Ask Me Anything
Ask Me Anything (AMA) Community Rules and Guidelines
This is the lemmy.ca AmA.
Welcome to the Ask Me Anything (AMA) community! This is a space where individuals from various backgrounds come together to engage in open and informative discussions. To ensure a respectful, enjoyable, and inclusive experience for everyone involved, we have established the following rules and guidelines:
-
Be Civil and Respectful:
- Treat all participants with respect, regardless of their background, expertise, or opinions. Personal attacks, insults, or derogatory language will not be tolerated.
- Engage in constructive conversations, even if you disagree with the person answering the questions. Focus on addressing their responses or providing alternative viewpoints without resorting to hostility.
- Remember that the participants are sharing their knowledge and experiences voluntarily. Appreciate their time and effort.
-
Practice Politeness and Courtesy:
- Use polite and considerate language when asking questions or engaging in discussions.
- Be patient and understanding if the person answering takes time to respond. They may receive a high volume of questions.
- Avoid spamming or repeating the same question multiple times. Give others a chance to ask their questions as well.
-Use NSFW and trigger warning TW in brackets if you talk about sensitive subject.
-
Respect Boundaries and Privacy:
- Do not ask personal or invasive questions unless the participant explicitly invites such queries.
- If a participant declines to answer a question or requests to move on from a topic, respect their boundaries without pressuring them for a response.
- Avoid sharing personal information or disclosing sensitive details about yourself or others.
-
Be Inclusive and Stand Against Discrimination:
- Respect diverse perspectives and backgrounds. Discrimination, including racism, homophobia, and transphobia, will not be tolerated.
- Foster an environment that welcomes individuals of all races, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and identities.
- Be mindful of your language and the potential impact it may have on others. Avoid offensive slurs or derogatory terms.
-
Avoid Spam and Irrelevant Questions:
- Ensure your questions are relevant to the participant's expertise or field of knowledge.
- Avoid posting low-quality or repetitive questions that add little value to the discussion.
- Respect the purpose of the AMA and avoid using it solely for self-promotion or advertising.
-
Engage in Meaningful Discussions:
- Prioritize thought-provoking and insightful questions that foster engaging conversations.
- Be open to different perspectives and use the AMA as an opportunity to learn and broaden your understanding.
- Jokes are allowed as long as they are respectful, appropriate, and do not target or marginalize specific individuals or groups. -If you are sarcastic, we recommend to use /s to be sure there is no confusion about your intention. Fake sarcasm will be found.
Remember, these rules and guidelines are in place to ensure a positive and informative environment for all participants. Failure to comply may result in 3 strikes warnings, temporary restrictions, or permanent bans at the discretion of the moderators.
in the future, a mod check and balance system might be implemented . Subject to change : [You might appeal your ban by contacting a special appointed moderator to judge if the ban was abusive.
Special appointed mod can create jury like conversation with randomly chosen users with jury votes to decide if bans are legit or not.]
Thank you for being a part of the Ask Me Anything (AMA) community. Let's engage in enlightening discussions, share knowledge, and create an inclusive space that values respect and diversity!
Friendly communities :
view the rest of the comments
not OP, but also a pedophile. I don't know that we experience "urges" per se. We have a sexuality, just like anyone else. If you would say that urges are a part of any (non-asexual) sexuality, then yes we experience urges in the same way. FSM (shota/loli) is legal in my country, and I do use that as a harmless outlet. (Harmless in the sense that no real person is harmed in the production of the material I use).
People have always sexualized children. Personally, I'm not a fan of sexualizing real children (I'm something of a cartoonophile, so I almost prefer cartoons anyway?) But, I will say that private thoughts and fantasies can't hurt anyone, and as long as a person keeps those things between their own ears, there's nothing wrong with it. I do think that commenting in spaces that a child may see what is said is harmful. I don't think a child should ever know that a pedophile is attracted to them. I also don't like people using AI to generate pictures of real children. AI as a whole is a big mess that I don't like. I think that if it's trained using actual CSEM images it's pretty unethical, but if it's extrapolating virtual CSAM based on what it knows porn looks like and what it knows kids look like maybe it's okay? I think it's gray, but dark.
What's our endgame? Well, that's a great question that we need society's help untangling. When you say "if it were permissable" I'm assuming you mean adult-child sex? That's not what I want, nor is it what any anti-contact pedophile wants. We believe the risk of harm to a child is too great, and we stand against it even in places where adult-child sex is legal or permissable. But back to our endgame: let's say that everyone who is or will grow up to be a pedophile is killed or ceases to exist right now. In 13 to 20 years you will have a whole new crop of pedophiles. We are an unfortunate, but natural and kind of normal quirk of sexuality. I guarantee that you know at least 1 or 2 pedophiles who are not out to you or maybe even themselves. So what are we going to do with us if we aren't going anywhere? Well. We need resources. We need therapy and mental healthcare. And we need it regardless of our income. If society wants to help us not offend we need to be able to be open about who we are, we need to be able to seek help, and we need to have access to sexual outlets that don't cause harm (even if they're "gross" to the rest of society). I believe the fictional sexual outlets cause no harm, adult-in-adult ageplay causes no harm, child dolls cause no harm, etc. Are those things unpalatable to society at large? Yes, probably. But better that we have access to ethical things that are kind of icky than have sexual frustration and tension build inside us.
How do we reconcile that kids will age out? Is it a Michael Jackson thing? Well... realizing that kids will age out isn't a thing for me. I don't pine after real kids so much. Cartoon children can be children forever. As far as just preferring children's company... some of us are like that. Some of us mentally and/or emotionally feel much younger than we are chronologically. Some people may refer to themselves as trans-age or age regressors. But many of us are not like that. For myself, I wouldn't mind having a 10-year-old body with my current adult brain. Not even for sexual reasons, I just find having a body that age appealing and true to how I want to exist in the world.
To your last point: getting therapy is a very tricky undertaking. Mandatory reporting laws make it a requirement that therapists report us if they even believe we are a danger, and for some therapists merely having this attraction makes us potentially dangerous and therefore reportable. I know some people who have had the police called on them from a doctor or therapist's office when they asked for help. I know some people who have been outed to family members by a therapist. It's not always safe for us to seek therapy even if it is affordable. As there is more research about us, I'm hopeful that that will change, and there are resources out there for us to seek safe therapists, but these therapists may not be in our network, further complicating things.
This is actually a pretty interesting point.
We've been gradually starting as a society to reconsider the lines between concepts historically grouped together, like recognizing that a MtF trans person attracted to men isn't homosexual but better seen as heterosexual with a different gender self-identification from the body they were born into.
The notion of age as attraction vs identity is an interesting one I've not considered before. That there's a difference between an adult who sees themselves as an adult and is attracted to children vs an adult whose self-identity is more like a child themselves and attracted to similar aged people to how they self-identify.
I would also imagine that nuance and designation might be quite relevant to the issue of therapy and management.
If you were creating a virtual representation of yourself, what would that representation be in terms of age, gender, and other identity characteristics? And how long has that self-identify been apparent to you? Since you were actually that age, only years later, or even before it was that seen as the age you desired to be?
Hmmm.... So, I agree with you to a point, but I want to be careful here. Regardless of how anyone with age dysphoria (yes, that's a term we use) identifies, I want to be clear that I don't think it's acceptable for them to have any sort of sexual or romantic contact with a child. It might be appropriate for them to seek out another adult who feels the same way about their own age, or is interested in age play.
Additionally, not all of us experience age dysphoria. I believe it's most common amongst those of us who are attracted to our own genders, but that's purely anecdotal, I haven't taken any survey, nor seen any research.
If I could inhabit a virtual representation of how I would want to look, it would be myself (male) around age 8 or 9 or 10. Or possibly some conglomerate of features that I liked about myself between between the ages of like... 4 and 16, but that sounds much more amorphous, doesn't it?
This has been apparent to me since I was in my late teens. After watching the movie The Butterfly Effect I would often fantasize about sending my brain back into my childhood body and living my life again but with all my present knowledge and experience, and also not physically aging after a certain point. I've also imagined what it would be like to live like that species of immortal jellyfish that goes back to being a polyp and then grows into an adult jellyfish again. I also really liked the book The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August because the main character keeps getting born and living through his childhood. Disappointingly, the author mostly skips over Harry's childhood and focuses on him being an adult in each life.
I can not imagine how it must feel to have fucking cops come at you because you seeked help...