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Today, someone on pediverse asked for contributions to a project searching for a range of opinions on pro-youth rights/liberation MAPs beyond just the old rightwing pro-c party line, specifically looking for
a briefly stated rationale for Anti C supporting YL:
I have previously said that
I feel like it’s partly intuitive to me that c wouldn’t be a good idea in general. Societal oppression and added constraints multiply the amount of harm and trauma that would result, but before that there are already issues with regards to the differences in life experience, access to epistemic tools, and ability to consent because of being in very different stages of development and understanding which creates a lopsided experience in situations where power is used, and crossing appropriate boundaries of intimacy exploits an advantage older people have. I think it’s analogous to why we oppose teachers or professors having sexual or romantic relationships or engaging in any such behavior with their students. I wrote a thread about it a few months ago and discussed a paper arguing against it. The author argued that these relationships were wrong because they were supposed to be teaching students and helping them to eventually attain the same level of knowledge and understanding as themselves, rather than selfishly exploiting their position to have inappropriate relationships. Many adult students who had experienced such relationships with people in positions of power over them at college/university, even if they were ostensibly “consensual” and desired and did not involve explicit coercion or violence in the usual sense, later said that they were traumatized and felt that they had been taken advantage of, and believed such relationships were wrong. They experienced it as disempowering and abusive, and I think a similar idea applies to youth and adults or much older youth in general, wherein a goal to help a younger person interact with you on equal footing is thrown out in favor of capitalizing on naïveté or other vulnerabilities, freezing the victim in a subordinated position instead of recognizing that it was unethical and a violation.
I think the general common thread is feeling like you’re getting into something where the other, older or more powerful person has more and understands the situation more clearly and struggling to keep up or assert oneself but without the adequate tools to do so in an equal way, feeling like you’re being drawn into/caught up in something that’s too much for you and quickly spiraling out of control, and ultimately feeling “played”/like you were tricked or betrayed because the adult violated a duty of trust and did things to them that were against what would’ve been best for their wellbeing, / feeling like you were acting according to an adult script/doing what an adult wanted rather than expressing a perspective that was authentically your own. Like some survivors of CSA have reported, an adult exploiting them prevented them from developing an autonomous sexuality and sexual perceptions of their own, because they were sexualized/had adult sexual intentions foisted onto them too early instead of being allowed to explore sexuality at their own pace or with appropriate peers.
The paper about the college students who were abused also discussed how the perpetrators were disproportionately (cis) men, and the victims were disproportionately women, and such relationships/abuses constituted social discrimination against female students on the basis of gender because they reinforced the structural disempowerment of women and enacted the sexual exploitation normalized and prescribed by patriarchy. This doesn’t mean that all such relationships were of the same gender dynamic, but they still occurred within a context of social hierarchy and oppression. And stopping professional conduct violations was clearly asserted as furthering students’ rights, distinct from the paternalism which also makes up the patriarchal system, although some such sexual abuse apologists argued that this was the real oppression or crime against students’ agency. Likewise, CSA occurs within the context of broader societal adultism and generally helps to reinforce it, so many survivors perceive a similarity or connection between it and other forms of adultist violence and feel that stopping it, as one major action which eroded their autonomy, is important to the youth liberationist cause, not in opposition to it.
Are topics MAPs discuss also YL topics due to the presence of minors in our community?
Not necessarily, but they can be adjacent because of that, or intersect in a relevant way. I think the youthlib-specific parts are with regards to, for example, how minor MAPs (and allies) are much more likely to be abused by adult antis than minors, and abused by antis if we’re minors, and for many of us the abuse, violence, or harassment took on the form of adultism along with mapmisia. Being a MAP adds an additional layer of terror and precarity to the experience of being a minor, especially one with abusive parents or otherwise trapped in an abusive institution or setting. Being a minor means one is even more likely to have one’s opinions and behaviors in or about the community hyper-scrutinized, judged, or invalidated specifically on the basis of age. It is politically relevant how antimaps are often adultist, and even do CSA apologia, are secretly pro-c (in an anti-MAP way), or are caught perpetrating CSA themselves, as well as how they often leverage or seek to leverage adultism to harm MAPs and allies (e.g. telling one they deserved to experience child abuse, that they’ll appeal to their parents or teachers to shame/punish/abuse/stop them, etc.). Such adultist predators, sexual and otherwise, targeting minor MAPs and/or allies and/or others as well, have left deep scars on the MAP community (think Fulcrum, for example. Doubly so, there's no justice for people like us against people like him in this world). MAP liberation is relevant to youth liberation for ridding us of one particularly insidious vector of adultist harm/helping an especially vulnerable and despised demographic of minors (those attracted to other minors significantly younger than themselves).
I also think MAP issues are relevant to youth liberation insofar as clarifying one’s understanding of the former helps get rid of some biases and flawed thinking regarding the latter. For example, the belief that a certain bioessentially evil, dangerous, predatory demographic of deviant adults or older people with uniform biologically or inherently determined characteristics or thoughts/attractions which cause them to be innately disposed to committing CSA exists and justifies paternalistic forever-“protection” of youth through restrictions on their autonomy forms a key component of adultist logics. It deflects from effective interventions against CSA by encourage witch hunts trying to identify biomarkers and individual deviants while leaving the question of youth autonomy/liberation silenced/obscured, creates a false sense of security when youth are still actually unsafe, and helps to deflect accountability from perpetrators by assuming that they were not ideologically motivated and fully conscious in their actions, instead merely compelled by impulses or urges they were helpless to resist. Challenging the myth of uncontrollable sexual abusiveness is relevant both to presenting a more accurate, less demonized view of the MAP experience and in refocusing the anti-CSA discussion on the lenses of adultism, sexual authoritarianism, structural violence, and political policy.
In general, I think opposing different forms of bigotry instead of just one makes sense, because all bigotry is wrong. And others might simply support both views because they have independently concluded that both sets of arguments are correct.
a briefly stated rationale for Anti C supporting YL:
I have previously said that
Many youth liberationists are anti-c because we believe that child sexual assault/abuse is wrong, and other forms of child assault/abuse are also wrong. Abuse is necessarily not liberatory, by definition, so of course we would not support any of it as a part of youth liberation.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 feel like it’s partly intuitive to me that c wouldn’t be a good idea in general. Societal oppression and added constraints multiply the amount of harm and trauma that would result, but before that there are already issues with regards to the differences in life experience, access to epistemic tools, and ability to consent because of being in very different stages of development and understanding which creates a lopsided experience in situations where power is used, and crossing appropriate boundaries of intimacy exploits an advantage older people have. I think it’s analogous to why we oppose teachers or professors having sexual or romantic relationships or engaging in any such behavior with their students. I wrote a thread about it a few months ago and discussed a paper arguing against it. The author argued that these relationships were wrong because they were supposed to be teaching students and helping them to eventually attain the same level of knowledge and understanding as themselves, rather than selfishly exploiting their position to have inappropriate relationships. Many adult students who had experienced such relationships with people in positions of power over them at college/university, even if they were ostensibly “consensual” and desired and did not involve explicit coercion or violence in the usual sense, later said that they were traumatized and felt that they had been taken advantage of, and believed such relationships were wrong. They experienced it as disempowering and abusive, and I think a similar idea applies to youth and adults or much older youth in general, wherein a goal to help a younger person interact with you on equal footing is thrown out in favor of capitalizing on naïveté or other vulnerabilities, freezing the victim in a subordinated position instead of recognizing that it was unethical and a violation.
I think the general common thread is feeling like you’re getting into something where the other, older or more powerful person has more and understands the situation more clearly and struggling to keep up or assert oneself but without the adequate tools to do so in an equal way, feeling like you’re being drawn into/caught up in something that’s too much for you and quickly spiraling out of control, and ultimately feeling “played”/like you were tricked or betrayed because the adult violated a duty of trust and did things to them that were against what would’ve been best for their wellbeing, / feeling like you were acting according to an adult script/doing what an adult wanted rather than expressing a perspective that was authentically your own. Like some survivors of CSA have reported, an adult exploiting them prevented them from developing an autonomous sexuality and sexual perceptions of their own, because they were sexualized/had adult sexual intentions foisted onto them too early instead of being allowed to explore sexuality at their own pace or with appropriate peers.
The paper about the college students who were abused also discussed how the perpetrators were disproportionately (cis) men, and the victims were disproportionately women, and such relationships/abuses constituted social discrimination against female students on the basis of gender because they reinforced the structural disempowerment of women and enacted the sexual exploitation normalized and prescribed by patriarchy. This doesn’t mean that all such relationships were of the same gender dynamic, but they still occurred within a context of social hierarchy and oppression. And stopping professional conduct violations was clearly asserted as furthering students’ rights, distinct from the paternalism which also makes up the patriarchal system, although some such sexual abuse apologists argued that this was the real oppression or crime against students’ agency. Likewise, CSA occurs within the context of broader societal adultism and generally helps to reinforce it, so many survivors perceive a similarity or connection between it and other forms of adultist violence and feel that stopping it, as one major action which eroded their autonomy, is important to the youth liberationist cause, not in opposition to it.
Are topics MAPs discuss also YL topics due to the presence of minors in our community?
Not necessarily, but they can be adjacent because of that, or intersect in a relevant way. I think the youthlib-specific parts are with regards to, for example, how minor MAPs (and allies) are much more likely to be abused by adult antis than minors, and abused by antis if we’re minors, and for many of us the abuse, violence, or harassment took on the form of adultism along with mapmisia. Being a MAP adds an additional layer of terror and precarity to the experience of being a minor, especially one with abusive parents or otherwise trapped in an abusive institution or setting. Being a minor means one is even more likely to have one’s opinions and behaviors in or about the community hyper-scrutinized, judged, or invalidated specifically on the basis of age. It is politically relevant how antimaps are often adultist, and even do CSA apologia, are secretly pro-c (in an anti-MAP way), or are caught perpetrating CSA themselves, as well as how they often leverage or seek to leverage adultism to harm MAPs and allies (e.g. telling one they deserved to experience child abuse, that they’ll appeal to their parents or teachers to shame/punish/abuse/stop them, etc.). Such adultist predators, sexual and otherwise, targeting minor MAPs and/or allies and/or others as well, have left deep scars on the MAP community (think Fulcrum, for example. Doubly so, there's no justice for people like us against people like him in this world). MAP liberation is relevant to youth liberation for ridding us of one particularly insidious vector of adultist harm/helping an especially vulnerable and despised demographic of minors (those attracted to other minors significantly younger than themselves).
I also think MAP issues are relevant to youth liberation insofar as clarifying one’s understanding of the former helps get rid of some biases and flawed thinking regarding the latter. For example, the belief that a certain bioessentially evil, dangerous, predatory demographic of deviant adults or older people with uniform biologically or inherently determined characteristics or thoughts/attractions which cause them to be innately disposed to committing CSA exists and justifies paternalistic forever-“protection” of youth through restrictions on their autonomy forms a key component of adultist logics. It deflects from effective interventions against CSA by encourage witch hunts trying to identify biomarkers and individual deviants while leaving the question of youth autonomy/liberation silenced/obscured, creates a false sense of security when youth are still actually unsafe, and helps to deflect accountability from perpetrators by assuming that they were not ideologically motivated and fully conscious in their actions, instead merely compelled by impulses or urges they were helpless to resist. Challenging the myth of uncontrollable sexual abusiveness is relevant both to presenting a more accurate, less demonized view of the MAP experience and in refocusing the anti-CSA discussion on the lenses of adultism, sexual authoritarianism, structural violence, and political policy.
In general, I think opposing different forms of bigotry instead of just one makes sense, because all bigotry is wrong. And others might simply support both views because they have independently concluded that both sets of arguments are correct.
And other views, such as minors accessing porn or producing it for other minors. What should ultimately be permitted.
I have previously sketched out a set of policies (given the presence of a legal system) that I thought might be reasonable and a helpful corrective.
Regarding porn, I don’t think any commercial sexual transactions between minors would be a good idea, but just recording themselves having sex with their peers or sharing porn consensually with each other is fine, just as consensual sexual activity between peers is fine. That’s very different from adults sexually abusing them.
I don’t think forcing minors to be unable to access porn is right. Many minors are curious about or interested in the topic of sex or in viewing porn, many already do view porn, it’s not really logistically feasible to stop it in the first place, and it’s also toxic and unhealthy to impose restrictions based on misguided conflations with specific/direct adult sexual interaction/exploitation, pseudoscientific ideas (e.g. the “porn addiction,” “escalation,” and “neurological rewiring” myths), or some conservative/puritanical notions about sexual corruption of childhood innocence. None of this is actually necessary to prevent abuse or particularly helpful with it, and many adult abusers of children do forcibly restrict the media their victims are allowed/able to access as a tool to control them, impose sexual shame/self-doubt, and follow through regressive values. There are also some very creepy and sexualizing trends with regards to the issue in many cases, e.g. that far-right American politician who has used an anti-porn “accountability” application with his underage son to monitor each other and prevent each other from watching porn, which I would consider a form of child sexual abuse. These kinds of controlling and abusive adult behavior are often traumatizing, and I view them as one aspect of adultism.
I have previously sketched out a set of policies (given the presence of a legal system) that I thought might be reasonable and a helpful corrective.
Regarding porn, I don’t think any commercial sexual transactions between minors would be a good idea, but just recording themselves having sex with their peers or sharing porn consensually with each other is fine, just as consensual sexual activity between peers is fine. That’s very different from adults sexually abusing them.
I don’t think forcing minors to be unable to access porn is right. Many minors are curious about or interested in the topic of sex or in viewing porn, many already do view porn, it’s not really logistically feasible to stop it in the first place, and it’s also toxic and unhealthy to impose restrictions based on misguided conflations with specific/direct adult sexual interaction/exploitation, pseudoscientific ideas (e.g. the “porn addiction,” “escalation,” and “neurological rewiring” myths), or some conservative/puritanical notions about sexual corruption of childhood innocence. None of this is actually necessary to prevent abuse or particularly helpful with it, and many adult abusers of children do forcibly restrict the media their victims are allowed/able to access as a tool to control them, impose sexual shame/self-doubt, and follow through regressive values. There are also some very creepy and sexualizing trends with regards to the issue in many cases, e.g. that far-right American politician who has used an anti-porn “accountability” application with his underage son to monitor each other and prevent each other from watching porn, which I would consider a form of child sexual abuse. These kinds of controlling and abusive adult behavior are often traumatizing, and I view them as one aspect of adultism.
