The need to not point fingers in any one direction

[BLueRibbon]

Reading through relevant discourse online, I've noticed a lot of MAPs and tangential allies blame MAP hysteria on just one issue. Sometimes it will come as an imagined 'aha!' moment, where they feel they've finally cracked the puzzle. Other times, a person will ramble on for months or years about how one or two issues are the sole cause of our oppression. We see this with a certain lovable poster on BoyChat whose entire posting history is about the suppression of boys' sexuality, and with a rather less lovable individual on the pediverse who goes on and on about capitalism and 'the patriarchy', as if everyone lives in exactly the same culture as him.

https://www.brianribbon.com/home/the-ne ... -direction

[John_Doe]

I appreciate some of the history but I don't see how the hysteria could have originated with Christians or tabloid media. Christians oppose/d significant age-gap relationships because their morality doesn't stem entirely from their actual religion, their morality has changed with the times. I think they cherry pick what to accept (in my understanding, a lot of Old Testament rules were never made obsolete with Jesus' command to love thy enemies or sacrificing himself so mankind can have the opportunity for forgiveness etc. but I'm probably very uninformed about this. Nothing about Christianity seems to justify opposing significant age-gap relationships as age-gap relationships, at the very least not if we're talking about adolescents who can reproduce. Jesus' own mother is estimated to have been 14 when she gave birth to him so for whatever reasons Christians may have been a driving force behind the initial anti-MAP prejudice I don't think it stemmed from their actual religion, in the same way that Muslims don't necessarily support jihad or have a problem with non-believers even if that's consistently implied by the Islamic faith). Attributing it to tabloid media seems to imply what I think Porcelain Lark (I can't remember if it was him) and possibly others have argued in the past which I disagree with; that anti-MAP prejudice stems from stereotypes about MAPs that themselves came about through something other than an existing prejudice against MAPs. Linking its origin to feminism makes sense since they are hostile to straight male sexuality and the idea of 'exploitation' that doesn't necessarily harm the exploited (at least not under my standard) might have something to do with their general cultural Marxist framework. The concern with power imbalances as end-in-themselves seems to come from that.

Women often face genuine harassment and abuse from men, but they face it from other women as well. Men also face harassment and abuse from men and women. I don't see why it would be important to single women out even if they were disproportionately abused and primarily by men. Misogynistic societies like those under Sharia law don't need 'feminism,' they need gender egalitarianism.

The etymology of 'feminism' implies a fundamental preoccupation with girls and women as girls and women. The strange thing about the equation of 'feminism' with 'gender egalitarianism' is that if you tell people that you believe men and women should be given the same consideration, have the same comparable rights and be held to the same standard (when you account for relevant comparable prerequisites or alternatively stated; gender shouldn't be a factor in rights, responsibilities or consideration) they might insist that if you don't call yourself a 'feminist' you support misogyny, patriarchy, etc. They know what they're doing because they understand that the term is loaded with patriarchy theory and (again, just by its etymology alone) an implicit attitude that women as women, or more precisely women as an underdog group, deserve fundamentally special consideration that may or may not involve anti-male hostility or leveling down in order to achieve 'equality.' If you go up to libertarians and say, "I believe in the non-aggression principle and property rights but I don't call myself a 'libertarian,' I hate that word," they likely wouldn't care because the term doesn't matter, you'd be agreeing with their actual principles. Feminists try to sneak in an ideology that can't be reduced to gender egalitarianism by packaging the basic concept of gender egalitarianism with the view that society is systemically structured to marginalize women as women and that given historical and social context true anti-male sexism is categorically impossible etc. and if you don't accept that view of how modern Western society actually functions (which includes stereotypes that go beyond cultural norms, that would need to be written into some metaphysically fuzzy and abstract 'fabric of society' that can't be reduced to specific concrete interactions between people) or the logical and moral double standards (e.g. that the exact same criteria for sexism is valid or invalid depending on supposed historical/social context and the gender identities of the people involved in any given scenario), you believe that women don't deserve the same respect and consideration that men do etc. If this weren't the case, I believe, it would be totally irrelevant whether or not one calls themselves a 'feminist' if they actually believe that men and women both deserve respect, both deserve to be treated with consideration and kindness, both deserve comparable rights and so on (or at least, again, gender should not be a factor in how much respect or consideration you give people).

I wouldn't care if someone who agrees with me that everyone's/only happiness is intrinsically good called themselves a 'hedonist' or not (although, for reasons I won't get into, I do think that the true hedonists are those moral realists who take introspection or personal experience as the epistemic justification for hedonism as a moral realist position but my point is that the label 'hedonism' doesn't matter to me if someone shares my actual worldview).

You seem to take the idea of 'sexual objectification' seriously but then go on to mention sex negativity and sex exceptionalism, although it's possible that I've misunderstood you. I'm not going to assert this but I don't really buy the idea that men even generally don't associate sex with emotional intimacy or divorce how they feel about women's bodies from the women themselves (if a man truly hates a woman, I just don't believe that he's going to want to have sex with her unless maybe it's this calculated power play to humiliate/destroy her in vengeance or something which wouldn't have to do with sexual attraction per se. It gets complicated because people hold conflicting feelings and instincts simultaneously, but if you hate someone enough I have to believe that completely kills your sexual attraction to them, we naturally don't want intimacy with people we hate and we realistically have to associate people with their bodies; stress blocks felt attraction and vice versa and if you hate someone they are a source of stress for you). I think the idea of separating sex from 'love' (or at least emotional intimacy and a kind of affection) is convenient for many people since we live in a world that allows for people who are physically attractive despite having unattractive personalities so it allows them to have their cake and eat it too, but I don't think men generally don't want to feel at least some shallow emotional connection with the women they're attracted to or sleep/want to sleep with. If 'objectification' is 'caricaturization' or seeing someone one-dimensionally in terms of being an object of sexual pleasure for you I could maybe understand that to a degree, not to the extent that some might claim, but this isn't limited to sexualization. 'Heroes' are caricaturized and made into one-dimensional figures, you probably don't think too deeply about the private insecurities, fears, personality quirks, etc. of the guy who delivers your food; you see him as the guy who delivers your food (it's not surprising to 'find out' that he has an identity beyond that, which is why I say 'to a degree,' but that's primarily the basis of your perception of him before you get to know him or unless something about him otherwise stands out etc.), a celebrity might commonly be treated as an 'idea of a person,' etc.

I've thought for a long time that the worst way to perceive someone, to completely 'dehumanize' them, is to remove their emotions in the way that we generally do to non-human animals. We act as though because they are cognitively less developed than we are their emotions somehow aren't really as concrete and real as our own, we treat the fact that they have emotions as vague and abstract and the more distantly related they are to us the more vague the reality of their internal emotionality seems, or if we don't deny their emotions we treat them as if they don't matter. A sexist man can look at women and think "completely ruled by their emotions, no logical thought at all" and that's a problem, both in terms of just not being true and the prejudice that inspires the belief etc. (I'm rushing now because I have something to do) but it would be far worse to deny that she has emotions (Ingrid Newkirk once claimed that some whites denied that African slaves could feel pain, if that's true I think that's a much more dangerous racism than thinking that low IQ blacks are so emotional that they can't delay gratification or think through things rationally because at least the latter acknowledges that blacks are 'PEOPLE') 'Objectification' as the de-mentalization of women (or more specifically, erasing their emotionality, not just their rational agency) is something that doesn't seem to really exist (unless maybe we're talking about someone who prefers dead or unconscious bodies, I was going to touch on this but decided not to).

I also think it's a mistake to overstate a redeeming non-sexual aspect to 'minor attraction.' Sexual attraction is involuntary and primal, MAPs (i.e. pedophiles) as individuals can be more or less sympathetic to children (people can be physically attracted to people they wish they were not attracted to, I'd imagine that most people are). Being a MAP has nothing to do, at least ultimately, with wanting to mentor children/minors or a general love for them etc., it is defined by a desire to be sexually intimate with them. I'm sure you can be biased in favor of someone because of your attraction to them, I could see myself projecting angelic qualities on to attractive women because of what they look like in some scenarios or being more forgiving of them (in other scenarios, maybe I or other people would be more on guard/defensive, wrongly presume arrogance, etc.) etc. but it is ultimately about sex or sensual intimacy. This seems to be how LGB people, and even polyamorous people, sought or seek to gain mainstream acceptance; by removing the sexual element in ways that I think are dishonest. The 'sexual element' has a mental aspect (I'm completely bored the idea of sex with someone I couldn't feel affection for, someone I couldn't see myself cuddling with post-orgasm; sex without emotional intimacy is completely uninteresting and pointless to me and I'm not saying that because I have a moral problem with that, I just find it sexually unexciting. As long as you value your partner's happiness; which is a kind of 'love,' I don't care about your sex preferences) but I think the desired end of attraction is pleasurable physical intimacy.

[OnionPetal]

There are lots of brilliant people in the MAP community, but that also seems correlated with a higher proportion of people with obsessive interests. Those people with hyper-specific, laser-focused interests would do well to remember to zoom out once in a while and take in the big picture.

This article is a very good summary of the various issues that cause(d) and perpetuate anti-MAP hysteria. I have some minor gripes, where more nuance would have been helpful. Such as some middle ground between the anarchy of extreme youth liberation versus the the unyielding disciplinarianism faced by Cinderella's strict step mother, as echoed in the blog's comments. But overall, it's a good outline/big-picture summary.