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Well it's weird, its a word with a Rape affect but that is overloaded. "They groomed the prince to be king- those horrible, horrible groomers." Suddenly it seems silly to use as an insult
"You're teaching my kids things that affect how they behave and prepare them for a world where gay and trans and queer are things they can be!"
"chad-yes.jpg, gay and trans and queer are things they can be. Do you have a problem with that? Why?"
(I know why. We talk about it here all the time. But my point is to display how- without the affect it devolves back into the reasonable version of the debate that we tend to have here.)
But I won't argue that it hasn't been effective. Tools of war and all that.
I think a lot of the efficacy has come from the word being overloaded with rape affect though.
Nobody worries about a purported rape affect when describing gang members "grooming" kids to act as runners for their gang, or when people talk about cult members "grooming" prospective converts into going along with questionable practices by the cult leadership, or when people talk about an emotionally abuser grooming their victims into rationalizing their reactions to abuse.
Nobody worries in these contexts, because "groom" as a pejorative has a long and entirely uncontroversial use to refer to a specific sort of abuse of trust, whereby a person in a dominant position induces a vulnerable individual into granting them a special and unaccountable position of trust, increasing the victim's vulnerability and isolating them from others who might object or intervene. One of the more pernicious examples of this is grooming for sexual abuse, but the pretense that grooming kids for rape is the only possible meaning of the phrase is absurd to anyone who's spent more than five minutes on google.
This lie persists because it is rhetorically useful to progressives, and for no other reason.
Nobody worries about a purported rape affect in the cases you mentioned because people don't tend to throw around pedo accusations in the same sentence with grooming accusations in those cases.
If it's a lie, then speak plainly and specify what kind of grooming you're talking about. Right now it looks all too much like a gotcha - shout "grooming pedos, grooming pedos", then smugly proclaim "ah ha, but grooming doesn't just mean 'sexual'!" when people rightfully assume that "grooming" and "pedos" is the same accusation.
Building secret relationships with a kid* outside the circles of trust of their parents, family and other authority figures, for purposes of encouraging them to take actions that that their parents and family would not approve of. That's the understood, central definition of "grooming" across all contexts, from sexual to emotionally abusive to criminal to fringe-ideological, and always has been. It is a profoundly fucked-up and hostile thing to do, completely irrespective of the reasons why one chooses to do it, because it is a direct attack on the parents' relationship with their child. There is no context when any authority figure should be encouraging and assisting my kid in keeping secrets from me, ever, under any circumstances. That this fact even needs to be stated is a complete travesty. They are my kids, not the teacher's, and while we have all accepted that some parents are so bad that the government needs to step in, that is emphatically not the case here or the teachers would be reporting the parents to the cops rather than lying to them.
*The same principle generalizes to adults as well, as seen in discussions of emotional abuse in relationships and cult recruitment, but with adults it's murkier because they are empowered to make their own decisions. This doesn't actually prevent them from being groomed, but it makes the situation murkier than it is with kids, at least from the outside.
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I agree, but I think the rape affect is appropriate, at least with regard to trans issues. Medical transitions are a form of genital mutilation which cause massive harm similar in kind but greater in magnitude to rape. I would rather a child be groomed into sex with a pedo than groomed into undergoing medical transition, because the former would leave fewer long term irreversible trauma and could hopefully eventually be healed and recovered from.
With regards to LGB, grooming is only an appropriate accusation if the ideologues are trying to convince the children to be more sexually explicit, promiscuous, and/or think sex with adults is okay (things which would be a prelude to pedophilia). Almost nobody is accusing normal LGB people of being "groomers", and I disavow the ones who do. The efficacy of "groomer" comes from the rape affect, and in order to preserve that as a useful tool we need to use the word only in cases where that implication is accurate.
Medical transition involves HRT and not just surgery. There are trans people who choose to only get HRT and to never have genital surgery.
There are many trans people who voluntarily have genital surgery and are happier afterwards. There are no (or negligibly few) children who voluntarily have sex with adults and are happier afterwards.
Medium and long term HRT use can cause permanent sexual dysfunction and sterility.
Although no cutting or crushing is involved I’d still classify it as “mutilation” in the sense that you are purposefully permanently damaging healthy tissue to the point of dysfunction.
For example, if you purposely induced a fever in a baby for long enough to cause brain damage, you’ve certainly “mutilated” that child although no scalpels came out.
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Citation needed. Lots of teenagers agree to have sex with adults. Many of them later regret it, but many of them do not. I doubt there are any good statistics on it because of the highly controversial nature, but I would be willing to bet that the number that are "happier" is nonnegligible, if you're measuring happier based on the same sort of self-report that the trans children are using. Go ask a fourteen year old girl with a 30 year old boyfriend, or one who's sleeping with her gym teacher, whether she'd be "happier" without them. And for some of them they might actually be right. My ballpark guess, pulling numbers out of my ass, would be somewhere between 30-70% of underage people who have uncoerced sex with adults would "be happier" being allowed to do it, conditional on not receiving significant social or legal backlash from society, or being pressured to lie or cognitive dissonance themselves. Which is also where my ballpark guess for children who undergo medical transition is.
There isn't some magical force of nature that causes all relationships that pass the magic barrier of 18 years old to be automatically predatory and unhealthy, such that they are all actually harmful. However, I think that as a society it's useful to have Schelling point of "do not have sex with anyone under 18 for any reason", because it safeguards the significant portion who are coerced or groomed into it, or just have bad judgement and don't consider long term consequences properly because they're kids/teenagers, even if that harms the few who would be fine. If the potential harms are 5x greater than the benefits (compared to the outside option of waiting until they're 18), then from a utilitarian perspective it's worth preventing all of them if the proportion of those who would regret it are at least 1/5. We're not dooming people to never have sex ever, or never transition ever, just wait until they're 18 and have the mental and emotional maturity to figure out what they actually want long term.
If there's any situation where the idea of false consciousness may be legitimate, "14 year old thinks she wouldn't be happier without her 30 year old boyfriend" has got to be it.
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Supposedly Joel Schumacher became sexually active at 11 and doesn't seem to regret it.
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I don't think this is as true as you think. It brings to mind an interview with a woman who recounted how she lost her virginity at the age of 14 to David Bowie. She sure seemed to enjoy it, and revel in the memory. Of course, the taboo means you don't hear about it, but not hearing about it is not the same as not existing.
Not to be a neckbeard, but that’s technically ephebophilia and not pedophilia. I think you can find no shortage of men and women who had sex with adults as teenagers and don’t regret it years later.
It seems completely negligible that actual preadolescent children have sex with adults, and then look back fondly on the memory.
I don't think you'll find many people who will call a 14 year old a woman, instead of a girl.
I take your point, but this is also the age range that we're referring to with regards to hormones and surgery.
That point is also extremely fair, but it seems like there’s significantly younger children being indoctrinated into the trans lifestyle.
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Part of the problem is that the American age of consent is a bit ludicrous - by the time you're 18 you've already spent a third of your life sexually aware, and most people lose their virginity long before then. So it's very important to clarify whether one is talking about a) actual rape of prepubescent children, or b) mutually consensual sexual encounters that are biologically normal, legal in most of the world, and just happen to be called "statutory rape" in America.
I find it particularly concerning that progressives hold the position that teens are capable of deciding they're trans (complete with devastatingly life-altering physical interventions) when they're young but not capable of deciding they want sex (which is a hell of a lot safer, done responsibly). This just seems incoherent.
Keep in mind that the American age of consent is mostly fairly sensible in most places, but California's uniquely insane "18 or illegal, no exceptions" rule is the only one people hear about because Hollywood.
I think 18 has become the dominant cultural age of consent in America, even if there are lower legal ages in some places. I think it's partly Hollywood as you say, and partly from the ubiquitousness of porn where 18 is the hard limit.
On Reddit it's so ingrained that in discussions people simply refuse to believe it's ever under 18. They say that those laws only apply to 16-17's sleeping with each other, not adults, and that gets upvoted, while any correct comments get downvoted to oblivion.
Most places. Per wikipedia, he only states with it 18, without exceptions for people of similar age, are Arizona, California, Idaho, Oregon, and Wisconsin. That's less than a fifth of the population of the United States, I believe.
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The Junior Anti-Sex League's position is fundamentally "straight men having sex bad"; I feel to see how their pro-eunuch stance (intentionally uglifying men and women alike isn't increasing the above, that's for sure) or their other attempts to problematize straight sex is inconsistent with that outlook. The first clear modern example of this bloc gaining power is the imposition of an "age of consent" concept in the first place.
Newspeak; it's an attempt to conflate "non-coercive" with "doesn't offend the sensibilities/interests of the above group".
To be clear, you are saying that wokeism is why an age of consent exists in the first place? This is the exact opposite of the claim others are making in this thread, that wokeists are secretly paedos who want to abolish the age of consent.
I think it would be more accurate to say that wokeists are responsible for the age of consent increasing over time but simultaneously want activities traditionally seen as sexual that they believe shouldn't be considered sexual to be free from that restriction.
In a vacuum, woke is responsible for the AoC increasing over time when it's a hetero pairing and the younger of the two is a woman (they aren't, for instance, particularly concerned with the definition of rape being a crime women cannot commit in the polities where this is true). This tracks given what we know about the demographics of progressives (a majority female movement concerns itself with imposing female sexual dynamics- what a shock), and
if restated as "want activities traditionally seen as sexual to enjoy the plausible deniability of being sexual when it suits them", is an accurate description for how that demographic functions in the sexual marketplace.
I don't think progressives care that strongly about what the AoC should be when the younger of the two is a man aside from adding an extra layer of defense on top of the above special privilege/needing to pretend they care. Which was why NAMLBA was even tolerated in the first place back in the '70s (you really think one focused on girls would have gotten that far?) and why all the sexual "experiments" (like that German 'let's place kids with rapists and see what happens' one) never involved girls.
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Yes; I've covered this point and the reasons why I think this doesn't make sense/is missing the point many times before. This also lines up with what the actual pedos (who post here from time to time) have to say about the matter.
On one hand, they're secretly pedos. On the other hand, they're fighting for 25 and ex post facto rape laws.
The traditionalist outlook on sex (dominant here, as this is a traditionalist forum) is fundamentally incapable of unpacking that statement because it appears to start from the same uncritical "sex = bad" viewpoint that the progressive one does, just with the valence switched.
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Sure you do, just not from women or straight men (i.e. "those most in need of/most likely to adopt this crimestop reflex"); you tend to hear positive reviews a lot more about this on the gay male side of the aisle (Milo Yiannopoulos, George Takei).
And given what they have to say about it (I also know of one particular man who had nothing but good things to say about his straight relationship in his early teen years), the assertion that it's 100% a net-negative is clearly false.
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