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?

  • ssjmarx [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Barabas [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • StellarTabi [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.