As I look at GC posts, I see a lot of people who think girls are great. And I see a lot of people who really hope society could change so they could have sex with girls. Some will go for youth rights if that helps them towards their goal.

In all fairness, GC is an all-purpose public forum dedicated to GL. That includes appreciation posts, and of course, posts discussing media that features girls. Some GLers, like members of any other group, are more or less apolitical. Others have the same interest in complete youth rights as Dante and I, but they are not as well versed or comfortable in making lengthy discourses about it was we do because writing and debate are not high on their list of skills. That doesn't mean, however, that the right to have sex with girls is their only interest when it comes to youth rights. They just tend to let those with the most developed writing and debating skills take the lead; whether that's a good thing or bad thing, I'll let individual readers decide.

Most of us are not caught between the "I don't want any sexual relations with girls at all" and the "I want to do hardly anything else other than have sexual relations with girls" extremes. The great majority of us tend to be much more multi-faceted, with our overall desires and wishes being every bit as nuanced as our general personality and interests.

I see a very few people like you and Dante who have a passionate commitment to youth rights generally.

Then for starters, you need to check out the work of NYRA (National Youth Rights Association) and ASFAR (Americans for a Society Free from Age Restrictions), our nation's two biggest youth lib orgs, as well as the writings of Robert Epstein.

That's fine in principle. Of course you are a tiny drop in the bucket compared to all the other people who care deeply about the welfare of children.

Yet, to restate the point of my last post in this thread, those who actually call for a significant amount of attention or resources be allotted into combating the things that cause by far the most demonstrable harm to kids every year seem to be a tiny drop in the bucket compared to those who howl loudly for the wedge-oriented issues of sexual propriety and abstention. That doesn't say there aren't a significant number of people in the West and North who do not truly care about the welfare of youth, of course. But their voices are greatly drowned out by the demands and priorities of the moral crusaders in the media and government. And as I said before, I do not consider moral crusaders to be concerned about the welfare of youths in a comprehensive manner. Instead, they are almost solely concerned with the moral propriety of youth sexuality, and preserving status quo institutions which keep underagers in their current "place" on the socio-political hierarchy.

The correlation between those who think empowering youth to make their own decisions is the most important change and those who might like to have sex with children if they exercised that choice is rather stunning.

No, it's just that you focus only on the latter, because that is your main point of interest and priority: To detect signs of MAPs expressing a romantic interest in kids, and seeking to convince them into thinking that this is an inherently bad thing no matter what the law says. Hence, this is bound to color your perception of the entire board, and just about any topic of discussion as well. Also, a person looking mainly for rubies in a quarry composed largely of diamonds is going to be quick to spot the small number of rubies there.

I think anyone who poured over the board with a truly objective eye that wasn't focused on detecting one specific line of focus would see far more than posts where the person merely exclaims they want to have sexual relations with kids, and sides with the youth rights platform for that reason alone. This is not an exclusive youth lib board, however, so you will not see 99% of the posts being devoted to comprehensive discussions of youth lib. You will see many posts devoted to the appreciation of girls, and the expressed desire to have full romantic relations with them, which is a natural and human thing for a GLer to want. But the belief that such a yearning is intrinsically diabolical causes you to read the post to have sinister connotations. Moreover, interpreting those posts as being indicative that the GLer authors are mere buckets of lust, and little else, is doing a disservice to what you purport to be your own community. Dislike for your own community is self-defeating, not the sign of a noble iconoclast or champion of righteousness.

And as I've suggested elsewhere, working for any social change with the label of "pedophile" hung around your neck is a good way to make it less likely -- except perhaps in the one area of life experience of pedophiles ourselves.

That is only true if you continue to hold or endorse the belief that being a MAP means you have one interest on your mind alone, rather than an attraction base that is very multi-faceted. Correcting fallacies is one of the things we are striving to do. Further, no one here ever suggested that MAPs should take the lead in promoting youth liberation, and in fact, we are not.

I'll assume you are sincere, but this whole idea of a grand plan to refocus societal attention just seems practically irrelevant.

Thank you for giving us that, but the work to refocus societal attention is hardly irrelevant when that changed focus is to divert attention to where it truly belongs, and where it will do the most fundamental good.

There are all kinds of girls with all kinds of reactions.

Is is my main point.

I also thought Going All the Way was a great book, and noted the chapter you cite with great interest. Viewed by most of uninformed society, you and I actually appear quite similar and nearly as heinous.

A perception that needs to change. That goal needs to be made on different fronts.

I have suggested that when a sexual relationship between a young teens and an adult is discovered, the girl be allowed without pressure one way or the other to decide what she thought of the relationship, and as long as she maintains it was just fine, the man should not be prosecuted. However, if she decides it was under false pretenses, the guy is guilty -- not as a huge crime, maybe 3 months in prison? (and no sex offender registry for anyone ever.)

And no call for an investigation to clarify the girl's claims, and make sure she doesn't have a history of lying to gain favors from people, revenge for refusing to do everything she asks, etc.? That is giving a hell of a lot of absolute power to one side of the issue, and teens are more than intelligent enough to take full advantage of that, regardless of what you might think. Also regardless of what you might think, they are not a universal lot of sweethearts, but are filled with good and bad members, just like any group of people. Again, you need to read Roger N. Lancaster's book Sex Panic and the Punitive State, and pay particular attention to the incident that fully spurred him to write that book.

But it's always wrong for him to allow the relationship to start. Prior parental consent is a large ameliorating factor. Just note: my views on the subject are really quite far from mainstream society's.

What you just described to me certainly is. You have the right to make moral declarations, too, because you are entitled to adhere to any set of moral tenets that you want. One of the people I respect the most is a friend of mine with strong conservative views who has told me the following: "Personally, I think it's immoral for two men to have sexual relations with each other, and for black people to have the same relations with whites. However, I do not think either should be criminalized." I don't like his ideological views, of course, but he is a reasonable man that I can respect despite our moral views not coinciding.

When we talk about the nature of girls, we are largely just citing competing anecdotes.

Wrong. Incisive analyses utilizing direct interviews conducted by Sandfurt, Thompson (whom we just talked about), Rind, and Tromovitch, as a few examples, have made it quite clear that young people who were involved in mutually consensual relationships that were not "found out" and pushed through the system typically have very different feelings about the issue of intergenerational sexual contact and what difference consent makes than our culture commonly believes. And these are studies that did not make the error, either deliberately or inadvertently, of conflating cases of forced or coerced sexual contact with cases where mutual consent was involved.

Gregarious young teens do go from boy to boy. Among them all, many stop short of intercourse when they are young.

And many hebephiles - including myself - do not focus our sexual desires on intercourse, i.e., the penetration thing. The same was true with Elvis Presley, a known celebrity hebephile, which actually caused difficulties in his relationships with adult women, and with his young wife Priscilla, since she was an experienced teen who enjoyed intercourse by the time she met him. This is even more true regarding genuine pedophiles and prepubescents. Using the word "sex" in place of "sexual contact" or "sexual activity" in discussions of intergenerational sexual liaisons creates loaded assumptions that taint the veracity and integrity of the discourse. In fact, one of my own difficulties in my endeavors to find romance on the legal side of things is to adapt myself to the sexual desires of adult women. This is a problem I have less often with much younger women of legal age, btw, who often do not put as huge an emphasis on intercourse as they do on outercourse.

In order for these discussions to be fair and accurate, due attention given to what the typical MAP range of sexual desires includes is very important, and should not be assumed to be typical adult activities and desires that are simply focused upon the bodies and minds of adolescents and/or children.

When you say she will be devastated beyond description - also for the rest of her life that is a bar much higher than I feel needs to be met. I am against penalizing minors for their sexual activity, but when society puts limits on how adults can interact with them, I don't take that limitation on the minor's sexual expression as a very serious infringement. The people who may feel it as a serious infringement are pedophiles, not girls.

You just spoke for every girl in the world, Ethan. Is that really the universal wish for all girls, or are you projecting your own moral beliefs and hopes upon every one of them? I think it's only fair you ask yourself that question, and come up with an objective answer for yourself, even if you do not want to share it with me and the board (and you don't have to). And if you say, "Well, I don't see large numbers of girls parading outside city hall demanding rights to choose romantic relationships with adults," then you are completely overlooking the political situation that underagers of both genders currently find themselves in. I'll give you a hint: It's for the same reason you wouldn't have seen scores of black men advocating for their right to choose white women for their mates if you were walking on a pre-Civil War Southern plantation; or even if you walked around a city in the early 20th century Southern United States, when miscegenation laws and cultural mores were fiercely enforced. There have been girl pheophiles (people with a significant or preferential attraction on all levels for significantly older individuals) who have visited here in the past that made it very clear what would happen to the little freedom they then had if they openly advocated for this right.

One underage girl pheophile who once used to post here regularly (her nick was Fayla) had a YouTube channel where she regularly posted audio commentary demanding her rights. Guess what happened? The antis who were regularly monitoring both this board and her YouTube channel raised heaven and earth to find out who she really was; succeeded in doing so when she one time got careless due to a website she had; contacted her parents, her school, and her local police; she found pulled into custody, forced into a "therapy" program, and spent long periods of time in police interrogation demanding she give up the identities of any adult male she may have been involved with; upon refusing, she was deemed very emotionally disturbed and to be "empathizing with her abusers," and treated accordingly by the social workers; and had every last bit of freedom taken away from her, including her computer access.

That's all the reason underagers in general need to avoid "rocking the boat" about this issue in public at the present time. Hence, under age pheophiles [i.e., AAMs - Adult Attracted Minors] tend to stay in the toybox as stringently as MAPs do for very obvious reasons. What little freedom they have literally depends on them doing so. Ignoring this political reality is an exercise in one of two things: Massive ignorance of a major aspect of reality, or intellectual dishonesty.

Once underagers are granted the right to suffrage, we'll see how happy they are with the AoC laws simply on the basis of principle. Girls are negatively affected by not having these rights because, regardless of how they may personally feel about intergenerational sexual contact - either naturally or morally - it's an infringement on their freedom of choice. The right to choice is the main essence of civil rights and freedom. The great majority of them would oppose the AoC laws for the same reason that I and many other progressives and socialists stridently oppose laws prohibiting homosexual activity despite the fact that I and many of these other progressives are fully straight and have no desire to have such relations with members of the same gender. It's the matter of principle, my friend. That has to trump moralism when it comes to democracy.

The fact is that society is full of women who feel they have been severely damaged by sexual experiences with adults when they were young. Is some of it exaggerated and stirred up by societal attitudes? Undoubtedly. But there's a lot left over. The idea that it is all just society's attitudes amounts to a humongous conspiracy theory.

Does it? Have you asked every single one of these women if those sexual experiences were consensual or not? After that, did you ask them if they had a relationship that was "found out"? If so, did you ask them if they were either pulled through the "therapy" system, or met with a huge amount of negative responses by peers, family, etc.? Did you ask them if they were in any way, shape, or form perhaps motivated to see a past relationship in a new light after observing a popular trend of many women gaining lucrative financial killings by getting a lawyer and suing their past lovers for "damages" in civil court? Did you ask any of these women in question if they were strongly encouraged (one might say "bullied" or "cajoled") into seeing a past relationship they originally looked upon fondly in another way entirely after telling their experiences to a therapist they were seeing for common emotional problems like depression, which can have a myriad degree of causes? These questions need to be asked, and widespread evaluations need to be made, if this situation is to be analyzed fairly and accurately. I mentioned a number of social scientists who have done this very thing in the sense of being sure to put the question of consent to individuals involved in such relationships who were not "found out" and dragged through the system or placed under coercive "treatment" by an unscrupulous therapist with an agenda, or having talked to a lawyer hoping to jump on a popular bandwagon to acquire an easy $$$ rather than justice.

These are all important questions to ask, Ethan. This is no conspiracy, as that implies something that is essentially covert. In contrast, this is an ongoing and very open part of the system that has been overtly endorsed by the sex abuse industry and the media for over three decades now. No conspiracy was ever necessary for this. The real humongous conspiracy theory was the strong belief that the MAP community is full of conscience-less monsters who hang around playgrounds, schools, and street corners where kids lived, clad in trenchcoats and other sinister-looking attire, waiting to snatch kids that we didn't know to commit barbaric acts upon them. If you want to talk about conspiracy theories, well, there you go...the "stranger danger" panic is right up there with the Satantic ritual abuse hysteria from the '80s, and both are culled from the same source.

These women very often recognize that they consented at the time.

Note what the important questions I mentioned above. Because whether anyone likes it or not, they are very important and very relevant to this matter, especially when the civil rights of everyone is on the line.

Even if they are comparatively rare, these serious negative outcomes are enough to make the idea of men starting sexual relationships with young girls always wrong.

By that same logic, it's wrong to get married in call cases, since in the United States (at least) there is a 50% chance of a divorce occurring, which often (not rarely) results in bitter angst, heartbreak, frustration, and hardship not only on at least one of the two people who break up, but also on any children they may have, who are often hurt not only by the sudden separation of their parents, but any nasty custody battle that often ensues. Yet, you don't see marriage, divorce, or custody battles being totally banned, do you? Even though many people, including many children, are likely to be hurt as a result.

And divorce is statistically far more likely to occur, with the above negative repercussions rather than a relatively amiable separation, than a girl to be absolutely destroyed beyond recognition by a mutually consensual relationship she has with either a peer or an adult. This makes it quite clear that the idea that total prohibition is necessary in regards to intergenerational sexual contact is primarily based upon moral tenets and custom/decorum, and it takes many breaches of logic, incessant stereotyping, and extreme overcompensation to make an argument for it. Further, as noted above, its strong emotional resonance as a potent wedge issue causes it to detract attention and resources put into areas that cause the greatest amount of truly demonstrable danger to young people; erodes the civil rights of everyone by requiring a virtual police state and surveillance society to to even pretend to enforce; and it overlooks the fact that any genuine concern attributed to this problem can handle the small cases that do result in heartbreak with measures short of draconian prohibition, e.g., education and support. This is why I do not and will not support them on principle.

As for the issue of those resources going into tax cuts rather than the areas we really need them if they were taken away from all the surveillance schemes I mentioned: That is only going to be likely if a strong number of voters do not insist that the spared money be allocated into necessary social programs, rather than funneled into the Pentagon, corporate welfare, corporate bail-outs, or eliminated altogether to spare the rich having to pay any significant share. If the people can tolerate them going into these draconian, privacy-invading schemes or into the war machine, we can be intolerant of them being allocated away from truly necessary and important areas, such as community re-design, new means of safe and affordable mass transportation to lessen the need for personal automobiles, etc.