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I definately do not want to imply that you or any other blue here is a pedophile. I do not believe I or @naraburns has claimed that you or any other blue here is a pedophile. I have never understood the word "groomer" to be a synonym for pedophile, and in fact it is not a synonym for pedophile. It is explicitly a term for people who violate trust in an attempt to harmfully and secretly modify children's sexuality. Up until very recently, the only people who would even dream of doing that were in fact pedophiles, but it's the abuse of trust and the clandestine modification that's being objected to, not sex with kids. If the consernation is over percieved equivocation in language, allow me to be the first to apologize.
If you and others object to this so strongly, because suddenly conversation becomes impossible if one uses terms in a specific and unambiguous way that you don't agree with, let's not allow it to interfere with our communication. Give me a word. Give me a word and I will use it. you pick the fucking word to encapsulate "a person who is motivated to grossly abuse my trust and their authority in an attempt to fuck with my child's head, damaging their sexuality and their sanity, in secret and against my expressed wishes, to a degree that makes keeping them and anyone who associates with or supports them as far away from anyone I care about as possible", and scout's honor I will use that word unfailingly from now on. I will even translate quotes from others into that word, because I sincerely believe that is the idea most of them are trying to communicate.
This offer is open to any blue here. Pick the word that you think fairly encapsulates the above concept, and you will never hear "groomer" from me again. Make it as anodyne as you like, as anodyne as possible; it will pick up all the negative affect it needs in very short order.
(8 letters or less please for convenience, please and thank you.)
"Recruiter" is nine letters.
That works just fine for me. Done and done.
Expanding it explicitly to “trans recruiters” the first time in a post/reply should work pretty darn well, like my verbose replacement for “woke”: “purity spiral progressives.” It’s descriptive without being pejorative.
I’ll probably use it too, except in the cases where instances of clear sexual grooming occur, like taking kids to strip clubs or giving them pornographic books in schools.
I'm gonna push back a bit on the 'porngraphic books' side of things, here (and I guess in response to @naraburns at here). I'm sure that the central examples of this behavior exist -- creepy school teachers or Boy Scout leaders providing copies of Playboy or Lolita or Curiously Named Porn Movie XXX to their charges, or less direct stuff like Channel 5 -- but the actual example brought here is from this link, and it's not like LibsOfTikTok or affiliates are soft-pedaling their opposition.
I don't think these books are appropriate for pre-teens, and I'd be very skeptical for early puberty puberty. And I'll admit that I'm not a parent, and for some pretty obvious reasons not going to become a parent, so my measures may be off, here. But I'm skeptical that they're harmful for 16+s, in the way that a strip club visit or a direct feed to a California studio's 'casting couch' would be -- and given the MPAA ratings for films like Ace Ventura or Logan's Run, I don't think this is some bizarre only-childless-wackos spot.
I don't want to go too strong in defense of these pieces as books: I'm also skeptical of graphic novels as a particularly good medium for helping people deal or understand sexuality, biography-as-storytelling is really prone to this obnoxious vanish-up-its-own-tailpipe that downplays difficult questions like 'what's the point of this story' or 'does this actually inform', and these particular books double-down on these problems and have their own issues.
((Flamer has a delightful blurb about how it will save lives, which is slightly at odds with a often depressing and sometimes simply not-pruriently-gross actual content; this just something simply known, rather than actually demonstrated or even considered as a claim to be evaluated.))
But these books are 'pornographic' in the sense that a lot of Heinleinian or McAffrey-esque fiction; they portray sex for small portions, not always in sanitized or even idealized lights. They're not solely or primarily depictions of sex: they're "obscene" in the colloquial sense of having adult content that you'd not expect on broadcast television, rather than the legal sense of being nothing else. They're about sexual orientation, in that sense critics are definitely right, and I'm sure a sufficiently horny teenager could manage to find them more interesting than a Victoria's Secret or Men's Health catalog... but probably not by much, and without nearly as much content. Flamer's a little over 350 pages; it spends probably an order of magnitude more treating homophobic jokes like a high-level radiation hazards than it does any level of nudity or sex, and most of the stuff that does is more an argument for asexuality than otherwise. Gender Queer's more marginal, on these lines, but it's still much closer to a low-R than anything you'd see in a porn shop, and I don't think the extent it's worse than Titanic is an extent that makes it grooming behavior.
Now, there are frameworks that specifically treat all of that mess as pornographic, and even do so well before stereotypical extreme-fundie ranges, and there are valid reasons for parents to not want to have to explain what, exactly, that friendly ghost was doing in to Dan Akroyd in Ghostbusters (or... a lot of the stuff in Heinlein). And any adult specifically pointing a student to those specific works would get my hackles up. But I think it fits in closer to FCfromSSC's 'betrayal of trust', and the mere presence of the book in a library doesn't really seem like it's part of gdanning's "manipulative behaviors that the abuser uses to gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse, and reduce the risk of being caught," or even a broader "behaviors done to encourage or de-stigmatize unacceptable sexual behaviors in the target audience"
Nor do I think this is merely arguing over definitions: not being able to separate these two sets of problems leads pretty quickly to absurdity. Not just obvious stuff like ‘grooming’ that covers even abstinence-focused sex ed and VD-warnings and Reefer Madness (even when provided by a parent!) being meaningless, but that it doesn’t seem related to the hard objections.
I'll take "libraries" as my example context.
It's common in the US to have libraries in schools, at least in middle school and high school. There are also public libraries that are often after-school locations for nearby underage students. (Setting aside college/university libraries as not relevant to this point.) On the face of it, a library is a big collection of books--how much does the inclusion or exclusion of any given book matter, within the big sea of books? Some exclusion is inevitable, barring L-Space (sorry, PTerry).
Enter librarians. Sure, you can search the stacks yourself, but if you are in a rush or inexperienced, asking a resident expert is a very useful approach. Libraries are usually networked, so librarians can pull from a much larger pool of books, but most often, you're going to get recommendations for things that are in the stacks right now.
So you've got the availability of a particular controversial book, and the judgment of the librarian as to how much that book is promoted through placement and explicit recommendation. Librarians are probably the closest group to academia that isn't explicitly academia, and as you might expect, are biased to the left to an extreme degree. Their modal sense of appropriateness is generally governed by those ideological beliefs--among other things, that sexually descriptive material is not harmful to children, and may be helpful. As a result, Drag Queen Story Hour is now a thing, despite many parents' concerns about men wearing women's underwear that want to spend more time with their children.
That’s a valid class of concern, and one I’ve voiced whenever ALA Book Ban pieces are taken as fact. And it can be a ‘grooming’-style problem, if the adult is directly promoting specific titles to individual students, if the content is predominately sexual and sexy, or if there is an effort to encourage students to hide the material from parents.
But it’s often not, and the examples brought forth here aren’t that.
That doesn’t make them good, either as books or as librarian decisions. At the very least, they’re an intentional effort to bypass and contradict some subset of parent decisions about appropriate content.
But the differences between these two criticisms are severe. A parent can not betray their own trust when making these sort of appropriate content decisions, where a bad parent could groom their own child; a wrongly-trusted adult can groom a child while acting within accepted content.
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I really, really like "purity spiral progressives" as a substitute for "woke." I must be one of the most prominent complainers around here about "woke" as a term, but, gosh, "purity spiral progressives" is just precise. It tells me exactly what you're referring to and why you think it's bad.
It probably helps that I also agree with you that purity spirals are both common and pernicious amongst people with views similar to mine. You say "woke" and I say "Well, okay, do you mean me or not?" You say "purity spiral" and I say "Oh, yes, big problem, yup, I can follow what you're complaining about."
I am less enthused by "trans recruiters." It's better than "groomers" by a long shot, and it shares the trait of telling me what you're concerned about (namely, I assume, causing people to be transgender who otherwise would be perfectly happy as they are). It's awkward in that nobody believes themselves to be "recruiting" transgender people, so you're describing your interpretation of their behaviour in terms that imply that it is their interpretation of their behaviour when it is not. I think it ends up being keyed more closely to your specific political beliefs, as a result. I can't know who is a "trans recruiter" without knowing which behaviours you think will have the effect of creating transgender people out of people who would have been otherwise happy. There are a wide range of views on that subject, so different people are going to use the word to refer to widely different sets of people.
Still, I appreciate your efforts to find more precise terminology.
It’s not necessarily “otherwise happy” kids I’m worried for, it’s kids at that stage where they’re discovering unexpected feelings about bodies and trying to pattern-match it to what the adults around them have been teaching them.
If they’ve been told happy things about switching gender being as easy as changing Tip to Ozma, they might endure the hormones in good faith until they figure out it was just bad pattern-matching and stop, at which point they might be sterile or otherwise physically disordered.
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You don't think "purity spiral" is pejorative? I would regard it as having a strongly negative connotation even with things outside the culture war, even with things that I like outside the culture war. If I heard someone called someone a purity spiral Buffalo Bills fan, I'd think of someone that not only dislikes the New England Patriots, but someone that would chastise a fellow fan for admitting that Tom Brady was actually a great quarterback. In turn, the respondent might purity spiral down to, "yeah, but you probably still think he threw at least a few touchdowns without cheating, as where Real Bills Fans know that Bill Belicheat has never fairly accomplished anything".
Aren't purity spirals always bad?
Yes, they are. That’s why I’m referring exclusively to that subset of radical conflict-theory progressives who are using progressivism as a club against both their natural enemies in the red tribe and those who are somewhat or even slightly to the “right” of them: the Tulsi Gabbards and the JK Rowlings.
Liberals and progressives who are willing to explain and discuss their firmly held beliefs about privilege, poverty, race, and gender, and don’t reflexively fling “Nazi”, “racist”, and “fascist” are not “woke.” They’re not riding that endorphin-fueled purity spiral, they’re still trying to convince.
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