Minor Attracted Person: Is This A Conversation We Need To Have?
Or Have We Reached The Limit Of Speech And Academic Freedom?
Every advocate for free speech at some point must deal with that uncomfortable area bridging hate, taboo, and depravity. If you are a purist free speech advocate, you must agree that a Holocaust denier has just as much of a right to free speech as a pro-life activist does. But sometimes topics go further than moral questions or denial of historical events. The topic of Minor Attracted Person (MAPs) is one such topic. Should free speech apply to discussion around, and with, MAPs? In my view...a very reluctant yes.
However, rape, pedophilia, cannibalism, and necrophilia - have long been characterized as extreme anti-social acts of depravity. And even though I admit that speaking to the people who commit these disgusting acts can be beneficial, especially when an understanding can be gained leading in some way to prevention or harm reduction, when it comes to MAPs, I can’t shake the feeling that something sinister, separate from the free speech issue, is lurking in unlit corners.
Indeed, when it comes to these dark topics - the ones that exist over the social county line, on the far side of taboo lane, down the darkest, seediest, most rat infested alley, underneath the garbage bins, amongst the rotting carcasses of roaches who died from diseases too awful to name - a certain level of care is recommended.
Imagine a group of physicists conducting experiments on plutonium. They wouldn’t stroll into their lab in jeans and T-shirts, pick-up the plutonium with their bare hands, toss it back and forth among the researchers like it’s Monday Night Football, and then leave samples of it out in the open, on their desks over the long weekend, while the team heads north on a company camping trip, 6 hours away from the exposed plutonium paper weights glowing ominously back at the office.
Instead the physicist’s would work in a secure laboratory with led-lined walls. They would be completely sealed in hazmat suits that shield for radio-activity. They would use special equipment to handle the plutonium. When they finish for the day, the plutonium would be secured in a special chamber designed to seal in radiation, and that chamber would be locked in another radiation proof locker with a security alarm set to go off at the slightest disturbance of the surrounding air quality.
That is how I think the conversation of MAPs should be couched. As if it were radioactive. I’ve used Marshall McLuhan’s media tetrad to think through this issue, below I show how it works.
The Four Laws Of Media (The Media Tetrad)
The media tetrad has four stages. 1. Retrieval 2. Enhancement 3. Obsolescence 4. Reversal
Instead of trying to explain what this means, it is much easier to use an example to demonstrate the concept. In the case of Minor Attracted Person (MAPS), this is a new term that seems to be a politically correct replacement for the word pedophile. When a new invention arrives - whether in a tangible hardware form, or intangible idea form (like MAPs) - the media tetrad can be a useful tool to help think through the implications and likely future effects. If we put the idea of “MAPs” through the tetrad. It looks like so:
What does MAPs retrieve from the past? It seems to revive ancient practices, like when it was common for men to marry young girls (ie child-brides).
What human attribute does MAPs enhance? It seems to, on one hand, enhance the capacity for tolerance. But on the other hand, an ancient latent sexual desire directed at children that has been thoroughly repressed and made benign in the vast majority of people over centuries of social development.
What does MAPs render obsolete? Pedophilia; The modern idea that prepubescent children are not developmentally mature enough to participate in sexual activity. Whereas pedophilia implies a psychiatric disorder, Minor Attracted Person, implies a degree of normalcy or acceptance. The child is referred to in non-human terms - minor, whereas the pedophile is referred to in human terms - person.
What does MAPs reverse into, once pushed past the limits of its potential? It begins with the intent to humanize MAPS. Once this idea becomes established, the new boundaries will be challenged just like the old ones were, and the idea of MAPs will become more and more socially acceptable. I think it is fair to assume that once this condition is achieved, the rate of sexual abuse of children will increase. What started out with the intention of humanizing MAPs, reverses into the dehumanization of children.
If a large enough constituency of MAPs gain support, a faction may emerge that will advocate for pedophilia itself. But only under the strictest of circumstances, with complete adherence to all federally regulated policies and procedures, the depraved perverts will say.
The danger is that the notion of MAPs, held as a luxury belief, will set a normalizing course toward the social acceptance of pedophilia. Many of the woke will hold the novel idea that MAPs are human beings who deserve dignity like everyone else - but it won’t be the children of trendy MAPs advocate’s who are placed in situations at higher risk for pedophile predation. The nature of luxury beliefs involves passing the cost on to someone else. The children of the working class, who rely on public programs and institutions for child care, will pay the costs of the elite's luxury beliefs.
This is unlike the past. When elites had wished to confer their elevated status, they paid the cost in material luxury goods to accomplish this. Today elites are more likely to hide or downplay their material wealth. However, the holding of luxury belief, like that MAPs are just fine and part of a healthy, diverse and inclusive environment, costs the holder nothing, while signaling that he is part of an elevated intellectual class. But harm inflicted on the victims of pedophiles is beyond measure, and represents the true cost of the luxury belief that says a Minor Attracted Person is misunderstood or even persecuted; not, a dangerous, perverted, sicko, who will become the worst type of criminal the moment he acts on his impulses.
Thanks for reading! This post was inspired by Episode #16 of Frances Widdowson’s Rational Space Disputations, in which both the issue of Holocaust deniers and minor attracted person get discussed.
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The conversation may be permissible, but it doesn’t mean anyone with a functioning conscience & the desire to protect children has to appear to politely agree with condoning it. This reframing of vice is devious & predatory in itself. Grooming the public at large. In McLuhan’s model, what we stand to loose is incalculable & an immense betrayal of generations to come. Imo this Pillar must stand firm. The line was drawn, it must remain & we must hold it - for all our children; present & future.