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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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On the other hand, if Serena Williams taught a middle-school aged boy how to play tennis by playing with him, I would find that wholesome. I would think the same if whoever hell is the male best player did the same with a girl. By contrast I can't concoct a scenario when anyone would teach a child about sex, by having sex with them, without the whole thing being predatory.

It is not a gotcha, it is not bad faith. It is a valid analogy/question.

Why can't there be a teacher, acting in good faith, showing a child/teenager how to use a condom or what a birth control pill looks like? Maybe even outright demonstrating sex to show how this looks in practice.

Put another way, the suspicion on any adult talking sex to a child seems like a practical line drawn to make the best of an imperfect reality. I think if we had a surefire way of knowing a person's intent, we would absolutely not have a problem with some people getting to depict graphic sex to children on the basis of teaching them what it's actually like.

Why can't there be a teacher, acting in good faith, showing a child/teenager how to use a condom or what a birth control pill looks like?

Because it violates the terms of the analogy. That's like teaching tennis by explaining the theory, demonstrating proper forms with videos and mannekins, or whatever. It can be a lot of things, but what it is not, is teaching tennis by playing with them.

Sure. What is fundamentally predatory about adult-child or adult-teenager sex which couldn't be negated if neither party is sexually interested in the other?

I hope that I'm not badly misunderstanding you... you're saying it would more acceptable to have sex with a kid, if neither party is interested?

The idea of having sex with someone I'm not interested in at all sounds vaguely traumatic, as an adult. For a kid, it sounds like it would completely mess up their view of sex and relationships generally.

Also we've had people here argue that most child molesters aren't pedos, I'm not sure I buy the argument, but if it's true, wouldn't the majority of child molestation be non-predatory in your book?

I hope that I'm not badly misunderstanding you... you're saying it would more acceptable to have sex with a kid, if neither party is interested?

It might be. I haven't fully thought through the ramifications, so I won't endorse the position. But it seems to me as if a major part of the anti-progressive rejection of child sexual liberation is that only pedos want to fuck kids, so if you make a socially accepted position in which that can happen, then pedos will naturally accumulate in that position.

To address the issue of trauma, I think adults can and often do engage in all kids of work/actions which they don't actually like doing. As for the "kid" part, I think it's best we drop that, because at the very least, the American education system by and large teaches these things when you are in middle school, which I don't think is a population considered "kids".

So, if we knew that neither the teenager nor the adult had any interest in sex with each other, but were engaging in it so that the teenager learned how it worked or felt in practice, what is the objection?

Also we've had people here argue that most child molesters aren't pedos, I'm not sure I buy the argument, but if it's true, wouldn't the majority of child molestation be non-predatory in your book?

I don't see why they'd be non-predatory. A hunter might not care about the animals he kills and might even despise the meat they produce, I'd still say it's valid to call him a predator.

It's a thought experiment. We're trying to figure out how something works, why it's like that, so we ask - how does fire work? Would fire burn without air? This doesn't mean we want to burn everyone.

Right, and I'm going along with it. I'm trying to point out that the setup he's proposing would still involve someone getting burned. Either what he's setting up is an "electric fire", or while he's cutting off ~80% of the content of air, the part that he left happens to be pure oxygen, or there's something else he's missing.