AASECT discussion of agency and autonomy

[PorcelainLark]

I've been thinking lately that consent might be a red herring. I was talking on ATF today about why anti-contact MAPs still tend to judge AMSC as severely as non-MAPs. In other words, just because you think AMSC wrong, does that necessarily mean people are being proportional in their judgement of it?
I kind of feel like, even if you had solid evidence of minors capacity to consent, people would still justify their disgust of it. Maybe, like with homophobia, there could be a connection between the object of attraction and the object of repulsion: a masculine woman would be unattractive to a homophobic straight man. A teleiophile is potentially disgusted by MA because they are attracted to features of maturity. They can't disconnect their judgement of the attraction, from considering it from the first person themselves (e.g. I don't want to have sex with a man because it's disgusting, so no one else should want to either).

[PorcelainLark]

I think I mostly agree. (Though I would hesitate about the question of when minors start to be sexually interested; since people always have the unassailable claim that sexual interest is the result of early exposure to sex, i.e. something external*. Also, is it wrong to talk to asexuals about sex? If not, what difference does it make whether there is an internal interest in sex?)

I think maybe starting to use cognitive behavioral therapy on the disgust of antis against MA might help. Like questioning what makes sexual contact so terrible? This article talks about applying CBT to homophobia, perhaps we could adapt it for applying it to antis?
https://cbtgym.com/overcome-homophobia-with-cbt/

However, it's a bit of a digression from the topic at hand.

* You could flip the argument. Aren't we trained from an early age to avoid anything sexual: to be clothed at all times, not to spy on the naked bodies of others, not to touch our genitals? Is the innocence of sexuality really a natural state, or something conditioned?

[Lennon72]

What is AASECT?