That's aweful, it's people who don't understand the reality of minor attraction that are so quick to judge and have an opinion. I spoke to a prison warden who had retired from that and become an educator and she said that pedophiles in prison for offences such as cp shouldn't be there, prison just isn't a helpful environment for them. They are not criminals and it causes problems for prison guards to look after them within a prison population of actual criminals, so it's dangerous for everyone and doesn't really improve or change things. Her view was that pedophiles should just get training on how to deal with things better with only serious offenders going to prison. That would be cheaper and make prisons safer for everyone and would help pedophiles to integrate better. She also said that as an educator she's found one pronblem being that social workers and the police are not qualified or experienced to understand pedophiles, they just don't have the training or education to understand these situations and so totally mismanage them.WavesInEternity wrote: Fri Mar 21, 2025 6:36 am My longest-time romantic partner was a psychology student (eventually a PhD). I initially believed that her extreme openness regarding minor-attraction was a result of her own autopedophilia, but I was surprised to find out that others in the academic discipline of psychology and adjacent fields were also generally quite open-minded in that respect.
I was even more pleasantly surprised when I found out about the recent wave of researchers, perhaps best exemplified by Allyn Walker, who are choosing to engage with MAPs directly as a central part of their research, and who treat us with respect and compassion. This is, I believe, one of the most encouraging trends in the world today, and one of very few causes for optimism. Perhaps Mu should write to interested researchers? What exactly would we say?
By contrast, i was extremely disappointed in the attitude of NGOs and social workers in the field. When I ended up homeless, in one shelter I frequented, I once disclosed that hebephilia was my preferential sexual orientation to one staff member during a philosophical discussion that tangentially had touched upon ephebophilia and the popularity of "barely legal" pornography. As a result, I had to endure an extremely unpleasant, intimidating conversation with the coordinator, who repeatedly told me to go into therapy to be "cured" and that I should be taking medication (chemical castration). As he already knew I liked anime & manga, he was especially angry at what he perceived as the "promotion of paedophilia" in such media, and he had no interest in looking at the academic evidence (that there is no connection between prurient fiction and abuse) that I was trying to show him on my smartphone.
I hadn't even mentioned that I actually have strictly paedophilic desires, too...
I do think that things will improve in our lifetime, if we help things along. I base that on a few things.
1. As we've discussed, researchers are not anti-map and generally agree that we should be more socially integrated and treated better. If the research establishment is with us then it's an important lever to move the narrative in a positive direction. I don't know how we best support this lever, whether we fund/support more research, although if we funded research then you know some people would argue that the research is biased. But we should do what we can to support researchers.
2. I've talked to many many people over the years about the map issue and I've found most are not ardent anti-maps. There is a small very vocal anti-map contingency but they've failed to make the mass middle ground hardened anti-maps. They've made them wary and distrustful for sure, but not totally anti-map and that I think is because most either or not invested one way or another or their human instinct is to just not hate people. Distrust yes, but not blindly hate. In fact I think most people are inclined to tolerate others and conenct with others, it's the social instinct, and so I think it's easier to bring the mass middle ground towards accepting maps than it is for anti's to pull them away.
Take transexuals or gay people, when I was a younger man there was a very vocal contingent against those groups and it made me and others wary of them. But then I went out clubbing as a young man, met both, found them to be normal nice people, all that prejudice quickly evaporated away. I think the same would be true for maps IF people encountered us in the same way.
3. It doesn't make economic sense to lock up all pedophiles when there are just so many. I think the economics of a more war ready world will just make the map issue less of a priority and something to refocus away from.
