Richard Hanania's Creepy Lolita Solution To Low Birth Rates Would Be A Dysgenic Nightmare

Richard Hanania, in The Real Target of Pedophile Hysteria Is Age Gap Relationships, wants us to believe that the only thing standing between civilisational and demographic collapse is our refusal to admit that men are biologically wired to find 17-year-olds (and, by slippery extension, 15- and 16-year-olds) sexually attractive. He diagnoses the “Epstein hysteria” as simple concept creep: Ergo, first we all agreed real paedophilia was evil, then hysterical (mostly female) people started moving the goalposts until a 45-year-old dating a 17-year-old became radioactive.

He is technically correct that Jeffrey Epstein was not a clinical paedophile (a clinical diagnosis for a person with a primary sexual interest in pre-pubescent children). Epstein was a hebephile (a clinical diagnosis for people with a primary sexual interest in pubescent children (Blanchard et al., 2008)) and an ephebophile (primary sexual attraction to mid-to-late adolescents).

The “Tanner (sexual maturity rating) Scale”

Note on clinical terms
Paedophilia corresponds to the primary sexual attraction to pre-pubescents, Tanner stage I-III. Typically aged under 11.
Hebephilia corresponds to the primary sexual attraction of pubescents, roughly, ages 11 or 12-14.¹ : Tanner stage II-III
Pedohebephilia: corresponds to the primary sexual attraction of both of the above. Ephebophilia: Primary sexual attraction to mid-to-late adolescents, Tanner stage IV.
Teleiophilia: Primary sexual attraction to sexually mature adults in a particular age range (20–40) Tanner stage V
Gerontophilia: Poorly defined term around the primary sexual attraction to aged 70+. No Tanner scale.

Further note: I am definitely on some watch list after my online spellcheck searches today!

Hanania is also technically correct that post-pubescent teenagers (Tanner stage V) can trigger normal male sexual interest. Neither of those technical truths does the work he wants them to do.

Let’s start with the facts he keeps sliding past:

The 2008 Palm Beach grand-jury documents and the 2019 federal indictment (PDF) describe dozens of victims. The youngest confirmed recruit was 14; many others were 14 or 15. The median age was nowhere near “two months shy of 18.” When your argument requires pretending the typical Epstein victim was a first-year university student instead of a secondary-school pupil, you have already conceded the real case is indefensible.

Hanania’s entire piece rests on two logical errors I (and many of my betters) have spent decades explaining to feminists about their arguments:

The first is the naturalistic fallacy. Best example of this is on the adaptive or by-product hypothesis on rape. It goes like this:
Feminists: “If rape is found to occur in nature, it is justified and defensible.”
Me (and others): “No, description is not prescription. An ought is not an is.”

In his article, Hanania runs the mirror-image version: because normal adult men feel sexual attraction to fertile teenage girls, calling powerful middle-aged men who act on that attraction with 14- and 15-year-olds “predatory” is supposedly “lying about biology.” Same sin, different beneficiary.

The second is evolutionary mismatch denial. We, in the West, live in ecological release. High nutrition creates fat, which triggers hormones, which triggers menarche in human females far earlier than at 13–15 as in our pre-ecological release ancestors. Note, puberty and menarche are not the same. In subsistence cultures closest to our ancestorial environment, puberty can begin three or four years before menarche. Girls can become interested in sex and even explore with peers but the risk of pregnancy is low. In the West, these two events often correspond. There is no ‘safe’ exploration phase, and certainly not when adult predators are lurking. Finding a physically sexually mature 14- or 15-year-old sexually attractive is not a disorder; it’s just a calibration that made sense in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA) and is now mis-calibrated because of modern nutrition. This was not the normal case for human in the EEA. Modern nutrition triggers adult-level fertility cues at 13–15 while the prefrontal cortex while the prefrontal cortex (impulse control, risk assessment, resistance to coercion) finishes maturing at 23–26—exactly the schedule it has had for 300,000 years (Arain 2013; Steinberg 2010, Hrdy 2000). Every pre-modern society that could afford to wait did wait; average age at first birth in hunter-gatherers, historical Europe, and modern natural-fertility populations is 19–22, not 14–16, because younger mothers and their babies died at horrific rates. Raising the age of consent was not a denial of biology; it was one of the first great victories of civilisation over biology.

The harms of “lying about biology,” according to Hanania, are political distraction, a stigma on normal male sexuality, a slippery slope to banning DiCaprio’s 23-year-old girlfriends, and—above all—worsening the fertility crisis. (By the way, I watch Megyn Kelly every day and, while I do zone out when she begins to talk about pop culture, she talks way more about Meghan Markle (see my interview with Dr Dani Sulikowski here). But notice what is missing from that list: the dramatically higher rates of coercion, child abuse, infanticide, child abandonment, and lifelong trauma when young teenagers become mothers. The same fertility cues that make a 15-year-old objectively attractive also make her and her children objectively vulnerable.

Hanania’s most revealing move is to present the fertility crisis (which is real and something I am working on) as the trump card that justifies dismantling the age-gap taboo. He is remarkably specific about direction: older men with much younger women = good (“at least has the potential to lead to children”); older women with much younger men = not even worth discussing. It’s true that post menopausal women don’t have children, but simply older women? How old? A woman’s fertility peaks at age 25 (Geary, 2021). He even floats, half-seriously, that we should stigmatise attraction to older women and older men should be encouraged to suck it up and date college girls for the future of humanity. Hanania is a 40-year-old man. As Mandy Rice-Davies, a teenage call-girl embroiled in the 1963 Profumo Affair, famously said… “He would say that, wouldn’t he?”

What he once again never mentions is that male fertility is not immortal. Paternal age above 35—let alone 45 or 55—is associated with sharply rising risks of de novo mutations, autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, childhood leukaemia, low birth weight, miscarriage, and premature birth (Khandwala et al., BMJ 2018; Urhoj et al., 2017; Reichenberg et al., 2019). Sperm do not age gracefully. Hanania’s “pro-natal” policy is, in practice, a dysgenics accelerator for the next generation.

More importantly, it is not even necessary. In every Western country surveyed in the last twenty-five years, young adults say they want, on average, between 2.1 and 2.4 children — at or above replacement level (GSS 2022; European Social Survey 2020–22; ONS 2021). The gap between intention and outcome is real, but it is not caused by a lack of desire for children. The gap between intentions and outcomes is structural and cultural, but it is not solved by handing the entire supply of peak-fertility women to middle-aged men who missed the boat the first time round.

The real poison is not “hysteria about paedophilia”; it is the decades-long feminist and progressive campaign that has brainwashed girls to see marriage and motherhood as oppression and taught boys that they are inherently toxic. The antidote is to get feminism out of our schools and institutions, stop demonising normal young men, and rebuild the conditions under which young men and women can assortatively pair off, marry, and start families with each other—not to clear the field so that middle aged men can cosplay as Bronze Age warlords.

If the age-gap taboo had been erased when Hanania was 25, my bet is that he would have been the first to call it gross and exploitative. Now that he is ageing, it has magically become the only realistic solution to civilisational collapse.

History, evolutionary anthropology, psychology and biology show the line on sexual consent moves for a reason, and it almost never moves downward. In 1957, rock ‘n’ roll’s first great wild man Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin and was called a paedophile and cancelled, even though the only law he broke was bigamy. Ages of consent have been raised and close-in-age (Romeo and Juliet) exemptions added. The system has self-corrected. No serious person is coming for your 19-year-old dating a 28-year-old. What we are coming for—what we have always come for—are the mature men and women who treat 14- and 15-year-olds as consumable commodities.

The very title of Hanania’s intellectual touchstone betrays him. Vladimir Nabokov did not write Lolita to celebrate the beauty of the “nymphét” or to argue that 12-year-old Dolores Haze was a willing participant in a tragic romance. He wrote a savage, first-person indictment of Humbert Humbert’s self-serving rationalisations. Nabokov’s point was never “she was biologically mature, therefore it was fine”; his point was that a middle-aged predator will always find a way to dress up his deviancy as destiny. Yet seventy years later, half the internet treats Lolita as though it were an aesthetic mood-board for age-gap relationships rather than a horror story about how sophisticated language can be weaponised to groom both a child and an audience. Hanania’s essay is just the latest high-IQ footnote to that same misreading.

Then we have the image from the film American Beauty that Hanania chose himself to illustrate…what? American Beauty (1999) is literally the modern cinematic companion piece to Lolita. The whole point of the movie is that Lester is a creepy, self-deluding predator whose “attraction to youth” is not noble or biologically pure; it is a symptom of his midlife crisis and moral rot.

Technically no, she’s 16 not 6.

For a man who claims to be defending ‘basic biology’ against hysteria, choosing this still, with Kevin Spacey leering at a 16-year-old while fantasising about deflowering her, is an almost comically tone-deaf own-goal. The film portrays Lester as a contemptible, self-deluding creep who is mercifully murdered before he can ruin another child’s life. It’s not an ode to youthful beauty; it is a black comedy about how that obsession destroys everyone it touches. Hanania has unwittingly captioned his own thesis with its refutation.

Precision about language does matter, but it is not a shield for predation. Hanania’s essay is a masterclass in motte-and-bailey; in his dreams it’s thot-and-bailey: defend the motte of “17-year-olds aren’t pre-pubescent” while quietly retreating to the bailey that therefore nothing much was wrong on Epstein Island. It won’t work. The line is where it is for the same reason seat belts and antibiotics exist. Civilisation is what happens when humanity matures enough to say, “Yes, I feel the urge, and no, I’m still not going to do it, because I’ve seen what happens when everyone does.” There is a dysgenic tipping point, but the answer to it is not to throw the teenage girl out with the baby and the bathwater.

There’s no concept creep about the term paedophilia. Most people have not heard of hebephilia and ephebophilia, and while more could be done to inform people of the difference, using it for Hanania’s casus belli is pure sleight-of-hand. The public is not suddenly forgetting that paedophilia means pre-pubescent children and deciding, in a fit of collective madness, that a 45-year-old sleeping with a 22-year-old is the same thing. What the public is reacting to, viscerally and correctly, is the spectacle of rich, powerful men treating 14- and 15-year-old girls like disposable toys. That reaction is not “concept creep”; it is the immune system of a healthy society finally kicking in.

When that immune system fails (when police, councils, and prosecutors look the other way because they are terrified of being called racist or “sex-negative”), thousands of working-class British girls get gang-raped for years. That is exactly what happened in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, and a dozen other towns. The grooming-gang scandals were not caused by an excess of paedophilia hysteria; they were caused by its opposite: adults in authority refusing to enforce the very civilisational guardrails Hanania now wants dismantled in the name of fertility and “biological realism.”

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18686026/