more updated intro (draft)

[chronic_ally]

Hi. I’m Iris. I’m disabled so I have a difficult time making the edits/new posts on this blog that I want to. I am very traumatized and mentally ill and I periodically struggle with delusions/psychosis. I mute and block a lot of people, often because of a politically neutral trigger, to preserve my mental health. I’m a catgirl (but not a girl), nonbinary, they/it pronouns user. My opinions have changed a lot over time. I would probably change a lot of the things that I’d said in 2021.

 

I hate psychiatry. I don’t believe that MAPs should “get help to lower risk of offending.” I don’t believe that “getting more MAPs into therapy so we can therapize them into a lower risk of offending” is a valid or useful form of CSA prevention. I do not believe that mapness is in itself a CSA risk in general, at all, and that even MAPs who do commit CSA do so for the same reasons that non-MAP abusers do, and in the same ways. I believe “mental health help for MAPs” should be for actual mental health help (as in, decreasing emotional distress we experience). I believe that this is best done in a decentralized, grassroots manner (i.e. MAP communities), not with professional therapists (who almost always suck). I do not believe abuse results from a perpetrator’s mental health difficulties or other negative emotional struggles, nor from any generalizable biological characteristics or internal personal traits/experiences.

 

“Paraphilic disorders” do not exist, “pedophilic disorder” does not exist, the DSM is wrong.

 

I dislike most of the nonprofit workers, academics, and other “professionals” who talk about mapness in the above manner, because of their often rigid/incomplete models which don’t account for a lot of our experiences, their insistence on the “MAP-therapy-as-CSA-prevention” plan, how they still (often) characterize minor attraction as an “illness” or “urge” or “temptation” that is difficult to “fight”/“resist”/which makes us significantly more likely than nonmaps to offend, how they cannot actually do anything really effective against CSA or against the violent abuse MAPs experience because their vision is fundamentally limited. I am skeptical of broad claims that pedophilia or other mapness has been proven to be a result of specific differences in “brain structure,” amounts of “gray matter,” specific “differently-crossed wires,” etc.; attraction is a complex phenomenon that IMO most likely cannot be reduced to such oversimplifications.

 

I also dislike how some groups of MAPs/allies rigidly define mapness to be synonymous with committing CSA, or being a rightwing bigot, or supporting abuse of children/adolescents. Antimaps say this too, and it doesn’t become any better if you believe it though are actually okay with the bigotry/CSA. These strains (or similar) in academia/psychiatry are a significant problem too, and always leave people like me/the MAPs I’ve known behind/in the margins.

 

I’m a CSA survivor and I rant a lot about CSA and other abuse. I’m sometimes told that I complain too much about everything. I hope for reimagining our strategies and ways of responding to abuse when it occurs. I’ve experienced severe violence from antis (including sexual), and also a lot of harm from others within my community, none of which any normies’ “prevention” models have ever come close to addressing. Nowadays I try my best to help us resist victimization, entrapment, and control if/when they occur, and to push back against the abuse culture which takes hold in every community unless it is actively fought and stamped out.

 

I’m anti-contact, as in I’m against chronological adults or other significantly older individuals having sexual or romantic contact/interactions/relationships with chronological children or adolescents. I don’t believe anti-c policy should involve putting restrictions on children/adolescents to prevent abuse; rather, the adults/significantly older persons have an ethical obligation to not engage sexually/romantically with them. I don’t believe this would be ok if only everyone stopped believing it was wrong, or if youth were no longer oppressed.

 

I’m an anarchist and supporter of youth liberation. For example, I believe that violent self-defense against child abuse(rs) is urgently needed. I support principled “vigilantism” (as in meeting the victim’s needs in getting free from their abuse). I believe police, prisons, etc should be abolished, as they range from “mostly useless” to “causing the problem” with regards to C(S)A. I am strongly against the popular refrain that “vigilantism (against CS abusers, against antis, against other bigots/oppressors, etc.) is bad because it harms police investigations and it should be the police doing it.” That is nonsense. There is an issue with vigilantes who try to harm purely for the sake of harming, without the goal of directly working towards survivors’ autonomy as much as possible in mind, but conflating that with violent self-defense/aiding violent self-defense just replicates the same problems they have. I support “direct action” that is actually direct (also applies to stopping harassment and abuse online; we need to expand our imaginations a lot here).

 

In the past, when I was much newer to the self-proclaimed “CSA prevention” milieu and these issues in general, I was very supportive of a model where “rehabilitating” perpetrators of abuse/other victimization was the solution to the issue of abuse/victimization. I no longer believe this. I am still, of course, supportive of the idea of rehabilitation; I believe people can change and regret harmful past decisions and stop doing harm/take accountability; I am against judging someone purely by their past when present circumstances show that they genuinely believe their actions were wrong and they are not a threat now. However, I don’t believe that we should wait around pinning hopes on perpetrators to change, as a solution to their harm, and basically having to surrender our safety/autonomy/wellbeing if we’re unlucky. I came to these conclusions after going through a lot of bullshit over these past few years, and processing a lot of other past bullshit, and thinking things over a lot more, and realizing that the liberal narrative was incomplete and harmful (had felt that my experiences with violence weren’t “real” (“normal”) violence in the way mainstream narratives of violence are, but in fact mainstream narratives are the ones which are unrealistic and narrow and the hypothetical perpetrator who is subjected to total, unfair, disproportionate, ostracizing, abusive punishment because the entire society hates abuse(rs) so much is just that, a hypothetical). Defending them is defending something which does not actually exist, and is not actually a real issue, and is misleading/a misdirection from the politics we actually need.

 

I think “abuser programs” trying to get abusers to become less likely to abuse are mostly a good idea, if applied correctly, i.e. exclusively as an addition after survivors are already safe regardless of perpetrator intentions, or when no material action against abuse is being sacrificed in favor of taking chances with “change” instead. If so, they have a potential to maybe increase some of the net good. If a situation of control/material threat is still ongoing, however, staking victims’ safety on them is only superficially bandaging a severe open wound. I believe some similar programs can prevent some first-time CSA somewhat (i.e. not focused on people’s potential feelings/internal psychological experiences, but on their ethical beliefs, and challenging them if they support abuse), but even these can only go so far. What motivates someone to support abuse/to enable abuse/to abuse includes far more than just formal educational experiences. Fighting social conditions of power imbalance which prevent victim resistance and reward abusiveness is much more effective and needed right now.

 

I am not interested in “debating” any of the above, since I have already debated these points with people numerous times, and been badly harassed/otherwise harmed over all of the above and I have a very limited bullshit tolerance. I mostly post about my thoughts and opinions and analyses on Mastodon nowadays, but I also use Twitter and Tumblr.