It's bandied about by the type of person that says "roastie" unironically, and it's probably safe to assume that's where it came from. (Sorry your divorce went so poorly, dude.) You can notice that it presents a peak from 13-18 and a drop-off around the time they describe as "the wall": after 25, the chart presents a precipitous fall and according to the chart, by the time a woman's 27, fewer than half of all men will find her attractive. That is, the data in the chart lines up perfectly with their talking points, and it doesn't resemble anything in the paper. Lately, I've seen it pushed around by the creepy pedo crowd to justify something or another (you people are unreadable), and then recently by someone on Spinster whose point was "All men are pedophiles! HERE'S A CHART!" (Sorry your divorce went so poorly, ma'am.) The chart gets shoved around the internet by people that think it'll bolster their point, and then either tacitly accepted by people they're arguing with or both of them are playing the same game and they didn't even look at the chart before responding with an infographic or an ad hominem or something.
The gullibility is mind-boggling. How does this happen?
The data's presented in a dry, somewhat professional-looking graph. It's easy to understand immediately. No one posting it appears to have read the paper in question: here's a chart! People wouldn't just make up a chart to lie on the internet! Look, it's got a citation! It's got the trappings of legitimacy, but it's completely illegitimate. So my suspicion is that the root cause is laziness, sloppy thinking (confirmation bias is a hell of a drug), and the Twitter Disease, where the goal of every post is to win a stupid political argument on the internet and they don't care if what they're doing is repeating someone else's agitprop because the people they talk to every day are actually Enemies and if you ever lose any ground in a stupid political argument on the internet, $bogeyman wins and all of humanity is plunged into a dark age.
I don't think there's an easy society-wide solution. I think people are going to continue to care about the *appearance* of legitimacy more than they care whether what they are saying is legitimate or not, and the distortion of every human interaction is not going to die off on its own. This is the major problem with totalizing political philosophies, essentially anything that says, in effect, "The personal is the political." (That stuff you can find in Marx and Stalin and Hitler and every other social catastrophe: if there's nothing outside the reach of politics in your view, if every conversation you have involves pushing politics, or if you cannot be friends with someone that doesn't share your politics, you've got the disease.)
That having been said, the possibility of solving the problem in society is a different question from the possibility of solving the problem yourself. That's completetly possible: you can stop being stupid. (Or, at least empirically, I can say that it's possible to successively approximate not being stupid.) You can check primary sources: if someone's point (even if it's your point) relies on a chunk of data, look at the data. Does it hold up? Does the point rely on ignoring any of the data? Where did the data come from? A lot of sociological data uses only people age 18-22, because it's easier to put up a flier outside the dorms and because you can much more easily get an undergrad to trade 2-4 hours of their time for $50 than an adult with kids: this is not exactly a representative sample for everything, as it's clamped to age, it implies an income bracket and a higher education level than a big chunk of the population has. (A somewhat famous series of studies on human sexuality used, for many of its studies, a pool of convicted sex offenders to get the data, probably farther removed from a representative sample than college students; I've touched enough third rails already, you probably know or can guess who it is. Why not go look at the primary sources yourself?)
absurd_data_falsely_citing_hall95.png
hall1995.pdf
@p The chart is pretty bogus given the labels alone. Is there a definition of "sexually attractive"? Does it account for "nubility" by which I mean a girl appearing to be of fertile development maturity, regardless of her chronological age? There is a beauty and attractiveness in "youth" in general. Many of the things mature women do or at least the marketing suggests they do, clearly has the goal or appearing younger than they actually are. One might even consider the current trend in pubic hair styles, or even overall weightloss to be with the intent of looking "younger". Some of the "Asian" fetishes tend to focus on the more slight, less curvy sub-nubile or pre-pubescent appearance. Though the androgynous focus a while back, was focused not only towards a unisex but also for the more slight. The occasional bear in a dress with a full beard being an obvious exception.
It might be a better study to focus on the origins of pedophiles' templating or impressioning as it were. Are their still somewhat stuck in their 12 year old brain getting that same feeling from seeing a 12 year old girl? I assume that at 40 a man does't see a 12 year old girl with the same reaction he did when he was 12. I think it would be too simple to say it is just that. Like many situations with sex power is involved. Perhaps the power one feels over someone is directly proportional to the weakness they perceive in that person's appearance. These are just guesses, thinking aloud.
In theory, we should be reacting to natural cues to further the species. Nubility/fertility specifically the recognition of which, would be key to the survival of such a species. One may argue towards the precocious pubescence perhaps brought on by either hormones in our food supply or possibly by the easily available high caloric foods leading to childhood obesity and potentially increasing the rate at which girls may reach a body fat percentage that would increase estrogen earlier than one would have in years past. This in itself is taking things outside the idea of pedophile stimulus, as defined naturally of the interest in those below a nubile/fertile development, and into a legal realm of chronological age.
As to whether or not a man can suppress his arousal or not, one might argue that it may be more important that he can control his reaction to such arousal. Traci Lords was legally a minor when she made movies and posed for nudes in Penthouse magazine. Legally, all that work became "child pornography" only after it was revealed that she was underage when it was made. However, any man looking at her image would recognize her as an "adult woman" because that is what she looked like with all the cues of such. Contrast that with the nudes Brooke Shields had in Playboy when she was 10 which I doubt could be confused with an adult woman in any way.
