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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36175817/ I was reading this paper by Sara Jahnke the other day and I think it reflects a similar divide. Particularly you can see that at VirPed "person with pedophilia" had a high level of acceptance, but "boy/girl lover" had a low level of acceptance. The opposite was true of BoyChat. B4U-Act was somewhere in the middle. This reflects each site's general trend in terms of contact philosophy, with B4U-Act being agnostic (but focused on mental health issues specifically rather than minor attraction more broadly). Extract 11 says "I dislike 'a person with pedophilia.' It makes it sound like an illness, which I don't believe it is." This reflects the opinion of an ego-syntonic MAP that one is more likely to encounter on BoyChat. There is a strong resistance to minor-attraction being seen as a mental health issue here, whereas VirPed users are more likely to accept that they have an illness or paraphilia. Extract 10 says, "I personally resisted BoyLover for a time, because it seems on the surface to be 'someone who is a lover to boys' rather than 'someone who loves boys'. The former is clearly sexual while the latter is more romantic". The ego-dystonic, anti-c VirPed user is more likely to avoid terminology that frames their attraction in overtly sexual terms. Obviously we can only speak about communities in broad terms. Individuals within communities each have their own values and opinions. I've never been a member of VirPed, so I've only seen their opinions "in the wild", I may be strawmanning them to a degree, but I think from the communities I have been a part of, my observations stand. |