal to a natural even arguably somewhat involuntary tendency of humans in general: to remember a pretty face, etc.

He seems to say it to make himself forget that he feels bad, and it works, at least temporarily. Yet there is something inescapable. He feels that this is an ineffective argument, and it's quite presumable that he doesn't really believe pictures and film are not the same as a wandering eye.

Here we encounter his second process of justification, which is composed of three main parts. Now, unlike the above, the first two thirds of this don't seek to defend the act itself, but rather focus on him. He denies responsibility for his feelings both in their genesis and continuation. Next he claims that he actions taken on behalf of these feelings, “don't really hurt anyone”. He accomplishes this last piece by comparing it to the vaguely worded “sexual eccentricities”.

So, reading into this a bit...

He denies control of his feelings, and, by some degree of extension, his actions. There is a common argument you'll find crop up among men which says, though often in many more well veiled words, that they need pornography. It is sometimes upgraded a level whereby some men will claim they need or deserve sex. This is a very common justification for rape, especially cases of marital rape. We see this argument presented in its infant form  here, though significantly declawed.

The article he was responding to drew a very pointed comparison between devoteeism and pedophilia, and I believe that it is at least this to which he compares his fetish. It is worth noting that pedophilia, despite the findings of Kinsey and other facts pedophiles use to defend their actions, almost always leads to at least a few “bumps in the road” for the child in question (which is not to say that victims are irreparably damaged mind you). Pedophilia, when physically manifested upon a child through any medium, can be understood then as inherently damaging, regardless of intent.

More to the point though, I do wonder what exactly his quadriplegic friend knows. Certainly she's privy to his attraction, but what of these behaviors he has trouble justifying simply to himself? Does she know? Does his ex-wife? If no, how would they feel if they did? Would they feel violated suddenly finding this out about him?

So looking at his distillation of the pertinent facts of his situation, does this justify his behavior? He knows two women he assures us he has never violated, and while he feels bad about his other behavior, he never chose and is unable to alter his feelings. Are his actions beyond harm? Should he be allowed to photograph and film women without their prior knowledge and consent?

As I've said before, actions like these are not harmless. While he may not dream of harm to disabled women, he certainly executes it by blocking out some parts of his conscious awareness. Stealth filming etc. may appear to be initially absent of harm, but these acts still carry potential to be harmful. As the internet continually embraces sharing and becomes more widespread, the potential for harm and potential magnitude of this harm rises even further. With every iPhone and PC produced his justification grows weaker.

Furthermore, as I have said in earlier posts, I believe that this behavior is harmful to him. What he's going through is a process known as cognitive dissonance. That alone is generally identified as “bad”. However, he is also allowing himself to lose sight of the humanity of others and the consequences, or at least potential consequences, of his actions. He is allowing himself to literally dehumanize others, and thus in some ways remove his humanity. He willingly subverts his own capacity for reason in favor of an animal drive.

Still though, he didn't choose this, and he can't do anything about it. Does he then have some right or need for material featuring disabled women?

No.

There is no way around this. Even he knows this, but tries to forget. That he is successful in this task explains why sexual exploitation on the part of devotees is so prevalent. Even those with a conscience are able to hide themselves from it, in the pursuit of greater gratification.

If he lived in a vacuum absent any human contact whatsoever, then perhaps we could take some small measure of pity on him but such is not the case. He clearly has regular somewhat private internet access. There are plenty of resources for him to get his rocks off looking at women and men who are entirely consenting. Thanks to the same internet that allows his exploitation to expand beyond his control or knowledge, he can even get a lot of this material for free.

Though with pornography we do encounter a number of arguments in opposition. I'm saving these for a later blog, suffice to say, there are some, and not all of them are poorly wrought.

Let us be more than fair and assume though that, for whatever reason this relative abundance of dev porn just doesn't work for him. Maybe he's blind or severely visually impaired, maybe he just can't get off without looking at stealth footage, maybe he's too poor to afford stuff priced at roughly a dollar a minute, maybe he is a pedophile and can only get off to footage of girls well below the legal limit. It doesn't matter. Is this poor, helpless dev then left with nothing else but his little old imagination to get off with (a trait entirely unique to humans by the way)?

Actually, no, he's not.

Even pedophiles, those latter day dalits, have the ability to craft intricate and artful fiction to their heart's desire. Actually, I'm not positive about that. Maybe it is illegal for pedophiles unless it's sanctified as art, but with devotees such a provision doesn't matter. Whatever disability or combination of disabilities, or devotee mashup slash fiction you like, you can write it to your heart's content.

In fact, many do. There's already a number of thriving communities built around this exact behavior. Now, not all of them are perfect. In fact I've found more than I would like which are run side by side with picture trading. Some even incorporate pictures into their stories. It might sound ridiculous on its face but you can take even something as banal as the internet fan-fic and turn it into a real life coercive sexual experience.

My, the ingenuity of the human intellect!

The painfully obvious points I am arguing are as follows.

1) There is never a proper justification for stealth filming and other coercive practices.

2) Devotees have a plethora of other options for satiating their desires.

3) I hope this guy and other devotees can one day come to admit to themselves that they do feel bad about what they are doing and that there are other, healthier, ways they can joyously and non-coercively express their sexuality.