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?
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.
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.
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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.
This is literally a QAnon anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
????