A Theory

[James]

It is often the case that what we hate most about ourselves manifest as what we hate most in others. This typically takes the form of resentment, such as an overweight person's resentment of a fit person, or a poor person's resentment of a wealthy person. Starting from this general principle, it appears likely that the general antipathy towards MAPs and even, to an extent, AAMs, stems from an inherent sexual attraction the majority of adults have towards children, including their own.

Freudian psychoanalysis offers us three useful concepts by which to explore this idea. They are:

• the concept of the unconscious

• the concept of repression

• the concept of rationalization

• the concept of the Oedipus/Electra complex

Freud (and many of his successors) posited that very little perceiving or thinking is done consciously. Indeed, most of our thoughts and actions emerge from the unconscious. That is to say, most are scarcely aware of what truly animates them. To this end, most adults are not consciously aware of their attraction towards children and would deny such attraction upon direct questioning - not due simply to social pressure (though this surely plays a part) but because they are truly unaware of this attraction. Despite a woman's physiological response to breastfeeding her baby, or to receiving a foot massage from her 8 year old son at the end of a long day, or a man's response to his teenage daughter walking around the house in her underwear, or his 5 year old daughter sitting in a "certain way" on his lap, the conscious mind will devise all manner of ways to filter this basic biological response - that of sexual arousal - in a way that can be tolerated by the ego, that is, the sense of self.

This brings us to the concept of repression. Repression is, broadly speaking, the process by which the conscious mind subjugates thoughts/feelings/ideas that threaten the stability of the ego. That is, if the ego has decided attraction to children is "wrong," the conscious mind will dutifully filter out via repression all thoughts/feelings/ideas that threaten this conception. Thus, one response of the conscious mind to sexual arousal towards children is to simply ignore it - effectively, to pretend it does not exist, regardless of any physiological indications to the contrary.

Of course, as with all defense mechanisms, repression is imperfect - it sometimes fails. At this point, the most common secondary defense mechanism is rationalization. So, the mother may rationalize that her son's foot massage stimulated her only to the extent that feet in general are erogenous zones and that she would have been equally stimulated by a professional masseuse. Or the father may rationalize that all men, as visually stimulated creatures, would be aroused at the sight of a teen girl's body and he merely "forgot" for a moment that the girl in question was his own daughter.

This would be quite well and good if it were not for Freud's discovery, however, of the Oedipus and Electra complexes. That is, of the son's inherent attraction towards his mother and the daughter's inherent attraction towards her father (assuming heterosexual orientation of the child - son/father and daughter/mother attraction is also possible but less common). While this idea was highly controversial at the time of its introduction, and remains so today, I contend that it is correct insofar as it aligns with readily observed behavior in children towards their parents and towards older adults (friends, teachers, uncles, aunts, etc.) in general.

Many of us in the MAP community, in accepting (rather than repressing or rationalizing) our own attraction towards teens and children, have consequently come to recognize the sexuality organically found in the objects of our affection. That is, we recognize that girls and boys are sexual creatures from a very early age and that they begin to seek sexual stimulation and gratification long before they reach reproductive maturity. Instances of young girls using their "cuteness" to manipulate the older men in their life, or of young boys developing intense, sexually charged "crushes" on adult women, are too numerous to count. Thus, it stands to reason that the first man a girl encounters (her father) and the first woman a boy encounters (his mother) may, and often do, become objects of nascent sexual desire.

All of this is to say that, insofar as society has deemed sexual attraction towards children wrong, and incestual desire even more so, the condemnation of MAPs must follow as to acknowledge child attraction as simply a type of sexual orientation, thus enabling open discussion and potential practice, would reveal just how common this "orientation" is. Indeed, it is likely that MAPs are about as common as men who like big breasts or women who like muscular men, and we do not classify liking big breasts or muscles as a distinct sexual orientation.

Antis do not hate MAPs because they harm children - they hate them because they hate the MAP within themselves.

[John_Doe]

I don't doubt that some of this might be circumstantially true (regardless of what motivates anti-minor attraction prejudice I have no doubt that all heterosexual teleiophile men are attracted to pubescent or post-pubescent minors who have the same fertility-indicating features that make women in their 20s and 30s sexually attractive for that reason, and I suspect that prepubescent girls are at least mildly attractive to most men as well) but you lost me with the Freudian pseudo-science. That has no empirical basis. Freud never 'discovered' a standard Oedipus or Electra complex in all, or even just average, human beings, there is no way to inter-subjectively demonstrate any of this. That's not even to say that any given theory in psychology must necessarily be wrong, or entirely wrong, only that you can't inter-subjectively test theories about first-person experience so the concept of psychiatric authority is misplaced. All psychiatric interpretation of human behavior (what it implies about subjective experience as opposed to just using past sensory observation to predict observable human behavior as natural phenomenon, which I don't think you can really do, in terms of fixed laws or even near-absolutes depending on what we're talking about, given how varied and flexible our behavior is) is ultimately rooted in projection. You'd think this would be so obvious to people.

I don't think a physiological response to bodily stimulation necessarily implies attraction to someone either. I think that people can honestly and accurately say that they don't feel attracted to people they are, on some level, physiologically dispositioned to feel attracted to under the right circumstances but I don't think that people are unaware when they actually experience an instinctive desire to be physically intimate with someone. They can interpret it in a way that is contrary to what they actually experience but that's something else (you can't not be 'aware' of an experience on some level, unless we're talking about meta-cognition; and there have been many times when it would 'hit' me that I was mentally playing a certain song or I'd 'consciously' think about or appreciate an intuition I had or why I was hesitant to make a certain choice, etc., despite actually experiencing it. Experience is 'awareness').

If I had a teenage daughter and was attracted to her I would never in a million years want to traumatize her by letting her know that I was attracted to her (I can imagine that would be deeply upsetting to most people, and I mean largely because they would find the prospect of one of their parents being attracted to them disgusting. If the Westermark Effect is a legitimate concept and we are sexually desensitized to people we might otherwise be attracted to when we are frequently exposed to them up until some time after 6, adults would be more likely to be attracted to their children than vice versa, especially if most people's parents are middle-aged when their sexual interest really starts to develop), it's possible that I'm biased by sex exceptionalism but I think there's something to be said for a daughter being able to rely on her father to love her unconditionally in a way that has nothing to do with the self-serving sexual love that leads to relationships that are inherently transactional (to the extent that they're built on sexual/'romantic' interest); not that the two are inherently at odds or that no one can compartmentalize their sexual attraction to someone from other aspects of their relationship with them or how they feel about them 'as people' (or as a teacher, doctor, leader, scientist, friend, etc.) but it's not hard to imagine the risks that might come with sexualizing parent-child relationships in real life (possibly even in a society with no sex-negativity or incest/child-adult sex taboos), but I do love the idea of living in a society where it's not considered shocking or distasteful for a parent to be attracted to their child, to fantasize about their child or to be open about their sexual/romantic feelings for them in the right company/under the right circumstances. The idea of having a close sexual/romantic relationship with my teenage daughter is not unappealing to me (I am not attracted to my actual mother but the idea of being a 12-year-old boy having such a relationship with a fantasy adopted mother could also be appealing to me. I think a lot of people are turned on by the idea of abstract incest despite being sexually repelled by their actual relatives).


I'm not so sure that incestuous desire (towards adults or relatives who aren't your children/younger than you) is more taboo than minor attraction, especially pedophilia. I don't think your last point really explains why minor attraction is considered bad to begin with. Personally, I suspect that the most common primary reason for the anti-pedo. stigma (especially if we're talking about attraction and not actual sex with children or minors) is that it ruins the image of 'innocent' children that we need to maintain. You could apply my own point to this and ask, "why do we think the sexualization of children detracts from their 'innocence'" and I might say sex negativity (or maybe some people can't compartmentalize parental instincts with sexual desire, so sexualizing babies would make it impossible to have that natural 'goo goo gah gah' response most people have and those feelings extend to much later on in their child's lives. I have to be honest, the idea of sexualizing cats has always bothered me, for example, even though I have no fundamental moral problem with that. Maybe perceived asexuality is part of what most people are wired to view as 'cute,' I often think of women as 'cute' but in a different way than puppies and kittens) and then, "why do we view sex as inherently dirty and inappropriate without justifying context," and then maybe I could say because it's animalistic; we're supposed to be higher-minded creatures, etc.