I wanna understand a nepiophiles perspective

[eveeve]

Hi Everyone!

I have a genuine question for MAPs and especially nepios, this question is not to shame anyone or judge! Obviously a child can give consent, that’s kind of a known thing, but what about children who are too young to even speak? How does consent work for children around those ages? Again no judgment! Just curious and a genuine question!
Thank you!

[Fragment]

I take a cautious approach and only support an age of consent as low as 12, and even then with extra precautions that don't apply to adult-adult sex (eg a minor that feels they were taken advantage of can press charges even if they ostensibly gave consent).

That isn't to say that I believe younger children are incapable of simple consent. I just believe dynamics get more complicated.

Additionally, we're talking about a much different situation. For 12-17 year olds roughly 50% of "child sexual abuse" is by acquaintances aged 12-24 (very likely their romantic partners). For 0-6 year olds, 67% of abuse is by a family member. We're dealing with very different situations, so I think it's likely we'll need different policy measures.

[eveeve]

I do agree we all gotta take a super cautious approach with any age, because like you said, even if they said they gave consent they can easily go to law enforcement and say they didn’t. May I ask what dynamics are different for children younger than 12? and what policy measure examples do you think would be a good solution for the problem?

[PorcelainLark]

My opinions change about this often. I think I read that the level of neurodevelopment plateaus at 4. So while the differences across the ages 1 to 3 are drastic, the differences between 4 to 11 are less extreme. I think the age of consent has to at least match the age of criminal responsibility, since otherwise you could get into absurdities like a minor being treated as responsible for committing rape while not being treated as responsible enough to have consensual sex. With the exception of some states in America, and Mauritius, the lowest the age of criminal responsibility is 7.

From a practical point of view I think maybe 14 is most achievable, since it's the lowest age of consent found across so many different continents. Although I do think minors younger than that consent.

I would imagine integrating nepios into society would require rethinking sexual norms to a much greater degree. Some time ago, I read about cultures that would masturbate their infants to help them go to sleep. I wonder if you could make a comparison to coma victims or animals, in so far as they aren't able to directly communicate or reject sexual advances from another. If there were conditions under which it was acceptable to have sexual relations with a coma victim, then it might be acceptable for a nepio to have sexual relations with an infant. What criteria could use for separating acceptable and unacceptable acts without invoking assent/consent? Maybe physical harm, distress, and/or retrospective rejection.

So if a nepio didn't cause physical harm, distress, and they knew they weren't doing anything that the infant would oppose when they were old enough to understand, then maybe that would work as a substitute for assent/consent. I think it's probably impossible to meet that last criteria though.

In practice, if it wasn't for the gratification of the adult, but, for example, to make the infant fall asleep or to sooth them, then it would be easier to argue for AMSC in that context.

I'm not a nepio, though, so I don't know if there's already a standard answer to this question. Maybe you should edit your thread's title to mention you'd like to hear the perspectives of nepios.

[Pegasus]

Hi Everyone!

I have a genuine question for MAPs and especially nepios, this question is not to shame anyone or judge! Obviously a child can give consent, that’s kind of a known thing, but what about children who are too young to even speak? How does consent work for children around those ages? Again no judgment! Just curious and a genuine question!
Thank you!

For a child who can already speak and has a minimum of comprehension, they can already say the words “yes” and ‘no’, “I want”/“I don't want”, but for babies and those who don't yet speak?
When you tickle a baby, when you blow on its tummy, when you tickle its little feet, what is their reaction, you will probably see it smile and make pleasant sounds.
That's why you can draw the answer: her reactions are the consent, if she's well, if she shows happiness, if she shows that she's not going through something bad or suffering, we can draw the answer from that. I'm a nepi, a GL, but I can also recognize that girls from 7-9 years old can also be very sexy and beautiful.

[FairBlueLove]

When you tickle a baby, when you blow on its tummy, when you tickle its little feet, what is their reaction, you will probably see it smile and make pleasant sounds.
That's why you can draw the answer: her reactions are the consent, if she's well, if she shows happiness, if she shows that she's not going through something bad or suffering, we can draw the answer from that. I'm a nepi, a GL, but I can also recognize that girls from 7-9 years old can also be very sexy and beautiful.

As simple as that.

I'm not a nepi, but I don't feel it hard to agree with Pegasus' point.

[WavesInEternity]

Sorry for being a party-pooper, but no, it's nowhere near that simple.

A) What some women say

I know two women who were non-violently sexually abused at a very young age, neither of which got the authorities involved or went into therapy, and they both independently say pretty much the exact same thing about the trauma and its consequences.

What's most striking is the similar language they use about the experience itself, saying for instance that it was "like an electric shock", or that those memories are so powerful that they really stand out among all other memories of the time. They both say the men, their fathers in both cases, didn't realize that they were causing harm precisely because the girls "seemed OK with it" (this is partly why they forgave them). They never cried or resisted.

They describe it as having "burned off" (I'd say "overused" or something similar) those neural connections. The underlying hypothesis is that such powerful stimulation—yes, sex is powerful, I do agree with that much—that the brain wasn't ready for meant that the brain down-regulated to compensate, which eventually made all sexual stimuli feel uninteresting and boring. It may be that all the talk about brain development being insufficient for sexual activity, while it's patently false when it comes to adolescents, does apply to very young children.

Now, how harmful is it to permanently prevent a person from truly enjoying sex? My mother says she doesn't care, but of course, she doesn't know what she's missing. The other woman is more resentful about it.

B) What my moral framework says

My preferred moral theory is a version of preference utilitarianism with some added sophistication. The general idea is that what is morally good is what satisfies the greatest number of "informed" or "grounded" preferences, for the greatest number of people. Preferences are "grounded" when they are the result of inferences that are true (in a universal, objective sense), or at least believed to be true (in a personal, pragmatic sense).

If they are to be morally relevant, preferences must be understood as much more complex than "pleasure and pain", and definitely more complex than the outward expression of such feelings. Many people may hate being tickled yet appear to enjoy it (I've got one in mind). A masochist may prefer what you would view as pain. Many parents, in many cultures, may claim that a child should suffer to some extent to become "stronger", although I'd personally mostly disagree.

Even the simplest understanding of those matters shows that it isn't as simple as looking at the infant's momentary reaction. To give an extreme but very real example, parents at the turn of the 19th century would give opium to infants to soothe them. This caused addiction in several of them at a time where opiate dependency was ill-understood. Of course, the opium pleased the infant. Was it a good idea to give it? We must look at the long-term outcomes, not merely the immediate results.

Here's an even better example: if I give my kid lots of delicious junk food that they love, they'll be happy at the time, but the long-term consequences will be catastrophic.

To take into account such scenarios, the moral framework I subscribe to gives moral value not just to preferences before their fulfillment, but also a posteriori, so that the aim of parenting isn't just to satisfy the child's preferences at the time (and in the case of infants, none of their preferences are "grounded" anyway), but that when they are capable of looking back at their infancy and then their childhood, they consider that what they experienced was preferable to the alternatives.

In other words, if you could demonstrate that people who experienced sexual activity as babies end up looking back at such experiences positively, I could consider it acceptable. In the absence of such evidence, and indeed considering that there is substantial evidence against it, I would err on the side of caution and forbid it altogether, similar to how I feel about incest generally.

[FairBlueLove]

non-violently sexually abused

I'll try to make it simple again. The culprit is the word "abuse". This is what makes it complicated. It applies to sex, opium and sweets alike.

[WavesInEternity]

I'll try to make it simple again. The culprit is the word "abuse". This is what makes it complicated. It applies to sex, opium and sweets alike.

I don't think that's an adequate response. The cases of the two women I described, from the perspective of the men who committed those acts, actually fit into the "simple" pattern Pegasus described previously: "she seems to like it" and "I'm not going too far". They were tragically wrong.

The issue is that with some things, the risk of unintentional abuse is simply too high, and there's nothing simple about that (as a person who ended up unintentionally addicted to opioids despite being very knowledgeable about drugs, I know that all too well). Giving opiates or cocaine to children casually is one of them. According to available evidence, sexual contact with children below a certain age is another. Yes, there's a lot of disagreement regarding what that age is, and it's clearly not during adolescence, but I do think there's solid evidence for the notion that such an "absolute threshold" does exist.

The comparison with junk food was only insofar as it highlights that the morality of the situation goes much further than "the child seems to enjoy it".

[Pegasus]

With regard to these two women, I don't know the ages at which they went through this experience, which seems to have caused them problems, but I believe that they already had a certain awareness to know that they were doing something. When I referred to sensations and reactions, I was only referring to babies. The reactions that go through them show how good or bad something can be, and this will visibly be noticed. If it's good, that moment, at that time, will be very good for her. Here comes a question: do you remember when you were a baby? What you went through, where you went, who held you so many times? Do you remember anything good or bad? But the “moment” can be good or bad.