I read an article recently via Hunter Stinson, who also hunts pedophiles and I imagine has dreams similar to mine; I know he has mental health issues as much as I do — go figure.  If you’ve never had the pleasure of writing about pedophilia with your buddy over breakfast, you haven’t really lived.  That’s more or less how I spent last Hallowe’en.

Anyways. Thrill testing is something that you see in child grooming.  A friend actually asked me about it about a year about but I didn’t know at the time what it was called.  Basically the premise is being able to determine a child’s arousal and tolerance level through stimulation and provocation.

I was, I will easily admit, a curious and creepy child.  I am a curious, creepy, and passionate woman.  So I understand this sort of testing, even if you don’t.

Another way to explain it is this.  We as a society create ideological creatures to teach our children the dangers of the world, how to identify them, and how to respond to them.  There are various ways of determining someone’s arousal point, and I am not going to give you the manual to testing.

What I will say is that we invented fairy tales like Jenny Greenteeth and Jenny Longarms — bogeys who haunt the ravines and wells in order to kidnap children — in order to scare kids away from potentially deadly situations.  These characters “existed” in the human mind in the middle ages, much in the same way as Slenderman does today.

I find it deeply disturbing, as a Dark Reader and Dark Writer, to read about the fact that Slenderman has made its way into the cultural consciousness to the degree that it has.  People talk about him as if he really existed, and its claimed that to talk about him is to call him.

The character plays upon deeply engrained ancestral psychological fears and its easy to see why one would become preoccupied with it as it is psychologically fascinating and disturbing – precisely what is required for psychological testing by grooming.

Shadow people, a phenomenon a large percentage of the population experience, also plays into this.