IM AN ANTI-ANTI AND BELIVE IN SHIP AND LET SHIP AM I THE ONLY ANTI-ANTI THAT FEELS UNCOFORTABLE ABOUT THE CONCEPT OF THE TUMBLR MAP POSITIVITY MOVEMENT? DONT GET ME WRONG, I BELIEVE THAT MAPS SHOULD FREELY GET HELP WITHOUT JUDGEMENT AND THAT THEY SHOULDNT BE HATED UNLESS THEY ACT ON THEIR DESIRES. BUT THE CONCEPT OF AN UNSUPERVISED COMMUNITY OF MAPS FEELS KINDA SKEEVY TO ME ,ESPECIALLY WHEN IVE SEEN MAPS GUSH ABOUT THEIR UNDERAGE CRUSHES AND TALK ABOUT HOW THEY REGULARY WORK WITH CHILDREN ALONE..

You’re not the only anti-anti that thinks that, but unfortunately if you were looking for like-minded people to validate those feelings then you’ve come to the wrong place.

Of course, I stand by my belief that a closed off ideological community will frequently result in echochambers, drama, potential manipulation, corruption, and the like, that groups should always be open to criticism and discussion, for their own safety and successfulness.

The MAP community isn’t closed off though - the members interact with people outside of the community, there are allies who are part of the community, and there’s no political ideology that one has to subscribe to in order to join the community, so the members themselves self-police the risk of echochambers because they vary in stances on any given topic. There are conservative MAPs, liberal MAPs, MAPs who are against loli and ddlg, and MAPs who love those things. There are people in the community who are there because science and child abuse prevention and psychology, and there are people who are there because they started as anti-antis and realized that the “suicide baiting is wrong” and the “thoughts can’t harm” stuff applied there as well, there are people who are there because they hate and/or are concerned about pro-cs and see the NOMAP community as the best way to counteract them, and so on and so forth. There are so many reasons and thought processes and discussions - they even try to talk to and discuss things with antis themselves - so the community is incredibly good at being aware of the risks that come with closed-mindedness.

People work with adults. Whether or not somebody can do so safely is dependent on that person and on their own self-control, not on their paraphilias or attractions. There are people who take advantage of their position to hurt the adults that they work with (look at the Hollywood abuse scandals). People shouldn’t abuse anybody that they work with, child or adult - but whether they will do so isn’t based on whether or not they have an attraction (most child molesters aren’t MAPs, and rapists in general aren’t inherently attracted to their victims or even to their victims’ sex/gender), it’s based on a myriad of risk factors and personality traits and so forth.

As long as posts are adequately tagged, anonymous, marked as NSFW, and so forth, the only issue that I have with people talking about kid crushes (provided they haven’t done anything to harm the kid - such as harassment, leering, assault, etc) is that it leads to stuff like this. Plus people screenshot it and then post it untagged on a discourse blog, everybody sees it despite efforts by the original poster to keep it away from anybody who could be triggered— and then you get “ERMAGHERD THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT KIDS!!! THAT THEY FIND HOT!!! THEY’RE!!! TALKING!!! ABOUT!!! KIDS!!!” and I’m like— Yeah??? They find kids hot??? That’s why they’re MAPs, my dude??? I mean like, anything that I can think of that would be Too Far™ would also be too far with adults - be respectful about how you talk about other people publicly, obviously.

If you had a friend with violent thoughts, and occasionally they said things like “I really wanted to punch this guy the other day.” (speaking casually, not describing having had intent to do so) would you start calling them “skeevy”, “dangerous”, “sketchy”? It’s human to want to get things off your chest. It’s okay to not want to hear that - to block certain tags, or to ask people to not talk to you about it. But I can’t find myself able to tell people that their thoughts don’t make them evil, that they can accept and love themselves, and then force them to lock those thoughts inside because they’re too “evil” to be shared. It’s contradictory and potentially detrimental to that person.