Olivia2012 wrote: Sat Mar 22, 2025 12:39 pm
Also, I AM an AAM, but not really in the way I'd love other people or how u like minors.
I'm curious: how is it that you think I "like minors"? How would you describe what you understand my feelings to be?
Olivia2012 wrote: Sat Mar 22, 2025 12:39 pm
Part of me still hates MAPs, and I still don't really trust them. Having this conversation with you in the first place makes me worried, even though I know you really won't do anything to me.
[...]
I'm still kinda confused on how I feel about this and MAPs in general
I agree with FairBlueLove: it might well be that your conflicted feelings are in no small part due to the stigma we're fighting against. Although you should also keep in mind that, as Jim Burton and myself pointed out in your "Aam" thread, the MAAs who are willing to engage in sexually explicit activities with you are less likely to be "high-quality" individuals that genuinely care about you.
The inner conflict you feel seems to have a counterpart in the typical experience of young MAPs. Although I had realized that I was preferentially attracted to younger girls by age 12, I was in denial about being a MAP until age 15, and even then, I hated myself for it. I wanted that part of me to be gone at all costs. I tried to ignore it, to obsessively think about sex and intimacy with adults instead, to use various drugs to suppress my libido. Nothing worked of course. I was intermittently suicidal for years. It took me a long time to reach true self-acceptance and
ego-syntonia. It only happened a few months ago, concomitantly with my rejection of the strict
anti-contact stance I used to adhere to for a moderate
pro-c stance.
Olivia2012 wrote: Sat Mar 22, 2025 12:39 pm
Rape is terrible, and he (the rapist mentioned in the original post) got what he deserved.
This is, in my opinion, your biggest mistake.
The main reason why our society believes that rape is
uniquely horrible is that our collective imagination has this idea of female "purity" as something transcendentally valuable, and "robbing" a woman of her "purity" is seen as unthinkably horrific (this is also why female-on-male rape isn't viewed with nearly the same horror, unless it involves an "innocent" boy). This is, however, an essentially religious sentiment, not a rational assessment of harm.
I am extremely familiar with
rape trauma syndrome and its effects, considering that my mother has an exceptionally bad case of it. It's the paradigmatic syndrome that led to the understanding of what's now called complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD).
CPTSD is, by definition, a rather terrible and pernicious condition, but there is nothing
particularly terrible about CPTSD resulting from rape compared to CPTSD from other causes, such as domestic abuse or war.
Most importantly, it's worth noting that not all cases of rape result in rape trauma syndrome (nor do all cases of domestic violence result in CPTSD for that matter). In fact, only a minority do. If you get beaten once as a child by an authority figure, even very badly, it will doubtless leave a traumatic memory, but it's unlikely to have a pervasive negative impact on your ability to function in everyday life. The same is true with rape. Cases where it results in CPTSD are typically ones where it occurs repeatedly over time and/or as part of broader traumatic circumstances such as an abusive relationship (in my mother's case, both). One-off opportunistic rape by a complete stranger is generally the form of sexual abuse that's easiest to recover from. The harm is comparable in intensity to getting assaulted by a stranger on the bus. Do all perpetrators of assault deserve to die?
In truth, if there's something that makes rape unique among forms of assault, it's not that it's especially harmful (it's not), it's that in some unusual cases, it can cause little or no harm.
What I'm going to tell you here is a very intimate fact about a person I once loved dearly, and I want to emphasize that
it's not intended to undermine the legitimacy of the suffering of rape victims, nor condone the actions of the man (I would support putting him in prison).
My ex-girlfriend was once raped. She was 16 or 17, and the man towards the end of his 20s. However, she only realized quite some time after the fact that it had been rape, due to the way her pre-existing rape fetish coloured her interpretation of the experience. Although she said "no", and the man very literally forced himself upon her, it was a pleasant experience for her. She suffered no harm whatsoever, and the man had used a condom. No, she was never abused as a child nor anything of the like. She began having rape fantasies aged 13-14. I did around age 12. Our consensual sex life was, at times,
very rapey. We didn't even have a safe word until the disintegration of our relationship in the last 2 years.
There you have it. I'm disgusting, my ex-girlfriend is disgusting. A lot of people are disgusting, in fact, considering that (in the US, but other Western countries show similar results)
two-thirds of women and half the men admit to having rape fantasies. This is extremely widespread. In
another US study, the proportion of women who have rape fantasies is 62%, with only 9% viewing them as completely aversive ("disgusting").