#ace disourse
@courteousmingler is a csa and rape survivor and I want to make it clear before I start this that this is in no way meant to cast doubt on her account of her own abuse.
Over the course of the past several weeks, courteousmingler has made several posts calling out “REGs” and “acephobes” for what she sees as pedophilia apologism. She bases her accusations of pedophilia apologism on the idea that a blanket condemnation of all pedophiles is an inefficient means of combatting child sexual abuse. She outlines her stance on this in this post. From her questionable assertion that ostracizing all pedophiles is an ineffective way of preventing child sexual abuse, she seems to extrapolate that anyone who expresses anger or discomfort with pedophiles is opposed to using “the most effective” methods of combatting child abuse. She says as much in this post:
REG’s strongly oppose any and all effective methods of combating pedophilia. asks yourselves why, everyone!
courteousmingler has denied that this kind of framing of the issue of pedophilia and csa is implying that “REGs” stand to gain from covering up pedophilia and child sexual abuse. She has denied that it is implying that “REGs” are child abusers. But I don’t think it’s a stretch at all. In fact, I think it’s dishonest to pretend that there’s nothing clearly implied here about the motivation of the people she terms “REGs” - a group of people which includes many CSA survivors.
When a handful of people who were uncomfortable with her framing of this issue and with posts like this one where she seems to defend the idea that pedophilia is a mental illness (something she has, for the record, gone on to state that she’s “leaning towards” not believing), accused her of pedophilia apologism, she turned the accusation around on them and said that THEY were pedophile apologists.
Worth noting is the fact that @antillles and @cherrypielesbian are survivors themselves.
People should not have to disclose their survivor status in order to be considered “entitled” to being angry at pedophiles. Please note that that link contains graphic discussions of CSA and its impact on victims.) It is one thing to tell someone who has made it clear that they are not a survivor to back out of discussions among survivors regarding specific types of abuse and how to deal with them, but it is another to make the blanket assumption, as courteousmingler does, that anyone who disagrees with you can’t be a survivor, or a survivor of a specific kind of abuse. Framing discussions of CSA this way creates an environment where people are compelled to disclose their survivor status in order to even say that they are angry at pedophiles, and that’s destructive, especially from someone who responds to someone telling them “I was gangraped” with “i literally never asked to be sent messages about gang rape”.
