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I take the point that I made that assumption, but I still don't think that it's correct to extrapolate present trends to expect a normalisation of pederasty. The direction of change is clearly not as simple as "away from right-wing morality" - we are not seeing murder becoming acceptable or mainstream, and I don't think zoophilia is getting there either (even though it would be such low-hanging fruit if you just wanted to offend conservatives), though the carrying principle may be switched from sexual taboos to animal welfare. Therefore, a priori, the details of the concrete activity matter - a model like "right-wingers hate it, therefore left-wingers will eventually push for it" does not have sufficient predictive power. In the case of pederasty, there are enough features that set it apart from the activities that have been made acceptable by the left-wing drive that I don't think you can just put it on the same trendline:
the existing taboo rests on the idea that "consent" by the child is unavailable or invalid on principle, as opposed to the pattern, memed as "A: I consent; B: I consent; GOD: I don't", that previous normalisations overcame - in other words, there was no principal objection that, say, out of two gay men, one of them could not competently consent to gay sex because he was not mature, unencumbered and responsible enough to be trusted with grasping the consequences;
it goes against a countervailing tendency to shelter children/tighten parental control over them more, out of security considerations;
the main beneficiaries of a legalisation of pederasty would no doubt be straight men (who already exhibit the greatest variability/jitter and a well-documented preference for youth), and the left-wing ethos strongly defaults to limiting this group's sexual self-actualisation, rather than enabling it.
What are the forms of legalised/normalised pederasty that could plausibly slip by these three? It seems to me that a NAMBLA-style "legal when gay only" version would be exceedingly hard to sustain with the present memetic complex (and anyhow would collide head-on with the third point above with the first publicised case of a Discord lothario who has the rule engineering mindset to ask his 12 year old to become a boy on paper). I could imagine a weak version along the lines of it being systematically tolerated in the case of trans perpetrator + blessing of the legal guardians, but that seems like a case where the delta-damage that can be done by the systematic tolerance over the baseline of having that sort of guardians and environment is not particularly big. (Also, children's lives being ruined by bad guardians is a problem that society seems to have resigned itself to leaving largely unsolved apart from the occasional bandaid solution.)
Here's a good parallel: "democrats will never tolerate gang shootings: they hate guns and anyone who uses them"
In practice, we get decriminalized gang shootings combined with ever more aggressive laws against legal gun owners, because it turns out the hatred wasn't directed at the guns and violence, but at the (white, male) gun owners featured in their anti-gun propaganda.
Similarly, leftist hatred of sexual misconduct is targeted at "the (cis-white) patriarchy," not the misconduct itself.
A girl at my local school had to be withdrawn recently because another student with a penis wouldn't stop aggressively sexually propositioning her, and the staff with the new progress pride flag in every classroom window wouldn't do anything about it. They said "she" was just expressing her identity as a lesbian.
This is only going to escalate in the same way that anti-gun rhetoric coupled with pro-crime policies did. The same leftist prosecutors already have "queer affirming" prosecution policies that are going to effectively decriminalize age of consent violations as long as it's "queer," while legislators simultaneously increase penalties for 17 year olds getting married.
And there's another factor. When leftists really don't like something, they get aggressive about it. They "problematize," they make hashtags, they get people fired, they set a party line and ruthlessly establish conformity by any means necessary.
When they don't really care and just want to stop conservatives from doing anything about it, they make whatever soothing/mocking/rationalizing mouth-noises necessary to convince the person they're talking to that nothing is going to happen, and anyway it won't be bad... besides, it's too late to stop it, and anyway you probably deserved it.
Which of those modes do you see happening here? Because I see a lot more anger from leftists here about "election deniers" and "residential school genocide deniers" than I do towards pedophiles. The excuses and rationalization about pedophilia look an awful lot more like the "deflect" mode than the "deal with" mode. And I think you're too smart to be doing this unconsciously.
Edit: and of course the second I open twitter CNN is going to bat for a gay man who raped a 12 year old
Edit edit:
You know what's going to happen when the "sex and gender clinic" starts talking about a "growing scientific consensus," don't you?
Not a good parallel - in the scenario I painted, the beneficiaries of any such policy would still be straight white males, who by pure force of statistics are the majority of pedophiles. It would be more akin to republican gun owners realising the loophole and joining suburban gangs en masse, which they won't do only because of their distaste for the company they would have in those suburban gangs. Sex with minors is generally a small group activity, not subject to that issue.
That's just saying that they don't participate in your current moral panic about it. There is a lot more anger from leftists about "election deniers" and "residential school genocide deniers" (...here? Who here believes in the latter so firmly as to get angry?) than about union-busting at the moment too, but rest assured that leftists are firmly against union-busting.
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I agree- if the (predominantly straight female) Left were really wanting to normalize under-18/over-18 sexual relations, we should have by now seen a marked increase in attractive and enthusiastic late teen and early twentysomething women doing their part to seduce the tweens and teens of America. One would think that, were the Left as sex-positive as they desperately want/need to pretend, that straight young men would be the group they'd start with given their massive oversupply in the sexual marketplace.
With that tone-setting preface out of the way:
But not non-straight men, which is kind of why they're the tip of the, uh, spear in this regard. The
Junior Anti-Sex Leaguepredominantly female left-wing sees them as an excuse to hurt straight men anyway ("it's time to learn about buttsex today boys and girls, all genders are equal but some genders are more equal than others, equality means that both boys and girls are prohibited from socializing like boys because the gay boy complained once, etc." being perfectly representative of this point), which is the main reason the '60s pedo "experiments" mainly concerned themselves with pairing gay men and straight boys (and to an extent, why it's "man-boy" in the first place; man-girl needs no movement as it's merely a natural expression of the power equilibrium between men and women).This is already documented fact, regardless of whether the legal guardians go on to lose the next Virginia election. Unless the we-bes and associated problem children, er, adults are removed from the department (the actual solution is to mandate that no schoolteacher without kids shall be employed by the district- affirmative action forcing the teacher population to match the students' would go a long way to solving the problem provided the current high tolerance for public school molestation-by-weird-sex-propaganda stays constant, and it obviously won't now that the people tolerating it have little else to do after being purged!) nothing will change.
Maybe those children's grandparents shouldn't have freaked out so hard (over, ironically, the same problem: scatterbrained pedo enablers in
schooldaycare, pedos catfishing/lurking in Internet chat rooms, and the occasional snatching blown way out of proportion by financial incentives) in the '80s that constructive interactions and lessened age segregation were still things that existed thus enabled some exposure to social normalcy. The [Outer Party] parents have already lost this war hard and are fighting over the last table scraps of parental power they're currently "allowed" to exercise, and if they can't see that (though, again, it's been the room temperature for the past 40 years) I think they probably deserve to lose.Sucks for the kids, but the only other [straight men] that seem to care about them by definition are just doing it to get them in bed- though if not them, the [totally risk-free alternatives] who are trying to convince them to mutilate themselves with the end result of nobody ever willingly going to bed with them (splitting the fatal cuts of that one suicidal kid across a thousand healthy ones, a solution redistributionists should naturally favor) so really they were fucked either way.
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I agree that the idea of consent (magically obtained at age 18) did form, until recently, a very strong Schelling point that prevented the NAMBLA types from gaining influence.
This Schelling point is now under strong attack from multiple groups.
The trans enthusiasts who are pushing children (even very young children) into adopting trans identities and even surgical or hormonal modification.
Feminists who are pushing that age 18 no longer forms an age of consent for women, and that a man dating a much younger (but still legal) woman is a groomer
I have a hard time believing that any Schelling point is strong enough to withstand the current fast-changing sexual environment. In any case, it my personal view, pederasty (defined as post-pubescent but under 18 sexual relations) causes far less harm to the minor than does exposure to trans ideology.
I'd far rather have my 16 year son or daughter have a sexual relationship with their teacher than to have a sex change. So I guess I don't even know why we worry about pederasty so much when the larger problem is people causing irreparable harm to their bodies through exposure to trans ideology. We don't need to argue that trans is bad because some of the proponents are groomers. It is bad on its own merits.
Then oppose it on those merits, rather than trying to conflate it with pedophilia.
I think the age-of-consent Schelling point is still strong. /u/4bpp gives several good reasons for why it’d remain intact. The current push for trans acceptance makes a hard brake when it approaches the subject of children.
I certainly don’t think that shaming men for allegedly imbalanced relationships is going to weaken such a norm.
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