I know it's not like me to push out so many blog posts in succession, but this is a topic important to me that I wanted to write about and that I talk about a lot: division.
Division is something that creeps into communities everywhere. Political parties on both sides of the aisle can be divided, organized religion gets divided over time, and so do queer communities. Over time division can increase, but in marginalized communities it tends to improve.
Before “LGBTQ+” was ever a thing, it was just gay men. Of course, lesbians and trans people and MAPs existed as well, but to the public it first seemed like gay men were the only ones who existed. As it stands that's barely a community, but once gays and lesbians banded together, a real community was founded, and from there on more and more people under the queer umbrella have found sanctuary in the community.
I've talked a lot before about how MAPs and other radical queers will eventually have our time, but today I offer a slightly different topic covering division within radqueer circles, specifically covering MAP history.
When pedophiles first started to come together, boylovers arose out of the gay rights movement. Naturally so since men loving men was a thing, so men loving boys wanted in too, which was okay until they got kicked out of ILGA, but this sole inclusion of boylovers, specifically male boylovers, left out a large number of MAPs.
When girllovers finally got their time to shine, it was online in forums, but not the same forums that boylovers eventually found sanctuary in. For whatever reasons MAPs felt the need to divide. Conservative boylovers wanted to leave females out of it, and girllovers got a sour taste in their mouth of how boylovers were, so this wedge was driven between the two groups, both viewing the other as the worse of the two.
In modern day it's gotten better, as general online MAP spaces exist and tend not to discriminate based off gender, but there is still one way in which we are majorly discriminated, and that's contact stance. You can have your opinion about anti-c's wanting to report pro-c's to the cops, and anti-c's calling pro-c's groomers, but we have common ground: we both want to be recognized.
I've heard it said that efforts such as VirPed were created to invent contact stance that divides us and prevents us from building momentum, and though there is lack of evidence for this theory, based on the effect it had I completely believe it to be possible. The MAP community is intensely divided, still by gender, contact stance, political stance, whatever. We need to put aside our differences if we ever want acceptance, just like how gay men and lesbians found their common ground, and accepted trans beings even when there wasn't any.
Someday we can be recognized as queer, but how can we ever hope to be included when we ourselves don't want to include each other?
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