MAP Forum

I feel that there is two types of "pedophiles", the first type is the one that experiences a sexual and emotional attraction to children, even when they're not sexually aroused, they still admire children, whilst the second type simply jerks off to the child's body, then has zero interest once their libido is gone.

I think a good comparison for this would be actual transgender people, and cisgender people with a "sissy" fetish.

I am not at all demonizing or criticizing people for their fetishes, but i was wondering if we should consider these people as "MAPs".

I feel that the second type of "pedophile" tend to be the more apathetic ones, since they don't exactly care much for children outside of when they're jerking off.

What do you think?

Agreed!

I think there's a distinction to be made between only feeling sexual attraction towards children but not an emotional connection and straight up disregard and objectification. Some people who are sexually attracted to adults don't feel romantic attraction towards them, and they're capable of having respect and/or platonic love for people they have sex with (allosexual and aromantic is the term). I'm somewhere on that spectrum myself, meanwhile I'm pretty sure there are some MAPs who can feel romantic love but in an abusive and possessive way, or who are nonexclusive and really only treat adults they're with as full people

Scorchingwilde wrote: Fri Apr 03, 2026 5:01 am I think there's a distinction to be made between only feeling sexual attraction towards children but not an emotional connection and straight up disregard and objectification. [...]

Well said.

Anyone who reduces a child to an 'object' to be 'used' is not doing MAP activism any favours. MAP activism should be driven and led by people who truly care about children. But keep in mind that the spectrum of emotional versus sexual attraction can be different for each person. Just because someone isn't interested in the 'romantic relationship' aspect of child love, doesn't mean that they aren't still affected by totally unjust laws (e.g., around prohibited media) and discriminatory treatment. As long as activists respect and prioritise the autonomy of children, then the exact nature of their attraction seems extraneous.

I think there could be a meaningful distinction made between teleiophiles who are turned on by the idea of prepubescent children or experimentation, novelty and the appeal of forbidden love and people with a stable true attraction to them but even then, there's some arguable grey area between those two camps (i.e. some people are mildly attracted to prepubescent children and some people are primarily or exclusively attracted to them, and everyone's interest in children might not be stable).

For the most part, I don't think that the worst feminist (or socially conservative) caricature of 'objectification' as an inclination toward treating people as mindless sex objects is a real thing (the closest to it might be necrophilia, which I have a moral problem with if we're talking about the fetishization of dead bodies as dead bodies and not a mere attraction to them because they resemble living bodies, but to play devil's advocate; even totally separating the sexual appeal of someone's body from how you feel about their mind wouldn't have to imply disregarding their mind, meaning you could love someone and sexualize their body in a way that is totally divorced from how you feel about their mind, and you could hate or be indifferent to someone and do the same. Again, good or bad, I don't think this is how human sexuality actually works). I'm convinced that pretty much everyone prefers to have emotionally intimate sex with people they feel emotionally attracted to/affection for, even if the sex is recreational and for its own sake rather than as an expression of love. There's clearly a psychological aspect to sexuality which is why people can be turned on by the idea of having sex with a police officer or a Nazi. Even the appeal of 'hate sex,' or at least the idea of it, I imagine, would have more to do with relieving tension or abandoning self-imposed taboos/engaging in the forbidden (when you dislike someone your instinct is to avoid intimacy with them, if you're attracted to them this means a natural suppression of that which prevents them from being a source of pleasure and is frustrating because your instinct is also to mate with physically desirable people; we can hold contradicting impulses simultaneously. The only way that true hate sex, as opposed to 'forgiveness sex,' makes sense to me is if we're totally separating someone's body from their mind which I just don't think works in practice. Sexual attraction/pleasure and emotional distress are mutually antagonistic, your libido goes down when you're experiencing high enough stress for whatever reasons, if you completely hate someone that person is an object of emotional distress for you that will block the attraction you'd otherwise feel to them unless, again, we're completely separating someone's body from their mind which I don't think we can do intuitively. When you have sex with someone you're sharing an experience with them, you're socializing. If you hate someone, why would you even want them to have a pleasurable experience?).

A concept of 'objectification' that makes more sense to me than the stereotype of straight men viewing women as incidentally sentient walking sex dolls is reducing someone to being an object of your feelings which people tend to do even outside of sexuality, I think we generally treat other people primarily according to how they make us feel. That doesn't imply disregarding their mind (on the contrary, 'romantic love' can be 'objectifying'. You can 'objectify' people through some form of hyper-idolization, or as enemies, people objectify their children as their legacies, etc. etc.). A hyper-sexual image of someone or a fixation at any given moment on their being a sexual being is normal, even without any 'reduction,' I think this kind of objectification is unavoidable (at least without sexual suppression). When you seen an attractive man in a magazine or a woman in a porno you know nothing about them; they could be incredibly cruel, disrespectful, arrogant people with undesirable personalities, they could be Nazis, they could hate animals, they could celebrate murder, they might not be attracted to you, to sexualize them you might need to project a particular image on to them and if you have a full picture of who they actually are (as full of a picture as you could have under certain common sense inferences), your attraction to them might soften their flaws, you might romanticize them, you are biased because of your attraction to them; it's hard to see them impartially.


I don't want to make categorical statements, there may be people who are turned on by the idea of rape (not taking control in the bedroom in ways that their partners themselves find desirable or a fantasy where they don't have consent but the other person ends up liking it but really holding someone down who's miserable and traumatized and desperate to escape and knowing that you're hurting them) and murder etc. but I think that's so beyond normal human sexuality and once the novelty or forbiddenness of that wears off I don't know if the interest would remain.

Most people who aren't sexually attracted to children (assuming that everyone isn't relatively attracted to some of them and I wouldn't be surprised if they are) are still emotionally attracted to them. I think the idea that pedophiles are going to be especially sympathetic toward children is a mistake because sexual attraction is self-serving by nature. You don't admire someone just because you have an involuntary sexual response to them, you can easily admire and love someone you find sexually repulsive and many people are attracted to people they wish they weren't attracted to because they don't like or respect them.