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(continued from part one)
And so with that: are you specifically interested in ageplay or what we are calling autopedophilia?
BLY:
Yes. I’ve always been into ageplay, even before I had sexual feelings. Even when I was a four year old kid I had a sense of wanting to be treated infantile in quite literal ways, with nappies and dummies etc.
And these feelings stuck around as I grew, so as an adolescent and an adult I’ve experienced a lot of the different types of minor identification or childlikeness that I just listed before. I was probably quite a bit like Josh, with maybe a slightly greater interest in sexual acts (in those days, anyhow).
I had a lot of AB and autopedophile fantasies when I was an adolescent and very young adult, and because I had no way of reaching other people into that, all my activities, like dressing up or fantasising I was a kid, peeing my pants etc. were all done alone by myself, never with any partner.
My body was slow to change but by the age of seventeen or so I remember getting the first painful waves of age dysphoria, really hating my body and the way it was growing hair and my skin was getting rougher. That feeling worsened through my twenties.
Then later in my twenties I joined ABDL communities and ageplay communities and at first I took those fantasies online and just shared those fantasies with others, then gradually met up in real life with other adults who felt this way. And being able to share those experiences was a huge relief to the age dysphoria. It didn’t solve the problem that most of the time I had to be an adult, but it made that reality more palatable knowing I had this escape from it available.
I remember the hardest times were when I’d come to the end of a weekend with other ageplayers and we’d gotten totally immersed in this fantasy of being kids.
I hit some big depressions sometimes when I had to come back to reality from that, but still, the release was good while it lasted. And during those weekends, sometimes, in the middle of it all, I could just close my eyes and almost believe that the feeling of the toys in my hands, and the smells of food and the texture of the clothes I was wearing and so on — so long as I didn’t look closely in the mirror — I was feeling and acting just as I did when I was a kid, and I was inhabiting again a tiny slice of that moment of my life.
And as I got older I got to meet more people in real life who had different takes on minor identification or childlikeness. And I could see fairly up close how people give expression to this side of their personality. Because I’m gay most of that experience was of gay or bi men and not so much of women. Nor did I meet any trans folk, knowingly, although I have become more aware of them in the community in recent years.
CANDICE:
Again, I think that example of going through depression and being able to close your eyes and really believe that you are feeling the toys in your hands, the sounds and the textures, really gives this element of having a sense of joy and peace and the innocence of the time. And so again I think people might listen to this podcast and want to pathologise or judge or criticise what we’re talking about here… but there really is an element of being able to go back in your mind to a time and place when you were younger and find that, especially when you’re depressed, so it makes a lot of sense to me.
Let’s look at the question of autopedophilia and legality because I think a lot of people… there’s so much ignorance out there when you hear of someone who has an attraction to children for instance and the automatic assumption is that they are a child molester which is a bunch of bunk, but is auto pedophilia illegal, for those that are wondering?
BLY:
Really short and simple answer: no. It’s not illegal to have these feelings, nor is it wrong.
Most of what we call autopedophilia is totally legal because it’s a feeling, and you can’t make feelings illegal. People with autopedophilia who do ageplay in private with other consenting adults are doing nothing illegal at all, and I think in most people’s eyes they feel like, even if you’re doing stuff like using diapers or things that wider society considers a bit weird, so long as that doesn’t impact anyone else and everyone consents, well, that’s totally fine.
The only things which are beginning to be criminalised are certain kinds of materials associated with ageplay. So for instance in the UK, adults who are dressed up to appear as if they’re kids is counted as CSEM or child pornography as it’s described in the law. I think the intent of this law was to try and stop people being able to defend actual CSEM by claiming the model is of age, but just looks younger because of the clothes, but this also seems to catch some genuine ageplay material which is purely by and about adults doing roleplay.
If you have ageplay material that depicts or describes actual minors and is very obviously fetishistic or describes sexual arousal, you can be on the edge of the law in certain countries, depending how the law is interpreted and how you read the test cases. I won’t go through all the different countries’ laws as it’s a mixed picture, and the laws are applied in far from a consistent way, but I know that one should be more careful in, for example, Canada than in the US. That said, recently there was a case in the US involving just written fiction — not images — which has made me less sure of that.
Mostly, though, those are edge cases. The vast majority of fiction and fantasy that people share is not prosecuted.
Now of course I have a specific angle on this area, because after spending a lot of my adulthood exploring my minor identification, most recently I’ve joined the MAP community which of course is an entirely different category because autopedophilia is not pedophilia and most of these minor identifying folks are not MAPs.
Actually, I think we need to say that again because it really bears repeating. Having age dysphoria or being AB or an ageplayer doesn’t mean you’re a pedophile. As best I can see the vast majority of folks in those communities aren’t pedophiles and in fact MAPs and pedophiles when known about aren’t made to feel welcome in those communities because of this stigma.
There’s a sequel to this, but we’ll come on to that at the end.
CANDICE:
That definitely was such an important section. You repeat it, but I think it’s important to say that one more time: having age dysphoria or being AB or being an ageplayer does not mean you’re a pedophile, so that’s really important. Some other things to think about is that fantasies and feelings are not illegal but in Canada and in places in the US they might be more… there’s a lot of discussion and a lot of controversy about images, if it’s cartoon images or certain materials that’s not considered child exploitation material might be considered as csem. So just to be very aware of that. But you do want to make sure that if you’re engaging in age play, it is with a consenting adult and to be really mindful of what methods you have for getting things online. So if someone’s listening today and has autopedophillia, age dysphoria, age regression… what support is out there that’s actually safe for them?
BLY:
So this is an interesting question because I think a lot of people assume that if you have autopedophilia, it’s not, like, seen as a mental health condition that even merits support or help. Most people think it’s a kink or a fetish. And some people think that if it’s a kink, saying a person might need help is kink-shaming as if their kink was a problem in itself.
But I don’t really see it that way. There’s so much stigma and shame around kinks. Sometimes they’re about stigma and shame. We can’t expect people not to need a little help around making sense of if if they find they have a stigmatised sexual or lifestyle interest.
For some people a kink is all it is and good for them. The support those people mostly need is to understand that though they have this very very minority interest, that doesn’t make them bad people, that they didn’t choose it (it doesn’t matter if they were born with it or not — probably not, but they still didn’t choose it).
There are some people who are ABs or ageplayers and fetishists and they go through binge and purge cycles with this.
So they collect clothes and paraphernalia, and maybe go online in secret to roleplay, and as well as being a great source of satisfaction in their lives it also becomes a bit of an addiction, like porn or gambling can be for some people.
They love everything about it when they’re in the zone and turned on — it’s like an addiction, almost. They’ll put aside things in their life to try and experience it. It’s like they have a huge loyalty to this child alter ego, and that child inside has needs that really must be taken care of.
But once they hit that orgasm they sort of step back and wonder why they do this so much. And at that point they experience terrible shame that they’re into something so weird and humiliating that they never want anyone to find out about.
Maybe after a while they decide ‘I’m not doing this any more’ and they throw out all their ageplay stuff and delete all their secret logins to ageplay sites and decide to just be normal.
Then after x months, they come back again because you can’t just shut off this part of you. Getting out of those cycles and getting to a place of self-acceptance is something where I think counselling and talking therapy really can help, because if you’re constantly embracing then rejecting an important — even a fundamental — part of yourself. So its almost like not treating yourself well. It can be quite dangerous for your wellbeing.
The other thing to say about using ageplay is that not everyone wants the same things from it or takes it as seriously as others do. Ageplayers seeking partners or playmates might not realise what the other people involved needs from it.
And if you have a circumstance where one person is there with a fixed fantasy they just want to get off to and go, like a hookup, and the other person has an emotionally-centred need for taking it slow and making it feel meaningful with lots of aftercare, for instance, then you have the risk of something that feels unpleasant and uncomfortable for one or both of those folk if those motivations are not understood, it could even be a bit abusive.
You’ll notice that’s also true of regular dating and sex, of course, but I think with ageplay and kink — because we all grow up in a culture that doesn’t talk about those things — we don’t get to absorb the rules about how it can be done safely and sanely and with clear consent.
Dating is not easy for straight, vanilla women, but at least a woman going on her first few dates might have read the problem page in a magazine for years and talked to her mom about bad experiences, or she’s seen movies and so on. She has at least a little bit of forewarning about the types of guys she’s going to meet on the journey.
But with ageplay we just don’t have that background information floating in the culture around us. We tend to learn about the pitfalls by experiencing them, and that can be very damaging if we get unlucky. So to make ageplay a supportive instead of destructive and traumatic thing, it’s really necessary to get help or information from those with experience, and I think ageplay communities have gotten better over time at facilitating that, although there’s still some way to go.
And this is really important to a particular group: some people might have a particularly strong need to respond to autopedophilia through ageplay or similar activities because it’s therapeutic or healing for them. People who are survivors of abuse or of trauma are well-represented among autopedophiles and among ageplayers, and some of them really don’t just see it as a mere trigger for orgasms.
They see it as fulfilling a very very deep emotional need that they’ve had most of their life — maybe a profound need for care or unconditional love, or for protection from the things they fear, or for having someone that can take adult responsibilities from their shoulders and make decisions for them.
And people in that circumstance, really, they are sort of taking on responsibility for their healing from their traumas and abuses, it’s almost like their ageplay is therapeutic in itself, if it leads them to a place where they feel better, ultimately.
Sometimes ageplay is like a fixation — an obsessive rehearsing and replaying of some traumatic experience like peeing your pants, or being bullied, or being abused by an adult, and playing out that scene is a way of bringing something frightening under conscious control, because you can stop or pause the scene, or switch roles or explore it. But at other times the compulsive need to return and return to the trauma can become a bit of a trap too. An addiction, not a cure.
So I think ageplay can be healing in itself, but for me I found it really started to illuminate my life when I was in therapy, figuring out what it meant to me. And the goal of therapy wasn’t to stop ageplaying or stop experiencing autopedophilia, which I suspect is impossible anyway, but just to help give it its proper place in the whole picture of my life.
Going back to age dysphoria, for some there’s this strong sense of distress that goes with it. They are tortured that they can never fully live out this deeply felt desire to be a kid. The reality they would prefer just isn’t achievable in the same way that, for some trans people for example, it might be possible to resolve through a physical transition.
And a really bad age dysphoria is a very dark place to be in, because (a) nobody’s heard of it, (b) there is no operation or cure and (c) ageplay here is only ever a consolation prize. Some people really get to very depressed, suicidal states about this impossible gap between who they are externally and who they feel they are internally.
For me, because I have had times when I was in that dark place, I’ve learned that looking for an answer — in the sense of finding a fix that makes everything feel OK -— that’s too much to ask for. But a combination of introspection and writing and time and therapy, perhaps especially time — has allowed me to sit with the discomfort of knowing I can’t be, say, eleven years old again — and to understand that that’s not the end of all possible positive experiences I could have as a human.
And at the same time I know that wanting to be a kid is something my brain is always gonna do to some extent, and I will always devote a lot of thought to it. I don’t think I could train my brain to just forget it and focus on other more practical achievements in life.
CANDICE:
Well you do such a beautiful job of giving so many examples, so thank you so much for your thorough answers to my questions and really to allow folks that are listening who are having these experiences to know that there can be so many different reasons why you might be interested in ageplay or age regression and so on and so forth. I just really appreciate your thoughtfulness and taking the time to answer these questions. We are wrapping it up with our final question, and it has to do with ABDL… and so you mentioned earlier in our discussions prior to coming on our podcast that there are a lot of confused ABDLs so what I’d like you to do is to define that for us, but also now that there is confusion around other ageplay things, because people won’t admit to having minor attraction — so if you could tell us more about that, that would be great.
BLY:
OK, so let’s just say it one last time, just so nobody can accuse the podcast of mixing the terms up: ageplay and ABDL and autopedophilia are not pedophilia.
Like I said earlier, AB and ageplay communities are keen to establish that important fact, because a lot of regular folk — especially those who only get their information about kink from The National Enquirer or wherever — just see it in a lurid way. They see that it can involve childlike things and they see that it can be a sexual thing and they put those together and say, oh, hey, so it’s like pedophilia.
And this is worrying for community leaders in ageplay because they don’t want safe spaces for ageplay getting called out and policed and stigmatised more than they already are. Nor do they want those spaces shut down. Imagine how reluctant some venues must already be to host AB munches and social nights, and imagine how much worse that would get if they couldn’t explain it’s not pedophilia.
So these communities really come down hard on any sign of pedophilia. You see it among babyfurs and ABs and ageplayers. People are ridden out on a rail if they’re suspected, and artists get cancelled and denounced and lots of moral panic goes on.
Sometimes that’s very legitimate because those communities do contain some very vulnerable people — not kids, but people like Zac who I described earlier who are in the headspace of kids and who really need a safe space where those boundaries are really respected.
However, because I am in both the ageplay and MAP categories I also need to tell my truth about this too, as awkward as it is. The reality is that although they won’t admit to it at all, there are MAPs in ageplay communities who are doing no harm and who have nowhere else to go.
So, it’s been known for a while — thanks in particular to Ray Blanchard — that among MAPs there are quite a lot who as well as being MAP are also autopedophilic or age dysphoric or ageplayers or emotionally congruent with kids in some way.
Almost nobody has measured this yet, but there was a recent self-selecting survey aimed at MAPs in which around half of them described some kind of autopedophilia or child-identification, so although I’d want that to be measured again to get a more reliable figure, it seems like a lot of MAPs aren’t just attracted to kids but have some ideas about being or acting as them, or being treated that way.
And so naturally there is an overlap in the Venn diagram, meaning a subset of minor identifying people are also minor attracted people and vice versa.
Now that population is not really studied, and I haven’t studied it scientifically, but I’ve spoken informally to, I’d say several dozen over the years, and here’s a thing I learned. The relationship between their minor attraction and their minor identification isn’t always obvious.
Earlier we talked about Josh who is attracted to adults but turned on by roleplaying as a 2 year old, and we established that Josh isn’t turned on by 2 year olds, just by quote — being — unquote two years old. You could say that his “age of identification” is 2 years old. But his age of attraction, which is a term MAPs use to describe the ages of people they find attractive — is, let’s say, 17 plus.
So he’s not minor attracted, but he is minor identifying. I don’t think for most people their age of identification is usually as precise as an age of attraction can be, but this mismatch between the two can even apply when a person is a MAP and also minor identifying.
So you might have someone who is attracted just to boys 11-14, but who roleplays as a toddler, Age of attraction: 11-14; age of identification 1-4, say.
You might have someone who was born male who is only attracted to young boys but whose autopedophilia sees them roleplaying as a pubescent girl. So, age of attraction: 5-13, age of identification 12-16, gender of attraction: male, gender of identification: female.
So my point is that ages of attraction and ages of identification don’t marry up in an obvious way. They sort of are independent.
And that is really significant in terms of how MAPs exist in ageplay communities.
A MAP and a non-MAP could share a pattern of autopedophilia that is identical to one another — the same age of identification — but still have completely different ages of attraction.
And that means the non-MAP might enjoy sharing an autopedophilic fantasy with the MAP, but nothing would indicate to them, necessarily, that the MAP is a MAP.
So we have quite a difficult situation here, which is analogous to the situation in society at large, where non-offending MAPs and those who are doing no harm exist in this kind of “don’t ask don’t tell” space where nobody needs or wants to tell anyone else that they’re minor attracted.
If you ask the admins of the ageplay spaces, MAPs shouldn’t be there, but there is nowhere else. And if someone started an explcitly MAP ageplay space, I don’t know if that would be allowed to last, either.
If we’re in those communities we can only express the autopedophile side of ourselves and frame our fantasies in every which way that can’t cause someone else to say “This is pedophilia!” We can make friends, do scenes and go to munches so long as nobody ever talks about whether they’re minor attracted or not. I think the same is true in the wider category of kink too, actually, but I think that it has a lot of very difficult implications in this community especially.
I feel uneasy about it, but I also see it from both sides because I know from personal experience that being gay, being AB, being age dysphoric and being minor attracted are all morally neutral things because none of them are chosen, and we should judge people on their actions, not their attractions or their fantasies, however rare those might be and however much stigma attaches to them in society at large.
In theory age dysphoric folk and strongly minor identifying folk and MAPs do have something in common because the nature of their fantasies are such that there aren’t ways of playing them out in the real world. In the case of MAPs that’s for moral reasons rather than purely logistical ones, but still.
It’s also true to say that the early AB culture in the 90s was more accommodating of stories with minor characters and so on. There was an infamous website called deeker.com which had a lot of AB stories featuring minors, and the most popular story that used to be sold by DPF (the Diaper Pail Friends) featured two adolescent minors. It’s always been there, but in an implicit way.
Nowadays the current generation of ABs and ageplayers really reject those early manifestations of age-based fantasy, but even while they say that, we see it recur somewhere else — like in fiction spaces such as ao3, for instance, or in somewhere like the age regression archive.
So I don’t know what the answer is, but as with society at large I hope we can eventually get to a place where there are safe spaces for everyone according to their different needs, and I also hope that as the science progresses we get closer to the common neurological roots of all the paraphilias and attractions and identities, so that our efforts are informed by facts instead of prejudices.
In the meantime, I can only be what I am, and if that means I break the categories, then I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do other than go on being the way I am and saying what is true from my perspective, and talking to other MAPs and other autopedophiles until we all feel a little more comfortable with who we are. That’s the hope, anyway. It’s a really interesting time in history, and for me, there is reason for hope.
CANDICE:
Well Elliot thank you for reading this for the last hour! That is challenging. It’s challenging to read someone’s answers, really, truly and so thank you so much for reading Bly’s answers. And, Bly, thank you so much. I know you’re listening out there. Thank you so much for giving us such thoughtful answers today.
I do want to say in the last points that you made that you said that it’s been known for a while, thanks to Ray Blanchard, for MAPs there are quite a lot who as well as being minor attracted persons are also autopedophilic, age dysphoric, ageplayers or emotionally congruent with kids in some way. That I think is a really pointful statement and something that needs to be discussed further, again, not to create more stigma or judgement or pathologise, but really to open up another conversation.
I think there’s a lot of researchers in the field of pedophilia and minor attracted persons who would actually find that quite fascinating, so thank you so much for pointing that out, and I just really loved what you said at the end that — and I would agree — I really hope eventually we can get to a place as a global community where there are safe places for everyone according to their different needs. Because we’re not talking about harming anyone; we’re not talking about harm. We’re talking about things that go on in people’s minds that from what you’ve described and a lot of the examples that you gave: other people work through challenging times in their lives but also bring them positive experience. So, thank you so much, Elliott, for taking the time to read for Bly and Bly, thank you for For having the courage to be on our podcast
ELLIOTT
I just want to say like thank you for having me back on and Bly, I apologise for stumbling over some of your words; I hope the message still got out there OK.
CANDICE:
Well, I will say that I think the message got out there. I know I was captivated by your reading, and so I really believe the message is going to get out there just fine. So thank you again to both of you and until next time… we’ll see you soon. | |
