jumpingjacktrash:

roachpatrol:

the-real-seebs:

funereal-disease:

Competing access needs strike again, I guess.

I think a lot of people’s experiences of trauma have looked like “being forced to grow up too fast”. Having things they weren’t ready for pushed on them, whether that was being sexualized against their will or tasked with raising younger siblings in a parent’s absence. For those people to feel safe, they need a space where vulnerability is acknowledged and a strong boundary is maintained between dominant people and their potential victims. Hence the “I don’t care how mature she is; having sex with a 17-year-old is wrong” line of thinking. Those people’s pain is valid. Their boundaries are valid.

I think a lot of other people’s experiences of trauma have looked like “being infantilized against their will”. Things like growing up in a family that didn’t acknowledge your sexuality, or being institutionalized, or being disabled and therefore seen as a child long past the age of maturity. For those people to feel safe, they need a space where their agency is affirmed and no one will try to control them “for their own good”. Hence the “I may be young, but please believe me when I say I know what I’m doing sexually” line of thinking. Those people’s pain is valid. Their boundaries are also valid. And neither group deserves to take precedence over the other, 

I, personally, fall into the latter category. My experience of abuse involved being treated like a petulant child who didn’t know her own mind or desires. I could not be in charge of my spirituality – of any aspect of my inner life, really. I couldn’t have the things I wanted; I couldn’t even be trusted to know what I wanted. And all of it, all the micromanaging, all the gaslighting, was allegedly for my own good.

So when I see statements like “having sex with a girl of X age is necessarily wrong, no matter what the girl says”, I have a very deep, very instinctive middle-finger reaction. I have had enough of being told that what I want doesn’t matter, isn’t important, and isn’t even really what I want. I can’t make my own decisions? Fucking WATCH ME.

That said, the statement “having sex with a girl of X age is necessarily wrong, no matter what the girl says” may be enormously beneficial for someone from the former group! I can absolutely see how, if someone has been sexualized against their will from a young age and groomed into wanting things they now regret, that someone might find it empowering to admit “I said I wanted it, but I wasn’t really mature enough to make that decision, and the adults in my life were at fault for that”. We just have to be mindful of splash damage to Group B, who will, predictably, prickle at the notion that what they say doesn’t matter. 

It applies in non-sexual situations too. Someone from Group A, who was forced to drop out of school and raise their siblings after the death of their parents, might say something like “teenagers just aren’t capable of taking care of children. they’re still developing; they deserve to have a youth”. Meanwhile, someone from Group B, who is developmentally disabled and has fought for years to be allowed to babysit their siblings, will see that and think “fuck you, I’m just as capable as anyone else”. 

I also think each group makes the mistake of projecting an abuser-centric view onto the other. Group A, for instance, might accuse Group B of secretly wanting to sexually coerce young women, while Group B might accuse Group A of wanting to sexually restrict those same young women. This is a mistake. Because both groups are speaking from their own trauma, neither is necessarily serving the needs of abusers. They are talking about what they, personally, need in order to feel safe and to extend aid to those like them, and both models are valid. We just can’t pretend that one can exclude the other. 

This is relevant to a lot of the discourse.

this makes a lot of sense to me, and also explains why i crashed so dramatically into all the pedophile drama. i’m definitely a member of Group B, who chafed all my adolescence at being condescended to and controlled, and couldn’t wait to be grown up and powerful. i hated the idea that i was too young to do anything, especially anything sexual, and i admired my upperclassmen who maturely discussed smut and yaoi like they were suave experts. i had sex as soon as someone i liked was offering, at 16, and never regretted it. i was really enthusiastic about sex in my late teens, and had as much as i could. i was writing smut by the time i was 18.  

so to me, 16 always seemed like a perfectly normal and healthy age for consensual age-appropriate sexual relations, and i was totally startled to find out a lot of 16 year olds disagree. i was then an idiot who realized way too late that it’s incredibly creepy for a grown woman to be arguing with teens that they are too old enough to have sex, and by the time this fact was rammed through my dense skull i had said some stuff that Group A people interpreted (incorrectly but understandably) as sexually predatory. and of course, call-out posts never include a user’s apologies or retractions… 

ironically, my abuse was a kind of group C – people being rulebound and judgy in a very personal and dehumanizing way, controlling and punishing not because they wanted to infantilize me, but because they saw themselves as heroes and me as a monster. they didn’t want to make me into their baby doll or their sex toy or their ego stroker or anything at all; they wanted me to not exist.

which means the entire fucking discourse is a huge trigger to me, whichever side it’s coming from. although the anti side is much MORE triggery, seeing as they tend to play the hero/monster game.

i was seen as a monster because i’m autistic – my expressions are wrong, my tone of voice is wrong, my eye contact is wrong. pretty much everyone in my childhood except my parents, and uncountable other people through my youth and adulthood, many of them in positions of power over me, decided i was Bad or Not Real and treated me accordingly, and nothing i could do would change their minds. now roach is being seen as a monster ecause she’s been honest about her lived experience, by people who actively campaign to spread vicious rumors, and nothing anyone can say will change their minds.

it’s a NIGHTMARE.