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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28521 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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hope was that this would go away if homosexuality was normalised

What was the mechanism to accomplish this?

It's like hoping for less crime if we stop arresting and prosecuting criminals.

What was the mechanism to accomplish this?

The substitution effect (for drugs), but in reverse: you're giving up your ability to have gayness be illegal so that gay children aren't instantly arrested for that crime should they blow the whistle.

Of course, you could always pass laws to avoid that (i.e. "gay sex isn't illegal so long as you're under AoC, as after that you're expected to know it's wrong")- and we already do this for lots of crimes. But if you're starting from 'legalizing gayness as end goal' you're obviously not going to take that approach.

There were five commonly proposed mechanisms :

  • Normalization of homosexuality could make it possible to discuss abusive homosexual relationships without admitting to illegal or taboo interests as part of the complaint. The extreme case is something like Dahmer, where police literally handed an underage victim to a serial killer (though Dahmer lived in Wisconsin, where adult homosexuality was legal at the time, he'd been booted from bathhouses for drugging people and the police in question had largely been driven to a policy of not asking questions). But a lot of stuff well below that level should have gone through the courts, and was instead handled through whisper networks that were plainly not up to the task, because the victims or witnesses could have faced liability or stigma.
  • The separation from Actual Abuser and just homosexual would have made the stigma on the former more significant. Most of the documented stuff from Keynes involved people over the age of consent or who were plain adults and just younger than him, with the more serious allegations looking to be misunderstandings by more recent readers of the common terms of the time. Contrast Gajdusek or Breen's clear and known abuse of young children. But in the lingo of the day and even into the early 1990s, most public discussion (even in gay spheres!) would not distinguish the two fields, leaving far less pressure on the marginal bad actor to behave better.
  • There was a common failure mode where an outed (or afraid-of-being-outed) teenager would flee or be kicked out from their normal community, and find that a combination of personal interests and business discrimination and native contacts would lead them to crash with various unrelated gay adults, often for pretty lengthy periods of time. Sometimes these were full-blown group houses, more often they were just rooming with friends-of-friends-of-friends, whatever. Sexual relationships in these conditions would be prone to abuse even without the age disparity, but it also meant they were people who had perfectly healthy (and above-age-of-consent-the-entire-time) relationships that looked really skuzzy from Traditional Perspectives. Cleaning this process out would both reduce temptation for marginal bad actors, and more critically also remove an avenue of normalization.
  • Demographics are (and were) a bitch. For a heterosexual person, there's about one het member of the opposite sex in a five-block age range of your age for every thirty people. For a gay person before the Internet, that number was probably closer to 1:600 or 1:2400, depending on who's numbers you trust. And given the covert nature of efforts, gay men were limited in how they could go looking. While some approaches were able to concentrate all possible sexual partners, sometimes even into one room, in practice the real answer required looking very wide in one way or another, and opening that age bracket was often the only available choice. Young adults in particular have particular problems with complying with the standard rule for hets, both because of the more narrow slices and because those present were far less likely to be able to be out, be mobile, and be trying to match publicly. ((And the AIDs crisis blew up a large slice, too.))
  • For... mechanical reasons that straight people aren't going to want to hear about, there's a lot of more awkward stuff that can happen between two gay virgins than two heterosexual ones, barring pregnancy. And while that's a very big 'except', it at least involves months before the emergency room visit. Various downstream knowledge and pragmatic matters made 'gay mentor' a thing, and while a majority were genuinely in the 'leave a pamphlet and pretend the question never came up' side, it left a massive space for abuse among people who by definition would not be able to readily recognize abuses. Increased information availability in public spaces, the growth of sex toys as an available industry, and more one-to-many discussions of gay sex mechanics, all did genuinely reduce that.

A lot of this was predicated on most abusers selecting their victims by opportunity or mild preference, rather than strong preference or as obligate parts of their sexuality, and that wasn't always true. And there remain awkward edge cases that neither the gay community (nor society as a whole thinking about the het versions!) really want to handle as rules rather than on a case-by-case basis.

But it wasn't wrong, either, nor clearly wrong at the time.

A lot of that still sounds like hope.

I think the idea was that pederastic men REALLY wanted to have egalitarian relationships with men their own age, but couldn't under the conditions prior to legalisation, and would switch if these egalitarian relationships were possible.

I guess some have, sort of. Pairs of pederastic and pedophilic men can now abuse their victims together. Sometimes they even adopt their victims.

Asserting that homosexuals = pedophiles really requires evidence, not just asserting it because you really super believe it.

On the one hand, it's been months since your last ban. On the other hand, you now have a lot of warnings and bans stacked up and you've already been told that you're running out of warnings, and low effort shitting like this is pretty much all you do.

I'm giving you a 3-day ban and telling you knock it off with the naked culture warring.

For the record, there does (or at least did) exist at least one poster-boy gay couple with semi-adoptee that turned out to be child pimps.

One can very much have a debate about how common this is, though.

Sure, but asserting "Homosexual child molesters exist" is not the same thing as asserting "Homosexuals are child molesters."

Technically, he didn't assert that; he asserted that gay marriage and adoption have made it easier for gay pederasts to molest children. I'll grant that the language used does kinda give the impression of your latter quote, though.

In any case, I was merely providing a citation that "sometimes" gay pederasts do in fact fly under the radar due to the acceptance of two-dad households (to the point, ironically, that the journalist who originally covered them - in a now-deleted article, although still findable - threw shade at the "bureaucracy" that was still in their way at the time). Is that a cost worth paying? Plausibly. But I don't just ignore a [citation needed] if I remember something appropriate off the top of my head, whether or not I agree with the overall point.

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