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CANDICE:
Hi everybody, I’m so excited for today’s podcast. We have an individual who’s on today who is a wonderful human being and has been part of the map community for 3 years. He tweets and blogs about the topic of autopedophilia. We all know — those that listen to our podcast and are in the map community and who are map advocates — understand the risk of coming onto this podcast and using one’s own voice so we have the kind generous Elliott who’s another map who’s going to be reading Bly’s answers for us today so I want to welcome you and thank you for reading Bly’s answers.
ELLIOTT
Yeah, I’m glad to be here. I have known Bly for almost a year and he really helped me out at the beginning when I joined the community, so I’m more than happy to read his answers for him.
CANDICE:
Wonderful, and that is so important for people to hear as MAPs coming out into the community. It can be kind of scary and so to have MAPs who are willing to be a support is wonderful. So, with that, let’s go ahead and get started because this topic of autopedophilia… I know a lot of people probably don’t know what it is. So I would like to start by talking about autopedophilia and get a real clear understanding of what auto pedophilia is so tell me.
BLY (read by Elliott):
OK, so I have to start with a couple of disclaimers here. This is a subject that is still being learned about and I’m not an expert because there really aren’t any experts. Even the academics who study this are not experts yet. They’re just trying to describe what they’ve observed.
I would describe myself as an autopedophile, but the way I and many others experience that doesn’t necessarily line up with the current dictionary definitions.
So, the definition used by scientists like Kevin Hsu and J. Michael Bailey, goes like this: an autopedophile is someone who is, quote, “sexually aroused by dressing in children’s clothing or fantasizing about having a child’s body”, unquote.
So an immediate thing to say about that is that it’s not the same as pedophilia, because pedophilia is finding children sexually attractive, whereas this is finding the idea of being a child arousing.
But what I also want to say is that that scientific definition really only covers just a couple of aspects of a much bigger phenomenon, and in a way for some of us, that definition I just quoted is a bit like saying the definition of gay is a man who gets excited by the thought of a man kissing him. Like, yes, that captures an important part of it, but it doesn’t capture the whole thing, nor necessarily is that true for everyone who is gay.
So, what actually are we talking about if we need a wider definition? I would say the group I consider myself part of, is “people who are emotionally or sexually drawn to the idea of identifying with or identifying as if a minor”.
And the various related terms we could use are… let’s start with the term ageplay — which is for people who roleplay as children because they have autopedophilia.
A subset of those is ABDL or AB folk, which stands for Adult Baby / Diaper Lover, also known as infantilists — that’s people who roleplay specifically as infants or toddlers — or as adults who get treated that way. Other ageplayers might be middles — roleplaying as kids older than toddlers but younger than adults.
Those groups can (and do) include people for whom ageplay is a sexual kink. But they also include some for whom it’s a nonsexual or semi-sexual thing. Or you could even call it a proto-sexual thing — not what we think of as adult sexual activity, but a pre-adolescent form of bodily exploration and experimentation.
We could also talk about people with emotional congruence with children, who as adults see children as their peers or equals.
There’s age dysphoria, where people view it as a a negative, distressing thing that they can’t remain or be a child. This doesn’t necessarily have the roleplaying element.
There’s the word regression, too, where adults get really deeply into a kind of childlike headspace, some of whom consider it involuntary, while for others it’s just a very compulsive or rewarding thing to do voluntarily. They really don’t feel like they’re roleplaying.
And there are some rare folk who think that their true identity, in some sense, is as a child. In other words, they imagine they would feel happier if they literally were a child and not an adult at all.
So it’s a real forest of labels and terminology, and at the moment we don’t understand any of it scientifically.
CANDICE:
Well I just absolutely love that you were able to go into each of these descriptions in nice detail, if you will, and it would be good for people to continue to get educated. Those who are listening today may say ‘I am not a pedophile but I do really have some interest in what Bly is saying about autopedophilia, ageplay, regression, age dysphoria and so on and so forth. So thank you for going into some detail about each, because, again, some of these were new to me and I think if they’re new to me they’ve got to be new to some other people and anyone listening who possibly said ‘that’s me; I fit with that — that term that he used — but I never really knew what it was’.
So let’s go onto the second question. Can you try to describe the subjective experience of autopedophilia, ageplay and some of these other things and give some examples.
BLY:
OK, so to try and make sense of all those terms above, I’m going to invent a few different people, based off people I’ve met or read about to show how this works.
So, let’s pick a random ageplayer. Let’s call her Joanne.
Joanne is a woman of 30 or so. Normal life; likes donuts, sitcoms, gaming.
And since she was a teen Joanne has discovered she gets really sexually excited by the thought of being treated like a young girl, acting out and getting spanked by a father figure.
And Joanne isn’t sexually interested in kids at all; she’s into adult men.
But her whole fantasy is that she has the social status of a bratty little girl who is naughty, gets told off, punished and then forgiven. When she has this fantasy, she’s significantly focused on the older man, but also on the experiences and physical sensations of being little and, in this situation, powerless.
So, some people might have issues with the politics of that scenario, but it’s important to say that this fantasy came to Joanne pretty much unbidden. In real life she doesn’t put up with nonsense from men, or think that she’s in any way deserving of physical abuse. She doesn’t even believe in spanking kids.
But this fantasy has been there for her since her adolescence. And we would call that fetishistic ageplay. She gets a strong emotional and sexual kick out of it, not just from the spanking or being addressed as ‘missy’, but from the clothes she wears to do this scene. It also relieves a lot of stress for her.
So that’s an example of a specific kind of ageplay. Joanne doesn’t really believe she’s really a kid. She knows she’s an adult and is pretty much happy with it but likes to delve into this fantasy sometimes.
Now let’s take another ageplayer, and this one is an Adult Baby. So that’s Josh. He’s gay and twenty-three. He’s a gamer and a stoner, but also at college studying… biology, say. He’s generally a credit to his snowboarding club.
And he has this secret desire, which he’s had since he was a bedwetting kid of eleven or twelve. What he dreams about is being dressed and treated as a toddler aged two.
And at home in a box he has toys and a pacifier and a teddy bear, and he also has diapers and he loves putting them on just by himself and pretending he’s really that age. And he takes it pretty far, meaning he fully uses that diaper when he’s in the zone.
But for Josh, unlike Joanne, it’s not quite so much a sexual thing. Like, he actually doesn’t much want regular sex with another guy. He’s attracted to adult men of around his own age, but it’s at least as much an emotional attraction and if he got together with another AB it would definitely involve them both dressing up, and probably cuddles, and maybe even some kisses, even an orgasm in the diaper, but he’d be uncomfortable if it became just sex. Mostly he likes to hang with other littles and sometimes with a daddy and get pretty deep into the headspace of being a toddler. So I guess he’s a regressor too.
So that’s an example of a mostly nonsexual ageplayer and specifically an AB.
Now let’s take… Lewis. Lewis is thirty something, married to a woman, who he loves and finds attractive, and does a lot of running. He doesn’t have any kid clothes or anything like that, no diapers, but he’s getting to the point where he’s getting kind of hairy on his body, more than in his twenties. Up to now he shaved his chest and even sometimes his legs and armpits, just because he liked the way that looked.
He tries to keep fairly skinny too, not too built and not too chubby. He has a floppy sort of haircut, and he’s more than vaguely aware that basically he has tried to preserve a little bit a style and appearance that is younger than he is, and he’s also become aware that he finds himself attracted to quite boyish looking women too. He also a couple of years ago got braces as an adult, which he only somewhat needed.
And he basically feels pretty rotten each time he looks in the mirror and his age is staring back — not just wrinkles and stuff, which depresses most of us from time to time, but specifically his development. He basically liked his look better when he was a skinny wiry teenager, when he remembers having a lot of intense feelings and was kind of on top of the world, doing well in school and sport and before life got complicated.
He sometimes thinks about that when he has sex with his wife, almost imagining them as teenaged boyfriend and girlfriend sometimes, but he wouldn’t say that out loud or share it with her.
The idea of seriously roleplaying as a teenager doesn’t really grab him and he’d feel stupid and cringey acting stuff out like that, but he wishes he really could have that look back again, and daydreams a lot about it.
So Lewis would be an example of age dysphoria around appearance, with maybe a little bit of autoephebophilia thrown in — i.e. attraction to the idea of himself as a teenager.
One more example, though, could be Zac. And Zac, who is autistic, has a more pronounced age dysphoria and emotional congruence with children. He’s eighteen and basically wishes he was eight, not just in terms of how his body and face looks, but also in terms of how he’d like to live. He never got interested in girls or even too much in boys, he doesn’t like alcohol, he’s frightened to learn to drive and really doesn’t quite understand or want to understand money.
He gets a little aroused when imagining being back at elementary school, and while he doesn’t fantasise sexually about children, they’re there as a backdrop to those daydreams, but he doesn’t have sexual fantasies per se.
He sometimes does a bit of ageplay by himself, but doesn’t have the social skills really to go on the ageplay or kink scene and actually the thought terrifies him anyway because it would mean having to have adult discussions around consent and to roleplay like he was an adult, which, in his heart of hearts, he just doesn’t see himself as capable or confident doing. He just wants someone to look after him without him having to spell out what he wants.
He does dress up a little bit and enjoys the sensation of being a little boy, but… it’s far more than roleplay for him. At those moments he closes his eyes, avoids mirrors and almost believes that he’s eight. In public he sometimes comes across as excitable and uncool and not like you’d expect from an eighteen year old.
And if you were a magical genie and could offer him the chance to physically transform into an eight year old and go back to school and that would be his life, he’d say yes without having to think about it. That would be a dream come true. He’s not interested in his life as an adult, and sometimes — this is the darker side — he actually thinks about killing himself to escape it.
Finally, let’s go with Ginny, who is a regressor, and who is at High School, and Ginny — at times of stress, like today — she basically drops back to the reactions, thoughts and behaviour of a young kid, almost like it’s too much effort not to do that. She has the stuff in her room at home that allows her to do that, but like Zac, she doesn’t really think of this as playacting. She’s mentally a kid for the time she stays regressed. Maybe not even a kid of a specific age. She’s not really interested in having a caregiver or involving anyone else at all and it has zero to do with sex. It’s just a thing she does.
So there is a lot of diversity here, but one common factor. Everybody with this has the idea of another self that is developmentally younger than them, sometimes by a lot.
And this imagined kid that is with them, this might in their mind be literally the kid that they were when they were that age, or it might be some idealised alternative kid that they weren’t. There’s nothing to say that if you want to act out being a kid that kid has to be the same gender as you were, or have the same personality or talents. Just like in any roleplay or imaginative act, you can try being something different or you can try to recapitulate the familiar.
Those with age dysphoria and Zac in particular who sort of sees himself as a child — he might not think this in a totally literal way — he knows he’s eighteen, he can’t forget it — but in some sense he feels like although he might have an adult body and insurance and a job and whatever, his real authentic personality is that of a child.
So if Zac ever did do an ageplay scene, which maybe he might try when he’s older, that for him is not just about hitting the marks, and including fetish elements a, b and c, but more about just freely exploring the arena of a child’s life experience, because that’s how — if the outside world didn’t make him act like a grownup — that’s how he is inside and how he wants to identify.
We could argue all night whether those folks are indulging in an unrealistic fantasy or whether there’s something physically different about their brains that makes them have a subjective feeling of being a kid, but what I do know is that they exist, and that the term autopedophilia doesn’t really capture what this is for them.
So as I said there’s a wide variety of words for this stuff, but not a single phrase.
In an online community I’m in, because there isn’t a single word for these different kinds of feelings, we’ve started using the term Minor Identifying Person (with “identifying” meaning “identifying with” as much as it means “identifying as”). To me that’s a placeholder term. It doesn’t capture all the variations perfectly.
I kind of like the term “childlike” because that does capture it in broad strokes, but it’s also true there are adults who think of themselves or behave childlike, but wouldn’t self-identify as belonging to a specific group or category because of that. So maybe that’s too general a term.
At any rate, it’s diverse and we can’t just reduce it to a sexual kink, because even for those for whom it’s a sexual kink it could be very much more. Certainly true of me.
CANDICE:
That was very detailed, and I love the different examples. I think the global community will really appreciate hearing about these fictitious but with reality or some real element, if you will, such as Lewis, where we talked about age dysphoria or Zach, similar, or Ginny, about the age regression; Joanne the fetishistic age play… and Josh who likes the adult baby fantasy.
And one of the things that you said (and I have had the privilege of looking at your answers [earlier] because Elliott is reading for you today) — one thing that stood out is when you said that this imagined kid that is with them might in their mind be literally the kid that they were when they were that age or it might be some idealized alternative kid that they weren’t. There’s nothing to say that if you want to act out being a kid that that kid has to be the same gender as you were or have the same personality or talents.”
And so I agree that ‘autopedophilia’ I don’t think captures what we’re talking about at all. It may purely be because people take the word pedophile and pedophilia and go all sorts of ways with it in a downward direction, but I do think this was really beautifully laid out to give specific examples.
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