When Pro-Shippers Turn on MAPs

An Introduction

 

            I was first introduced to the concept of maps, or “minor attracted people,” while browsing the dash of my now-defunct Tumblr account. This was probably about five years ago, back when Tumblr was still relevant, at least among millennials like me.

I never interacted with any maps myself, but I started seeing warnings popping up from my social justice-oriented followers:

   

Maps, or so these posts informed me, were pedophiles using the Tumblr platform to prey on minors. The posts claimed that the cutesy name was a way for pedophiles to rebrand themselves and hide what they really supported. This was, supposedly, grooming minors into having sex with them, and child sexual abuse of all kinds.

Another popular subject of these posts was the fact that maps were supposedly calling themselves “pedosexual,” and wanted to turn the LGBT community into the LGBTP community. I actually lost a fair number of Tumblr followers during this time for naively using the LGBTP acronym, meaning for the “P” to stand for pansexual, but being interpreted as supporting pedophiles joining the LGBT community. Followers pointed to posts like these to cite that pedophiles wanted to join the LGBT community:

Snopes has thankfully debunked the legitimacy of pedosexuals who want to invade the LGBT community. When I learned that the people who wanted pedophiles to join the LGBT community were just homophobic trolls, I was relieved beyond measure. I thought that the entire concept of maps, then, must have been fake. People weren’t really proudly calling themselves “minor attracted.” The entire thing must have been a joke.

Surprise! It wasn’t. I learned this after I migrated from Tumblr to Twitter. The people making those posts warning about maps had migrated, too. Posts on my Twitter feed warned me to stay away from anybody with a pear emoji in their name, which was supposedly a secret marker of being a pedophile. They used a pear symbol, these posts told me, to stand in for the phrase Pro-Expression, Anti-Repression (PEAR). So maps were real? And the secret emojis kept changing.

 

One day, I saw a Twitter follower of mine with the emoji of a small sprout in their name. I thought that I’d seen a post warning about pedophiles using the sprout emoji, so I turned to the Twitter search bar.

And as I clicked on a post warning against the sprout emoji, something simultaneously clicked in my brain: I was no better than a map myself.

I remembered being a teenager, idly admiring the beauty of a younger girl who lived in my neighborhood. I remembered being 15 or 16 with a crush on my 11-or-12-year-old friend. I remembered being at a neighborhood party in my twenties, unintentionally distracted by a cute preteen girl until my friend’s mom sent me a sharp, disgusted look.

I hadn’t meant to do any of these things. But I couldn’t deny that throughout my life, I’d had an unwanted attraction to people who were, well, younger than I thought I should’ve been attracted to. I told myself that I wasn’t a minor attracted person. I didn’t take pride in my attractions. I really, really didn’t want to talk about them publicly. And I knew that I didn’t think pedophiles belonged in the LGBT community. I knew I was different.

But there I was, 30 whole years old, sitting on my bed with a phone in my hand, falling apart. Even though I didn’t consider myself to be a map, I was still attracted to minors. I’d been attracted to minors all my life, but somehow repressed this fact ever since I’d been eleven. I’d been aware of being attracted to minors in the moment I was having the attraction, then pushed this fact so far down that not only was I not aware of it, but I actively hated maps – I hated the only other people who were like me that I was aware of.

As I held that phone, memories flooding back to me, I realized that this realization was the end of me. Or at least, it was the end of my relationship. I’d been in a very happy relationship with a man around my age for a few years, and I loved him more than anything. He meant so much to me, yes, because he was amazing, but also because I’d just gotten out of a decade-long abusive relationship that had all but destroyed my self-esteem. After getting out of that relationship, I had legitimately thought that I could never be loved. I wasn’t even fully a woman; I was a little bit non-binary, a fact that had disgusted my ex. I had a myriad of mental health problems, some of them scarier than others, like a personality disorder. You can’t even Google personality disorders without finding guides on how to “deal with” people with them, how destructive and terrible they are. My ex hadn’t understood me, hadn’t really supported me ever since I had my first major breakdown, after I made it clear that I wasn’t just a girl with a pretty face but a real, whole person dealing with some pretty big issues.

My new boyfriend had showed me real love, had been with me through my ups and downs and made it clear that he didn’t love me any less because of my gender identity or because of my mental illness issues, or even because of the significant weight I’d gained on psychiatric medications. This man hadn’t known me when I was thin and quiet, and he took me at face value: someone damaged, someone sometimes loud and sometimes angry. He was kind and gentle and patient, understanding that I was deeply hurt, that I could get badly triggered. He loved me more than anything, too. And I was about to lose him.

Immediately, I pulled away. I told my boyfriend, tear-stricken, that there was this Thing I wasn’t telling him about. He probed, gently at first, until he realized that this was something serious, and that I wasn’t going to tell him. I couldn’t. I was paralyzed with fear and self-hatred. Everyone knew that pedophiles were worse than dirt, were some of the world’s most hated people. There was no possible way that my boyfriend would still love me after I told him, but I couldn’t work up the courage to tell him. I was living under dark clouds, and my boyfriend was stressed beyond belief wondering what this deep, dark secret of mine was. Had I killed someone? Raped someone? What wasn’t I telling him?

I made an emergency appointment with my therapist, but it wasn’t for another week or two. All I could think about in those weeks was my secret. I felt disgusting, dirty, immoral. I’d seen how people reacted to pedophiles online: with immediate vitriol. With death threats, doxxing attempts, with gifs of people holding guns and pointing the triggers. Even my own online friends did this. Nobody in my life, I realized, would ever love or even like me if they knew my secret.

And then there was the fact that pedophiles, I thought, didn’t just have an attraction to children, but acted on it. Maps, I assumed, were proud of hurting children. And I was like them. So was I doomed to offend too? Was I going to hurt someone? I felt like the fact that I was going to hurt a child was inevitable. It happened to everyone else who was minor-attracted, after all.

Weeks later, I sat in my therapist’s office, still feeling impossible dirty and irredeemable. I couldn’t even bring myself to say the word “pedophile” or even “minor-attracted.” I phrased it the way I did earlier in this blog post:

“I have an attraction to people who are younger than I should be attracted to.”

My therapist immediately understood. At first, he judged me just as harshly as I thought he was going to, telling me in no uncertain terms not to hurt any children. But he turned my world upside-down with what he said next: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you or your attractions. You’re still a good person.”

He spent the next 45 minutes telling me not to hate myself, telling me that I was still the kind, loving, reasonable person I’d always thought I was even knowing that I was attracted to minors. And as I told him that I had absolutely no intention of hurting anyone but was worried that I was doomed to offend, he told me that he knew me, and he knew that if I set my mind to never hurting anyone, then he trusted me completely. He was further reassured by my confession that I was still mostly attracted to adults, that my minor attraction was more of an anomaly than a constant.

What struck me was how genuine my therapist seemed. When I countered him by saying that he probably had to tell me I was a good person because he was my therapist, he seemed shocked. He told me that he wouldn’t lie to me, especially about something as serious as this. He told me that he really, truly thought I was a good person.

I left the appointment with a giant weight lifted from my shoulders. I left with the courage to finally tell my boyfriend what had been bothering me for the last few weeks. We sat out in his car in a pharmacy parking lot. Looking away from him, I told him everything.

“I harbored the idea for a while that this is what you were going to tell me,” he said, voice tense, “but then I thought, no, you couldn’t have those kind of attractions. Not you.”

“So you’re going to break up with me?” I asked.

My boyfriend laughed curtly. “Quinn, I love you. I’m not going to break up with you over this. I’m actually relieved that you told me. What you put me through before you told me, when you told me you had this deep, dark secret and were convinced that I was going to break up with you over it – that experience was actually much worse than learning this about you now.”

I promised never to treat him like that again, and he promised to love me no matter what kind of attractions I had. But he had one more question for me: I wasn’t a map, was I?

I gulped, remembering how I had stereotyped and misunderstood maps only weeks ago. I knew that in most people’s eyes, maps were worse than just pedophiles; they were people who were proud of hurting children. They were people who wanted to normalize and glorify pedophilia, people who wanted pedophiles to be part of the LGBTQ+ community.

But I’d been secretly doing research. I’d created a Twitter account to find out what the map community was really like. To my surprise, a majority of the community seemed to be against child abuse and against having “sexual contact” with children. Not only that, but none of them wanted minor-attracted people to be part of the LGBT community. This all just strengthened my resolve never to touch a child, and made me completely convinced that not only was I not doomed to offend, but that I would never, ever offend.

My boyfriend was wary of my involvement with the map community at first. It still causes arguments between us at times. But he resolved to still love me with as much warmth and passion as he always had, even though I was a map.

And you know what? I love myself too.

I think that all maps who have not and would not ever hurt a child should love themselves, because there is nothing wrong with having unwanted actions that you don’t act on. This is actually the crux of therapy for people with pedophilic disorder, but that’s the subject for another post.

 

-       Quinn

Twitter: KidsCantConsent