MAP Forum

Do you feel anxious about being a minor-attracted person? I get the impression that many MAPs feel anxiety or disgust about who they are, sometimes even leading to self-harm thoughts.

I don't feel any disgust or anxiety myself, so I'm curious how others here experience it.

-I am bothered by the stigma around older or middle-aged men being attracted to or romantically/sexually involved with younger women, not just teens but women in their 20s as well. I don't really want to search for the words right now (how it affects me at least some of the time or how unreasonable I think it is. Obviously true pedophilia and even an open attraction to young teens is even more stigmatized than 40-year-olds admitting that they are attracted to 20-year-olds; not something possibly vague like 'finding them attractive on some level' or 'being able to see that they are considered conventionally attractive,' I mean being sexually and romantically attracted to them) but I would like to live in a society where the attraction itself was de-stigmatized and the desire for sexual/romantic intimacy with minors and young adults (when held by significantly older adults) was not considered inherently inappropriate, even if the general belief (reasonable or not) was that risk-aversion still justifies discouraging age-gap relationships even when retroactive sociogenic harm due to internalizing the idea of their being inherently exploitative isn't an issue (in the same way that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with my wanting to bond with someone over a peanut butter sandwich. If they're deathly allergic to peanuts and exposure could kill them then that would be good reason to avoid that in real life but it wouldn't capture the idea that offering someone a peanut butter sandwich or wanting to share the experience of eating one with someone was inherently sadistic, callous or inappropriate. People will often hide behind the value of emotional trauma to legitimize the inherent impropriety of AMSC when you can 'theoretically' have the latter without the former).

I'm not really interested in engaging with it though. I've somewhat lost interest in morality as a topic, at least as far as conversation and debate goes even though I hold my ethical beliefs and ideals that I don't live up to close to me on some level, in the back of my mind, throughout the day. The biology angle is a little more interesting to me but even that is pointless because there is no changing the world. If people don't care then they don't care.

I don't think you can derive morality from hard facts about human biology but part of the age-gap stigma, when it comes to teens and men especially being attracted to them, is rooted in a denial about puberty and what sex is 'for' from an evolutionary standpoint. My biology approach doesn't help at all if someone would concede that an older adult attraction to teenagers is perfectly 'natural and healthy' even though a good person will avoid acting on that attraction, but the dogma today is that normal and/or moral men naturally lose their attraction to teens and young women when they hit a certain age, their attraction to young women doesn't stem from their biology; what their bodies are adapted to do (fertilize eggs which requires ovulation which is absent for age-related reasons in some girls/women under 15 and over 45. Even within the 15-44 range the ideal, from an evolutionary standpoint, would probably be someone who is at Tanner stage 5 without being perimenopausal; so maybe around 16-39 with 16-24 being the super-ideal since egg quality begins to gradually decline as early as 25, I don't know. My actual personal preference would more or less be around 12/13-39 but there might be some 13-year-olds I'm less attracted to for age-related reasons) but a moral failing on their part.

-I don't have any self-imposed guilt about being attracted to teenagers or the developed-looking preteens (or even about being relatively attracted to some prepubescent girls but I don't really think about them normally or much or as much) but I do find it demoralizing in a way that the consensus is that an adult my age shouldn't be interested in them, that the prospect of sexual or romantic intimacy with one should fundamentally not be a source of happiness for them/me; even just in terms of fantasy. It's an inhibiting and restrictive culture, at odds with and in denial of human nature.

-I'm sure this is off-topic but I don't really understand people who, albeit circumstantially (since most people are selectively rather than consistently cruel or compassionate) have some of the most callous disregard for human suffering (or the suffering of non-human animals, which is more culturally acceptable depending on which animals we're talking about) but see AMSC in all circumstances or even the desire for it (in fantasy scenarios where the younger person enjoys it and doesn't ultimately suffer as a result) as unjust or immoral. I'm not trying to make a point, I'm genuinely curious about what seems to be this deep-rooted personality difference between myself and other people. Even human injustice aside (i.e. in consideration of suffering that doesn't result from a lack of compassion that moral agents have for other sentient beings), when you consider how bad suffering can get I just can't wrap my mind around the idea of anyone being inherently harmed by something else (anything other than felt emotional distress. You can claim that multiple things are inherently harmful but felt emotional distress as emotional distress and that thing/those things don't share a common nature that could make them both or them all intrinsically harmful/bad). I don't know why everyone isn't on the same page about this. If minors enjoy sexual/romantic intimacy with adults, to the extent that it could be a source of happiness for them, why would you oppose it on principle?

Who would even care whether or not they could 'meaningfully consent' to it, if it didn't actually cause them pain? Again, I'm curious about how people arrive at such radically different values and principles because even before I became a hedonist, I think I would have completely understood my current perspective so I have to wonder how much of our worldview is just more or less fixed due to personality differences that establish relatively early on (someone can go from this view to that view but the underlying motivation might be similar or there might be context that explains having held a worldview that's so at odds with their current view etc.) as opposed to something that we can realistically 'reason' with people about and influence them against.

-Let me add, I wish that I didn't prefer women under 40 (and there are many middle-aged women whom I find as attractive as younger women but the ones I'm strongly attracted to look as though they could be in their 30s or younger). It's an inconvenience. Anti-age gap people seem to never consider that a preference for younger partners isn't something that's chosen, even though they understand this perfectly when it comes to homosexuality or in various other ways. If attraction were a choice it wouldn't make sense to exclude some of the sweetest, kindest people or someone with whom you could be very compatible with in terms of personality. I don't think it would make sense to choose to prefer younger partners, even though I'm not ashamed to be attracted to teens and young women (actually, I probably have sometimes been ashamed of who I'm attracted to but moreso because they're not kind people so maybe I'll find it humiliating or as though it's a betrayal to the people/animals they don't respect or sympathize with, but not because of their age).

A bit. I worry I might be too obvious in my fancy towards younger people and end up getting socially hung for it

Not really anxious or disgusted about myself, but anxious around other people in the way someone would be if they were a minority walking through a neighborhood with a high rate of hate crimes or something like that. I only really feel disgust when I think about fictional minors whose appearance is a bit younger than my minimum age of attraction, and that's more of an uncanny valley effect in my eyes because they're somewhere in between what I like and what I actively dislike, think of anyone you're attracted to doing something that would turn you off, and that's kind of what I feel.