Essay:Hamstrung
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| Part of NewgonWiki's essay series on MAPs in the 2020s | |||||||
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| ♦ Jim Burton ♦ MAPs, Paraphiles and Fascists MAPs, Zoophiles and Transids The Virped Paradox Hamstrung (a case for Anti-c) Pedophile trolling for beginners [D] ♦ BLueRibbon ♦ The Push Pro-Reform ♦ Talix ♦ On "The Trauma Myth" ♦ A.H.J. Dautzenberg ♦ Marthijn, Lesley Uittenbogaard | |||||||
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| Category: Minor-attracted people | |||||||
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Hamstrung
Why it’s time our movement took a hard turn Anti-C
Jun 26, 2024 ◆ Jim Burton
- "For a while, a few years, actually, I truly believed that Virped could become that place."
Well, hang on. It might still be.
For readers in the MAP online community, the feeling we are “going nowhere fast” might be a familiar one. But in spite of numerous pot-holes in the road, what I intended to do strategically within the MAP Movement in 2021 has finally been achieved.
I entered a community where surviving pro-c’s hid in the shadows behind obscure identities, or masked their power-level, “just getting along” in the background somehow. Never before an underdog inside their own community, confidence was at an all-time low. Pro-c’s like me feared being hounded, outed, and validity-policed to an early suicide by antis/anti-c’s who no word of a lie, openly and gleefully identified as “sadistic psychopaths”.
But rising from the ashes, Newgon co-founded, supported, and then earlier this year, set free one of the most radical, controversial, pro-c political organizations ever to have existed, in the form of PCMA.
Organized, aggrieved and determined to win, as one of its infiltrators once said in a news article;[1] love them or hate them, this was an army of roving, multi-directional Pedobears you simply could not ignore. On a certain social networking site at one point in time, it looked as if activist nonces were controlling half of the traffic going through the MAP keyphrase. If hating “pedophiles” was in your head, then they were in your head.
In this era of mistrust and prejudice, PCMA set about audaciously spreading its message on the same platform known for the 22 + 16 = pedophilia meme. The project gained literally millions upon millions of impressions, hand-over-fist, by conning celebrities such as Jordan Peterson, and his followers with a selection of unavoidable lures. Their memetic discourse centered on unlikely heroes such as Rind and Kinsey. Lock away your children, lock away your pets, these reprobates are truly deranged, and armed with dodgy Russian info-memes that misquote the Hall Study!
PCMA caused considerable offense to passive-aggressive and frankly jealous anti-c’s. So much that for catharsis, they even constructed an entire, impotent rage-fork of Wikipedia to “debunk” it as a troll-farm full of Fascists. Now MAPs of every stripe have a taste of the radical pro-c discourse, they know our arguments and know what our ultimate victory could spell. Young MAPs are even starting to learn about their own history, thanks to the research and targeted information warfare of myself and others, something that was completely unfathomable at the start of 2021. At the peak of social media censorship, the meek MAPs, despite their rich trove of historical literature, were shamefully considered “just another identity fad”. Yet today, Newgon regularly charts in the top 10 search results for major keyphrases on our topic, mixing it with the news sites and professional bodies. We now see upward of 10,000 visits in a good week.
But time for a reality check. If our community; our movement, does not take a hard turn anti-c soon, we are in effect, hamstrung. While I won’t be giving up the opportunity of being described as a “kidfucker in waiting” (to put it in needlessly edgy MAP Fediverse parlance) this is something that just had to be said sooner or later.
Back in 2022, I argued on BoyChat and FST, that the anti-c NOMAP ideology had unresolvable flaws, and was doomed to fail, left to its own devices. I have not changed in this regard.
I still have grave doubts as to the ultimate growth potential of a (predominantly pedophilic) anti-c demographic, and its fundamental inability to represent MAPs as a whole. I am more convinced that if 10-20% or so of all adults are strongly hebephilic, it will be their fight, and that of their potential lovers, that will fuel the greedy, pro-c lawmaking endgame of political-elite groomer-allies over the line. For me, this is the only possible conclusion to this culture-war that favors our group. And yes, it will be sexy, ugly and chaotic.
Anti-c discourse is still fundamentally negative, unexciting, egodystonic, technically wanting and just plain unsexy. This grief-ideology is victim-centered, and just not optically radical or subversive enough to motivate the 10% or so of the population it needs to achieve it’s goals. At the thick end of the action, at least. Anti-c dogma perpetuates stigma, and besides, our movement will inevitably mature past this juncture. Individuals will themselves mature and begin to strain against the ties that bind them, driving these changes.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, here. Without an anti-c “base of strength”, our movement has no catalyst, and will simply not progress. If pro-c’s, particularly the radical ones come to dominate public perceptions of our struggle, we will never be trusted; never be taken seriously as a whole. Without a very strong anti-c majority, our target audience will remain convinced that unlike them and their innocent children, we are simply, like I said, deranged and deluded. Pro-c’s will be left with no pipeline to take advantage of – they would simply become ghettoized little savants, bohemians “railing impotently against the norm” inside a padded chatroom cell.
This step-change could, and ideally should arise from demographic expansion in the younger, predominantly anti-c, queer part of our community, not erosion or unlikely conversion of its small, existing pro-c portion. To be a credible force and move forward, I would say it has to be something in the order of 85:15 anti to pro-c, for us to make some progress towards visibility and destigmatization in the decade of the 30s. If we’re at 50:50 now, that means anti-c’s must utilize Fediverse and shipping communities to at least treble their manpower.
As I have argued before, our community also needs to become more open to moderate and dissenting opinions, and less divided by consent philosophy. Organization-level initiatives above, say, Virped and Newgon need to avoid focusing on specific reformist arguments with respect to laws against consent and pornography. These are the kind of disagreements that most younger MAPs will see as cringeworthy; a turn-off. No one position can really be said to properly represent our community, even if it is a "compromise".
We should be more professional, more organized, and less inclined to conduct hypocritical witch-hunts against alleged “fascists”; witch-hunts we should be the first to recognize for what they are: the work of hostile forces. We must attract the high quality individuals, opening multiple avenues for intellectually mature discussion absent the chilling validity discourse perpetuated by malicious online personages.
We need to create safe spaces for all the doubly-invalidated reactionary (yes, traditionalist, even new-right) MAPs who are currently still in hiding or in denial. Spaces for up-and-coming activist and scholar anti-c’s must also be a priority. Our diversity is our strength, and in a strange way, if we are seen to be more diverse, this humanises us and provides those who would otherwise be detractors with opportunities to join us; to support us, if only in part. Our identity must transcend the purely political. I am a strong believer that community inclusion of invalidated minorities such as reactionary and paraphilic MAPs should go well beyond the “anything goes”, free-wheeling ethos of PCMA. We should be helping anti-c, paraphilic and invalidated right-wing, reactionary MAPs build their own home-bases to share their ideas and organize realistic and pragmatic initiatives for visibility activism.
Don’t like it? Easy answer – create your own activist cell, and double the trouble. This can start online, and it’s the grass roots anti-c’s who should be taking this fight on right from the very beginning. Not pro-c madmen like me, who clearly belong in a jail cell with South America’s answer to Bubba.
And to take my argument further, it’s not like anti-c or neutral, non-c activism hasn’t already had resounding successes, where decades of pro-c agitation failed miserably before it. Through the ANU blog, Newgon’s founders effectively initiated the online MAP Discourse we see today by employing an anti-c/non-c information scheme. MAPs as subjects of research and citizen-journalism go back even further, with the writings of Heather Peterson and B4U-ACT’s “Minor-Attracted Adult” advocacy from around the turn of the century. Proving the most ingenious ideas are often those deemed to be “square” at the time, both B4U-ACT and Virped went on to see consistent success, courting allies among researchers, therapists and journalists. They created an entire information scheme eminently marketable to liberal society and the professional classes. What B4U-ACT and Virped have done, has attracted state funding; gone on to inspire documentary films and celebrated volumes.
Hate what they stand for? Please. They have risen from nothing and forged real-life contacts that persist to this very day. Square MAPs have made recorded history, and opened the door.
Despite my reservations about anti-c paraphilia activism and its long-term viability, it’s true that as well as having a better optic (if managed well), it comes with perks; side-benefits. For example, anti-c’s are far more naturally adjacent to the larger communities we are positioned to recruit from, or gain some support from. This includes erotic art and fiction, “other” paraphiles and new forms of queerness which all lean under-25 and strongly anti-c. Being close to these groups means we already have their foot half-way in the door. In other words, we offer them an acceptable way to become part of our community - without getting cold feet, or being scared off by radical “pedophile rights” screamers armed with too many Rind citations not to be a wrong-un. The types who would be at home in Law and Order: SVU’s “Newgon episode” and its legendary courtroom scene.
Paraphilia as a base for activism is interesting by virtue of its adjacency to queerness. Not only can people claim to have hundreds of paraphilias, but working as a group of “invalids” potentially destigmatizes the more extreme among them - a kind of trojan horse/safety in numbers effect. Apart from my labeling concerns, and the fundamentally non-paraphilic nature of tween/teen-attracted MAPs, the only major reservation I have about paraphilia activism is the very fact that its end point is undefined. As a results-oriented person, I want something to fight towards, and that would be the set goals of a pro-c MAP Movement, rather than the creation and intermixing of limitless new identities. In this way, paraphilia works a lot better as an identity-based community, so people can feel valued and validated, rather than as a strict movement per se. In many ways, I suspect shared social invalidation will ultimately be what shapes our Alliance, or forces it into existence. Until an alliance of the invalidated is possible, we are pushing against the tide.