I'm not talking about queer people getting called groomers. I know why that's happening. I'm referring more to a more general fear of pedophilia instead of just repackaged homophobia.
I feel like I'm hearing about it like every other week. For instance, parent bloggers noticing that their engagement skyrockets when they post their kids eating hotdogs or in swimwear. Another example is an increasing trend of people on Pinterest creating walls and albums labelled "hot kids."
I know that elite freaks are all pedos, but is pedophilia an actually growing problem among regular people? It seems to me like when suburbanites freak out about any other thing like BLM or immigrants marching through and razing their communities. Or the crime freakout in the 70s/80s.
Am I being naive and we actually need to be on high alert?
Basically every moral panic is just trying to not address how pedophilic mainstream US culture is by targeting a minority
This made me reflect on the other moral panics I lived through. DND, Pokemon, Harry Potter. They were all based on the pretense of protecting children from demonic forces.
All traceable back to the Satanic panics of the 80s 😎
I saw some footage from that time, and man it boggles the mind how these trained psychologists just bought into this thing and primed their patients into making up stuff with leading questions. Like kids were talking about (spoiler just in case, but understand there was an FBI investigation and none of the allegations were found to have any basis in reality)
spoiler
being forced to watch ritualistic sacrifices of humans and pets, repeatedly forcibly impregnated, and then receiving multiple abortions by the age of 16-18, seeing their siblings being sacrificed
And it also begged the question, if satanic rituals were so widespread back then, how come none of them were brought to justice or even caught. Like listening to these moral panic psychologists you'd think the whole USA was just one big satanic cult.
yeah let's blame satanists for things reactionary christians do.
I'm possibly very wrong about this, but this is an angle I haven't heard yet. I first noticed the pedophila moral panic emerging at around the same time there was increased mainstream discourse into consent and feminism. Somewhere between 2005 and 2015, that timeframe. A lot of it was reemerging feminist discourse that had been going on since the 1970s though. That's around when a lot of folk might have heard "rape culture" for the first time. It's when there was a lot more media criticism about depictions of women. There was a lot of discourse in that time too about sexualizing minors, but from a more sensible angle, not these bizarre child kidnapping conspiracy theories.
A lot of what American conservative paranoia does is latch onto ambient feelings to twist them, re-normalize them to better serve standard American bigotry. In this case I think white suburban ideology latched onto the ambient growing concerns about consent, boundaries, women's empowerment, all of that, and did trial and error twisting it until landing on something indefensible: Pedophiles. Surely pedophiles don't respect consent. They're the worst type of person imaginable, and they tap into that growing discourse. But instead of the discourse focusing on anything liberatory, or talking about patriarchy, or white supremacy, it became a way for conservative ideology to express ownership over children. It's repackaged queerphobia too, like you said.
It has to be connected to conservative ideology worried about children too. Each of the moral panics in previous decades centered around the autonomy of young people set upon by some social shift.
The 60s hippies were kids who rejected things like the Vietnam draft, or rejected the suburbanization they were destined to be a part of. The 80s were a reaction to more women entering the workforce, relegating childcare to daycares or babysitters. You'll notice that was reflected in the media too. So many of 80s horror movies are about children left alone in their suburban home while the middle class parents are out, while a working class coded murderer stalks the neighborhood with a big knife. There was a general panic about children being unaccompanied or being left with strangers. The Satanic Panic was a panic over what might be going on in daycares, now that more women were workers instead of rearing children all day.
And now in the 20s, more children are expressing autonomy through the internet. You can't control who your kid is in contact with anymore or what they're reading. But who knows where that leads, so the panic is all about brainwashing or secret cults or scary people in masks who will kidnap your kids in the Wal-Mart parking lot.
And now in the 20s, more children are expressing autonomy through the internet. You can’t control who your kid is in contact with anymore or what they’re reading.
It's interesting that the way conservatives have latched onto this is by trying to dismantle libraries and public education. Like, phones seem like a much more obvious and direct "vector" for the
Spooky Satanic Leftist Agendaor whatever, and yet they refuse to acknowledge it. Funny, considering how much those same groups of people like to complain about this and that new-fanged whatever.Well it's important to recognize that the conservatives are just as addicted to social media as everyone else is. They can target TikTok for a ban because kids are the only ones using it - but the only legislation they might ever force onto Facebook will be to force them to unban everyone who got banned for racial slurs.
I think understanding it in terms of reaction is helpful. If I understand it correctly, these panics seem illegitimate and a reaction to social progress.
The new social progress causing reaction, according to you, is children having autonomy in online spaces.
How do you square this with other opinions in the thread that argue there are legitimate concerns about groomers organizing in places like discord and tiktok? Do you think it's moving out of the realm of pure reaction?
Oh, there are real pedophiles on the internet, yeah. I don't mean to say it's just parents being strict with their kids. It's a legitimate concern, but I don't really have the expertise to say how legitimate or widespread it is. I do think a lot of the paranoia around pedohpiles does have to do with kids figuring out new ways to express themselves, find online communities, or interact with social media in a way that's very alienating to their parents. But then...
A random thought I'm having is that a lot of pedo men seem to think their decades of living without consequence will extend to an online space as well. They think it's just like the office where they hit on their employee's daughter, then get away with it. Except now there are records, time stamps, pictures, people's full names. Justin Roiland for instance was caught being a pedo using his main Facebook account listed under his real name with a picture of his face. It's absurd how little planning these groomers put into this. Maybe that's why there's more reasonable discourse about pedophiles now? There's simply more evidence of it now. It's hard to dispute pictures, chat logs, etc.
And the conservative pedophilia panic is absolutely reaction, since they're taking the feelings about the real threat of online groomers and instead focusing on teachers and fictional kidnapping gangs who want to steal white children.Every reactionary movement has to at least gesture in the direction of something that's real or something that people feel is real, then it's used to suppress social progress.
Also I've also never heard reactionaries mention the very widespread, very real issue of undocumented children getting wound up in prostitution, which is a huge part of human trafficking
I think it's more an active de-normalization of existing trends. Like there have always been extremely strong tendencies towards sexualizing minors in mainstream American pop culture - I wouldn't say it was socially acceptable, but more that it was seen as sort of pervy or disreputable on a level with watching porn, going to strip clubs, etc as long as it didn't extend to (openly known) actual assault.
Like ~10-15 years ago reddit built its name on catering to pedophiles, necrophiles, zoophiles, and violent misogynists in general, even going so far as to openly honor the creep behind most of them. ~15 years ago there was actual earnest age of consent discourse still going on. 15-20 years ago it was common to have middle aged men sexualizing teenage girls on sitcoms, and it was at worst shown as pathetic and something to laugh at. Middle aged men carrying on affairs with teenage babysitters was considered an acceptable plot point in media in general, where the only problem was portrayed as being the adultery and not the predation. *Gestures wildly at literally the entire framing and discourse around teenage popstars going back decades.* There was massive amounts of adult men preying on teenage girls throughout Hollywood and the recording industries pretty much since their very inception, and the scorn it got was because of the lasciviousness or out-of-wedlock sex, not because it was a grown man preying on a child.
Literally the only exception from that time period I know of offhand was The Sopranos of all things having an episode where Tony wants to jump and/or kill a coach who he learns is sleeping with teenage girls, only to have his "morality winning out" moment and calling the cops on him instead. Fucking Tony Soprano had more of a moral compass than the mainstream pop culture.
I feel like there's been a ground shift towards rejecting these :libertarian-approaching: tendencies in recent years, and that entails both noticing all the creepy shit :libertarian-approaching:s do towards kids and calling it out when it happens.
Gestures wildly at literally the entire framing and discourse around teenage popstars going back decades.
Looking back on Britney Spears is wild and how she was literally a fuck toy schoolgirl in her music video. I was a teen around the time so it was off my radar about creepy older men lusting over her.
Remember those countdown timers people would make for various child celebrities turning 18? That kinda stuff would float up onto the front of reddit, even get tv news coverage.
There was massive amounts of adult men preying on teenage girls throughout Hollywood
This is literally a QAnon anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
its quite simple. the Right uses a separate definition of pedophilia. to them, anything that can possibly compromise the dominion of the Patriarch over the sexual or even just independent lives of their children/women is pedophilia. this is why its so universally applicable for them. Sex education, probably the single most effective preventative of actual pedophilia, is itself -to the right- grooming, because it's perceived to open the possibility for the kids to have any kind of sex that isn't under the watchful eye of God and Marriage. Also when a Patriarch does actual pedophilia its fine because the victims are their property
on the Left we're at least clear on what pedophilia actually is, but because of our inherent mistrust of coercive & traditional institutions we do tend to go a little overboard. i don't think this is a huge problem when its mostly making people angry at the ruling class
'myth of consensual sex: isn't there someone you forgot to ask?' is the actual ideology of chuds
yeah, once secondary sex characteristics you can do a lot with cameras, lighting, and basic makeup.
maybe people would be less weird about it if we didn't have decades of airbrushed 14-16 year olds on fashion magazines and 28 year olds playing highschoolers on TV
I do think it's an issue that the main representation 18 year olds get in media is the hottest 26 year olds you've ever seen
this is exactly the kind of secondary issue getting twisted up about that's overboard. the reeds of culture and art critique does nothing to protect actual people, just massage the egos of people for having the 'correct' amount of puritan opinions about casting & content in high school movies
real action for movies are stricter child labor laws & stronger unions. the systems that protect anyone on set are the ones that concretely protect children. i'm far more interested in the performers' comfort than interpretation of the final work
protecting actual children in schools is about giving them dignity & authority, the capacity for someone to abuse power is a proportion to how much they have. teachers and administrations getting to enact their own tiny tyrannies on schools and classrooms is the environment that facilitates abuse, we don't need to be scrying into the minds of abusers and determining whether they were led into it by the casting of some adult in a movie (spoiler: they were not)
I don’t think you understand how organized pedophiles are. You can apply a lot of your intuitions about white supremacist organizations to pedophiles and it would be pretty accurate. Lots of dark money donations. Front websites that seem edgy but innocuous but their core usership is full of pedos who have dedicated back channels which control moderation (these tend to also be Nazi safe havens fwiw). TikTok is full of pedos and so is Discord. Not because these platforms are particularly bad, but because they are internet platforms and we have almost nothing in terms of established social norms for protecting kids online. Parents don’t understand the risks. Corporations wanna “offer parental controls” to essentially offload the responsibility onto parents who have no clue those half assed tools exist.
Children’s rights advocacy is difficult because children can be very difficult to organize without a centralizing commonality like abusive child labor to bring them together. But they are one of the most abused demographics in existence, systemically and interpersonally. I know a shit ton of people who were groomed online and have looked back on it like, “oh yeah I guess that’s what that was”
Front websites that seem edgy but innocuous but their core usership is full of pedos who have dedicated back channels which control moderation (these tend to also be Nazi safe havens fwiw)
:what-the-hell: Can you elobarate a bit? This is the first time I'm hearing this.
It’s a reference to several sites like some of the chan boards and the one that got kicked off Cloudflare last year. Fascist leaders have a tendency to be arrested for CP and a lot of these sites have a fast-and-loose relationship with moderating CP. And of course, the crypto wallets that donate to these sites are huge. The amount of money that passes through them is well beyond what you would need to run a site like that, even at the scale they do. Imo the fascist organizing and the pedo organizing are very interlinked
My only contribution is to suggest Jeamie Loftus' Lolita Podcast. It details how an overtly anti-pedophilia book was more or less franchised into serving the opposite purpose, and it makes a surprisingly good lens for looking at America's tolerance for sexual predation
Lolita the book is actually good and cool and does not in any way condone or endorse pedophilia. Kubrick did the opposite. Stanley Kubrick as an aside but huge part because of this is a guy I would love to see torn down. He put out a fee good films but as far as his approach to film making goes and especially turning Lolita into pedo sympathy thst has tarnished the whole thing forever, he's shitty to actors cause he doesn't know how to direct and center framing is how your parents take photos. I love 2001, Strangelove, Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket and really like Barry Lyndon but holy fuck do I hate Kubrick.
Yeah, I read the book in high school, I just don't want that in my search history
I had to defend Nabokov somewhere in this thread and it was an opportunity.
it's such a perfect microcosm of how we collectively think about CSA. even thinking about or describing it or anything adjacent to it is experienced as unconsciously supporting it, so for moral self-preservation we maintain strategic blindspots that allow the problem to fester.
Lola Sebastien does a great video essay about it . It's like other people making the abyss gaze back at you when the novel is having a look at the abyss if you get my odd metaphor.
I think pedophilic culture is more common, intentional or not. Like hiring grown ass adults to play children in the media. Or porn being very weird about babysitters and siblings (blah blah blah kink shaming whatever).
And it is a problem. Republicans and Christians/Catholics have a lot of institutional power, and they have lots of pedos in their ranks. they are obsessed with teenage girls’ bodies and want to control it for the lord or whatever. Making it taboo to talk about periods, pregnancy, abortion, families, and so on makes it easier for an “authority” figure to groom a child into accepting terrible things, whether it’s a worldview or abuse by said figure
Conservatives used to freak out about Muslim grooming gangs in the UK. But recently the conservative government changed their laws to make it harder for illegal migrants to be protected against human trafficking gangs
hiring grown ass adults to play children in the media
this is nothing new, watch high school movies from the 70s and 80s and it's even more blatant than today. Sissy Spacek was like 27 in Carrie, a movie that begins with a bunch of "high school" girls naked in a locker room
Personally, I think this is a fine practice (having older actors play younger people). I don't really want kids anywhere near the famously groomy entertainment business.
The desire of directors and writers to have naked teenage girls is fucking weird though
Or porn being very weird about babysitters and siblings (blah blah blah kink shaming whatever)
Kink shaming is beyond the point. Incest porn got a major boost right around the time the porn sites were seeing a lot of pressure from their finance vendors to crack down on “exploitative content”. I quote that not because I don’t think they get rid of a lot of genuinely exploitative content, but because that monicker was used as pretense to disempower a lot of sex workers, but that’s a whole other topic. Bottom line is certain keywords got deprioritized or flagged as exploitative. As soon as “teen” became flagged, a bunch of fetish content that catered to situations where “teens” happened to be interacting got real popular.
So if people are into whatever kind of play that is, that’s their prerogative. But there are material underpinnings to the whole trend which are much more insidious than any individual kink.
Conservatives used to freak out about Muslim grooming gangs in the UK. But recently the conservative government changed their laws to make it harder for illegal migrants to be protected against human trafficking gangs
Because it was never about protecting kids, it was about protecting white/british kids.
But recently the conservative government changed their laws to make it harder for illegal migrants to be protected against human trafficking gangs
Which law is that?
I don't think pedophilia has been any different than it was for years. It's just more in the forefront now thanks to conservatives weaponizing pedophilia accusations and Q for blowing up with conspiracy theories about it. People are still as weird over teenage girls as they were in the 90's and before, but now I'd argue there's more people who can pick up on clues about creepy old men trying to advance on girls.
No, there is a pedophile problem in society that we are only just now scratching the surface of.
When you say there's a pedophile problem, do you mean that there are more people who are sexually attracted to children than previously thought or that the number of pedophiles is still small but they are allowed to prey on kids?
Or something else like a pervasive aura of sexualization of children like other people in the thread are saying?
Like it’s been a systematic problem filled with powerful and organized individuals for quite some time, and suddenly people are catching onto the fringes. You wouldn’t believe the amount of child abuse this baby can fit in it slaps the hood of America
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Catch_a_Predator
this might have a bit to do with it - I haven't watched regular TV since like 2002, but I recall this show was a big deal culturally (never watched it)
it certainly had it's flaws and conflicts of interest, but the reason it was canceled is pretty wild (CW: suicide)
spoiler
In November 2006, Perverted-Justice announced that another To Catch a Predator sting had been conducted with law enforcement in Murphy, Texas. There were 25 men who arrived at the location on Mandeville Drive over four days, with law enforcement investigating additional suspects. The predators included a former church music director and a former police officer in his 60s. These additional suspects, who conducted chats but did not arrive at the undercover house, included Kaufman County assistant district attorney Louis Conradt, who shot and killed himself on November 5, 2006, at his home when police attempted to serve him with a search warrant, after he had been caught talking to and exchanging pictures with a Perverted-Justice volunteer posing as a 13-year-old boy. After Conradt failed to appear at a prearranged meeting, NBC and local police tracked him to his home. He committed suicide as police and an NBC camera crew entered his home, capturing the scene when the fatal shot was fired. His estate, managed by his sister Patricia Conradt, filed suit against Dateline for US$105 million. The case was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.
the abrupt ending of the show, along with the fact that the honey-pot operation was ensnaring cops and DAs - it shows that there are likely many pedos in positions of power and 'respect', but then it got shutdown - which sure could have fueled many conspiracy spirals for the 'think of the children' crowd
didn't see any mentions in the thread so thought it was worth adding
edit: oh ya and all the catholic priest stuff has been percolating for decades - there was certainly a peak of those kinds of stories in the news but I can't say when that was really
I learned from an FBI agent friend-of-friend that pedos very commonly kill themselves within days after a raid occurs, even before any trial is started. It might be why most outed pedos are completely remorseless, as the self-aware ones took care of themselves.
All i have to say its weird that even with this moral panic child marriage is still legal in parts of US like Wyoming.
Also when the victims are teens especially boys it seems to be more accepted in general like :macron: who was groomed by his teacher.
Not really it's a serious issue that effects all levels of society. And people are only beginning to scratch the surface.
I'd say the most common and socially accepted from of this is teachers sexually assaulting middle or high school students. Most people won't even think it's a form of pedophilia if a female teacher does this to a male student. They talk about how lucky the student is.
Both and neither.
I think pedophilia is definitely more widespread than some people might think. I think there are some groups of elite's and other connected pedos engaging in sexual abuse of children, on top of just normal not powerful people also abusing children. Epstein, the Catholic Church, there's all sorts of proven, large networks.
I also think this (and the trans obsession) is basically the latest "satanic panic". Matt Christmas in the Hell on Earth podcast made a point about witch burnings in Scotland during and after the English Civil War that I think there are a lot of parallels to. IIRC, he described the witch trials as the Scottish being unable to psychologically deal with the collapse of the Scottish Kirk and loss to the English and looking for someone to blame that I think have some interesting parallels.
So I would say don't go crazy about trying to resolve the contradictions. The threats are both real and imagined.
TW: the most disturbing thing I've ever seen: the trailer for "the world according to garp" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmRPh1xwab8
I find this really fucking disturbing. I haven't seen the movie, but regardless of if you use roku, goto IMDB, yt, etc., the trailer is basically the same. After about the 1 minute make you get a slow motion HD closeup of a baby's genitals. It's so fucking gross and offputting. Also ruined that song for me.
When I was in school, I got in trouble for things like gang colors (I don't remember what I was wearing that day), spaghetti straps, dresses not reaching my knees or showing boobcrack, no flip flops. I remember one teacher had a fucking ruler for measuring students clothes and it made me really uncomfortable. If my spaghetti straps didn't one inch they made you go home or wear a huge shirt with the school logo on it.
I think there are a lot of children-involved things we should be panicking about, but all the attention seems to be focused on fake problems like book #11,634 in the highschool library having boymouth to boygina sketches or w/e.
treating children's bodies as inherently sexual is kind of exactly what the problem is. it's a naked baby. that's how they are when they come out of the vag. i think more repression is exactly the kind of psychological condition that enables, rather than prevents the abuse of children.
Perception of this stuff is something that has demonstrably changed over the last hundred years, possibly because of the increased awareness of pedophilia. My grandparents have a photo album and one of the pictures is of kids in Germany playing in a fountain, all naked, because a swimsuit wasn't considered necessary until you were a teenager. That kind of thinking doesn't fly today - all kids are considered sexually vulnerable, and it's a mindset that has been onboarded so completely that even completely neutral depictions of genitals are construed as sexual.
Yeah, I remember that kids up to the age of toddlers used to be nude at the beach when I was a teen (late 00s). Then they all started to wear bottoms. Now they even put tops on the baby girls.
Was not seen as anything but innocent at the time. My favourite picture of myself as a child is me and my brother (both nude) with hats, he was dressed in a cowboy hat and had a toy pistol while I was in a baby bonnet wielding a plastic cow as a gun. Nothing sexual about the picture, but I can see how a nude 4 and 2 year old would raise some eyebrows at this point.
I actually don't find nudism problematic. I do think it's a problem where we live in a society where rated R movies don't show weewees or vanjays but random sitcoms and movie trailers have no issue SURPRISE FLASHING GENITALS IN YOUR FACE with absolutely no warning.
I don't think it's repression. If I were watching a movie trailer and one minute into it, a 60 year old man shows up and starts shaking his dong in front of the camera right up close, am I repressed with psychological condition for feeling violated? After all, he too, came out of the womb naked. It's indistinguishably gross to me. You did actually watch the trailer, right? I do find fully naked babies on TV offensive in the general sense, but this specific example is off-the-rails nuclear next-level "WTF" material.
Flashing, indecent exposure, etc., are categorically sexual assault. I genuinely feel like I was flashed by the movie director just because I watched a fucking movie trailer.
yes i watched the trailer. i assure you we're seeing the same thing. i do not find the human body inherently sinful. i saw a baby's penis and was just okay with it.
oh ok, why don't you become a police officer and tell the next woman who files a police report about a random man flashing her in the street "I do not find the human body inherently sinful. You saw a penis and should just be okay with it.". That's really fucked up.
why don't i become a police officer to tell the next woman who breastfeeds her child in public that she is in flagrant violation of decency laws and needs to cover herself up? You know, a thing that actually happens with some frequency?
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sound glib about your trauma. I'm just trying to tell you that it is by no means universal, and also a baby is not the same as an adult in that one is sexual and the other is not, and I don't think this is that complicated of an idea.
A different focus but the same overall trend of moral panics about pedophilia against ongoing sexualisation of children and everything else in American culture, while people who actually commit child sex abuse remain overwhelmingly family members and family friends.
