MAP Forum

MrJC1201 wrote: Mon Feb 16, 2026 9:39 am I went with "A mix of both but mostly culture (70%-30%)".

I think it is predominantly social conditioning that causes most people to be so averse to adult-child sex. That, along with the real problem that some MAPs do abusive things to children and the media/pop culture presents that as the norm for paedophiles. All of this causes the hysterical, irrational reaction to adult-child sexual relationships.

I haven't really kept up with the thread but I really disagree with the idea that the grievance most people have with MAPs (or rather true pedophiles or even 'pedo-curious' adults who are in some sense interested in prepubescent children and normal teleiophiles who are open about their attraction to legal minors) is rooted in stereotypes about them that for whatever reasons happened to develop. Most people are against child-adult sex itself. I don't believe that they oppose child-adult sex itself because they assume that there are no pedophiles who genuinely care about children, they might claim that child-adult sex itself necessarily harms children but there really are no hypothetical conditions under which most of them would accept child-adult sex as plausible. If an upstanding otherwise sympathetic man expresses attraction to children they will, at best, have a love the sinner; hate the sin attitude toward him.

No level of moral respectability is going to convince people that murder is ok because a really nice guy sometimes murders people, even the analogy is silly because you're not a 'nice' person to the extent that you want to murder people or don't value their lives. People are generally against child-adult sex because they want children to be asexual on principle. When it comes to older teens or young adults (I think this also applies to children) there's the power dynamics aspect but, again, I don't think it's just about stereotyping older adults who are interested in significantly younger adults (although the one-dimensional caricature of a man who wants to exploit impressionable young women so he can have someone to control and use helps with the narrative), they feel that the relationship is fundamentally inappropriate.

However, I believe we need to separate out how different groups in society react to it. What is a socially conditioned response in one group, may well be more natural position in another group. "Conservative" feminists are the best example. Their hatred of MAPs (mostly) comes from the same place they hate men dating younger adult women. I don't think they are just being socially conditioned to feel that way. It comes from insecurity and jealousy. This is why most of their anti-MAP energy goes into shaming men who like younger females (including MAPs).

It's so obnoxious to say but I also suspect that insecurity and being competition-averse has something to do with this. I'm sure that not every woman who argues against age-gap relationships is motivated by insecurity or jealousy or some attempt to eliminate the competition. I don't claim to know when this is the case, if it ever is, but, again, I think that it's a factor. Worst case scenario; one's biases, insecurities and agendas don't detract from their argument. I like to play the evolutionary psychology game and I think that women just have a stronger 'interest' in discouraging age-gap relationships than men do (not in terms of their conscious motivation or what helps them in terms of their well-being but in the sense of assuming that natural selection will tend to favor attitudes that facilitate gene propagation. I realize that it's more complicated than just a gene to code for x attitude, environment is obviously a significant factor. Identical twins can have very different attitudes, beliefs systems, ideals, etc. and they can change throughout their lives). Young men will be the ideal (sperm quality begins to decline after 35) but men never stop producing sperm, they can impregnate women well into old age even though there is an increased risk for certain conditions like down syndrome or pregnancy issues (most babies with older fathers will be healthy).

Unlike the females in most species, women eventually go through menopause and completely lose their capacity to reproduce (some researchers theorize that human menopause was selected because it forced prehistoric women to focus on helping with grandchildren or the children in their families/communities instead of their own and that resulted in gene propagation because the children of their daughters or granddaughters or women who might be distantly related to them survived in part because of their help), given my understanding of what it means to be male and female I could argue that prepubescent children, post menopausal women and castrated men (or any male or female who, for whatever reasons, doesn't produce sperm or ovulate. Even with anovulatory cycles, menstruation is the direct result of a girl's/women's body preparing for pregnancy) aren't functionally male or female. Even getting pregnant when perimenopausal is unlikely and perimenopause in one's early 40s is normal, even though actual menopause is considered early if it occurs before 45 (perimenopause before 40 is considered premature, it's 'primary ovarian insufficiency,' or something like that). So we should expect that both men and women will generally prefer relatively young partners but that men will generally have a stronger preference for youth. The super ideal for pregnancy is late teens/early 20s (I've constantly read that a girl's periods don't stabilize until two years after menarche but browsing a reddit thread online, all the women either said that their periods never stabilized or were stable immediately. In another thread, with scores and scores and scores of replies, a couple of women had their first period at 17, around half of a dozen at 15 or 16 each, at least one as early as 7 and a surprising number as young as 8 or 9 but no menstruation after 15 is considered primary amenorrhea so girls who are 15 and older are of reproductive age even if they, individually, haven't started menstruating. Some articles online claim that pregnancy under 16 or 17 is riskier but I've mostly only heard that about pregnancy under 15. Either way, egg quality begins to decline as early as 25 which is also when certain risks increase).

Men are arguably working against their 'genetic interests' in discouraging age-gap relationships between men and younger women who are old enough to reproduce (which isn't to say that such relationships are good or bad. To be honest, I've been less interested in the morality of these relationships than the denial of human nature and biology that stigmatizing them tends to involve, lately). They are contributing to a culture that would inhibit them from forming relationships with the only people whom they could reproduce with after they reach a certain age. A man's body is biologically adapted to fertilize egg cells which requires ovulation and rules out post-menopausal women and prepubescent girls alike, so the expectation that average men are ever going to naturally prefer women of post-menopausal age is purely political and extremely naive, it has no basis in biology. A 20 year old girl will probably prefer a man her own age but if she were absolutely desperate for a baby she could get that from a 50-year-old man, the likeliness of a 20-year-old man impregnating a 50-year-old woman who won't miscarry is extremely low (at 45, once you account for the fact that around 53% of pregnancies at that age result in miscarriage, a pre-menopausal woman has a less than 2.5 chance of conceiving naturally within a year and carrying that pregnancy to term. At 55, 90% of women will have a 0% chance; because they are post menopausal, at 60-99%). I won't elaborate on some points that I might eventually make in another thread, I know I'm a broken record with the fertility stuff but the biology angle is interesting to me because it's irrefutable; whether you're a philosophical hedonist, a secular humanist, a Christian, a Buddhist, a libertarian, a fascist, a communist, it has nothing to do with morality or value judgments. I mean, we can inter-subjectively test the idea that the actual 'biological function' of sperm cells is to fertilize egg cells.

However, I think among the general, happy, secure population of people, there is no natural basis to hate adult-child sexual relations, providing they are consensual. We can see many historical examples where it was considered normal and society had no/little backlash against it.

There seems to be a handful of cultures that accept sexual intimacy between adults and prepubescent children but stigmatizing relationships between men and girls over the age of 15 seems to be a modern Western attitude that just hasn't existed in any other culture for the vast majority of our existence as a species. If I'm forgetting something I wanted to say, this is already too long.