You know, when Tom is just being his usual flailing NPD addled self he seems pretty harmless, but jesus christ the second it gets into anything related to his sexuality it's like a window into a chaotic dimension where nothing makes sense aside from the fact that you feel dirty. Trying to make heads or tails of the mental gymnastics he's invented to try to justify all of it as not only normal, but admirable, is to go insane.
That said I think it's reductive to label Tom's obsession with kids as purely sexual. Raging narcissists like him also love targeting children in service of their ego, because young people are too uncertain of themselves and lacking in an established identity to call his bluff or laugh at him when he says he's going to fight them or w/e. Unlike adults, they actually stand a chance of being wowed by his nutty made up tales and mediocre "artistry", and they might even look at his clumsy usage of $5 words and claims of being a "journalist" who totally has thousands of fans all over the world and be tricked into thinking he's above average intelligence.
Once people hit the age of majority the curve on how hard you have to work to impress/manipulate them spikes appreciably, which normally isn't an issue if your life is built around genuine personal development instead of egocentrism, but for folks like Tom (and unfortunately a lot of disgusting motherfuckers online) they desperately want to get at those kids when they're still pliable, before they hit that curve, and the more fucked up and lacking in self esteem they are the easier he believes it is to exploit them and thus the more drawn to them he is, since for Tom the only comfortable interactions are ones where he has complete control.
Granted, that kind of behavior is still shitty, almost as much as if the interest was exclusively sexual (we're seeing evidence of that with the trend of indoctrinating/grooming into trooning out. The end result is that you're destroying their life either way), and Tom's interest in teenagers is clearly also sexual, but I'd argue that interest has a different pathology from that of actual pedophiles.
So my point is that like with that Boxershorts guy, Tom is right. I don't think it's fair to call him a pedophile:
He's just a predator.
A revolting, repulsive, lecherous old creep, and an abject ego-obsessed waste of air who's doomed himself to never develop as a person because he's a junkie in every sense whose life is built around delusion and desperate self aggrandizement.
Hopefully he finds that description more amenable.
