="Learning to undeny" post_id=22743 time=1782420532 user_id=2962]
I don't care too much about gay marriage itself (although I support it right now), but if we regress to a time without gay marriage (in those parts of the world where it's a thing) it will be because homophobia has increased, and people will be more vigilant about deviant sexualities in general. Also, you can make a straight male movement if you want, but over a half of people here seem to be bi or gay:
https://forum.map-union.org/viewtopic.p ... rls#p15297
(That poll didn't ask about your gender. I could be wrong. But at least 1/3 are bi.)
I'm not a data scientist or statistician but I wouldn't take any poll from within a MAP forum as representative of anything other than the composition within that organization given that the internet and organizations in general have filtering processes etc. We could get into all the reasons to be skeptical of the idea that a webpoll is particularly meaningful but I think its easier to just point out that Kinsey came to the conclusion that most of the public are "soft bisexuals" in the 1950s. Meaning they experienced some same sex attraction but not a massive amount, were predominantly attracted to the opposite sex and most of their partners were opposite sex. So from that perspective we might assert that most people are gay and bisexual and come to wonder how so many people can live comfortably under the "heteronormative" status quo, not to even speak of recent history where the State took a more openly cooercive position with the depth and nuance that deserves.
It does seem like lolicon and depictions of underage females/adult women "coding" themselves as underage in their presentation is the main way that MAPs interact with this subject in the day to day. And that's notable because for most of Western history, and I'd say the 19th century was where the historical norm began to cleave, most portrayals of MAP relationships, positive or negative, in art or literature were male-male. And even with Greco-Roman pederasty many but not all of these relationships were with teens. Its pretty notable that there's no equivalent to the story of Jupiter and Ganymede for GLs that makes a starkly hebephilic/pedophilic relationship between say a man and a girl the topic of a sacred myth. Someone can correct me if they know of a similar GL story within the canon of Western antiquity/medieval literature. By contrast, there is the
Tale of Genji in Japanese literature and the story of Muhammad and Aisha which has extremely powerful GL themes and cultural-religious influence.
I haven't taken a stance on whether I believe in orientation as a hard concept rather than just a sort of reductive liberal myth that seeks to explains a particular tendency, however powerful. Its very possible we have many more GL pedophiles than previously existed in the West given that lolicon and the brief period where girl-prominent cp was widely available on the internet and elsewhere created an object of attraction for straight/straight-leaning GLs to latch onto. The fact that
Lolita , a book written as an "anti-pedophile" book by a Russian expat, not only became discursive when talking about pedophilia both within MAP circles and in academic circles opposed to it, but for whatever reason became a cultural touchstone through which "pedophilic" GL desires were often channeled into is itself telling. And Nabokov commented in the early 50s that he found it odd that Americans were more shocked to hear of an adult man and a young girl were caught having a sexual relationship than they were to hear of murder. He probably did not consider that for early to mid-20th century Americans "pedophilia" and homosexuality were often equivalent and this was often the lens it was viewed from even if the partnership was heterosexual. It was "queer", not gay, to put it vulgarly. Though we might also say here that a fear of racial mixing in media of the time which often portrayed (frequently adult) women entering into sexual relationships with black and chinese men through sex work, drug/alcohol use (particularly opium), or rape probably was a factor in consciousness here. Discursive writing on incest in the 19th century is interesting because its probably an early vector where GL desire was channeled (Alice in Wonderland is another) but like Lolita it was often formally against the practice but often seemed to aim at consciously shocking and titilating the readership into arousal while promulgating itself as morally serious.
All this is to say, whether GL was already more prevalent in cultural practice but not as represented in literature and art for whatever reason, or the slow creep in GL-oriented media and "sacred myth" (for lack of a better term here) from the 19th century onwards has helped produce it is an open-question. Already, by the mid-19th century, Marx is citing doctors reports arguing there are towns where female virgins above the age of 12 from working class backgrounds simply cannot be found. "CSA" statistics (1/4th girls vs 1/8th of boys) and the volume of prurient MAP-coded media and outright porn does tend to support the idea that GL is the most prominent form of MAP attraction.
I would say that beyond the 80s and 90s backlash (and the congressional investigation into APA for Rind 96 deserves special mention) the reason why you see a lot of systemic sexological interest in pedophilia seeming to dry up is until gay normalization a large part of the public associated gay/trans with pedophile. And, so, the gay lobbies and those in the liberal establishment naturally got their pet academics to start doing research that was open to the same charges of "advocacy!" as any study that returns a seemingly pro-MAP result but curiously much of it did not face this hurtle, maybe because of public ignorance but more likely because the thing being advocated for wasn't so much pedophilia in general as "gay male anal" to use Andrew Anglin's vulgar but shockingly useful turn of phrase. It seems very interesting to me that in the 70s and 80s and into the early 90s that gay, lesbian, bi, trans and feminist advocates could engage with academic research or advocacy groups like NAMbLA without much shock or horror. Maybe its simply a testament to how reactionary the general political and cultural trend since at least 1980 has been and I think there's truth there but I'm not sure that that's it. When pedophilia was associated being gay, with gay male anal, a cause many on the left wanted to promote it was cool, hip and counter-culture when more, when it was considered a possible barrier to getting (adult) gay male anal then solidarity could be expressed there however weakly, but the more research that came out indicating it was also predominantly a straight male interest and girls were more often to be the so-called victims plus it was looking more and more like it wouldn't be necessary to convince the public to be cool with it due to the conflation of the topics it was suddenly dropped. The Left has gone to bat for exceedingly unpopular causes in many instances like open borders, school busing, and trans kids (particularly a non-medicalist stance here) and in these cases it often did hurt their ability to actually gain power or their credibility on other issues they were more popular on but they felt the need to go ahead anyways. You really have to ask yourself why, in spite of Reagan, Clinton, and Bush, the Left did not feel the need to take a lonely and unpopular but necessary stance here that ran counter to the existing mainstream center/right-wing climate.
I would submit that this might be because straight (particularly white) men are treated as a problematic and anything that seems to favor their interests automatically becomes suspect regardless of how it affects other issues/spheres. I would also submit that pedophilia is likely to be a white tendency and that non-Asian minorities who engage in pedophilia are more likely doing it as a crime of opportunity rather than orientation. I can't say if there's any "genetic" reason why whites and asians tend to be more pedophilic as a sexual-romantic orientation rather than an opportunistic one. It almost sounds like a race realist thing to posit it but there
may be something here.
So all of us gay and bi MAPs here have to be happy with gay rollback?
Personal subjective happiness is irrelevant imo because it is already occurring, and on the trans issue in particular there's been massive reversal that's possibly even completely undone more than a decade of trans activism where the cause seemed to be relentlessly knocking down everything in its path. One might say maybe it was better to let trans issues fly under the radar if one had known in advance it was going to provoke a right-wing/TERF backlash that would make things that used to be very uncontroversial bc people didn't know about them and they were niche like medicalist youth trans treatment, anti-trans legislation is being passed on topics that was never previously a subject of law leading to direct repression thats worse than what many trans people experienced prior to the 2010s breakout of the trans cause/identity.
If you had told people this would happen in say 2018, or even much later, in say 2022-2024, people wouldn't have believed it. Now, its become a normal fact of life, provoking 400,000 internal migrations in the US, and as one post correctly said if such migration was being observed of a minority in Russia and China, the Western media would immediately leap forward with accusations of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Much like the overturn of Roe v. Wade made legal abortion access impossible in much of the United States, a previously unthinkable trans rollback has already occured and life has somehow moved on. It will likely move on if gays are forced into the closet and people here are underestimating the likelihood that not only will it occur but that it might be successful in the short to medium term.
And, to wit, I know from first hand experience on this subject in 2022-24 because I was warning MAPs not to get too excited about the whole trans kids thing because the medicalist paradigm creates an easy out so liberals don't have to consider pedophilia in the same vein and its not particularly persuasive to someone who doesn't accept a medicalist interpretation of gender dysphoria. I was also warning a trans backlash was likely. [I wrote on the topic of TERFism/feminism that I am going to make into a separate post since i want to address you directly]
If gay marriage is part of the status quo and accepted by the majority, the arguments used the rare occasion where you have to defend it against bigots (probably without much public) have little repercussion.
Defending gay marriage means that MAPs are engaged in free labor and propaganda work on behalf of people who consider us enemies. Politically, its a big loser to add our voice to the choir for no direct benefit, no promises or assurances. And, idk if its worth going into the fact that many gay rights radicals that were part of the original 70s movement and survived the AIDs epidemic were openly
opposed and hostile to gay marriage because it undermined the content and spirit of the Revolution they had been fighting for, there were a not small number of people from that 70s scene who didn't even say the movement as gay or
LGBT prior to the invention of that acronym but as a universalist sex-positive sexual liberation movement. And this is a bit of an aside, but if members of the MAP movement want to keep anything from their "gay rights" forebears why don't they keep that? For someone like Tom O'Carroll or Harry Hay that had a close connection to their 1st wave MAP or gay aligned activism. I don't see any constituency or side of the political aisle where that fits in quite naturally tbh in 2026 due to the rise of purity culture, not merely religious but secular, and the puriteens.
Who has a bigger microphone? The MAP movement or the gay lobby? If gays stop the rollback (somewhat unlikely) they won't credit it to us even if we help. Do you know what we do have? We are an avante-garde movement that is cool, hip, foward-looking and futurist. Kids are making idols out of Diddy, Epstein, and Peter Scully as a way to rebel against their parents, older generations and the stagnant order. We don't have billions in NGO and big political party money that can create an army of paid activists, that can turn on the (dying) traditional media and spin it in our favor. But what we are is a new movement, not even the 1st wave was primarily composed of GL pedophiles or even pedophiles in general, much of the motivation behind joining PIE and NAMbLA was striking down age-related laws that disproportionately affected gays. We can say much of the leadership had bigger goals and commitments tend to grow over time as people are involved in scenes and become exposed to a group's general world outlook.
What we have is we're a 21st century movement thats radically new in a world where most of the world is replaying 20th century politics and oppositions or even throwing back to 18th/19th century political faultlines and oppositions. I wouldn't downplay the potential impact that something underfunded, understaffed, undersupported but politically fresh and new can have in politics. One of the reasons that Mussolini succeeded when he really shouldn't have been able to is he was able to position fascism as something fresh and new, he positioned liberalism (aka capitalism) vs. communism as stagnant 19th century questions and problems that no longer fit the new conditions and century. Much like how monarchism vs. republicanism/parliamentary rule quit being the key and core active primary contradiction of politics after the French Revolution. The opposition of those liberal bourgeois and conservative aristocratic supporters that fought the liberals previously during the reaction that opposed making the franchise universal and those radical democrats who promoted universal suffrage also fell away from being the key contradiction as capitalists had to put down workers rebellions and strikes with violent means (including large-scale mass murder in Paris est. around 20-70k). Whether the more radical democrats were aligned with socialists and labor unions or not, it quit being a pressing issue as 1. the franchise was slowly and incrementally expanded covering broader and broader portions of the pop each time 2. the more clever among the capitalist elite and bourgeois political operatives realized the parliamentary machinery and party systems were easily gamed and so it would be practically impossible to end capitalism by a universal vote or even to redistribute elite wealth in a concrete, massive and tangible way, therefore the opposition between those who wanted limited franchise and those who did not also began to fall away.
just being able to offer something that seemed fresh in a world hungry for change where many old oppositions seemed obsolete in a world hungry for some type of change or novel thing made Italian fascism seem like a breath of fresh air to many. Again, this isn't to endorse it but you'd be surprised how prior to his association with Hitler how many people saw Mussolini as this bold fresh new thinker. His cult seemed much like that of Henry Ford, offering a real/percieved break from a status quo that to many people seemed still too stuck in the 19th century without going all the way over into something like communism. This is not an endorsement btw but an exposition.
With us, I believe we have a movement thats so desperate for success and action without focus that the movement sells short what is deeply appealing about it. The fact that its marginal, weird, and feels very new to people outside it, is in many ways its strength.
Many of these liberal and LGBT NGOs are getting millions if not *billions* cumulatively and still achieving nothing. Don't believe me? The Kamala Harris campaign burnt through 2 billion in 100 days. So what are the lessons 1. money, resources, mainstream cultural and poltiical acceptance aren't everything 2. The liberal establishment and LGBT lobbies are losing despite a far greater warchest of money and manpower then we have so what will adding a tiny layer of MAP activists add to that when we could be working on behalf of our own priorities?
Who knows long-term if that will happen, but short-term if LGBT loses some power they would still be massively popular and position themselves more strongly against MAPs to try to save themselves. I don't think that's beneficial to us.
That's already happening as they are losing so what are you doing to stop it? A drowning man pulling down another swimmer? Certainly not unheard of but where i have a problem is people saying we must save them. You know what could also happen? They reach out to MAPs because they are losing. Its not a coincidence that MAPs had some acceptance within that movement when it was far more marginalized (and radical) then it is now.
Do we have to wait 20 years or something until they (if your will materializes) lose so much power that they ally with MAPs or become irrelevant?
Does anyone have an actual timeline for victory? The fact that I never hear one underscores something I've come to believe, MAPs have no strategy, what MAPs believe is strategy is actually better classified as tactics and they are continually conflating the two. Funny how this arises in opposition to my stance but never seems to come up almost any other time. Under Biden some MAPs seemed to act as if they were going to abolish aoc tomorrow cuz trans kids and I say we should make the most of the present situation and suddenly its going to set things back by 20 years as if i personally determine the timeline.
What I will say is Strat thought that pro-C normalization work would truly begin in earnest in the 2030s I actually disagreed with this saying i thought its too conservative given how history is speeding up. If you don't want to be waiting forever for the anti-MAP system to end then you probably need to take a more radical approach that exploits the contradictions that presently exist, not the contradictions of 60-20 years ago or the contradictions you wish were the case.
