One of those occasional words thrown about in Joseph Smith-critical discourse is that Joseph Smith was a pedophile or, if they are trying to be fancy, a ephebophile or hebephile, so I thought it was worth going into detail about the literature on these terms and what they actually are.
Pedophilia is an attraction to prepubescent children. Joseph Smith married several women in the late-14 to 17-year old range. He was not having sexual relations with prepubescent children; by any standard he is not a pedophile. (At the outset, I should note that my read of the evidence is that the youngest marriage to Helen Mar Kimball [14, almost 15] was not sexual, she herself identified it as an “for eternity alone” marriage, but let’s assume that it was to be able to directly address the ephebophilia argument).
Some of the more sophisticated critics know that at 14-almost-15 they can’t accuse him of pedophilia like Mohammad’s detractors do for his 9-year old wife, so they try to move the goal posts by claiming that he was a hebephile (early stages of puberty) or ephebophile (late stages of puberty).
The problem is that ephebophilia and hebephilia aren’t really things. They’ve tried to get them into the DSM and failed, and there are good reasons it did. It doesn’t fit the criterion for a diagnosable condition unless it’s shoehorned into miscellaneous paraphilias diagnosis if it’s causing distress. The Godfather of this research is Michael Seto, who has written to a lot about how, for example, there is enough overlap between teleiophilia (attraction to adults) and ephebophilia, what Joseph Smith would have given his marriage to almost-15 year old Kimball, to preclude making it an official diagnosis. The pre-puberty and post-puberty distinction is much more fundamental than any further fine-grained distinctions after puberty, the norms around which vary across time and space.
But I don’t want to just win an appeal-to-DSM technicality; even if ephebophilia was in the DSM, there’s no evidence Joseph Smith had it. To have a chronophilia diagnosis like pedophilia you have to have strong recurring sexual urges towards that age group. I’m not a clinician (although I have interviewed and published on pedophilia), and there’s the famous Goldwater norm about not diagnosing a public figure from afar, but I think I’m on safe ground pointing out the lack of evidence.
The fact is that to receive a diagnosis of, say, pedophilia, it requires a stable proclivity, and not solely the rare/sporadic attraction for that particular age group. Simply put, given Joseph Smith’s distributions of sealings, there’s nothing to suggest that he had a particular thing for women in that age group.
The evidence people invoke are his handful of wives that were in the late 14-16 range. However, those are just the youngest cherry picked from a larger age distribution of wives. If Joseph Smith was only being sealed to late 14-16 year olds that would indeed raise all sorts of red flags about his sexual preferences, but his marriage to Kimball is no more evidence for a proclivity for late-pubescent women than his being married to Brigham Young’s sister Fanny Young (age 59) or cousin Rhoda Richards (58) is evidence of him being into post-menopausal women.
So if you want to say that marrying a 14-year old is weird, sure, but don’t conjure up faux-rigor by incorrectly using clinical psychological terms.
Of course, when people talk about “porn addiction” you get a bunch of people saying “akshually it doesn’t meet the technical criterion for an addiction.” And that’s true, but it’s still a real phenomenon nonetheless even if the technical terminology is debatable. On the same note, a weird predilection for 14-16 year old teenagers is a real thing; if you want to see Smith as a Jeffrey Epstein who would have had a penchant for teenagers with braces knock yourself out, but there’s not much support for that in terms of historic data.
Outside the clinical issues and on the separate question of weirdness or appropriateness, I don’t have much to add to the discourse that isn’t already out there about how norms differ across cultures. This isn’t an argument for moral relativism, but back in the day if you got married in today’s cadence, waiting until you made partner and had your school debts paid off, you’d be in the ground for five years before getting hitched. Societies often have good reasons for lifecourses having the cadences that they did.
But no, in making these distinctions I’m not trying to subtly argue that in the year 2025 an adult man having a relationship with a late 14-year old is okay.
As a teleiophile I think the 18 year old cutoff is absolutely the right call for our time and place in 2025 and I fully support the cultural stigmatization of adults being attracted to teenagers (and am disconcerted that one of the most searched porn terms is “barely legal.”) However, shorter lifespans change norms around the appropriate ages of marriage and childbearing for good reason, and the norms around the age of 18 are not inscribed into the sky across time and place like, say, the pre-puberty and post-puberty distinction is.
There are of course other concerns people have with Nauvoo-era polygamy, and I’m not trying to address all of them here, just this one particular issue.
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