Forgive me, this is off the cuff and a bit meandering. This article has provoked a feeling which I have, while often thought of, never attempted to put down in concrete terms.
Contexually, whenever someone starts going on about Nazis and how it led to this undesirable outcome or another, I have begun to flash back to a book I read called Voluptuous Panic, which detailed the post-WWI era in Germany in terms of how crushed underfoot the Germans were, how devoid they were of men (who had largely been killed in the war) and how the country ended up in this mind-boggling debt, the economy was razed, and finally how the survivors were so desperate that their service economy often revolved around prostitution and degradation.
The section on child prostitution is just staggering because it indicates a kind of protracted development of the "tastes" of pedophiles run absolutely wild, given license to indulge. Other abhorrent things are discussed in the book, but that was really the lowest of the bunch. One of the Sin Cities series documentary also explores Berlin of that era, although through rose-tinted glasses.
In any case, it's rather easy to see that after being ground into the muck like that, the people were ready to embrace almost anyone who promised something more clean than what they had been subjected to. And of course someone comes along, they always will.
But we ended up doing something notionally similar after WWII: more grinding of the Germans (this time through division, sanctions, etc), who seem to be now indoctrinated with a spirit of self-abnegation, as if the Germans of today (the locally born sort, naturally) must offer themselves up as some kind of sacrifice to repent of the sins of previous generations. Why, to prevent fascism we must destroy ... almost everything? The nuclear family, the "oppression of children's sexuality," and so on. And so the whole thing is a perverse echo of the previous post-World War episode, wherein the sentiment is that almost everything must be unmade if only to prevent the mistakes of the past ... which hardly worked the last time around. And so academics make a lot of high-sounding noise about restructuring and sexuality and deconstructing things, nevermind Chesterson's fence.
I'm starting to see ghastly echoes of this sort of thing as "MAP" ("minor-attracted persons," supplanting pedophile on the euphemism treadmill) becomes an acronym I see more and more often here in the U.S., and the usual academics begin coming up with bloodless jargon describing their activities.
If I had to pick a new mortal sin, I would say that inculcating someone, or a group of people, with a kind of spirit of self-loathing, a wish to erase one's own existence to extirpate a grievance that did not originate with that person high on the list. Once you have done this, you can lead them into the basest acts; nothing is off the table. And so the almighty prevention of fascism, the new Highest Good, leads to this kind of behavior, approved and encouraged even by government and scholars, who will have largely retired or died by the time any kind of momentum for justice will gather.
> I'm starting to see ghastly echoes of this sort of thing as "MAP" ("minor-attracted persons," supplanting pedophile on the euphemism treadmill) becomes an acronym I see more and more often here in the U.S., and the usual academics begin coming up with bloodless jargon describing their activities.
Despite living in the US and being one of those terminally online people who spend too much time on HN and Reddit, your comment is the first time I've ever seen the term "MAP" in my life.
I don't know what academics you're talking about, and I think I probably occupy an almost disjoint bubble from them. I don't read psychology papers or wherever that kind of stuff is found.
What you're describing is disturbing and I hope it's not happening. I can't discount the possibility that I'm just out of touch with the places or communities where it is happening though.
>Despite living in the US and being one of those terminally online people who spend too much time on HN and Reddit, your comment is the first time I've ever seen the term "MAP" in my life.
I first saw it a year ago, in The Washington Post, with regards to an ODU professor [1] I've seen it on both Fox News and/or CNN, as well.
Recently, it was in the news because a Texas teacher was fired, "Stop calling them that. You're not allowed to label people like that. Stop it, Diego," the teacher can be heard saying in the video. "We are not going to call them that. We're going to call them MAPs. Minor Attracted Persons. So don't judge people just because they want to have sex with a 5-year-old." [2]
The WaPo article you cite is about a professor who was ousted in part for using the term. It uses the term "minor-attracted person" exclusively in quotes; it uses the term "pedophile" in quotes once, in a sentence about the word, but otherwise uses it naturally. It is not reasonable to take from that WaPo article the notion that "MAP" is an accepted term.
You can easily search WaPo and find that the term "MAP" is used only in that article (again: about the term, and the fact that it cost someone their job), and that WaPo routinely uses the term "pedophile", quoting it only in stories where the allegations are ridiculous (like people reporting dads at playgrounds as suspected "pedophiles").
The Washington Post is a pretty powerful data point that the term "MAP" is not in fact in common use. It seems extraordinarily unlikely that it ever will be.
(So far as I can tell, the New York Times has never once used the term, either).
Voluptuous Panic had a section on "Wild-Boys", hypersexual BDSM-style roving gangs of teenagers. This and other characteristics of "Weimar degeneracy" were often discussed on 4chan's /pol/, by white nationalists who often came there to spread their word I assume. Seeing such a mention is what led me to a rabbit hole, I later wrote a short Wikipedia article on Mel Gordon, the writer of that work.
Apparently pedaresty was something treated on par with homosexuality those days[1]—Oscar Wilde was a pedarest, now remembered more for the "homosexuality trial". Many prominent writers, artists and such engaged in it, without much consequence. Perhaps Weimar was a bit more extreme, but the attitude seen there wasn't limited to Weimar alone. It was only much later that pedaresty was fully decoupled from homosexuality. If I remember correctly, NAMBLA was a member of the international LGBT alliance until the 1990s.
Is the MAP problem a real documented social phenomena or just a type of satanic scare? I understand it is researched as a topic in sociology like the Sambari people that practice ritualised homosexuality by having boys injest semen but that doesn't mean people are trying to make it socially acceptable. Honestly I can't think of a less unacceptable thing.
There really is a fringe of people, some of them recently accepted in polite society, who attempted to normalize the term "MAP" (none of them publicly condoned pedophilia; their ostensible aim was to destigmatize non-offending people with minor attractions, which was why the term was invented --- to distinguish people who happened to feel disordered urges from people who actually preyed on children). "Prostasia" was (is?) one of the big names here.
But a fringe is all it was. If you go looking for mainstream uses of the term "MAP", you're unlikely to find many. If you go looking for a movement to rename the practice of pedophilia, I'm even more confident you'll come up empty.
I don’t see a lot of current generation German spirit-busting going on. The 90s saw the myth of the clean wehrmacht finally addressed, this abhorrent stuff is being investigated by younger-gen German academics while the surviving vestiges of people who were empowered around the end of nazism and the power vacuum following try to fight back.
It’s also kinda difficult to separate the self-loathing from being part of a dark system, from the direct affects of reparations, from becoming ground 0 at the Cold War, from knock-on effects of any of the above. But one thing is for sure, prevention of fascism was definitely not a highest good, or at least for long. We released the war criminals and rearmed them the second that an ascendant Socialist power needed to be addressed, with 0 pushback on the demands.
>released the war criminals and rearmed them the second that an ascendant Socialist power needed to be addressed
Who/when? War criminals released in West Germany to combat East Germany? Did they somehow not commit war crimes this time?
> the myth of the clean wehrmacht finally addressed
Can you explain this a little more? I had a grandfather I never met who was in the wehrmacht. As an American youth I understood it as wehrmacht == nazi, without any distinction. I dismissed what my grandmother said about him hating Hitler as revisionism because A. I disliked her for other reasons and B. obviously a nazi would try to prove their innocence. Being part German felt dirty as a kid and I wanted to be distanced from it.
It was not until adulthood and digging through old family records that I realized there was a potential distinction between party members and the wehrmacht, or that they were drafting all able bodied men at the end. Though my grandparents clearly weren't heroes of any sort, I realized I had perhaps been too brutal in my assessment. But perhaps not! I just don't really know.
One day I'll get around to requesting his military record from the German government, though I don't know the integrity of those records, given the post-war political situation.
Yeah West Germany successfully pushed for western-held war criminals to be released in the early 1950s. Rearmament and relaxing of the terms of reparations happened very rapidly, within a year individual pieces are being rolled back. There’s kinda a general history of rapidly needing the Germans after WW2 and a lot of people got second chances (also see Operation Paperclip). West Germany used these opportunity to try to rewrite history, gain more government independence, dramatically lessening whatever “spirit-busting” was a part of WW2 reparations.
If you are interested in how interwar conditions led to the twisted nature of Nazi society, one book I recommend is Lothrop Stoddard's Into the Darkness: Nazi Germany Today (1940). An American historian took an extended tour around Germany just before the war. Along with observations and interviews, he makes some mention of how the extreme conditions of 1920s Germany had a deleterious effect on public character.
Publication of the book basically destroyed his academic career, because he didn't come across in the book as sufficiently anti-Nazi. His writing approach was to relate his observations without judgement, and let the reader draw the implications.
> as if the Germans of today [...] must offer themselves up as some kind of sacrifice to repent of the sins of previous generations.
This isn't a new phenomenon. Regan was criticized in 1985 for expressing similar views -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitburg_controversy -- albeit in a way which was either politically clumsy or extremely offensive to the victims of Nazism, depending on your viewpoint.
I see what you're getting at, and no, speaking frankly and truthfully about America's history of racial discrimination and persecution, as well as its history of other forms of mainstreamed/institutionalized bigotry, in classrooms and the media is not degradation that will lead to widespread cultural debasement and pedophilia.
To be clear, that is what parent is dog-whistling.
Contexually, whenever someone starts going on about Nazis and how it led to this undesirable outcome or another, I have begun to flash back to a book I read called Voluptuous Panic, which detailed the post-WWI era in Germany in terms of how crushed underfoot the Germans were, how devoid they were of men (who had largely been killed in the war) and how the country ended up in this mind-boggling debt, the economy was razed, and finally how the survivors were so desperate that their service economy often revolved around prostitution and degradation.
The section on child prostitution is just staggering because it indicates a kind of protracted development of the "tastes" of pedophiles run absolutely wild, given license to indulge. Other abhorrent things are discussed in the book, but that was really the lowest of the bunch. One of the Sin Cities series documentary also explores Berlin of that era, although through rose-tinted glasses.
In any case, it's rather easy to see that after being ground into the muck like that, the people were ready to embrace almost anyone who promised something more clean than what they had been subjected to. And of course someone comes along, they always will.
But we ended up doing something notionally similar after WWII: more grinding of the Germans (this time through division, sanctions, etc), who seem to be now indoctrinated with a spirit of self-abnegation, as if the Germans of today (the locally born sort, naturally) must offer themselves up as some kind of sacrifice to repent of the sins of previous generations. Why, to prevent fascism we must destroy ... almost everything? The nuclear family, the "oppression of children's sexuality," and so on. And so the whole thing is a perverse echo of the previous post-World War episode, wherein the sentiment is that almost everything must be unmade if only to prevent the mistakes of the past ... which hardly worked the last time around. And so academics make a lot of high-sounding noise about restructuring and sexuality and deconstructing things, nevermind Chesterson's fence.
I'm starting to see ghastly echoes of this sort of thing as "MAP" ("minor-attracted persons," supplanting pedophile on the euphemism treadmill) becomes an acronym I see more and more often here in the U.S., and the usual academics begin coming up with bloodless jargon describing their activities.
If I had to pick a new mortal sin, I would say that inculcating someone, or a group of people, with a kind of spirit of self-loathing, a wish to erase one's own existence to extirpate a grievance that did not originate with that person high on the list. Once you have done this, you can lead them into the basest acts; nothing is off the table. And so the almighty prevention of fascism, the new Highest Good, leads to this kind of behavior, approved and encouraged even by government and scholars, who will have largely retired or died by the time any kind of momentum for justice will gather.