CANDICE:

Hi everybody, I’m so excited for today’s podcast. We have an individual who’s on today who is a wonderful human being and has been part of the map community for 3 years. He tweets and blogs about the topic of autopedophilia. We all know — those that listen to our podcast and are in the map community and who are map advocates — understand the risk of coming onto this podcast and using one’s own voice so we have the kind generous Elliott who’s another map who’s going to be reading Bly’s answers for us today so I want to welcome you and thank you for reading Bly’s answers.

ELLIOTT:

Yeah, I’m glad to be here. I have known Bly for almost a year and he really helped me out at the beginning when I joined the community, so I’m more than happy to read his answers for him.

CANDICE:

Wonderful, and that is so important for people to hear as MAPs coming out into the community. It can be kind of scary and so to have MAPs who are willing to be a support is wonderful. So, with that, let’s go ahead and get started because this topic of autopedophilia… I know a lot of people probably don’t know what it is. So I would like to start by talking about autopedophilia and get a real clear understanding of what auto pedophilia is so tell me.

BLY (read by Elliott):

OK, so I have to start with a couple of disclaimers here. This is a subject that is still being learned about and I’m not an expert because there really aren’t any experts. Even the academics who study this are not experts yet. They’re just trying to describe what they’ve observed.

I would describe myself as an autopedophile, but the way I and many others experience that doesn’t necessarily line up with the current dictionary definitions.

So, the definition used by scientists like Kevin Hsu and J. Michael Bailey, goes like this: an autopedophile is someone who is, quote, “sexually aroused by dressing in children’s clothing or fantasizing about having a child’s body”, unquote.

So an immediate thing to say about that is that it’s not the same as pedophilia, because pedophilia is finding children sexually attractive, whereas this is finding the idea of being a child arousing.

But what I also want to say is that that scientific definition really only covers just a couple of aspects of a much bigger phenomenon, and in a way for some of us, that definition I just quoted is a bit like saying the definition of gay is a man who gets excited by the thought of a man kissing him. Like, yes, that captures an important part of it, but it doesn’t capture the whole thing, nor necessarily is that true for everyone who is gay.

So, what actually are we talking about if we need a wider definition? I would say the group I consider myself part of, is “people who are emotionally or sexually drawn to the idea of identifying with or identifying as if a minor”.

And the various related terms we could use are… let’s start with the term ageplay — which is for people who roleplay as children because they have autopedophilia.

A subset of those is ABDL or AB folk, which stands for Adult Baby / Diaper Lover, also known as infantilists — that’s people who roleplay specifically as infants or toddlers — or as adults who get treated that way. Other ageplayers might be middles — roleplaying as kids older than toddlers but younger than adults.

Those groups can (and do) include people for whom ageplay is a sexual kink. But they also include some for whom it’s a nonsexual or semi-sexual thing. Or you could even call it a proto-sexual thing — not what we think of as adult sexual activity, but a pre-adolescent form of bodily exploration and experimentation.

We could also talk about people with emotional congruence with children, who as adults see children as their peers or equals.

There’s age dysphoria, where people view it as a a negative, distressing thing that they can’t remain or be a child. This doesn’t necessarily have the roleplaying element.

There’s the word regression, too, where adults get really deeply into a kind of childlike headspace, some of whom consider it involuntary, while for others it’s just a very compulsive or rewarding thing to do voluntarily. They really don’t feel like they’re roleplaying.

And there are some rare folk who think that their true identity, in some sense, is as a child. In other words, they imagine they would feel happier if they literally were a child and not an adult at all.

So it’s a real forest of labels and terminology, and at the moment we don’t understand any of it scientifically.

CANDICE:

Well I just absolutely love that you were able to go into each of these descriptions in nice detail, if you will, and it would be good for people to continue to get educated. Those who are listening today may say ‘I am not a pedophile but I do really have some interest in what Bly is saying about autopedophilia, ageplay, regression, age dysphoria and so on and so forth. So thank you for going into some detail about each, because, again, some of these were new to me and I think if they’re new to me they’ve got to be new to some other people and anyone listening who possibly said ‘that’s me; I fit with that — that term that he used — but I never really knew what it was’.

So let’s go onto the second question. Can you try to describe the subjective experience of autopedophilia, ageplay and some of these other things and give some examples.

BLY:

OK, so to try and make sense of all those terms above, I’m going to invent a few different people, based off people I’ve met or read about to show how this works.

So, let’s pick a random ageplayer. Let’s call her Joanne.

Joanne is a woman of 30 or so. Normal life; likes donuts, sitcoms, gaming.

And since she was a teen Joanne has discovered she gets really sexually excited by the thought of being treated like a young girl, acting out and getting spanked by a father figure.

And Joanne isn’t sexually interested in kids at all; she’s into adult men.

But her whole fantasy is that she has the social status of a bratty little girl who is naughty, gets told off, punished and then forgiven. When she has this fantasy, she’s significantly focused on the older man, but also on the experiences and physical sensations of being little and, in this situation, powerless.

So, some people might have issues with the politics of that scenario, but it’s important to say that this fantasy came to Joanne pretty much unbidden. In real life she doesn’t put up with nonsense from men, or think that she’s in any way deserving of physical abuse. She doesn’t even believe in spanking kids.

But this fantasy has been there for her since her adolescence. And we would call that fetishistic ageplay. She gets a strong emotional and sexual kick out of it, not just from the spanking or being addressed as ‘missy’, but from the clothes she wears to do this scene. It also relieves a lot of stress for her.

So that’s an example of a specific kind of ageplay. Joanne doesn’t really believe she’s really a kid. She knows she’s an adult and is pretty much happy with it but likes to delve into this fantasy sometimes.

Now let’s take another ageplayer, and this one is an Adult Baby. So that’s Josh. He’s gay and twenty-three. He’s a gamer and a stoner, but also at college studying… biology, say. He’s generally a credit to his snowboarding club.

And he has this secret desire, which he’s had since he was a bedwetting kid of eleven or twelve. What he dreams about is being dressed and treated as a toddler aged two.

And at home in a box he has toys and a pacifier and a teddy bear, and he also has diapers and he loves putting them on just by himself and pretending he’s really that age. And he takes it pretty far, meaning he fully uses that diaper when he’s in the zone.

But for Josh, unlike Joanne, it’s not quite so much a sexual thing. Like, he actually doesn’t much want regular sex with another guy. He’s attracted to adult men of around his own age, but it’s at least as much an emotional attraction and if he got together with another AB it would definitely involve them both dressing up, and probably cuddles, and maybe even some kisses, even an orgasm in the diaper, but he’d be uncomfortable if it became just sex. Mostly he likes to hang with other littles and sometimes with a daddy and get pretty deep into the headspace of being a toddler. So I guess he’s a regressor too.

So that’s an example of a mostly nonsexual ageplayer and specifically an AB.

Now let’s take… Lewis. Lewis is thirty something, married to a woman, who he loves and finds attractive, and does a lot of running. He doesn’t have any kid clothes or anything like that, no diapers, but he’s getting to the point where he’s getting kind of hairy on his body, more than in his twenties. Up to now he shaved his chest and even sometimes his legs and armpits, just because he liked the way that looked.

He tries to keep fairly skinny too, not too built and not too chubby. He has a floppy sort of haircut, and he’s more than vaguely aware that basically he has tried to preserve a little bit a style and appearance that is younger than he is, and he’s also become aware that he finds himself attracted to quite boyish looking women too. He also a couple of years ago got braces as an adult, which he only somewhat needed.

And he basically feels pretty rotten each time he looks in the mirror and his age is staring back — not just wrinkles and stuff, which depresses most of us from time to time, but specifically his development. He basically liked his look better when he was a skinny wiry teenager, when he remembers having a lot of intense feelings and was kind of on top of the world, doing well in school and sport and before life got complicated.

He sometimes thinks about that when he has sex with his wife, almost imagining them as teenaged boyfriend and girlfriend sometimes, but he wouldn’t say that out loud or share it with her.

The idea of seriously roleplaying as a teenager doesn’t really grab him and he’d feel stupid and cringey acting stuff out like that, but he wishes he really could have that look back again, and daydreams a lot about it.

So Lewis would be an example of age dysphoria around appearance, with maybe a little bit of autoephebophilia thrown in — i.e. attraction to the idea of himself as a teenager.

One more example, though, could be Zac. And Zac, who is autistic, has a more pronounced age dysphoria and emotional congruence with children. He’s eighteen and basically wishes he was eight, not just in terms of how his body and face looks, but also in terms of how he’d like to live. He never got interested in girls or even too much in boys, he doesn’t like alcohol, he’s frightened to learn to drive and really doesn’t quite understand or want to understand money.

He gets a little aroused when imagining being back at elementary school, and while he doesn’t fantasise sexually about children, they’re there as a backdrop to those daydreams, but he doesn’t have sexual fantasies per se.

He sometimes does a bit of ageplay by himself, but doesn’t have the social skills really to go on the ageplay or kink scene and actually the thought terrifies him anyway because it would mean having to have adult discussions around consent and to roleplay like he was an adult, which, in his heart of hearts, he just doesn’t see himself as capable or confident doing. He just wants someone to look after him without him having to spell out what he wants.

He does dress up a little bit and enjoys the sensation of being a little boy, but… it’s far more than roleplay for him. At those moments he closes his eyes, avoids mirrors and almost believes that he’s eight. In public he sometimes comes across as excitable and uncool and not like you’d expect from an eighteen year old.

And if you were a magical genie and could offer him the chance to physically transform into an eight year old and go back to school and that would be his life, he’d say yes without having to think about it. That would be a dream come true. He’s not interested in his life as an adult, and sometimes — this is the darker side — he actually thinks about killing himself to escape it.

Finally, let’s go with Ginny, who is a regressor, and who is at High School, and Ginny — at times of stress, like today — she basically drops back to the reactions, thoughts and behaviour of a young kid, almost like it’s too much effort not to do that. She has the stuff in her room at home that allows her to do that, but like Zac, she doesn’t really think of this as playacting. She’s mentally a kid for the time she stays regressed. Maybe not even a kid of a specific age. She’s not really interested in having a caregiver or involving anyone else at all and it has zero to do with sex. It’s just a thing she does.

So there is a lot of diversity here, but one common factor. Everybody with this has the idea of another self that is developmentally younger than them, sometimes by a lot.

And this imagined kid that is with them, this might in their mind be literally the kid that they were when they were that age, or it  might be some idealised alternative kid that they weren’t. There’s nothing to say that if you want to act out being a kid that kid has to be the same gender as you were, or have the same personality or talents. Just like in any roleplay or imaginative act, you can try being something different or you can try to recapitulate the familiar.

Those with age dysphoria and Zac in particular who sort of sees himself as a child — he might not think this in a totally literal way — he knows he’s eighteen, he can’t forget it — but in some sense he feels like although he might have an adult body and insurance and a job and whatever, his real authentic personality is that of a child.

So if Zac ever did do an ageplay scene, which maybe he might try when he’s older, that for him is not just about hitting the marks, and including fetish elements a, b and c, but more about just freely exploring the arena of a child’s life experience, because that’s how — if the outside world didn’t make him act like a grownup — that’s how he is inside and how he wants to identify.

We could argue all night whether those folks are indulging in an unrealistic fantasy or whether there’s something physically different about their brains that makes them have a subjective feeling of being a kid, but what I do know is that they exist, and that the term autopedophilia doesn’t really capture what this is for them.

So as I said there’s a wide variety of words for this stuff, but not a single phrase.

In an online community I’m in, because there isn’t a single word for these different kinds of feelings, we’ve started using the term Minor Identifying Person (with “identifying” meaning “identifying with” as much as it means “identifying as”). To me that’s a placeholder term. It doesn’t capture all the variations perfectly.

I kind of like the term “childlike” because that does capture it in broad strokes, but it’s also true there are adults who think of themselves or behave childlike, but wouldn’t self-identify as belonging to a specific group or category because of that. So maybe that’s too general a term.

At any rate, it’s diverse and we can’t just reduce it to a sexual kink, because even for those for whom it’s a sexual kink it could be very much more. Certainly true of me.

CANDICE:

That was very detailed, and I love the different examples. I think the global community will really appreciate hearing about these fictitious but with reality or some real element, if you will, such as Lewis, where we talked about age dysphoria or Zach, similar, or Ginny, about the age regression; Joanne the fetishistic age play… and Josh who likes the adult baby fantasy.

And one of the things that you said (and I have had the privilege of looking at your answers [earlier] because Elliott is reading for you today) — one thing that stood out is when you said that this imagined kid that is with them might in their mind be literally the kid that they were when they were that age or it might be some idealized alternative kid that they weren’t. There’s nothing to say that if you want to act out being a kid that that kid has to be the same gender as you were or have the same personality or talents.”

And so I agree that ‘autopedophilia’ I don’t think captures what we’re talking about at all. It may purely be because people take the word pedophile and pedophilia and go all sorts of ways with it in a downward direction, but I do think this was really beautifully laid out to give specific examples. And so with that: are you specifically interested in ageplay or what we are calling autopedophilia?

BLY:

Yes. I’ve always been into ageplay, even before I had sexual feelings. Even when I was a four year old kid I had a sense of wanting to be treated infantile in quite literal ways, with nappies and dummies etc.

And these feelings stuck around as I grew, so as an adolescent and an adult I’ve experienced a lot of the different types of minor identification or childlikeness that I just listed before. I was probably quite a bit like Josh, with maybe a slightly greater interest in sexual acts (in those days, anyhow).

I had a lot of AB and autopedophile fantasies when I was an adolescent and very young adult, and because I had no way of reaching other people into that, all my activities, like dressing up or fantasising I was a kid, peeing my pants etc. were all done alone by myself, never with any partner.

My body was slow to change but by the age of seventeen or so I remember getting the first painful waves of age dysphoria, really hating my body and the way it was growing hair and my skin was getting rougher. That feeling worsened through my twenties.

Then later in my twenties I joined ABDL communities and ageplay communities and at first I took those fantasies online and just shared those fantasies with others, then gradually met up in real life with other adults who felt this way. And being able to share those experiences was a huge relief to the age dysphoria. It didn’t solve the problem that most of the time I had to be an adult, but it made that reality more palatable knowing I had this escape from it available.

I remember the hardest times were when I’d come to the end of a weekend with other ageplayers and we’d gotten totally immersed in this fantasy of being kids.

I hit some big depressions sometimes when I had to come back to reality from that, but still, the release was good while it lasted. And during those weekends, sometimes, in the middle of it all, I could just close my eyes and almost believe that the feeling of the toys in my hands, and the smells of food and the texture of the clothes I was wearing and so on — so long as I didn’t look closely in the mirror — I was feeling and acting just as I did when I was a kid, and I was inhabiting again a tiny slice of that moment of my life.

And as I got older I got to meet more people in real life who had different takes on minor identification or childlikeness.  And I could see fairly up close how people give expression to this side of their personality. Because I’m gay most of that experience was of gay or bi men and not so much of women. Nor did I meet any trans folk, knowingly, although I have become more aware of them in the community in recent years.

CANDICE:

Again, I think that example of going through depression and being able to close your eyes and really believe that you are feeling the toys in your hands, the sounds and the textures, really gives this element of having a sense of joy and peace and the innocence of the time. And so again I think people might listen to this podcast and want to pathologise or judge or criticise what we’re talking about here… but there really is an element of being able to go back in your mind to a time and place when you were younger and find that, especially when you’re depressed, so it makes a lot of sense to me.

Let’s look at the question of autopedophilia and legality because I think a lot of people… there’s so much ignorance out there when you hear of someone who has an attraction to children for instance and the automatic assumption is that they are a child molester which is a bunch of bunk, but is auto pedophilia illegal, for those that are wondering?

BLY:

Really short and simple answer: no. It’s not illegal to have these feelings, nor is it wrong.

Most of what we call autopedophilia is totally legal because it’s a feeling, and you can’t make feelings illegal. People with autopedophilia who do ageplay in private with other consenting adults are doing nothing illegal at all, and I think in most people’s eyes they feel like, even if you’re doing stuff like using diapers or things that wider society considers a bit weird, so long as that doesn’t impact anyone else and everyone consents, well, that’s totally fine.

The only things which are beginning to be criminalised are certain kinds of materials associated with ageplay. So for instance in the UK, adults who are dressed up to appear as if they’re kids is counted as CSEM or child pornography as it’s described in the law. I think the intent of this law was to try and stop people being able to defend actual CSEM by claiming the model is of age, but just looks younger because of the clothes, but this also seems to catch some genuine ageplay material which is purely by and about adults doing roleplay.

If you have ageplay material that depicts or describes actual minors and is very obviously fetishistic or describes sexual arousal, you can be on the edge of the law in certain countries, depending how the law is interpreted and how you read the test cases. I won’t go through all the different countries’ laws as it’s a mixed picture, and the laws are applied in far from a consistent way, but I know that one should be more careful in, for example, Canada than in the US. That said, recently there was a case in the US involving just written fiction — not images — which has made me less sure of that.

Mostly, though, those are edge cases. The vast majority of fiction and fantasy that people share is not prosecuted.

Now of course I have a specific angle on this area, because after spending a lot of my adulthood exploring my minor identification, most recently I’ve joined the MAP community which of course is an entirely different category because autopedophilia is not pedophilia and most of these minor identifying folks are not MAPs.

Actually, I think we need to say that again because it really bears repeating. Having age dysphoria or being AB or an ageplayer doesn’t mean you’re a pedophile. As best I can see the vast majority of folks in those communities aren’t pedophiles and in fact MAPs and pedophiles when known about aren’t made to feel welcome in those communities because of this stigma.

There’s a sequel to this, but we’ll come on to that at the end.

CANDICE:

That definitely was such an important section. You repeat it, but I think it’s important to say that one more time: having age dysphoria or being AB or being an ageplayer does not mean you’re a pedophile, so that’s really important. Some other things to think about is that fantasies and feelings are not illegal but in Canada and in places in the US they might be more… there’s a lot of discussion and a lot of controversy about images, if it’s cartoon images or certain materials that’s not considered child exploitation material might be considered as csem. So just to be very aware of that. But you do want to make sure that if you’re engaging in age play, it is with a consenting adult and to be really mindful of what methods you have for getting things online. So if someone’s listening today and has autopedophillia, age dysphoria, age regression… what support is out there that’s actually safe for them?

BLY:

So this is an interesting question because I think a lot of people assume that if you have autopedophilia, it’s not, like, seen as a mental health condition that even merits support or help. Most people think it’s a kink or a fetish. And some people think that if it’s a kink, saying a person might need help is kink-shaming as if their kink was a problem in itself.

But I don’t really see it that way. There’s so much stigma and shame around kinks. Sometimes they’re about stigma and shame. We can’t expect people not to need a little help around making sense of if if they find they have a stigmatised sexual or lifestyle interest.

For some people a kink is all it is and good for them. The support those people mostly need is to understand that though they have this very very minority interest, that doesn’t make them bad people, that they didn’t choose it (it doesn’t matter if they were born with it or not — probably not, but they still didn’t choose it).

There are some people who are ABs or ageplayers and fetishists and they go through binge and purge cycles with this.

So they collect clothes and paraphernalia, and maybe go online in secret to roleplay, and as well as being a great source of satisfaction in their lives it also becomes a bit of an addiction, like porn or gambling can be for some people.

They love everything about it when they’re in the zone and turned on — it’s like an addiction, almost. They’ll put aside things in their life to try and experience it. It’s like they have a huge loyalty to this child alter ego, and that child inside has needs that really must be taken care of.

But once they hit that orgasm they sort of step back and wonder why they do this so much. And at that point they experience terrible shame that they’re into something so weird and humiliating that they never want anyone to find out about.

Maybe after a while they decide ‘I’m not doing this any more’ and they throw out all their ageplay stuff and delete all their secret logins to ageplay sites and decide to just be normal.

Then after x months, they come back again because you can’t just shut off this part of you. Getting out of those cycles and getting to a place of self-acceptance is something where I think counselling and talking therapy really can help, because if you’re constantly embracing then rejecting an important — even a fundamental — part of yourself. So its almost like not treating yourself well. It can be quite dangerous for your wellbeing.

The other thing to say about using ageplay is that not everyone wants the same things from it or takes it as seriously as others do. Ageplayers seeking partners or playmates might not realise what the other people involved needs from it.

And if you have a circumstance where one person is there with a fixed fantasy they just want to get off to and go, like a hookup, and the other person has an emotionally-centred need for taking it slow and making it feel meaningful with lots of aftercare, for instance, then you have the risk of something that feels unpleasant and uncomfortable for one or both of those folk if those motivations are not understood, it could even be a bit abusive.

You’ll notice that’s also true of regular dating and sex, of course, but I think with ageplay and kink — because we all grow up in a culture that doesn’t talk about those things — we don’t get to absorb the rules about how it can be done safely and sanely and with clear consent.

Dating is not easy for straight, vanilla women, but at least a woman going on her first few dates might have read the problem page in a magazine for years and talked to her mom about bad experiences, or she’s seen movies and so on. She has at least a little bit of forewarning about the types of guys she’s going to meet on the journey.

But with ageplay we just don’t have that background information floating in the culture around us. We tend to learn about the pitfalls by experiencing them, and that can be very damaging if we get unlucky. So to make ageplay a supportive instead of destructive and traumatic thing, it’s really necessary to get help or information from those with experience, and I think ageplay communities have gotten better over time at facilitating that, although there’s still some way to go.

And this is really important to a particular group: some people might have a particularly strong need to respond to autopedophilia through ageplay or similar activities because it’s therapeutic or healing for them. People who are survivors of abuse or of trauma are well-represented among autopedophiles and among ageplayers, and some of them really don’t just see it as a mere trigger for orgasms.

They see it as fulfilling a very very deep emotional need that they’ve had most of their life — maybe a profound need for care or unconditional love, or for protection from the things they fear, or for having someone that can take adult responsibilities from their shoulders and make decisions for them.

And people in that circumstance, really, they are sort of taking on responsibility for their healing from their traumas and abuses, it’s almost like their ageplay is therapeutic in itself, if it leads them to a place where they feel better, ultimately.

Sometimes ageplay is like a fixation — an obsessive rehearsing and replaying of some traumatic experience like peeing your pants, or being bullied, or being abused by an adult, and playing out that scene is a way of bringing something frightening under conscious control, because you can stop or pause the scene, or switch roles or explore it. But at other times the compulsive need to return and return to the trauma can become a bit of a trap too. An addiction, not a cure.

So I think ageplay can be healing in itself, but for me I found it really started to illuminate my life when I was in therapy, figuring out what it meant to me. And the goal of therapy wasn’t to stop ageplaying or stop experiencing autopedophilia, which I suspect is impossible anyway, but just to help give it its proper place in the whole picture of my life.

Going back to age dysphoria, for some there’s this strong sense of distress that goes with it. They are tortured that they can never fully live out this deeply felt desire to be a kid.  The reality they would prefer just isn’t achievable in the same way that, for some trans people for example, it might be possible to resolve through a physical transition.

And a really bad age dysphoria is a very dark place to be in, because (a) nobody’s heard of it, (b) there is no operation or cure and (c) ageplay here is only ever a consolation prize. Some people really get to very depressed, suicidal states about this impossible gap between who they are externally and who they feel they are internally.

For me, because I have had times when I was in that dark place, I’ve learned that looking for an answer — in the sense of finding a fix that makes everything feel OK -— that’s too much to ask for. But a combination of introspection and writing and time and therapy, perhaps especially time — has allowed me to sit with the discomfort of knowing I can’t be, say, eleven years old again — and to understand that that’s not the end of all possible positive experiences I could have as a human.

And at the same time I know that wanting to be a kid is something my brain is always gonna do to some extent, and I will always devote a lot of thought to it. I don’t think I could train my brain to just forget it and focus on other more practical achievements in life.

CANDICE:

Well you do such a beautiful job of giving so many examples, so thank you so much for your thorough answers to my questions and really to allow folks that are listening who are having these experiences to know that there can be so many different reasons why you might be interested in ageplay or age regression and so on and so forth. I just really appreciate your thoughtfulness and taking the time to answer these questions. We are wrapping it up with our final question, and it has to do with ABDL… and so you mentioned earlier in our discussions prior to coming on our podcast that there are a lot of confused ABDLs so what I’d like you to do is to define that for us, but also now that there is confusion around other ageplay things, because people won’t admit to having minor attraction — so if you could tell us more about that, that would be great.

BLY:

OK, so let’s just say it one last time, just so nobody can accuse the podcast of mixing the terms up: ageplay and ABDL and autopedophilia are not pedophilia.

Like I said earlier, AB and ageplay communities are keen to establish that important fact, because a lot of regular folk — especially those who only get their information about kink from The National Enquirer or wherever —  just see it in a lurid way. They see that it can involve childlike things and they see that it can be a sexual thing and they put those together and say, oh, hey, so it’s like pedophilia.

And this is worrying for community leaders in ageplay because they don’t want safe spaces for ageplay getting called out and policed and stigmatised more than they already are. Nor do they want those spaces shut down. Imagine how reluctant some venues must already be to host AB munches and social nights, and imagine how much worse that would get if they couldn’t explain it’s not pedophilia.

So these communities really come down hard on any sign of pedophilia. You see it among babyfurs and ABs and ageplayers. People are ridden out on a rail if they’re suspected, and artists get cancelled and denounced and lots of moral panic goes on.

Sometimes that’s very legitimate because those communities do contain some very vulnerable people — not kids, but people like Zac who I described earlier who are in the headspace of kids and who really need a safe space where those boundaries are really respected.

However, because I am in both the ageplay and MAP categories I also need to tell my truth about this too, as awkward as it is. The reality is that although they won’t admit to it at all, there are MAPs in ageplay communities who are doing no harm and who have nowhere else to go.

So, it’s been known for a while — thanks in particular to Ray Blanchard — that among MAPs there are quite a lot who as well as being MAP are also autopedophilic or age dysphoric or ageplayers or emotionally congruent with kids in some way.

Almost nobody has measured this yet, but there was a recent self-selecting survey aimed at MAPs in which around half of them described some kind of autopedophilia or child-identification, so although I’d want that to be measured again to get a more reliable figure, it seems like a lot of MAPs aren’t just attracted to kids but have some ideas about being or acting as them, or being treated that way.

And so naturally there is an overlap in the Venn diagram,  meaning a subset of minor identifying people are also minor attracted people and vice versa.

Now that population is not really studied, and I haven’t studied it scientifically, but I’ve spoken informally to, I’d say several dozen over the years, and here’s a thing I learned. The relationship between their minor attraction and their minor identification isn’t always obvious.

Earlier we talked about Josh who is attracted to adults but turned on by roleplaying as a 2 year old, and we established that Josh isn’t turned on by 2 year olds, just by quote — being — unquote two years old. You could say that his “age of identification” is 2 years old. But his age of attraction, which is a term MAPs use to describe the ages of people they find attractive — is, let’s say, 17 plus.

So he’s not minor attracted, but he is minor identifying. I don’t think for most people their age of identification is usually as precise as an age of attraction can be, but this mismatch between the two can even apply when a person is a MAP and also minor identifying.

So you might have someone who is attracted just to boys 11-14, but who roleplays as a toddler, Age of attraction: 11-14; age of identification 1-4, say.

You might have someone who was born male who is only attracted to young boys but whose autopedophilia sees them roleplaying as a pubescent girl. So, age of attraction: 5-13, age of identification 12-16, gender of attraction: male, gender of identification: female.

So my point is that ages of attraction and ages of identification don’t marry up in an obvious way. They sort of are independent.

And that is really significant in terms of how MAPs exist in ageplay communities.

A MAP and a non-MAP could share a pattern of autopedophilia that is identical to one another — the same age of identification — but still have completely different ages of attraction.

And that means the non-MAP might enjoy sharing an autopedophilic fantasy with the MAP, but nothing would indicate to them, necessarily, that the MAP is a MAP.

So we have quite a difficult situation here, which is analogous to the situation in society at large, where non-offending MAPs and those who are doing no harm exist in this kind of “don’t ask don’t tell” space where nobody needs or wants to tell anyone else that they’re minor attracted.

If you ask the admins of the ageplay spaces, MAPs shouldn’t be there, but there is nowhere else. And if someone started an explcitly MAP ageplay space, I don’t know if that would be allowed to last, either.

If we’re in those communities we can only express the autopedophile side of ourselves and frame our fantasies in every which way that can’t cause someone else to say “This is pedophilia!” We can make friends, do scenes and go to munches so long as nobody ever talks about whether they’re minor attracted or not. I think the same is true in the wider category of kink too, actually, but I think that it has a lot of very difficult implications in this community especially.

I feel uneasy about it, but I also see it from both sides because I know from personal experience that being gay, being AB, being age dysphoric and being minor attracted are all morally neutral things because none of them are chosen, and we should judge people on their actions, not their attractions or their fantasies, however rare those might be and however much stigma attaches to them in society at large.

In theory age dysphoric folk and strongly minor identifying folk and MAPs do have something in common because the nature of their fantasies are such that there aren’t ways of playing them out in the real world. In the case of MAPs that’s for moral reasons rather than purely logistical ones, but still.

It’s also true to say that the early AB culture in the 90s was more accommodating of stories with minor characters and so on. There was an infamous website called deeker.com which had a lot of AB stories featuring minors, and the most popular story that used to be sold by DPF (the Diaper Pail Friends) featured two adolescent minors. It’s always been there, but in an implicit way.

Nowadays the current generation of ABs and ageplayers really reject those early manifestations of age-based fantasy, but even while they say that, we see it recur somewhere else — like in fiction spaces such as ao3, for instance, or in somewhere like the age regression archive.

So I don’t know what the answer is, but as with society at large I hope we can eventually get to a place where there are safe spaces for everyone according to their different needs, and I also hope that as the science progresses we get closer to the common neurological roots of all the paraphilias and attractions and identities, so that our efforts are informed by facts instead of prejudices.

In the meantime, I can only be what I am, and if that means I break the categories, then I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do other than go on being the way I am and saying what is true from my perspective, and talking to other MAPs and other autopedophiles until we all feel a little more comfortable with who we are. That’s the hope, anyway. It’s a really interesting time in history, and for me, there is reason for hope.

CANDICE:

Well Elliot thank you for reading this for the last hour! That is challenging. It’s challenging to read someone’s answers, really, truly and so thank you so much for reading Bly’s answers. And, Bly, thank you so much. I know you’re listening out there. Thank you so much for giving us such thoughtful answers today.

I do want to say in the last points that you made that you said that it’s been known for a while, thanks to Ray Blanchard, for MAPs there are quite a lot who as well as being minor attracted persons are also autopedophilic, age dysphoric, ageplayers or emotionally congruent with kids in some way. That I think is a really pointful statement and something that needs to be discussed further, again, not to create more stigma or judgement or pathologise, but really to open up another conversation.

I think there’s a lot of researchers in the field of pedophilia and minor attracted persons who would actually find that quite fascinating, so thank you so much for pointing that out, and I just really loved what you said at the end that — and I would agree — I really hope eventually we can get to a place as a global community where there are safe places for everyone according to their different needs. Because we’re not talking about harming anyone; we’re not talking about harm. We’re talking about things that go on in people’s minds that from what you’ve described and a lot of the examples that you gave: other people work through challenging times in their lives but also bring them positive experience. So, thank you so much, Elliott, for taking the time to read for Bly and Bly, thank you for For having the courage to be on our podcast

ELLIOTT:

I just want to say like thank you for having me back on and Bly, I apologise for stumbling over some of your words; I hope the message still got out there OK.

CANDICE:

Well, I will say that I think the message got out there. I know I was captivated by your reading, and so I really believe the message is going to get out there just fine. So thank you again to both of you and until next time… we’ll see you soon.

(end)

The post Prevention Podcast Transcript: Bly Rede talks about autopedophilia, ABDL, ageplay and more! appeared first on Pedophiles About Pedophilia.

Welcome to the Prevention Podcast. I’m your host, Candice Christiansen. Today we have a wonderful individual who identifies as a non-offending – meaning he’s never offended – minor attracted person who is also anti-contact. He goes by the pseudonym of Bly Rede and his answers will be read by an advocate of NOMAPs whose name is Rusty, so Rusty, I want to welcome you and just tell you how much I appreciate you for reading Bly’s answers today. How are you?

RUSTY: I’m awesome. And I thank you for letting me be here.

CANDICE:

Well, I just think it’s so important and I already told you, Rusty, that, you know, I’m going to want to interview you separately as an advocate, so we definitely will schedule that podcast interview because it’s so important that we do have advocates for this population out in our community, not just therapists who are compassionate or researchers who are compassionate but also advocates who are citizens so thank you again

I do want to say before we get started that because Rusty will be reading the answers for Bly, I will be chiming in to give feedback, share my thoughts about Bly’s answers. However, Rusty’s going to continue reading just based off of what Bly had answered before, so it may sound choppy to those of you that are listening. Please just know that it’s not a reciprocal conversation because we have an advocate who’s reading for Bly.

Shall we get started? All right, so the first question that we asked Bly: ‘Are you an anti-contact pedophile? What does that term mean to you? And what do you think is the difference between pro-contact and anti-contact pedophiles?’ so it’s kind of a long double question.

BLY (read by Rusty):

I am an anti-contact pedophile (and hebephile and ephebophile). What that means to me is that I have, since a young age, experienced an attraction for boys younger than me and that it’s not something I’ve acted on, either in seeking out child sexual exploitation materials, or in trying to act on that attraction.

In terms of the difference between a pro-contact and anti-contact pedophile, this is something I view through the lens of having been both, even though I never offended.

For a while in my late teens and very early twenties I was pro-contact for two reasons. Firstly, it was because I hadn’t really considered all the factors I needed to to understand how harmful sex is between minors and adults. I think I just assumed that, because I was well-intentioned and felt this very strong emotional affection toward young boys, that no harm could possibly come of it.

As far as I was concerned, a child abuser was some ill-intentioned person who had no tender feelings, and who literally got off on the misery they inflicted, and that seemed so at odds with my self image as someone who was gentle and not coercive or bullying. I had been the victim of bullying so I just couldn’t imagine doing something that would make a kid cry, even.

CANDICE:

So I’ll just stop you right there really quickly because I want to say I think a lot of individuals who we talk to — we hear so often how many NOMAPs or MAPs in general know they have an attraction by the time they’re teenagers. They know they have an attraction to children and I think there is a lot of confusion during that time about their intentions and, you know, what’s harmful and what’s not.

For those of you that are listening who are MAPs who are questioning — who are in your coming out process — that can be a normal part of the process and it’s also why we have folks like Bly who come on to educate about ‘this was my coming out process which was filled with confusion’. I really appreciate that. Thanks for sharing that.

BLY:

It took me a while to understand how much more subtle this is compared to what you read in the news. I came to understand that while there are abusers who are extremely cruel in that sense, there are also abusers who are more manipulative, and then there are those who just don’t see outside of themselves enough to anticipate the harm they could do, ones who are deeply misguided that the relationship they have with a kid is a supportive or equal one when really it’s very one-sided. Maybe it’s easy to assume a kid is your equal when you still feel disempowered like a kid yourself.

CANDICE:

Well, exactly and I think again that is a really key point too. You know, a lot of folks who have minor attractions are closeted and afraid for their life because of the stigma and hate, especially when we talk about pedophilia.

Hebephilia and ephebophilia are newer  terms for the global community but everybody knows the term pedophile and so, yeah, I think a lot of times what can happen is there can be definite missguidedness in regards to ‘oh, I can have this equal relationship with a child’ when in reality (and I can speak as a survivor but also a trauma expert who treats a lot of adults who had childhood sexual abuse) children do not have the capacity to consent on all levels, emotionally, mentally, physically or sexually. Their nervous system cannot tolerate it; they mentally are not able to consent and so again I appreciate your views on this.

BLY:

Because I was gay, and not ashamed of it, I was used to the idea that society had been proven profoundly wrong about gay relationships. I assumed for a while that pedophilia was on the same track.

It took me a while to see why the social change that happened around gay relationships just wasn’t going to happen for pedophilia, and for very good reasons – and it took the help of a very smart, very open-minded non-pedophile friend for me to hear and understand and believe that. As soon as I figured that out, though, I became anti-contact in all circumstances, not just most. I had never been in favour of what in those days we called child porn, so thankfully I never had that issue to deal with as so many do now.

Having made that transition into someone who was attracted but would never act, I then found myself profoundly alone. It was such a strong isolation. It wasn’t until Virpeds started, I think – which was years and years later – that I was even certain there were other people out there like me.

CANDICE:

Well, and I think that’s such a huge support for so many people out there.

Virped, which has come under fire recently by trolls who are just absolutely uneducated and ignorant — so many folks who are MAPs, including NOMAPs are isolated, feel alone; that’s one of the reasons why we do a podcast; that’s one of the reasons why we have a global programme; that’s one of the reasons we collaborate with other programs to offer support to pedophiles all across the globe.

It’s so important that there is support. I think there’s this misnomer if you will or this belief that if a pedophile reaches out into a community of other pedophiles for support then they’re all going to be at even higher risk to offend and that’s making the ridiculous assumption that attraction automatically equals action and so Virped – it is absolutely a positive support to folks who have minor attractions

BLY:

I figured that other anti-contact pedophiles must exist, but it was just too dangerous for one person to acknowledge it to another unless you were sure. And I was never sure. Even if I had a strong hunch that some other adult I knew was MAP (and sometimes I did), I had no way of finding out if they were anti-contact, and I didn’t want pro-contact people in my life, so why even risk starting that terrifying conversation?

You asked what is the difference between anti-contact and pro-contact. To me the difference is that a pro-contact hasn’t woken up from their daydreams of the world they wish was possible. They haven’t yet fully compared it to the world that we all actually live in.

And they’re not so different in that from anyone who follows an ideology too closely, but of course there are huge dangers to others if they act on those beliefs.

Now they would say, of course, no it’s everyone else who’s asleep and we all just need to read the Rind studies to understand this that and the other and that in such and such a circumstance under xyz conditions and when Jupiter is in Virgo (or whatever) contact is OK.

And I just say, no, not in the real world. In the real world, we avoid doing things we know have potential to cause profound harm, even if we believe that in our special case things would be different. We have to be suspicious of our own cognitive bias as pedophiles. Everyone does, but especially us.

CANDICE:

Well, now I really just want to say I appreciate that because we are absolutely 100% anti contact and so we have many individuals all across the globe who come to us, call into our global support group, who say ‘I’m anti contact :I don’t ever want to offend against a child.’

Some come to us because they’re suicidal, they’re depressed; they need help understanding the stigma; they want to have a healthy relationship with an adult.

Others are coming to us because they have viewed child sexual abuse images and are scared and all of them say ‘we don’t want to harm a child’ and I agree that there are those individuals who are pro-contact who do live in a daydream world believing that is us who are asleep, that we just need to wake up and we’ll get on board that it’s OK to have contact with children and we will always hold to our stance that it’s not OK. It’s never OK.

We’re also not supportive of contact-neutral meaning that ‘in some instances it’s OK to have sexual contact with children.’ We do not believe that, clinically or otherwise, so I really appreciate you sharing this, Bly, because this is so necessary.

I think there is a lot of confusion in the global community about anti-contact and pro-contact pedophilia. A lot of people just say that all pedophiles, all minor attracted persons are all the same and they’re not, they’re absolutely not, so I appreciate you making the distinction.

The next questions are: how long have you known you were attracted to children and how has your attraction to children impacted your life?

BLY:

Profoundly impacted my life. Profoundly. I think I have made all kinds of decisions because of it. The biggest one was opting to avoid a life situation where I had to care for kids or where I might pass on pedophile DNA, if there is such a thing, which there may not be. I think I figured early on that I would not be a parent or a sperm donor. It surprised me when I learned that some MAPs are parents and it doesn’t lead to bad places. But that was never a comfortable place for me to be.

It kind of helps here to explain my history in more detail, because I think it’s probably a bit unusual, even among pedophiles. When I first became aware of these attractions, around age fourteen or fifteen, they were almost a sort of a background thing because there were so many other things going on with my sexual identity at the time.

Even before I really had sexual thoughts, when I was aged 4 through 10, I had a lot of fantasies and daydreams about being cared for like an infant or a little kid – diapers and cribs and the whole caboodle, you know? I don’t know what caused this obsession, but it was there early and it was strong and while it’s changed somewhat over the years, it has never gone away. Most people know this as ABDL or sometimes autopedophilia and sometimes ageplay; there are different aspects that those words refer to and there isn’t time to fully explain it today. Most ABDL people are NOT pedophiles. That needs to be clear.

CANDICE:

Well, and I think that first thing you describe can be a  fetish behavior as well. You know, people will grow up and have fetishes that are pedophiles  and so I appreciate you saying that. And most ABDL people are not  pedophiles but for you this is something that you identify with.

BLY:

So from a very early age I was trying to keep from the people closest to me what felt like both a very dangerous and also potentially very humiliating secret – not always successfully. But then it got worse: my feelings about wanting to be babyish or childlike started overlapping with my sexuality as it kicked in and developed around the age of 11, and which happened to be gay instead of straight.

So at that point, a somewhat physically and emotionally immature 11 year old boy, I realised I was no longer just an eccentric, I knew I was a pervert. This was in the 1980s, by the way, when that was pretty much the only word most people knew for this kind of thing. It made me very self-conscious, but also very conscious of society’s hypocrisy about sex, where we make so many assumptions about what’s normal but are too embarrassed to check in case it’s not.

So, after a few years, partly out of annoyance about this hypocrisy (but not willing to go the full way) I owned up to the least unacceptable aspect of my sexuality and I came out at school as gay, and that leads to a lot of bullying, on top of the bullying I’d already had for just being a slightly odd kid. And in the midst of that I was becoming aware I was a pedophile too, so a lot of despair set in very early on for me. Some anger too, which I turned inward.

I didn’t even know anybody gay at this stage, still less anyone into all the other stuff, so the prospect of sexual experience at this stage seemed fairly unrealistic. Everything was just fantasy, whether it was fantasy about boys my age, older men or younger boys, so again it didn’t seem to matter which impossible, unfulfilled fantasy I focused on.

I tried to find out more from the library, which I discovered had two kinds of book on pedophilia. One I borrowed was a series of essays on child sexual abuse edited by Finkhelor and the other was the book I mentioned earlier called Paedophilia: The Radical Case by Tom O’Carroll, who had been a member of the Pedophile Information Exchange in the UK in the late 70s and early 80s.

And this book was a pro-contact book. Pretty much the only pro-contact book I ever read. It made the various arguments – which I now recognise as false, but naively accepted then – for why sex with boys wasn’t so bad. I already explained how it took a long time for me to see through all that.

CANDICE:

So this is another reason why we have a podcast; why we do a lot of educating; why we provide consulting to other clinicians across the world; why other programs are now coming forward; why research is out there…

Because  if people are misinformed or given information that’s limited, a lot of people end up reading books like you for instance: a book about pro contact pedophilia. Now those of you that are listening that are pro-contact probably hate me – that is OK!

I do want to say we want to be educating the world that there are a lot of people like you, Bly, that are anti-contact in that have never offended and so, sure, here you are in the 80s:  there is not a lot of information out there and so you are getting information that’s very confusing, especially for someone who decides ‘I don’t want to do this; I don’t want to be pro-contact; I don’t want to harm a child.’

BLY:

Just to add a problem, I couldn’t recognise myself in the academic books about sexual abuse because they were described – rightly – from the point of view of victims, and in very dry language that didn’t really try to get inside the head of the pedophile or the abuser, because that (again rightly) wasn’t the focus of the research in those days. However, the Finkelhor book was very helpful in that it made me aware of abuse, what it was and what sort of thing happened. It was important to me that serious academics were taking it seriously and measuring it objectively. I think it confirmed to me that sexual abuse was a real, widespread phenomenon that I couldn’t factor out or set aside in trying to figure out this question, not if I was going to be an honest person about this.

CANDICE:

Well, I will say that I’m really thankful that you did have the Finkelhor book and there were other books out there as well. I know Bessel van der Kolk has been around forever talking about survivors of sexual abuse and how much they endure on so many levels. And so that is a plus that you did read that, that you could see the reality for children who are sexual abuse survivors and so I’m grateful for that.

BLY:

Later on, I discovered there were consenting adults communities around ageplay and ABDL and that community provided me with a space where I could have ethical sexual satisfaction. I am very lucky that I am what they call non-exclusive, and am attracted to adult men as well as boys. There’s a lot of ways within ageplay that you can experience some of the same emotions and ideas that are tied up with minor attraction. That was a very important outlet for me.

CANDICE:

Well, and I will say with that, too, there a lot of folks out there who do all kinds of things sexually that are not pedophiles and so I know that there are going to be some people listening that are going to be judging your choice to engage in ABDL behavior with other consenting adults but I want the world to know we have a lot of people in our global community who engage in BDSM (who aren’t pedophiles), who are into kink and so on and so forth.

Sexuality is really on a spectrum and so are sexual practices and there are a lot of people out there that are that are not pedophiles who indulge in ABDL.

So for those of you that are judging Bly on this I want you just to be aware of that. [Next question:] What do you want the world to know about pedophilia and/or minor attraction?

BLY:

I want the world to know everything about it, eventually, but we won’t get that until there are more studies and more science about it, and that won’t happen until people decide it’s more important to destigmatise highly unconventional desires so that non-offenders come forward to be part of these studies. I probably wouldn’t right now, without a huge load of assurance about confidentiality.

Scientific studies will provide the kinds of information we need to really assess the risk – or otherwise – of people like me. It looks like there’s evidence already that not everyone who abuses kids sexually is a pedophile and I know just from myself that not every pedophile abuses. I’d really like it to be possible that we could get a true overall picture of that.

CANDICE:

What I will say is that there is research out there. I just think the global community needs to get on board with the research that’s actually out there we know in the research that 70% of all offenders who have child victims are non-MAP, so they’re not pedophiles.

There’s this assumption, though, that there’s a high number, or that everybody who sexually offends is a pedophile. or if you’re a pedophile you’re automatically going to sexually offend. That’s just not true; that’s why we say attraction does not equal action, you know, otherwise it would be, like, OK, a man who has a sexual attraction to women — adult women — is automatically going to be a rapist and it’s just not true.

So there is actually research out there. Does there need to be more? Absolutely, and we really need the global community in the media especially to get on board with the reality of this population

BLY:

What I’d like people to understand now, that I know, is this. I have never abused a child nor have I ever tried to create the opportunity to do so. While I don’t expect a medal or even a pat on the head for that, I am conscious that at times in my life, I might have gone that way, and so it is really important that people who are in my situation today are reached and orientated and given whatever help and guidance they need to really make sure they never offend or get inappropriate with a kid.

This is easier than it might seem at first, because the second thing I’d like people to understand is that it’s an attraction, which is not the same as obsession or compulsion or some terrible urge that cannot be contained. It’s attraction – like when you see a cute person on the street but you’re in a relationship, so you just put it from your mind. If you know you can’t have something it is usually that easy to deal with. It’s not some huge daily crisis.

CANDICE:

Well, that’s the biggest thing, and the difference – right? – is knowing that in our Society that’s the reality which for so many individuals who are MAPs, including pedophiles, it can be really lonely. And so in therapy we work through that: the depression and loneliness surrounding ‘I have this attraction that will never be acted upon. What do I do and can I have fulfilling relationships with adults that meet my needs knowing that I have this attraction it will never be fulfilled?’

BLY:

Again, that needs taboos to be lifted. I see no reason why the possibility of minor attraction should not be referred to in sex ed classes, so that some kid like me gets the message that it is not too dangerous for them to tell someone, in fact it’s more dangerous if they don’t.

It’s not enough to just shame and condemn people for something they never chose. Most of us find out we’re pedophiles aged 14. We don’t have a switch or a method that just turns that off, even though it’s such a shameful thing to discover about yourself. A lot of us spend years wishing there was a magic switch, and not actually dealing with the issue.

CANDICE:

My hope is that for teenagers that are listening who know you have an attraction to children, even parents who are listening and you notice that your teenager does — that you know there are people and resources. You can reach out.

I think something in the global community of researchers and clinicians that we are trying to figure out is ‘how can we offer an and outreach teenagers?’ because we know that is when the attraction is realised.

And I think a lot of times [for] parents… the stigma around it and the fear can create a block; create a wall where teenagers don’t want to reach out.

So yeah, I really hope that our global community can change in the way that we’re viewing the attraction and when it starts, so that teenagers can get help, because we are seeing too many teenagers that are dying by suicide as the result of having this attraction and the fear of coming forward to get the support they need.

BLY:

I would like people to learn, above all, that the attraction by itself, if not acted on, is not a blameworthy thing. None of us chose it. And when I say that I’m not trying to make a parallel with LGB people. Pedophilia is different. But that still doesn’t make it a choice.

Unless we resort to totalitarian solutions like selective exterminations or precautionary castration, which are inhumane and medieval, we have to accept that people like me are going to live in the world alongside all the other human beings and it’s better if we have support.

CANDICE:

I agree, and I will say for the global community, there are so many more people that are MAPs that are surrounding each and everyone of you, then you realize we need a wake up; that this is a real thing and we actually need to open our minds to understanding it better.

BLY:

I think most reasonable people agree with this when they think about this issue, but people are scared to voice it because it sounds like condoning abuse. Well, it isn’t condoning abuse if you’re suggesting a solution that could avoid it.

CANDICE:

What a strong statement, Bly. I appreciate you saying that because it’s it’s absolutely not condoning abuse we’re talking about attraction were not talking about action.

We believe that people being able to come forward to get the support they need will be a long-term preventive measure. It’s not going to help anybody to stay underground.

I think there’s a lot of controversy with pedophilia being a sexual orientation: I definitely know those discussions among researchers and professionals who treat this population that it indeed is a sexual orientation. I know that the community at large might want to argue that. I think the reality is, it’s something that we need to look at and consider.

With that being said, I also know and our clinical team here know that folks will come into our program, MAPs specifically, and a lot of them have trauma: traumatic experiences that have caused a sort of arrested development, if you will, [so they] really find that they’re attracted to children the same age as their abuse occurred and so I want to find out from you; know what your experience has been, related to that, if any.

BLY:

My age of attraction as it’s known has varied during my life. When I was in my teens and twenties it would go as low as about 5, but nowadays it’s seldom any lower than 7 or 8. In addition, I’m non-exclusive, which means that I have been attracted to people my own age, or even somewhat older, since I had attractions. And the attraction is to every age in between too, so, you know, I could see a man of 36 or 25 or 19 or a boy of 13 or 10 etc. down to about 7 – and potentially experience attraction. So there isn’t one particular age I am particularly focused on.

That said, there are certain ages where I had certain experiences, such as getting badly bullied or my parents divorcing or my first suicide attempt that seem to line up with slightly stronger attraction to boys of a particular age, so yes, there might be some connection there.

One of the ages that seems quite powerful for me in fantasy is fourteen, and I think that it was around that age, maybe just into fifteen, that I first discovered I was a pedophile, so perhaps that’s a factor. Another age is eleven, which is the age I first started experiencing sexual thoughts.

But when I start thinking about it there are other ages too that have strong attractions and emotions around them, so I don’t think that theory is a complete explanation, really.

It may just be that pedophiles are born with the pattern of attraction already defined and that maybe it’s the act of returning to traumatic events in memory through repetitive acts of fantasy that wears a path in the brain that really strengthens the idea of a particular age being especially attractive. Maybe.

CANDICE:

Well, I definitely appreciate you saying that, and that’s one of two things that we’ve seen: that individuals who are MAPs will, say, some believe it’s sexual orientation; some believe it’s sexual orientation and they’ve had traumatic experiences — and it sounds like Bly has had that happen, when he was bullied, and he’s saying that he feels like it could be for him sexual orientation. [Next question:] What are your thoughts on sites that have recently been trying to ban NOMAPs from posting or joining and thoughts  on the trolls and the ignorance that’s out there? Because I know we’ve experienced a ton of that.

BLY:

This is now the topic of the moment. My first point about this is that I would never have known there was a community of anti-contact pedophiles out there until there was Virpeds. And even then that wasn’t enough to get me to connect. I was terrified of any discussion online or of reaching out for help.

At that time, I also absolutely did not trust the idea of telling a therapist. This was partly because I didn’t understand the mandatory reporting laws as well as I do now, but also because I just had no idea how to find someone suitable. Therapists are only human and some will have certain prejudices that are going to make it hard to help someone like me. I know that’s not supposed to be true about prejudices, but pedophilia is an exceptional thing at the moment, and there’s very few people who will have read the studies, some of which are very controversial in their findings. And aside from all of that, there’s the question of money and affordability of talking therapy

So I felt stuck but also very depressed throughout my adulthood. I didn’t feel able to go to Virpeds because I was paranoid that my browsing history or some technical thing was going to get me outed, and I didn’t want to see a therapist, even though I was getting really very seriously suicidal and acquiring the methods I would need to die. It was when I had finally reached the idea that I was going to die soon that I decided I hadn’t got much left to lose and that coincided, very luckily, with the period when Ender had his twitter account and was deliberately making some serious noise on behalf of anti-contact pedophiles.

So I set up my own twitter, as a locked account, and just went on to talk about my plans to die and how unhappy I felt. And that was when I got messaged by other anti-contact MAPs, including Ender, and the help they were offering was practical, and most importantly, unlike therapy, it was possible to do online without having to feel like I was crossing some Rubicon that was going to change my life irrevocably.

It wasn’t long after that that The Sun ran its front page attacking twitter for having these pedophile accounts and Ender started going through this series of bans on his account. I was incensed by that, how unfair it was. And it galvanised me.

I’ve always hated The Sun for its homophobia and deliberate ignorance. So while Ender was absent I made my account public and started talking, because we need sane voices on twitter representing us. I really try hard to be a sane voice and to make sure people are reached, and moved toward help.

We’re attacked from all sides, of course, and in all kinds of ways from dumb to sophisticated (or sophistic), but the argument that I hear used all the time is that having anti-contact NOMAPs on twitter is “normalising” sex abuse, which I totally disagree with. It is just a sophisticated-sounding way of saying ‘please be quiet and stop being here, proving this subject is more complicated than I thought it was.’

They want us to just go back to skulking in the shadows where they can believe whatever they like about what they think we get up to, as opposed to what we actually do and believe and say.

That’s why it’s important we’re on twitter, not so we can all take a party line or say ‘pedophilia is great’, because it’s not great. It’s not something I’m proud of at all. We need to be there on twitter so we can say the unexpected, so that people can – as far as possible – hear how things seem to us unmediated by the medical professionals.

And I want exactly the same thing for victims of sexual abuse, and I think it’s totally incumbent on MAPs that they don’t do anything to silence or intimidate those voices either. We should stay focused on reaching other MAPs.

CANDICE:

I really appreciate everything that Bly has said here, and first I want to say that it saddens me that, Bly, you felt like you wanted to kill yourself.

I think that’s what trolls will say: ‘well just die or go kill yourself the fact that you’re attracted to children you should be in all of the horrible things that come after that.’

The reality is, just as Bly said, this isn’t a choice; this is[n’t] something that pedophiles are proud of. They do not feel like it’s something that they’re excited about: ‘ooh I’m so excited to grow up and be attracted to kids’. And so the reality is, just like anyone coming into our office — saying ‘I need help; I’m depressed; I’m suicidal’ — my argument is: why would I not help someone who has an attraction to a minor? They’re coming to me for help.

I also want to say that I’m on Twitter as well, as the Global Prevention Project, and know by talking about minor attracted persons and outreach and advocacy we are absolutely not promoting sexual abuse. In fact we’re doing the complete opposite.

So when trolls do their threatening and their badgering and their trolling and their harassment that actually does more harm to prevention efforts than what we’re doing, which is trying to educate the global community that attraction is not action.

I also want to say that I love how Bly said it is important that pedophiles, hebephiles, ephebephiles, MAPs are on Twitter; that the voices of men and women who are attracted are the ones that are educating and communicating to the global community.

We cannot just have medical professionals and clinicians doing the communicating, because we don’t understand it at the [deepest] level.

And so that’s our whole reason for doing this podcast so I’m just really, really appreciative that Bly answered that question for us. Thank you. So lastly, in your opinion, what are some things that therapists can do better to support no maps and pedophiles in general?

BLY:

I think that it needs to be made possible for therapists to intervene earlier. The ironic thing for me is that just around the time I was discovering my attractions, in my teenaged years, I had access to a therapist, but this thing of pedophilia and also of autopedophilia, they were both so taboo and seemed so terrible to me that I just never brought them up and the sessions ended without these fundamental things ever being mentioned.

I think that therapists and supervisors need publications and guidance about the facts of this, so they have something to refer to. Unlike a lot of people, I do see the logic of mandatory reporting in some cases, but I am really interested to hear when there are reports of how Project Dunkelfeld in Germany has gone.

I also think that there is a forgotten group here and that is the parents of children who realise they’re MAP. So if you’re the parent of a fourteen year old who turns round and one day says, ‘I love little kids in the wrong way and I’m not coping any more,’ that there is a book you can get out of the library or on Kindle that gives you some sort of clue what you can do to help. It must be a terribly frightening thing to hear, just as frightening as it is to say.

I would like to see there be a better network of therapists who will advertise clearly that they deal with this condition, not just euphemisms about ‘unwanted sexual thoughts’. I have gone through the websites of therapists that describe themselves as kink-aware, who maybe have a background in alternative sexualities. But my experience is that kink communities themselves really loathe pedophiles and make a lot of effort to cast us out and dissociate themselves from us, because of very important taboos about consent (and misunderstandings about our attitude to consent).

Some people in those communities are very enlightened on this, but for other people their marginalisation and the suspicion and misunderstanding that society has for kinksters makes them hate us all the more because they just can’t afford the toxic association with pedophiles. I wonder how much that rubs off on therapists who specialise in that area. I don’t know, and it’s probably not possible to generalise.

One of the difficulties with all this is that we’re in an era where paradigms about sexuality and gender identity are shifting very very rapidly, much faster than science can come up with relevant information for professionals. If you started practising therapy in 1990 when we were in the early stages of awareness of child sexual abuse and only halfway through a change in attitude to homosexuality, you would be forgiven for feeling all at sea now. It’s even the same for me. When I started learning about this, the all important newly discovered distinction was between gays, transvestites and transsexuals. That sounds totally quaint now.

I think that things move on when there is a public conversation. This is going to messy and ugly and it’s going to take a very long time and will probably always be controversial. I guess definitions in the DSM are going to be the main battleground, but public opinion and media representation will affect the debate too. Maybe there’ll be a non-offending MAP drama character sometime soon, or more likely an appearance in a novel or theatre piece. There is less censorship in those areas.

As for therapists, I think there will always be a need for them. I hope we get more of them who are trained in these issues. I hope they’re availabile with that training in schools and via referral. I hope that help for this becomes routine. And obviously I hope that they are helped in providing that help by a society that starts to realise that if you didn’t choose a mental condition, you don’t need to be shamed and blamed for it.

I really think that will help MAPs and help ensure there are fewer victims of child sexual abuse, and fewer consumers of child exploitation material. It’s what I hope for.  We’re in kind of a dark time right now for the world, but on this topic there’s never been a time in my life when there was more hope.

CANDICE:

I appreciate what you said about what therapists can do, Bly, because there’s a large population of therapists all over the world that listen to these podcasts and the beautiful thing about it is they’re listening to hear directly from MAPs to understand how best to support them in treatment.

I do want to say that mandatory reporting… is it is necessary when there is an identifiable victim and there’s imminent harm, and here’s the difference: when someone says ‘I have an attraction’ it does not automatically mean action. It does not automatically mean abuse. It does not automatically mean sex offender.

And so that’s what I want the global community to hear. I know when I first started our project and first was doing my advocacy for non-offending pedophiles I got a lot of blowback from other clinicians who said, you know, ‘How can you do this without reporting? What about reporting laws?’

And so the question I have to ask and I want all of you clinicians listening and even community members… What exactly am I reporting when someone says I have an attraction to a 12-year-old? What do you think the police are going to do if I call them? What about child protective services? I’ve no identifying information and there’s no imminent danger of a victim that’s being harmed. It’s literally an attraction.

I hope those that are listening to this podcast can really hear that we are talking about providing accurate treatment to individuals who are minor attracted, who have no desire to sexually harm a child. They need support in therapy in order to deal with their depressive symptoms; their isolation; feeling disconnected from the world… and they have a desire to stay safe in the community, and just like anyone else I will continue to help that population.

I’m also really excited to hear that there are more researchers out there that continue to do research on the MAP community and there [are] also other programs all across the world who are starting MAP programs [and] MAP groups because there is such a need.

People that are listening to us: let me say this last thing. Someone you know is a MAP. Go ahead and challenge me on that. Someone you know is a MAP. There are more minor attracted persons around us than we realize.

I think this is a beautiful time. I’m happy that there is hope out there, Bly, for you and other MAPs listening.

I want to thank Rusty for reading this; taking the time out of your day and every day. I see you on Twitter being such an incredible advocate for MAPs and NOMAPs especially, and so I really want to acknowledge you for that and I would love to bring you on and interview you sometime about what has gotten you into your advocacy.

So with that I want to say thank you so much, Rusty. Thank you, Bly for having the courage to share who you are with the global community and thank you to all of you that have listened to our podcast…. Until next time…

The post Prevention Podcast Transcript: Bly Rede – Attraction is not Action appeared first on Pedophiles About Pedophilia.

Hi there, fellow MAP.

MAP stands for “Minor Attracted Person” and it applies to you if you have a sexual attraction to people under the age of consent: teens or children.

If you’re new to this and still working it out, I have some good news.

(1) The attraction you’re experiencing is not your fault

(2) you are not alone and

(3) just having this attraction doesn’t make you a bad person. If you don’t want to hurt anyone, you don’t have to.

People talk about us in a terrible way. They use the word ‘pedophile’ to mean the worst kind of people in the world; they believe that all pedophiles are criminals and abusers (because they mostly ever hear about the ones who commit crimes or abuse kids). Some people believe that even if a pedophile hasn’t committed a crime yet they inevitably will.

These ideas are false. Society is wrong to assume every MAP has to be evil.

But having MAP feelings is concerning, all the same. I’m guessing you’ve had the attractions for a while. Perhaps it took a while to recognise them for what they are. Maybe you have also had thoughts about what it would be like if you could act on these attractions. Maybe you even fantasise about it (or maybe you try very hard not to).

Thoughts alone cannot harm a child, but certain actions could. We (the writers of this article) are anti-contact, non-offending MAPs. This means we believe:

(a) child pornography is a terrible thing in which real children are abused, and anti-contact MAPs avoid it.

(b) Real-life children are harmed if they are exposed to sex before the age of consent by someone significantly older. There is a mountain of evidence saying so.

As you explore the reality of being a MAP and look around at what is written about this online, you are going to find that some MAPs believe that children can consent to sex and that it’s OK to act on the attractions. We call these people pro-contact MAPS. They’ve been around for a long time and will give you all kinds of reasons to justify acting on pedophile attractions.Below are ten of the pro-contact arguments you might hear, followed by why anti-contact MAPs think they are bullshit, and could lead to kids being harmed.

The arguments:

1. “Children are sexual beings; it’s wrong to paint them as entirely pure and innocent.”

This is one of the tricksier pro-contact arguments, because there’s some evidence for it: maybe you remember having feelings from quite an early age that you now recognise as sexual. And sure, who was entirely pure and innocent when they were a child? Nobody. However, that still doesn’t mean that it’s OK or makes sense for older people to be sexual with kids.

If you think about it, animals are sexual beings, but that doesn’t make it OK to be sexual with them because they cannot consent. Vulnerable people with severe intellectual disabilities might have the ability to have sexual feelings, but not have the ability to consent to sexual activity, so that would make it wrong to try and have sex with them. The exact same principle applies to children.

Most pre-pubertal children are primarily sensual and want to explore that in all kinds of ways. We all had desires to explore our own bodies, and even to masturbate, but this happens long before our ability to understand what it means to have an adult sexual relationship.

And most of us didn’t want physical sexual attention from an adult, period. Maybe a few of us did, but probably more for attention and love than from a desire to be used for sex.

Children’s sexuality is expressed in a different way than adults’. Most children are rather sensual and curious in their expression of sexuality. Young children might touch their genitals and enjoy the sensations it brings; older children will explore other children’s bodies, out of curiosity rather than eroticism.

More rarely, some children express sexuality in abnormal ways, such as compulsive masturbation or seeking sexual contact with others (including adults). This does not mean that these children are more mature, or are capable of consenting to relationships with adults. In fact, because they are physically sexually active but not emotionally ready or educated about sex, these children are more vulnerable than less sexually precocious children.

If you meet a child like that, the best you can do for them is check they have the support they need from adults around them so they don’t run into trouble they could regret for the rest of their lives.

Anti-contact MAPs believe that a responsible MAP protects children from the risks of sex, putting aside their own desires to achieve that.

2. “Sex feels good, therefore children have the human right to enjoy sex, regardless of the person they experience it with”

Certainly, children have some rights: the right to protection; the right to be safe and happy; the right to make choices that are appropriate to their age. The younger they are, the more they will need adult help and guidance in exercising those rights.

The fact that something feels pleasurable doesn’t mean that there aren’t consequences or negative after-effects, nor does it make something morally right. Taking drugs is pleasurable, but often has negative consequences and often results in harm. Adults who experienced sex before they were ready often suffer from guilt, flashbacks, asking themselves ‘was it my fault?’ and ‘why me?’. Children’s right to a future free of these feelings is more important than their right to have sexual experiences.

This is obviously more true the younger the child is, but it’s still true even if they’re only just below the age of consent.

Anti-contact MAPs believe that children’s rights should be seen in the round and with care for their futures, not just picking out one ‘right’ because it seems to justify sexual behaviour toward kids.

3. “Kids can consent, they know whether they like or don’t like something and therefore they can say no to what they don’t like — if they don’t say no, it’s because they’re liking it and therefore it’s good for them.”

The idea of implied consent (‘They didn’t say no, so they like it.’) is not a valid excuse for rape in a courtroom, and certainly should not be applied to sexual situations involving children. You don’t have to have followed #MeToo to realise that.

Not saying ‘no’ can’t be read as a clear signal from a child, and you can’t be sure it indicates their understanding of what you might anticipate is going to happen. Children are often afraid to speak up and risk an adult’s disapproval or rejection, and they’re used to going along with an adult’s ideas and suggestions, trusting they will not be landed in a confusing world of concealment and lies.

Children should not be expected to understand or anticipate the risks of a sexual relationship, such as sexually transmitted diseases or the physical or emotional complexities of being ‘involved’ with an older person with their own emotional needs. They are not equal in power or understanding to you as the older person.

Any association between an adult and a child — or between children of significantly different ages — contains a power imbalance. If you’re the older person, especially a young adult closer in age to the child, this might not seem really significant to you, but if you listen to victims of sexual abuse, you start to realise how significant it really can be.

Anti-contact MAPs believe that relationships can only be moral if they don’t have a power imbalance that allows for abuse, and we believe this is forseeably the case in any adult-child relationship that turns sexual.

4. “There is no inherent harm in sex, the harm is caused by the way our society makes adult/child relationships a terrible secret”

Harm from sex can indeed be from a number of different causes both directly to do with the sex or following from it. Children can be hurt with manipulation, self-blaming, shame, physical pain from size differences, chemical changes in the brain, sexually transmitted diseases or infections and other factors.

Regardless of where that harm comes from, it is still harm, and there’s a very high risk of it. Playing with that risk with a child is like playing russian roulette with that child’s life.

Would you really want the object of your affections to become suicidal, to feel guilty about ever knowing you, or to self-harm or need therapy for years? If not, the choice is really clear: be anti-contact.

Anti-contact MAPs understand that someone who interacts sexually with a child is someone who is not taking the risks seriously.

5. “The age of consent is an arbitrary line, and doesn’t always make sense. There’s no one logical age when it’s exactly right for everyone. Abolish it and let people find the right solution individually.”

First, it isn’t completely arbitrary. Below certain ages no child is physically capable of sexual behaviour. When they’re a bit older, there is still a limit to their understanding of what sexual behaviour means.

At an older age still — say, during puberty — there’s a limit for when they could safely handle dating someone older. That someone would have a lot more life experience than them, and might turn out to be a creep or predator. Kids need the smarts that come with age to deal with that, smarts that they tend only to get by the time they’re close to or in adulthood.

It is true that there isn’t a single international age of consent and also that everybody is different in when they are ready for sex and different kinds of relationships (in extreme cases, some people are never ready). Like a lot of laws, the age of consent is an acceptable compromise between different factors.

But the fact it’s a compromise doesn’t undermine the fact it’s a good idea to have an age of consent.

A lot of pro-concact pedophiles also tend to focus on what they see as good consequences from lowering or abolishing the age of consent. They tend to ignore the likely bad outcomes. Even if most MAPs were ‘good MAPs’ who would only date people who were ready and never exploit them, there would still be people who would happily take advantage of the benefit of the doubt in a world without clear-cut age-of-consent laws, and might get away with acting abusively.

Sure, there can be arguments about which specific age — 18, 16, 14 or something else — is best for the age of consent. As MAPs, though, we know that people will assume we have a particular motive for suggesting whichever option we favour. Sitting this debate out is probably the best course of action for us.

Anti-contact MAPs favour following the legal age of consent where you are, and not wasting time looking for loopholes.

6. “Other societies in history have practiced pederasty or sexual rituals involving children, such as the Ancient Greeks.”

Uh huh? Let’s look a little closer. Pederasty (as the Ancient Greek practice was called) was not what we today would recognise as consensual. It was a system in which adolescent males (not little boys or girls) became sexual partners to older, more powerful men. The older men penetrated the youths, never the other way around. It was supported by some people in Ancient Greek culture, but condemned by others, and it wasn’t widespread at all.

The idea was that the younger male would get educational benefit out of his intimate relationship with an older more experienced one. Maybe so, but arguments that this needed to involve sex are kind of sketchy. Why does the education of a young adolescent boy need to involve having sex with his teacher? How come the Greeks didn’t apply this to girls too? What’s supposed to happen with youths who don’t feel any attraction to their teacher? Is it still good for them then? All in all, it looks like a convenient way for older men to get sexual satisfaction without the risk of getting someone pregnant. Nice one, Ancient Greeks!

There are other examples too, such as sexual acts performed by older males on younger ones as part of initiation rituals in various parts of the world, as recorded by anthropologists. But we’re not talking in this case about anything consensual as we’d understand it. The fact that some societies have unusual customs doesn’t imply they’re a great idea in other societies.

And none of the above really have much to do with what pro-contacts think is possible: one-on-one intimate sexual contact and romance between adults and much younger people, chosen freely by both parties. We basically don’t have any examples of that being widely accepted in any society in history in the entire world. Anti-contact MAPS believe this is for good reasons.

7. “There have been studies in which children who had sexual contact with adults have said that they enjoyed it.”

Surprisingly, yes, some studies like this exist, although none of them support a general conclusion that sex between adults and kids is a great idea.

All the same, some studies have found examples of certain people who say on record that they had sexual contact with an adult as a child, and that years later they did not feel like they were traumatised by it.

But not so fast, just because this evidence seems to support pro-contacters, let’s look further and more widely at the whole of the evidence available. Plenty other studies provide plenty of examples of people who say the exact opposite about their experience — i.e. that it was traumatising and felt wrong.

There are also examples of people who as children felt they were consenting, or didn’t know anything was wrong, but later as adults felt they had been abused. Here is one.

Basically, this is about picking out little bits of evidence and ignoring the rest. The studies that pro-contact MAPs like to quote (usually only the first kind) do not study enough people to get an accurate idea of how the majority of children respond to exposure to sex.

Not only that, but no studies have found a clear pattern for the type of person that is traumatised and the type that isn’t. In other words, there is no way before sexual contact of being sure which child would be traumatised by it for the rest of their life and which wouldn’t.

We think a good MAP just wouldn’t ever take that risk if they really loved kids.

8. “Pedophiles are normal, nice people, not like the monsters they’re portrayed as. The media’s scary stories about child abuse are exaggerated or even invented.”

You know what? It is definitely true that a lot of pedophiles you will meet, whether pro or anti-contact, are going to be basically nice people, not at all the ravening beasts that the media likes to portray. (The media like to do this because (a) in a world where the truth is complex, people find it easier to believe in evil monsters and (b) sensational presentation of the facts gets more clicks than the actual truth.)

So, yes, a lot of what people believe about us is a distortion of the truth, as you will know because you’re probably a nice well-intentioned human being yourself.

But being nice or normal is not a guarantee of angelic behaviour. Nice people can do wrong things, sometimes even with good but misguided intentions. A nice person could go wrong because they want something so badly that they overlook or minimise the harm it could do.

Unfortunately, sex is one of the areas where nice people are particularly prone to mistakes or irrationality. Maybe it’s something to do with how all human brains are wired to try and get sexual satisfaction, even when it’s a pretty terrible idea.

Anti-contact MAPs believe that pedophiles are not monsters, but like everyone else, they’re human and fallible. We also acknowledge that the consequences when a pedophile gets it wrong can be really horribly devastating. We have to take responsibility and make sure we really are good people in action as well as intention. All the time.

9. “When you think about it, the child has far more power in an intergenerational relationship because their word could jail the adult, whereas they would be protected.”

Well, pro-contacters, in the first place, the reason the penalties are so great is because the adult has the power, and they used it against someone with less power.

But also this is a simplified view of life, that having power is all about what the law says and that every bit of wrongdoing can always be easily reported and the victim believed. The reality of abuse is that children often do not report it because the process of reporting is scary (and it can be fallible).

The older person in these situations is often someone who has won the child’s trust over a long period of time, only to betray that trust after years of grooming. The older person might have thought the child ‘understood’ that the adult wanted a romantic, sexual relationship, even though the adult never made that clear from the get-go, and the child just sort of felt they should go along with it.

We’ve all had situations where a long-standing friend does something we don’t like and rather than dump the friend, we feel trapped by loyalty to them instead. Well, imagine that feeling multiplied by all the influence that the older person has, and all the uncertainty and confusion that the child has when they have an older friend who is mostly really nice to them but keeps doing or suggesting uncomfortably sexual things.

Maybe the child knows it’s wrong but doesn’t like the idea of their friend going to jail. Far from feeling powerful and confident, the severity of the punishment puts the child off from saying they feel uncomfortable, and that tips the balance of power back where it always was, in the hands of the older person.

Anti-contact MAPS believe that you should never put a child in a position where they have to choose between feeling obliged to please you somehow or going through the life-changing stress of getting you into court.

10. “Well, I wanted sex with adults when I was a kid of thirteen. Others must want that too, right?”

Just because some adolescents feel they want sexual love from an adult, doesn’t mean everyone else does, or everyone of any age would

But yes, it’s true. Adolescent crushes happen. However, adolescent crushes or fantasies are not the same as a mature relationship of equals. It’s a stage of desire we all go through on the way to figuring out what is possible and realistic and desirable in romantic or sexual partners.

What teenagers might imagine in their bedrooms with pin-ups on the wall would not feel at all the same as if they had the real-life person there having sex with them.

If an adult appears in a child’s fantasy, that adult is a fictional character, entirely under the child’s control. They’re not going to do anything unexpected or unwelcome because their behaviour is completely in tune with the child’s imagination. And the child can just turn off the situation when they want without worrying about that fictional character’s feelings.

With a real person it’s a completely different situation. If something doesn’t feel right, they need the confidence and the knowledge to say so, and they couldn’t just make the real person disappear by opening their eyes and thinking about something else.

And besides, adolescent crushes require the object of the crush to live up to impossible ideals. Let’s be honest, you can’t, and at your age, having been through your own adolescence, you hopefully realised that by now and you wouldn’t try.

Anti-contact MAPs believe that children’s sexual desire is always best explored with their peer group, and the only role for adults is as objective, calm support. Parents, teachers or professionals may intervene directly where there is potential for harm. If you’re not one of those, that is not your role.

So what‘s better than contact?

You’ve read our rebuttals to common pro-contact arguments. We haven’t included all of the evidence that backs us up and we admit we don’t have room to include all the rebuttals-to-the-rebuttals that pro-contacters have thought up over the last few decades, we’ve just given you ways to think critically about what the pro-contacts are actually saying. We hope to add some further links at the bottom so you can have more information in the future.

Like we said at the beginning, just because you’re a MAP doesn’t make you a bad person. You’re attracted to minors, but you can live that way without ever harming a real kid.

Here’s some things you can do that avoid the pro-contact trap:

• Use your imagination instead of porn or real kids. There’s no law anywhere against harmless fantasy that stays only in your head. Make it about fictional kids, rather than real ones.
• Spend time exploring where your attractions might have come from and what they mean to you. Professional help is great if you can afford it, but if you can’t…
• Join a community of anti-contact MAPs (if you’re old enough) so you can get help and advice from people who know the territory. There’s Virtuous Pedophiles, for a start, and other sources of support are beginning to spring up.
• Join anonymously. It’s not yet safe to be ‘out’ to the internet at large.

You’re not a bad person, and you can pursue a good, meaningful life.

It isn’t easy when you’re a MAP. You will have to keep it a secret from quite a few people and you probably have very strong feelings around your attractions that you need to process.

The good news, though, is that this is a moment in history when it’s more possible than ever for you to reach out, get some help and guidance, and improve the quality of your life without harming anyone else.

There is hope. Good luck, and don’t get led astray.

This article was compiled by Bly Rede out of contributions from multiple MAPs. Time having moved on, and people’s lives having changed, those MAPs’ names are not included here, but will be re-added on request to Bly.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Medium, prior to Medium suspending and deleting the content of self-admitted pedophiles. As a result, no comments to the original article survived except on those user’s archives.

The post Why pro-contact pedophile arguments are bullshit (by a pedophile) appeared first on Pedophiles About Pedophilia.

Trigger warning: some of the below might potentially be distressing for victims of sexual abuse. I have tried not to sensationalise, but to be honest about what I saw and what I felt.

My history: when I was eleven, I started feeling attractions to other boys my age and I found I wasn’t afraid of this idea. It was the eighties, the dawn of an era when it was possible to be gay and for that not to be wrong. So after a while, I came out. I suffered a lot of bullying, but bullying was nothing new to me and it never made me feel there was anything wrong with my sexuality.

Then in my mid-teens I realised that I was experiencing attractions to younger boys — aged maybe eleven, ten, younger — as well as adults.

The part of my brain that was unafraid of ideas saw no more wrong in this than in my wholly unrequited fantasies about adult men. The feelings I felt and the boys I quietly idolised seemed innocent, pure, good. I couldn’t see myself in the role of the horrible, unctuous, secretive middle-aged strangers that fit the name ‘pedophile’. I knew I wasn’t malicious; I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I felt gentle, sympathetic feelings toward kids — albeit with this odd sexual element — and of course I was still a kid myself in many ways.

I just noticed the feelings, felt curious about them and let them be but I sensed other people would not like them. And I knew that ‘coming out’ as a teenage ‘boy-lover’ was not possible as it had become by that time for a gay teenager.

Repression seemed wrong, but preferable to everyone knowing.

I stayed quiet but it was still there and like anyone who finds they are different, I couldn’t just ignore it. I needed to learn about it; I needed cool, accurate information, facts over myths; I needed to hear about other people like me; I needed role-models, people who had been through this and come out OK; I needed reasons why I turned out this way; I needed someone to talk to; I especially needed reasons not to believe I was an evil person, because when I thought hard about what I was, I started to fear that maybe, after all, I might be.

Some limited support was available to gay teens in the eighties, if they knew where to look and were brave enough. But as regards homosexual pædophilia, all that existed was a patchy mixture of sources— each reductive in its own way. I scoured social science books, journalism, lurid tabloid stories, hints in biographies of famous composers and writers — and of course, gay fanzines and erotica. In those days the line separating gay culture from pederasty was not as thickly drawn as it now is.

Erotica was the most difficult of these to find and the hardest to justify searching for. Did I need it? No, but it was certainly something I wanted. Yes, I could use my own imagination, and did. I could add imaginary details to existing non-sexual works of literature. I could gaze at magazine adverts and make up my own stories about the boys in them.

But it was different when I could use someone else’s imagination and narrative. It felt more validating, less like I was the only person in the world with these thoughts. It certainly felt that way when I read my first ‘gay novels’ as a teenager. It made it possible for me to feel other people are into this. I am not alone.

There were a smattering of books about ‘intergenerational’ homosexual relationships available in gay bookshops, usually under the imprint of the Gay Men’s Press. These were literature, not erotica, but nonetheless included some explicit scenes. And like their infamous heterosexual forerunner, Lolita, they could be read selectively for reasons apart from their literary qualities.

Somewhere around the point I was finding and buying these books, I also discovered that I knew people who had been sexually abused as children. That forced me to think more seriously about what was real and what was fantasy.

Was I interested in images as well as text? Yes. I saw the Dutch movie For A Lost Soldier that depicts a romantic and sexual relationship between a twelve year old boy and a man in his twenties against the backdrop of the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945. The fact that it depicted the sexual elements so discreetly and in soft focus kept it on the right side of the law, but also had the effect of softening and sentimentalising the realities of what happens to the boy character. The romanticism of the film also airbrushed the more ambivalent relationship shown in the book on which it is based, Rudi Van Dantzig’s memoir.

The film was an eye-opening experience but at the point of seeing it I had never been tempted to go further. The idealised nature of my fantasies about innocent boys made me chary of exploring more explicit, less tasteful and less character-focused material. I’m not sure this was from a fully-formed concern about victims. Frankly, I think I was just afraid porn would be tawdry.

Nonetheless, one afternoon I was in a cybercafé, and my curiosity started me reading, deliberately, a pedophile usenet newsgroup. I’d known it existed for some time and had probably looked in before. The alt hierarchy of newsgroups was infamous as a repository of erotic material for every taste, although you had to struggle to find meaningful posts amid snowdrifts of spam.

Some pedophiles were active on the newsgroup. I guess it was a shop front for the material and contact they had in the deeper, darker recesses of the internet. Samples of what was on offer surfaced.

What was I looking for there? All of the things I name above  —  although on closer inspection I wasn’t sure if I wanted to become friends with any other pedophiles. Those that wrote comments seemed cynical, brutish, even flippant about their attractions. Nobody debated the morals of pedophilic actions. Nobody gave much away of themselves. Nobody admitted to doubts. They were probably all older than me. They were probably nastier too, I priggishly imagined.

Then I saw, in the top of a message thread, the first image in a series. I knew perfectly well that I would eventually see something like this. There was a part of me that had been looking out for it.

It showed a forlorn Indian or Sri Lankan street kid, perhaps six years old, malnourished, hair greasy, wide-eyed, serious-faced, sitting on a hotel bed in only his underpants.

The background was nondescript, grey tiles on the floor and halfway up the wall, I think. White paint above. It looked perfectly clean. The boy looked out of place.

He sat, one leg drawn up so he sat on his heel, the other dangling. His expression couldn’t be read. He could have been apprehensive; he didn’t seem bored or nonchalant. He didn’t seem interested.

He didn’t seem happy, either. Maybe he was even deploying an expression some older kid had taught him. Perhaps he’d been given alcohol or a pill.

Nothing was arousing about the image, neither its detail, nor what it promised. That boy belonged to a different world to the soft, well-educated, slightly spoiled boys that tended to appear in my imaginings; idealised versions of my younger self.

Nobody else was in the photograph, but there was the implicit man behind the camera, with no face, but with ideas in his head about what would happen next, perhaps even a list on a pad of shots he intended to get in the time his money had afforded.

I didn’t smash the screen, nor run from the room to heave my guts up in horror. It wasn’t like that. I just looked at the kid, for a few moments considered looking at more of the thread, felt suddenly afraid, closed the browser and got on with something else.

I don’t know how moral a decision it was. One factor may simply have been that the boy in the photo simply wasn’t that attractive to me. Had it been an older boy, one who looked less afraid, perhaps it might have pushed a button that made me view the next image, and the next after that. I’ll never know.

But at any rate, I looked at the photo for less than twenty seconds and never returned to anywhere like that online again. It was in retrospect an important turning point. The fear of proximity to child porn was enough for me to avoid even trying to find any other pedophiles for years after that.

I only heard the terms ‘anti-contact pedophile’ and ‘non-offending MAP’ for the first time comparatively recently, and on hearing them, finally, tentatively, cautiously, began to search for more about it, had my first online conversations with pedophiles like me, in online spaces where sharing pictures of children or discussing fantasies were banned. I realised that I’d never been the only one.

I’m older than most of the anti-contact pedophiles in this new generation. I suppose some of them are of the same generation as the boy in the photograph.

What might have happened to that street boy? I don’t even know in detail what happened to him in the minutes after that first shot. I don’t know whether he survived in the longer term. It’s hard to imagine a happy ending there.

I certainly didn’t do him one bit of good by not looking at those pictures, and I know I’m not helping him by writing about it now.

But I know that that photograph I saw put me off child porn for life, and that I never went back to see more. It didn’t stop me being a pedophile and I doubt anything could have. It isn’t much, but it is something.

I know others were less fortunate than me.

Maybe in the future nobody will be faced with the same choice.

I think there is hope of that.

The post The first time I didn’t view child pornography appeared first on Pedophiles About Pedophilia.

I’m a non-offending MAP. “MAP” stands for “minor attracted person” and is a more sciencey term for what is conventionally called a pedophile. Which probably made you shudder.

However, I don’t do bad stuff to kids because I am that special type of pedophile known as “non-offending” and “anti-contact”. A lot of people cannot compute this concept because all pedophiles want to hurt kids, right?

Not right. I wrote the below series of tweets after a long, frustrating conversation with people who basically wanted me to die even though I have never done anything illegal or dodgy as regards my pedophilia. Here are the facts, and the reason we’re on twitter.

1. Some people (me included) are anti-contact MAPs. We did not choose to be attracted to minors, and we have gradually come to realise that because we didn’t choose it, we don’t have to feel shame that we have this attraction. We can’t change it; we prefer not to live under a rock forever.
2. Other MAPs (often younger ones) are only just discovering their attractions. They have good intentions but they hear the daily lie “pedophiles are ticking time-bombs; it’s only a matter of time before you offend” and they are terrified it might apply to them.
3. These MAPs feel stigmatised for what they are and decide it’s wiser to keep it a secret. They decide it’s too dangerous to talk to other people about it, to ask for help or sometimes even to think about it too much. So they have to work on this entirely alone.
4. Where does a person who can’t talk to other people turn? To the internet. At this point there are three messages they can hear: [a] you’re evil; kill yourself; [b] society is wrong and touching kids is OK or; [c] you’re not evil BUT touching kids or viewing child porn are not OK.
5. If they listen to message [a] they’re going to have a terrible life, perhaps harm themself, which may affect the lives of other people around them. If they listen to [b] they could seriously hurt a child or children. These are both the wrong answer to this issue.
6. They need to be helped to live a valued, law-abiding life, whether that’s professional or peer support or resources or moral friends. They need it quickly too and without too many conditions. They don’t need reporting if they’ve committed no crime.
7. Now for a tricky part. While the attraction to minors is wholly involuntary, dealing with it day to day involves voluntary choices, which are not easy to make…
8. The first and easiest decision is to choose never to harm a child and to accept that consent is impossible. Every anti-contact MAP accepts this as the most basic part of being anti-contact.
9. A second and much more difficult choice is whether to tell non-MAPs in your life that you have these feelings. With society as it is, there is no right answer to this. Occasionally it might be a good idea but it’s really hard to predict the consequences.
10. A third choice is what to do with the feelings inside your own head. Will you fantasise about minors (which hurts nobody) or try to ignore or suppress the feelings. Again, there’s no one right answer to this one for everyone (I say: no harm, no foul).
11. In debating the various choices with yourself and others you’re going to think a lot about what MAPs are most like. Are we like gay people? Like kleptomaniacs? People with an illness? People with a genetic condition? People in such-and-such victimised group or another?
12. In reality, we might be a bit like some of those things but never exactly like any of them. Ultimately, minor attraction is most like minor attraction. It is unique and calls for a unique response.
13. That response therefore has to be based on the facts of minor attraction. [a] It’s unchosen; [b] currently incurable; [c] includes thoughts which harm nobody and [d] need not involve actions which do harm children.
14. That last point — [d ]— is where all our attention should go. If our efforts to prevent abuse by MAPs fail, that is the point that will have gone wrong. In other words, getting upset and angry that pedophiles have sexual fantasies about kids is a gigantic, irrational distraction
15. Yes, get upset that abuse happens, but understand the simple fact that not all abusers are MAPs and not all MAPs are abusers, nor destined to be abusers. THEN we can work out how we prevent potential abuse by the MAPs we can reach.
16. And in the meantime, don’t ban us (the convinced anti-contact MAPs) from twitter, don’t shut us down. Let us do what we can do in a society that mostly doesn’t want to hear about this aspect of the problem. And let @StopSO_UK @virpeds and others help us.

If this makes sense to you, why not find this as my pinned tweet on twitter and retweet it to your followers. @BlyRede

The post What do these “MAPs” want? Why are they on twitter?? appeared first on Pedophiles About Pedophilia.