The Prostasia Annual General Meeting will be held on 13 December 2021 and is open to all Prostasia staff, volunteers, members (present and past), and the Board and Advisory Council. If you are in one of those categories, you should have received a calendar invitation. If you did not, please email or DM me.
The agenda items are:
Executive Director’s report
Leadership changes
Introduction of Prostasia team members
Discussion of future directions for Prostasia Foundation
Q&A
We are considering using the Q&A time for a debate on Prostasia’s position on the morality of minor attraction. Prostasia’s official position now is one of agnosticism. We do oppose acts of stigmatization towards MAPs, but we neither promote nor condemn people for their private opinions about the morality of being privately attracted towards minors. Our public communications have been crafted accordingly. There has been a call for this policy to be revised, so the debate would be an opportunity for these issues to be raised before our incoming leadership team.
You guys do a lot of good with regard to stigma, and it’s nice to have so many good people on board with preserving the civil liberties of all, including MAPs to engage and indulge in their own fantasies, so long as doing so does not infringe upon the rights of others, especially children.
The current controversy is not about the “private opinions about the morality of being privately attracted towards minors.” The current controversy is that you apparently believe we need a cure, that nothing good comes from our existence, and are contributing towards the very acts of stigmatization you supposedly oppose. As such, I wonder why you believe it appropriate to suggest the issue is one utterly unrelated to why people are upset.
I don’t want anything to change with regard to the way Prostasia deals with minor-attraction and MAPs.
You guys are doing GREAT work on both fronts, and I think both can still be maintained providing they’re done so under the continued observation that CSA is wrong, harmful, and is never justifiable or okay.
I don’t want to see the MAPs who depend on Prostasia to feel left out, ignored, or rejected, and I certainly don’t want anything to change with regards to how @prostasia feels about fiction, fantasy, child sex dolls, civil liberties, kinks, etc.
Will Prostasia continue to defend child sex dolls, fiction, etc? @terminus
This I’d disagree with. While I obviously wouldn’t be opposed to Prostasia discussing the amorality of attractions, I don’t think they have any obligation to do so and I don’t think them not telling people how to feel is enabling anything.
Why does it matter what I believe? What matters is Prostasia’s policies going forward. For whatever it’s worth I personally don’t believe that experiencing attraction to minors is morally wrong, but the original concept was the Prostasia would be a big tent that would welcome anyone who supported our prevention focus, even if they did think that the attraction was morally wrong (which is the mainstream position, especially for people of faith). Changing their minds is an impossible task, and making that our focus would be a huge distraction. I am happy to offer a personal apology for offending some MAPs with the phrasing of those old articles, but they were published for years before these concerns were raised, and I am not going to unpublish them now.
If this is a personal thing, then I don’t think it’s necessary for us to debate it in public. But if you want Prostasia to make any policy changes, then please describe concisely what they are and we can add them to the AGM agenda for discussion. I tried to describe the core issue accurately above, but if you can do it better, please try.
The important thing is to answer clearly Chie’s question: Will Prostasia continue to defend child sex dolls, fiction, etc?
Anything else… Well, not my business.
If you want something written into policy, “Prostasia Foundation staff will not use stigmatizing language towards marginalized groups of any kind for any reason. Stigmatizing language is harmful and hurtful, and Prostasia Foundation is devoted to reducing stigma as much as possible.”
Edit: Honestly, I think we deserve stakeholder representation too and to be consulted about MAP-relevant communications from Prostasia Foundation.
This is not about changing minds. This is about the executive director of Prostasia Foundation, that wants to break the stigma around taboo topics, contributing to that very stigma and whether or not said person owns the hurt caused by that stigma.
For you to bring up the morality of attraction or changing people’s minds is… a red herring at best and distracts from the core issue: The stigmatizing language from an anti-stigma organization.
It would be hard to have an effective microbial disease prevention organization including people who don’t believe viruses exist. (Sounds improbable, but these days large numbers of such people are posting on the internet, all highly outraged at measures against Covid)
I suggest Prostasia resolve to ask people not to associate with the organization if they believe sexual attractions primarily arise by choice, or that such attractions are prevented from disappearing out of the psyche by choice or deliberate reinforcement.
That way, a baseline in science could be maintained. If there is ever any scientifically confirmed and independently reconfirmed evidence convincingly showing that sexual attractions primarily arose by choice, then this stipulation could be removed.
As we understand the science today, the notion of the ‘morality’ of an attraction should disappear, since the word presupposes choice and best fits an Irving Bieber viewpoint where, in the final analysis, conversion therapy is considered potentially effective and thus not a form of torture, contrary to the scientific conclusions that have been welcomed by the LGBT community.
I wonder how many are the types of extremists that you seem to mention or simply those who wish to use the scientific method on the, you know, the science, as opposed to viewing “the science” religiously:
My analogy was specifically about the people who profess not to believe that viruses exist. There are plenty of those, and we need not get into the many other sorts of medical contention. I didn’t intend to facilitate hijacking the thread into a debate on Covid fake news, misinformation and distortion. Start a new thread if you want to discuss that. In the meantime, as someone who works in science, I reject the idea that use of the scientific method is a religion. My own religion is Christianity. Its main relation to the scientific method is ‘you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.’ But then again, we don’t want to hijack the thread for religious debate, either.
It occurs to me that some people may confuse ‘morality’ with ‘moral applicability’ and might actually be oblivious to the question of how sexual attractions develop when they comment on the ‘morality’ of those attractions. They may just be saying ‘it’s not good to do the actions I have in mind when I see this word.’
If anyone considering such a hot button issue can pause to consider a definitional problem like this, the resulting clarity would help.
Unfortunately when dealing with the subject of minor attraction you are going to be dealing with lots of irrationality and hate. It is unavoidable. They will burn you at the stake for the smallest indiscretion. Prostasia will continue to be accused of being a “pro pedophile” organization as long as their policy isn’t something like “pedophiles are pure evil scum who deserve to be locked up and forced into conversion therapy for life.”
This is why as a MAP I never tell anybody about my attractions. Fuck these people. And then they want to act outraged and shocked when someone they trusted turns out to be a pedophile. Society gives them no choice but to lie and hide! I have to be fake to everyone. I’ve learned to be deceitful as a matter of survival.
It’s okay I’m not going to ask anyone to hang at the cross for me. I feel bad for allyn walker. I hope they can recover. If they need to remove themselves completely from the subject of minor attraction I understand. No one needs to put themselves in the line of fire for us.
These pearl clutchers would have an embolism if they realized how many of their friends, acquaintances, and family are MAPS.
This is part of the reason why they oppose any research being done into minor attracted individuals and their representation in broader society. They call it dangerous research, and it is, to their willfully ignorant understanding of the world atleast.
People who refuse to seek knowledge and who fear research are fools by the very definition. Unfortunately, it seems that the world is run by fools and idiots.
Right now, I’m seeing a lot of vilification of vaccine shots for children. Some of the people doing this may be just nervous about the new situation, but there are definitely a large number who are simply seeking the classic “they’re coming after our children” outrage-rabble-raiser that was the traditional weapon used against gay and lesbian activists. Their viewpoint has little to do with vaccination and a lot to do with hammering ‘the libs’ with misdirected child-protective emotional overflow. Bearing in mind that muddle-America only recently emerged from Pizzagate, surely nothing could be more opportune than to seize upon a researcher being scientifically reasoned about attractions to legal minors and to turn that into a hostile rallying point. I think you can expect to see lots of inexplicably illogical people, easily called fools and idiots, who in their hostile ravings are actually just doing a basic political manoeuvre that was described in detail by Machiavelli. Calling them fools just adds to their smokescreen, even when they’re not the most intelligent users of the device.
