What you seem to forget, Lat, is that though I use an anonymous nick in the online community, that is soley to keep my family from being targeted by harrassment by the antis. I am very much out of the closet in real life, and anyone in this community who knows me well off the board are well aware of that. I routinely defend the same principles among people I know in real life who are well aware of my real identity that I do on this board. Almost everyone who knows me well in real life are well aware of both my hebephiliac inclinations and of the fact that I am a pro-choice and pro-youth activist. And yes, I am afraid of the possibility of a pedo genocide, which is precisely why I fight so hard and do not "toe the line" on the principles and platforms I express, such as being "quiet" on the subject of youth lib, which would indeed be hypocritical for those of us who would purport to give a fully comprehensive analysis of everything of significance in society that is responsible for the current pedo hysteria. Also, if we love and respect youths, it's ridiculous to keep quiet about their need for emancipation in principle.

Yes, I agree. If you'll recall, I outed myself long before PJ came along. I took the risk. But with PJ and the like here, we live in a different environment now. It is stupid not to weigh the risks and realize that the current zeitgeist is much more hostile to us than it was when I joined GC. That's a nice saying, but it's not always true, is it? In fact, it's rarely true. History is littered with the corpses of people who were bold but got crushed under the heels of those far more powerful than they.

The latter historical example you used make my point quite clear: being an activist, and doing the right thing in general, takes a large degree of courage and sacrifice. Without these things, social progress would not occur. We can't expect this particular game to be safe, and while not everyone is in a position to play it due to many factors, those of us who can afford to do so need to do so. We stay within the bounds of the law with our advocacy, and if we are taken down as a result, then at least we proved we are capable of fighting for emancipation in a civilized manner, and at least we go down fighting rather than acquiescing. That will say volumes about our integrity, and eventually a lot of people in the public sphere will take notice of this...as they are beginning to do now. My time with B4U-ACT has shown that despite the presence of elements such as PJ, our situation is showing signs of hope, and we have allies and potential allies in places that we never imagined before we moved out of the shadows of cyberspace.

Yes, I agree there might be a faint pattern that echoes through the various minorities' fight for their rights, but there is one resounding difference: where are the large numbers of kids fighting for their own rights? Because, other than a handful, I don't see them. And don't compare them to slaves, which I know you're going to do. Slaves could be killed for rebelling against their masters; you can't kill kids for rebelling, or beat them too badly, or put them in chains, or make them work for 16 hours a day. Kids are adored by their parents, for the most part, and have good lives. I don't see child rebellions in the same sense there were frequent slave rebellions. Children can be defiant, yes, but I don't see them challenging the paradigm of parental guardianship.

The above was entirely ridiculous and it betrays another popular hallmark of the anti-choice creed: ignoring simple common sense and the legal and political situation that minors today find themselves in, as well as ignoring the history of civil rights movements. Let's take a look at these bits of common sense, legal facts, and history:

1) It's very obvious why minors are not currently clamoring for their emancipation in vast numbers--they do not currently have any civil rights to speak of, they have no access to the political process, and they are not yet listened to in large numbers by the media when they do speak out. No, they cannot be beaten, chained, or forced into work for 16 hours if they started rebelling, but they are still firmly under the legal control of their parents and their civil rights are not recognized by the government. As such, there are many types of punishments they can suffer for speaking out in large numbers that, while usually falling short of beatings or murder, are nevertheless equally effective at stifling their voices. Remember what happened to Fayla? She ended up being thrown into "therapy" for loudly clamoring for her rights. Kids can be forced to stay in their rooms, be grounded, having their allowances rescinded, forced to quit whatever meager job they may have in retaliation, denied access to computers, video game systems, etc. If large numbers of them took to the streets in protest, the police wouldn't hesitate to drag them back to their homes kicking and screaming rather than listening to them. Look what happens when they choose to run away from home? Saying kids have freedom that slaves didn't enjoy simply because they cannot be legally beaten or killed for defiance against the system is like saying that our democracy is fully respected simply because we can suffer consequences such as being fired from our jobs, having all major publishing houses refuse to publish our books due to their containing controversial views that goes against the beliefs of the prevailing system, or arrested rather than shot in the head as is the case in more totalitarian nations. Even if severe beatings and murders do not occur on a regular basis in response to such defiance, when you lack your democratic rights and are under the full control of someone else, there are many more "civilized" but no less autocratic methods for keeping you silent and punishing you for speaking out.

2) Women also didn't speak out in large numbers for their emancipation in the pre-suffrage days, yet do modern egilatarians and progessives consider their oppressed situation to be valid and okay simply because only a handful of women were protesting in those pre-suffrage and early suffrage days? The same thing was argued back then by opponents of women's suffrage that you are arguing here regarding minors: that women had good lives, the great majority of them were apparently content in these lives, and despite the fact that they were little more than the property of their husbands their spouses nevertheless adored them and often took care of them quite well. Yet guess what happened as time marched on? Women eventually turned out to support their suffrage en masse, they decided that freedom was better than being taken care of at the expense of their civil rights, and they also came to agree in large numbers with the old adage, "a benevolent dictator is still a dictator." The youth lib movement is in its early stages right now, and it's following precisely the same pattern as the women's suffrage movement did. No movement for emancipation ever started with enormous numbers of the oppressed minority in question challenging the system right at the beginning, because in all cases these minorities were in no legal or political position to do so. Please also note that women in the pre-suffrage days usually wouldn't be beaten, chained, or murdered by their husbands or male relatives if they spoke out in defiance of their oppressed position, but were nevertheless held down by a variety of other, more "civilized" methods, due to all of the factors explained in my next point...

3) The women in question had little or no access to the political process, because virtually all politicians in those days were male, just as nearly all politicians today are older adults; they were almost universally economically dependent upon their husbands, or in other cases their male relatives, which likewise greatly interfered with their ability to resist their oppression; they were raised to accept their position in society as just the natural order of things; the culture at large had strict, often legally enforced paradigms about what the "proper place" of a woman in society was supposed to be, and the great majority of women in society tended to behave and conform in accordance with these expectations due to the great level of indoctrination they were then subjected to since the earliest days of their lives; the job market was not open to women in those cases much as it isn't open to minors today, save for (in both cases) low paying jobs with limited hours that do not allow them to become a significant economic force in society; due to the then existing paradigms in society that accepted the notion of inherent female incompetence in comparison to that typically possessed by males, politicians refused to take the complaints of the handful of "loud" female activists in those days seriously, and ultimately the suffrage movement gained momentum as a result of prominent males who shared the liberation ideology taking up the fight for them in the early days, much as is the case with the youth lib movement in its early stages today; women were raised from birth not to see themselves as a distinct minority but simply to be functioning in their "natural" place in society, much as is the case with minors today. It was many decades before the suffrage movement really picked up speed and gained the attention of large numbers of people of both genders, and even longer before women gained the bulk of their civil rights (it wasn't until 1920 that they gained the right to vote). The youth lib movement is presently in its early stages, and as such, it's idiotic to denounce it on the basis of the fact that large numbers of youths aren't loudly demanding their rights when the movement is in its early stages, the socio-cultural paradigms regarding the "proper" place of young people in society are still operating at full force, and the state is actively working to restrict and curtail the rights of young people harder than ever due to the current sex abuse hysteria. Also, please note that women still hold that position in many Islamic countries, and due to all of what I mentioned above the vast majority of them are not currently loudly arguing for their rights. It should further be noted that the large majority of abolitionists who advocated freedom for chattel slaves during the early days of the movement were whites; the black slaves then lacked the political and economic clout to challenge the existing status quo on their own, and were only able to do so in large numbers later due to the early efforts of members of the same race who were oppressing them.

4) Defending the paradigm of parental control/guardianship on the basis that most parents adore their kids and genuinely love them is the height of irrelevance, because many people adore their pets also. The fact that minors are most often treasured property doesn't change the fact that they are still property. As for arguing that most kids have a good life under the present state of affairs, that depends on how you define the word "good." Granted, all of their material needs are taken care of, but at what price? All other minority groups eventually opted for the value of their civil rights over and above whatever comforts they may have enjoyed when they were the property of a majority class. As such, you are clearly underestimating the value and preciousness of civil rights.

5) The claim that kids have "good" lives right now can definitely be questioned when you look at the source of the greatest amount of real abuse inflicted upon minors. That source is the home, and the problem is not the institution of parenthood itself but the fact that such a huge degree of power over the kids is granted to parents, and as such it should be no wonder that abuse is so rampant. Since those of the anti-contact ideology repeatedly ignore this glaring fact and continue to evince some measure of support for the current state of affairs, it's no wonder that many on the pro-choice side question where their true loyalties lie: with the best interests of the kids, as they claim, or with the status quo that they often feel they have no choice but to support. You act terribly offended when this is expressed, but sometimes people have to call things as they see them. Many kids are routinely bullied by their parents, and even parents who do not physically or sexually abuse their kids engage in a large amount of emotional abuse (which is usually justified as a legitimate model of "parenting"), and this causes many kids to rebel in non-constructive ways, such as running away from home. The fact that thousands of kids per year run away from home, commit suicide, suffer from extreme depression, and engage in many other socially negative signs of defiance (e.g., excessive or reckless use of alcohol and drugs). Hence, saying that you see no signs of youth rebellion to compare with the slave rebellions of the past is also ridiculous, because you are clearly ignoring the evidence that rampant youth rebellion does indeed occur.

5) Now, as to the claim that kids have it so much better than chattel slaves do. It's ridiculous to claim that kids aren't routinely beaten or even murdered, because that happens all too often, regardless of the fact that it's no longer legal. And it's most often inflicted by parents, not adults who are attracted to them as the media likes to contend. And I will remind you again that emotional abuse is entirely legal no matter how severe it gets. And please do not try to argue that all slaves had it extremely bad. Not all slaveowners engaged in beating, killing, or raping their slaves, and many of them treated their slaves reasonably well, and the great majority of the slaves owned by these "decent" plantation owners dutifully carried out their responsibilities for them with little complaint. Many of the slaves grew close with their owners, particularly those who were house slaves, and enjoyed what was considered a good life by the standards of the time. But they were still slaves no matter how much adoration they may have received from their owners, and few people in the modern world attempt to justify chattel slavery on the basis of, "not all slave owners were bad people and many of them treated their slaves quite well and gave them a good life so you can't say that chattel slavery was entirely bad."

You're missing the point, or more likely playing the willful ignorance card. The legal, social and scientific evidence suggests that kids' brains are still developing, which makes it hard to determine whether they fully understand the implications of consenting to something. You cannot be expected to consent if you don't know what you're consenting to. This is why consumer protections are a good idea, and other such laws. Why wouldn't we also apply this to minors? I agree with you that society vastly overcompensates, but I think MAP activists tend to vastly overcompensate in the other direction, or perhaps undercompensate is the better word here.

The above statement totally overlooks the fact that it doesn't take a huge amount of brainpower to know the difference between something that is pleasurable and something that isn't, or the difference between something that is life-affirming and positive and something that is not. There is no evidence whatsoever that minors are not able to consent to sexual activity or "do not know what they are consenting to" because enough scientific evidence has been compiled to suggest that young adolescents are perfectly capable of informed consent and pre-pubescents are capable of what is called simple consent, which means that both age groups of minors perceive mutually consensual sexual contact as having been within their capacity to understand and tend to produce positive or neutral feelings, not emotional harm. Using the "they may enjoy it but it's still wrong because they do not know what they are consenting to" is a thinly veiled attempt to defend what is, at its root, a breach of custom rather than a breach of ethics. But that is beside the point, because the legal, social, and cultural evidence doesn't suggest that kids' brains are too naturally underdeveloped to consent or make other competent decisions, and this is no more scientifically valid than previous claims of teenage hormones causing inherently erratic and bad decision-making capacity in adolescents, or the more recent pseudo-scientific nonsense of the "faulty teen brain" that allegedly causes most teens--even those as old as 16--to have a natural proclivity towards making bad decisions and having generally poor judgment. These claims are cultural rationalizations, not valid scientific data. And once again, the argument you used above to justify the legal curtailment of youth rights is very similar to that once used to justify similar curtailments of the legal rights of blacks and women, on the grounds that their brains were so different from that of white males that they were inherently incapable of making judgement that was on par with that of white males. In fact, in the early part of the 20th century, in the Southern states of America, black men who had mutually consensual sex with white women were routinely lynched because it was believed that white women were too inherently incompetent to "know what they were getting into" (in other words, the thought of white women actually enjoying a sexual encounter with an icky black man just had to be a sign that the woman wasn't acting competently).

This is not a red herring. Where are all these studies you speak of? And for every one you can produce, I can find at least two that counter it. The fact is, we just do not know enough to make an informed decision, and we will not know enough until society pulls its collective head out of its ass and takes a more-or-less impartial view of the issue. Good luck making that happen. No, I'm not twisting the word rights, because in some cases people--adults and children--need to be protected from their own ignorance.

Where are all these studies? For one thing, did you not read the Rind Report? Did you not read the study conducted by Susan Clancy for her book The Trauma Myth (and she is someone who is definitely not friend of the MAA/MAP community!)? Are you not also aware that these studies have been conducted for a long time now, and are generally recognized as factual, but simply ignored and even condemned by the government and the media simply because they do not recite the official party line? Read reports like this, for example:

Moser, Charles and Peggy J. Kleinplatz, "DSM-IV-TR and the Paraphilias: An Argument for Removal," paper presented at the American Psychiatric Association annual conference, San Francisco, California, May 19, 2003.


"Special Section: Pedophilia: Concepts and Controversy," in Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol. 31, No. 6, December 2002, p. 465-510.

Read the articles by Richard Green, an example of which is here ⚠️ ↗. He has mentioned that studies making it clear that mutually consensual sexual contact between adults and young people isn't emotionally damaging to younger people goes back to the 1960s, and he commented in one article that Susan Clancy's "revelations" in The Trauma Myth is nothing new but only appears to be because of the tendency for professionals and the government to marginalize any study that does not conform to societal cultural beliefs, no matter how numerous those studies may be.

As for your contention that you can find numerous studies that say otherwise, I have little doubt that most of those studies have a huge amount of sample bias, were conducted by "researchers" with a strong anti-MAA attitude, largely if not almost entirely limited its samples to adults who were under the supervision of the criminal justice system, and the vast majority of young people who were interviewed had largely non-consensual sexual encounters with adults or had consensual encounters and were subsequently found out and dragged into "therapy," or the studies mixed together consensual and non-consensual reports from interviewees to deliberately produce conflicting data (a well known tactic). There are very few peer reviewed and objective articles tackling this subject conducted by non-MAAs with no perceived gain from such studies other than a commitment to truth and scientific objectivity that found results which coincide with popular societal beliefs or with the anti-contact crowd's contentions. And you are well aware of the notorious degrees of sample bias in many of the studies! It's far from only MAA activists who are making that point!

Further, any degree of ignorance on this subject that young people may have is mostly cultural, based on the way they are raised and denied access to proper education and information, and isn't something that is inherent.


I'll wager you support consumer rights like full disclosure, etc. Why would you do that unless you recognized that sometimes we can fall victim to misinformation, lack of information and the like?

But my solution to these types of problems is entirely democratic: full access to reliable and objective information to all concerned, and no withholding of such info from anyone "for their own good." Nothing in that solution has anything to do with prohibition laws. And that is not the protectionist response.

Kids can only understand so much; below a certain age they're incapable of parsing out abstractions in thought. You know this. Who's to say that in the system you want adults won't be talking over kids' heads in order to "educate" them so they can legally consent, when in reality the adults are just manipulating them?

It's been well established that kids as young as six years of age, with the proper education and guidance, can competently participate in a democratic process and understand enough about this to do so effectively. The concern for the possibility of adults manipulating them can be resolved entirely democratically, without the need for across the board prohibitions that hurt far more innocent people than guilty, and which judge all young people on a totally arbitrary basis without taking their individuals merits into consideration. Also, the term "manipulation" needs to be defined very clearly; it's often used in a nebulous manner to censure people who make unpopular decisions without the slightest bit of evidence that any degree of coercion was used or that any demonstrable harm was caused. There are enough kids out there of reasonable intelligence that there is no reason to believe that large numbers of them will be incapable of understanding basic concepts of life, including sexuality, if they are given the proper education and guidance, along with full access to information. Mass mistrust of the motives of adults in education children is totally counterproductive to a society based on democratic principles. Need evidence for that? As I have told you before, making assumptions without asking for evidence lead to draconian solutions, and the result of such things is the sexual abuse hysteria of today. Look at the current state of affairs to see very good empirical evidence of what happens when society operates according to mass mistrust, finger-pointing, assumptions, stereotyping, and draconian laws.

There is evidence that some kids have much greater capabilities then they are expected to have, but I can tell you based on a lot of personal experience with kids that many are operating at the level of expectation or lower.

And this is to be expected, just as many women in the pre-suffrage and early suffrage era operated entirely according to expectation or lower because of the manner they were raised, the expectations society placed upon them, and the nature of their status in society. Many men who opposed the suffrage movement did so on the basis of what their personal experience told them, without taking all of the socio-political factors I mentioned into account. As a result, it was widely believed that women were "naturally" incompetent, poor at decision-making, overly emotional, and mentally weak in comparison with men, and the great majority of women back in the pre-suffrage era did indeed act in ways that appeared to validate the cultural beliefs--until they gained the legal right to oppose these paradigms, after which the majority of them ended up exhibiting behavior and capabilities that would startle most men who lived in the 19th century.

Also, kids can be advanced in one area of their life and regressed in another.

As can people of all age groups.

The best possible solution that I can see is what I proposed: a system of tests in which kids must earn their rights. Rights are a privilege anyway; they are not pre-existing in nature. Fore example, no animals have a right not to be slaughtered by other animals (except in some cases if the slaughtering animal is human.) We invented rights; they are not inherent. We should have to earn them, I think.

I largely agree with what you say up above. However, I believe certain rights should be inerrant for everyone born within a democratic system, including freedom of speech, the vote, and freedom of religious choice. Rights are not inherent in nature, but neither are the vast majority of laws that humans have created, and this is what you seem to overook. Just as certain man-made laws need to exist in order to make human civilization safe to live in, so do certain rights need to be guaranteed in order to make life in that civilization as free and happy as possible.