What would you want to see addressed in a big pro-MAP manifesto?

[Kierkegaard]

The past couple months I've been working on trying to collect bits and pieces of things I've written and organize them into a big, full scale defense of the MAP movement and rebuttal to all the common attacks. As in a very long essay or short book length comprehensive kind of thing, 20-60 pages. As far as I know there have been virtually no attempts by any respected academics to seriously and openly argue for child-adult sex being ethical or to advocate for the rehabilitation of pedophiles as an unjustly oppressed minority. There are some philosophers of ethics who have taken up the pro-pedophilia perspective as a kind of devil's advocate, thought experiment thing, as academic ethicists often enjoy doing, but none of these are daring enough to actually conclude child-adult sex is okay(they always desperately look for reasons to justify the pre-dominant narrative), and even the more well-written and generous papers like this have mostly been dismissed by the mainstream as silly academic theorizing, which they basically are when written by non-MAPs with no real skin in the game. So even the philosophers who have pointed out the critical flaws in the standard "can't consent" argument don't ever take the issue seriously or treat pedophile rights as a serious social justice concern. I mean, maybe some non-MAP philosophers take this point of view seriously in private, but you'd have to have brass balls to risk your entire reputation and career becoming known as the "pro-pedophilia" ethicist.

In addition to addressing the core ethical arguments regarding consent, and reviewing the scientific evidence on trauma and to what degree harm is intrinsic or socially constructed, I'm also planning on including sections on the history of pedophilia in relation to the field of psychology, and the ties to the queer rights movement of the 50's-80's which conservatives exaggerate and leftists deny completely. I'll also talk a bit about different anthropological perspectives, youth liberation and protection from genuine abuse, gender differences, the feminist perspective and the intersection of pedophilia with patriarchy, and law/policy ideas for the future, especially to replace the age of consent and respect MAP rights while still protecting(and strengthening) children's safety.

Basically everything I want to write about is already talked about on the wiki, and most of the articles are pretty well written, but the problem with the wiki is that it consist of dozens of disparate articles which anti-MAPs can easily ignore or pick apart one by one, and doesn't adequately address(steel-man) all of the counter-arguments or scientific evidence which seems to go against us. It feels a little too biased in favor of the pro-MAP perspective, basically. I understand why it's designed like that, but I'd like to write something which fully addresses all of the common anti-MAP talking and anti-contact talking points as thoroughly as possible, in addition to making a positive argument for MAPs being unjustly persecuted and oppressed. In one document which can be shared around and which I can hopefully try to get enough attention drawn towards for some level mainstream engagement. So serving as bait(though very serious, high quality, good faith bait) for people to engage MAP arguments is another reason I think a manifesto would be good.

I'm hoping to share sections of what I've written in this thread once I polish them up a little bit to get feedback. I have a lot already, it's just very disorganized. Here's a rough draft of an introductory paragraph and thesis statement for an unfinished essay I was writing a little while back but never continued or did anything with:

Is pedophilia a sexual orientation? Some scientists who study human sexuality seem to believe so, although this categorization is the subject of much academic contention. In 2013, there was public controversy after it was revealed that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) described pedophilia as such in the discussion section(but not in the actual diagnostic criteria). This was quickly addressed by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the publishers of the DSM-5, who clarified in a press release that the reference to pedophilia as an orientation was a "text error", and would be corrected to "sexual interest" in the next print edition. They also said that in the DSM-5 pedophilic disorder is considered to be a paraphilia, not an orientation, and that they stand behind efforts to criminally prosecute child sexual abuse (CSA). It is notable that the APA felt the need to clarify not only that they categorize pedophilic disorder as paraphilia rather than orientation, but to imply this categorization is somehow pertinent to the criminalization of CSA, and that one of the functions of the APA as a professional-scientific organization is to "stand behind" particular criminalization efforts. While the APA has made their stance clear, there are a growing chorus of researchers who do support classifying pedophilia as a sexual orientation, such as Michael C. Seto, a forensic psychologist and widely respected expert on pedophilia and adolescent sex offenders. Seto argued in a 2012 paper published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior that the similarities between traditional gender-based orientations and pedophilia are sufficient to construe pedophilia as a type of sexual orientation. Seto does not however conclude that this means CSA, or the actualization of pedophilic desires, ought to be decriminalized or considered to be morally acceptable. Rather than wade into the scientific debate, I wish to examine the social, moral, and political consequences of these opposing categorizations(and possible ulterior motivations for each of them), to consider what we can learn from the similar debate which occurred over homosexuality in the 20th century, and to detangle the relevant descriptive questions from the normative ones. Additionally, while it is widely accepted these days that the quest for a purely objective, value-neutral science of psychology free from the influence of any normative bias is an undertaking impossible to complete, I hope to demonstrate that this framing of psychology as a science aiming towards objective truth but inevitably tainted or impeded by normative bias is so deeply flawed as to be almost backwards. Insofar as psychology is a practical rather than theoretical science, that is to say, a science done for its' forensic and psychiatric applications, normative value judgements are foundational pillars upon which the field has always necessarily been built, not impediments to be minimized or corrected for in a process-towards-objective-truth. In the psychology of deviant sexuality it is in fact the pesky objective evidence which most often gets in the way of our quest to reify these foundational norms, to essentialize them in the cloak of empiricism, not the norms which taint the quest for truth. In other words, the psychology of deviant sexuality is not a quest for truth at all, but a quest to make-true the sexual mores we have inherited from extinct or dying social relations, to ground them and renew them in the secular present and breath into them new life amid the constant threat of sexual liberation looming on the horizon.

Does anyone have any suggestions for things to include or talk about?

Also, does anyone have any thoughts on "MAP" as a label vs just going with pedophile, or child-lover? I don't really love any of these terms, to be honest, but it seems like MAP is basically what we're stuck with for the moment and it is starting to pick up some positive mainstream academic use, so eh.

Also, I'm probably already familiar with most of the mainstream stuff that has been written on the ethics of pedophilia and history of sexual deviancy, but if anyone has any articles or books to share that might be useful for me to check out feel free to let me know.

[Learning to undeny]

I like the idea.

Do you think that changing society's views and legislation on AMSC is necessary for MAP rights? And how can this change be attained? This radical approach has been tried before, only to be met with increased repression.

Have you checked out BrianRibbon's manifesto? Which seems to be shorter and more imbalanced towards the pro-choice pro-MAP perspective than you want.

Also, does anyone have any thoughts on "MAP" as a label vs just going with pedophile, or child-lover? I don't really love any of these terms, to be honest, but it seems like MAP is basically what we're stuck with for the moment and it is starting to pick up some positive mainstream academic use, so eh.

"Pedophile" is good, but "MAP" is best, because it does not lead to confusion. This word makes it clear that we are talking about a preference or orientation. Only issue is, it appears to include normative sexualities, but now telios are forced to argue that "16 it's not the same as 6", which is benefitial.

[Jim Burton]

Some "real" arguments relevant to how the topic is prosecuted in the here and now:

1. The removal of financial incentives in Child Sexual Abuse investigations, particularly when the act being prosecuted would not qualify as assault under any other definition.

2. No more prosecutions based on hearsay evidence - electronic communications and records must support what is being prosecuted.

3. Coercive or deceptive acts against a teenager or adult should carry a significantly higher penalty than voluntary acts involving even a child - including those later regretted (see: broken soul narrative, missing homework narrative, body dysmorphia narrative).

Edit: If you are going with "no age of consent law", what I have never seen argued successfully in decades on this forum or its predecessor, is the practical case for totally opposing AoC laws. So that would be important.

The case for "no intrinsic harm" in adult-minor sexual relations is easier to make, especially if you radically reorganize/dismantle a lot of the power relations that underpin the cultural archetype of the child - get rid of coercive teacher-student relationships, etc. Either that, or you would have to justify a whole lot else as being in some way intrinsically harmful and outlaw some common and mundane activities.

What I always see from that point (accepting the "no intrinsic harm" argument) onwards is naive idealism - MAPs typically assume the means must be identical to the ends and never make the practical case for strongly opposing consent laws, especially in a prohibitive environment. Perhaps because it's inconvenient, or an existential threat.

It then plays into the "temporarily, permanently online" nature of MAP spaces - you see "radical" MAPs making arguments for radical reform you know they would never stand up in public and defend, then said person "burns out" and disappears from the community. Just now, I'm seeing someone on Pediverse saying they've "never felt so pro-c" after embarking on some historical research of Ipce, Newgon or whatever else. Which kinds of sums it all up.

[CantChainTheSpirit]

Thank you for this post, it is much needed.

I maintain that anti's are a small but loud minority that is content with making spurious claims that sound sensible at face value but are easily dismantled. Most people don't dismantle those arguments because they don't care about them. People used to throw around statements about gay people, how they're destroying society, the terrible things they get up to in secret and most people just accepted them because they weren't gay and didn't care but they sounded reasonable. But then people did challenge them and put out the positive case and suddenly people woke up to the nonsense behind homophobia.

Building a positive case is much needed. Not a defensive case where we dismantle the obvious nonsense thrown against us. I mean we should be doing that anyway. But a positive case that puts the anti's on the back foot for a change. What are all the positives and what are the dangers of blindly accepting the anti's arguments. What are the real costs and dangers to everybody.

[PorcelainLark]

There's this hypothetical timeline I wrote last year.

First, three closely linked simple changes via legal activism.

1. MAPs become a protected class (i.e. you can't discriminate in employment or housing because a person's a MAP)

2. Laws are put into place that recognize hate crimes and hate speech against MAPs.

3. Possessing softcore child erotica becomes decriminalized (e.g. you wouldn't get in trouble just because you own a naked picture of a child).


With these legal changes MAPs could live more openly, and so people would become less afraid of MAPs. This process of becoming more comfortable would take a few years. So maybe five years like that.

As communities come to build friendship and trust with open MAPs, MAPs will no longer be imagined as the monsters like Josef Fritzl. MAPs will be your best friend, your son or daughter, your sibling; when people say hateful things about MAPs, now non-MAPs will take offense to it too because they will see how unjustified it is.


Then there will be a second stage.

1. The decriminalization of statutory rape.

2. Abolition of a distinct legal category for child sexual abuse as opposed to regular sexual assault.

​3. The age of consent is lowered to the age of criminal responsibility.

4. Artificial child pornography is decriminalized.


If statutory rape is decriminalized, MAPs in more permissive communities will be able to demonstrate their relationships are non-abusive to those communities, even though those relationships will remain supressed in conservative/religious communities. If CSA and SA are treated as the same, it undermines the idea of the pedophile as a distinct type of criminal. If the age of consent is lowered to the age of criminal responsibility, then people can stop hiding sex from children. Another five years would pass.


Finally, there would be the last stage:

1. The idea of statutory rape is abolished.

2. Softcore child erotica would is legalized.

3. Artificial child pornography becomes legal.


That's as far as I see things going. I don't think real hardcore child erotica will ever be decriminalized or made legal, because of the risk of commercialization. As I often say, a big part of why we're in this situation was the public backlash against child prostitution in the 19th century. I mean, look at how messed up former child actors are in regular films. If there's a risk of parents making their children go through things that will mess them up because of some economic incentive, it will mean any liberalization of laws relating to hardcore child erotica will be unconscionable.

[John_Doe]

As far as I know there have been virtually no attempts by any respected academics to seriously and openly argue for child-adult sex being ethical or to advocate for the rehabilitation of pedophiles as an unjustly oppressed minority.

I remember watching a video by Lauren Chen countering arguments made by some college professor who was arguing for a more lenient attitude toward child-adult sex (the example he used was of a 12-year-old girl with a grown man) on the grounds of not wanting to restrict personal freedom, I can't remember his name. Peter Singer is probably the most respected and well-known 'philosopher' in the world, I remember a clip from ages ago, when he considered himself to be a preference utilitarian, where he seemed to lean toward the plausibility of child-adult sex when pressed by an interviewer about what his ideas about ethics implied. If I'm not mistaken, he is a hedonist now and hedonism clearly implies that child-adult sex is not intrinsically bad (only suffering is intrinsically bad. Child-adult sex is not suffering, child-adult sex is child-adult sex), children are harmed only by their own felt emotional distress and the sexual pleasure of both pedophiles (or 'pedo-curious' teleiophiles)/ MAPs and children would be intrinsically good even if it should be weighed against risks and costs of permitting child-adult sex. Hedonists might not be honest about what their position implies (I remember dealing with an anti-pedo. hedonist on freespeechtube years ago), they might not explicitly connect the dots for people, but if you're saying that all happiness is intrinsically good and only suffering is intrinsically bad then you're saying that sexual pleasure itself is always intrinsically good and a thing that doesn't ultimately cause suffering or deprive anyone of happiness isn't instrumentally bad. It's true that this means that sadistic pleasure qua happiness is inherently good but the object of sadistic pleasure (the suffering of others) is intrinsically bad and the psychology that allows for it (wanting others to suffer, being opposed to their happiness) is anti-hedonistic (if a thing is inherently good/bad then it is immoral to de-value or negatively/positively value it), so consistent hedonists cannot be sadists. Hedonists might disagree among themselves as to whether or not child-adult sex can be practically justified but, if they are ideologically consistent, they have to concede that child-adult sex itself is intrinsically neutral and whatever sexual pleasure that pedophiles feel as a result of real-life sexual intimacy with children or even just the fantasy of sexual/romantic intimacy with children is inherently good and worth celebrating, so they cannot support stigmatizing pedophilia itself (unless they believe that promoting hedonism would be a net negative in which case they'd be flat out lying to people about their privately held beliefs and publicly pretending to reject hedonism) or oppose child-adult sex in theoretical scenarios where we'd have no reason to assume serious enough long-term harm even if they think that child-adult sex should be discouraged in practice.

Peter Singer, Jeremy Bentham and Torbjorn Taansjo are the most well-known hedonistic 'philosophers' that I know of (the concept of professional academic philosophy turns me off, basically for the same reason that the perception of psychology as a legitimate empirical science does, and I'm a little sensitive about reading works by other hedonists because I don't want our position to be misrepresented and their inconsistencies/hypocrisies are harder for me to swallow emotionally. The pointlessly esoteric language philosophers sometimes gravitate to can also turn me off, I guess because I see it as an attempt to reinforce a claim to special expertise that can't be inter-subjectively demonstrated). I don't know how serious they are/were about consistently applying their ideas to different issues (Bentham didn't seem to take non-human animal happiness very seriously) but that's what's implied by hedonism, whether hedonists acknowledge or realize this or not, and that means something to me.

It's also not very rare to hear people say something like, "pedophilia is a mental illness, pedophiles deserve compassion and not condemnation. We need to get these people help."

There are some philosophers of ethics who have taken up the pro-pedophilia perspective as a kind of devil's advocate, thought experiment thing, as academic ethicists often enjoy doing, but none of these are daring enough to actually conclude child-adult sex is okay(they always desperately look for reasons to justify the pre-dominant narrative), and even the more well-written and generous papers like this have mostly been dismissed by the mainstream as silly academic theorizing,

What/who exactly do you have in mind? So they oppose child-adult sex but they're playing with arguments that could justify it for the sake of honing their debate skills or what?

which they basically are when written by non-MAPs with no real skin in the game.

I don't think that you have to be gay in order to value the happiness of gay people (or to have some kind of altruistic love for them or at the very least just respect their autonomy or oppose various double standards that disadvantage them from a fairness standpoint) but I don't really think the concept of a distinct MAP sexuality is meaningful if it includes pubescent children (which, by literal definition, it does). Some people might strongly prefer pubescent pre-teens or young teens over 'adults' but I believe that all heterosexual men (if they are not pedophiles, ironically; considering how loosely the term is sometimes used) must be attracted to some pubescent pre-teens/young teens because they have, to some degree, features that indicate puberty and by extension fertility, features that make women in their 20s sexually attractive. 99% of the people of who think that it's wrong for adults in their 20s, 30s and beyond to be attracted to or intimate with teenagers or 12-year-olds are themselves attracted to some teens/pre-teens. I wouldn't be surprised if most straight men are relatively attracted to prepubescent girls as well, what seems to be statistically unusual is a preference for prepubescent children.

So even the philosophers who have pointed out the critical flaws in the standard "can't consent" argument don't ever take the issue seriously or treat pedophile rights as a serious social justice concern.

There's pointing out the holes in certain arguments in favor of a position one might still hold and then there's rejecting the ultimate premise itself. When you say that they don't take pedophile rights seriously, do you mean that they only disagree with bad arguments against child-adult sex or something related to pedophile rights despite agreeing with the general population that pedophilia/child-adult sex is inappropriate/inherently wrong for their own unconventional reasons or that they're just not passionate about the issue or what?

I think the debate about pedophilia being a 'sexual orientation' might be somewhat meaningless because we can draw certain basic parallels to the treatment of a 'sexual orientation' and that of a seemingly fixed, stable 'sexual preference' (a preference for a certain kind of partner) regardless. It seems like a semantics issue to me (I don't really 'see' why 'sexual orientation' should have to be based on gender although I can understand why people would think otherwise since the nature of sex is largely tied to reproduction and reproduction is why people are male or female. Penises are literally adapted to enter vaginas and sperms cells to fertilize egg cells, so homosexuality; although this also applies to true pedophilia, is in some sense 'deviant' but that is not a dog whistle for 'bad' or even 'unnatural,' not do I think that everyone is a latent heterosexual or teleiophile/hebephile who just wants to try something new or is turned on by the idea of a same-sex partner or prepubescent child etc. A preference for redheads will probably not be as strong or absolute, or even consistent, and it can't be tied to fertility/reproduction).

I self-published a book on amazon about my ideas about ethics and there's a brief section on child-adult sex, I'd be willing to send you a copy, if you're interested.