MAP Forum

When doing research for my recent article on Sly Boy and Katie Cruz, one of the most frequent comments I saw was that MAPs should get help instead of expressing pride over our sexual orientation (or 'illness', as they call it). Let's take a very brief look at why that's such an infuriating retort.

https://www.brianribbon.com/short-takes ... lp-brigade

I read a lot of that section of the comments, and the "get help" was often accompanied by a definition of help that consisted of a bullet to the head, which is surprisingly straightforward.
But between the violent ones and those who compromise by suggesting a psychologist, the difference is actually minimal: they both want the same thing — to sweep the dust under the rug. The invitation to go to a psychologist doesn’t seem different to me from locking someone up in an asylum: you want to set the person aside, keep them under control, effectively remove them from society. Whether it’s the individual themselves or what the individual carries with them (in this case, an unconventional attraction).

If there were a genuine and sincere interest in people’s mental health, that invitation to seek help would be limited to those who are paranoid, those who respond in an excessively violent or frightened way, those who are, in fact, experiencing psychological distress. Not to someone who simply has a certain attraction, which in itself says nothing about the person or their mental state.

Great response, NF.

Very few people actually care about anything other than their pitchfork.

I wonder if you can exploit that, though. If you know they're lying, can you sometimes take advantage when they try to "save face"?

Few people actually want us to "get help".

They tack it on at the end of their psychotic homicidal rants to make themselves feel better about what they just said, because deep down they know it's messed up. They're not complete psychos because they're at least offering the opportunity for "help", right?

A lot of people also use it as an escape from uncomfortable critical thought on the topic. If MAPs need to "get help" — this implies our existence represents an inherently wrong point of view that must be fixed. Therefore issues that concern us like the age of consent don't need debated. The critical aspect of the discussion can be avoided. You see this in other conversations with things like legal age gap debates, where if you genuinely ask someone why a 19-27 age gap is wrong, you might just be told to get help rather than see a proper response.

If you're so obsessed with the number 18, then you're truly the one who should get help. The age of consent isn't even 18 in most countries. I heard of a guy who got beaten up for trying to meet a 17-year-old in a country where the age of consent is 15. So these ageists don't even care about the law and are really the criminals who should get help

I have read horror stories of people who try to get honest help, haven't done anything illegal, and still get their life flipped upside down because someone down the pipeline automatically assumed they had done something illegal.

Lost their job, became known in the community as a "criminal", all electronics stolen (they never got them back) but the charges eventually fell through because they didn't do anything illegal, family disowned them, homeless shelter wouldn't accept them due to "on-going criminal investigations", and they couldn't get another job.

They slept in their car and used free WiFi on a cheap burner phone they got to post about it.

The world is not kind to us, no matter what we try to do.