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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.)
This whole discussion has helpfully provided me with a great example of the right quietly redefining a word for political advantage he way the far left redefined racism. Thanks guys.
I strongly disagree. Please tell me: do you believe my art teacher telling me I should come to school in women's underwear to get in touch with my true self qualifies as grooming?
I've brought this up twice now, and nobody in the "groomer is a slur" camp has deigned to state their opinion on it. I'm curious why, when it seems like such a clear example they could build trust by reassuring people they are against it. If they are, in fact, against it.
To be clear - are you claiming this physically happened to you? If so, I'd appreciate if you elaborated a bit, gave context, etc, although it makes sense if you don't want to.
I know a lot of trans people, many of whom transitioned in high school, and at least 80% of them weren't encouraged at all by their school / parents to be trans, and despite knowing a lot of personal details of several I've never heard of anything like that happening, so it's not really representative of the median 'trans kid'.
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I am certainly against teachers making suggestions about their students' underwear, that is messed up and should not have happened.
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Are you expecting anyone to say "Yeah, that sounds fine"? Because I doubt anyone here would. Do you want a "I'm sorry that happened to you?" like you'd get from the wokes you hate (and which I personally have always thought seems pretty damned patronizing)?
People who think "groomer" is being used too broadly are not denying that groomers do in fact exist. Just like most people who object to "racist" being used as a boo-word do not generally deny that actual racists exist.
Not a single one has said that it's categorically not ok, which confirms my suspicions that people don't want accurate use of the word to catch on.
And no, I don't want anyone's sympathy; I found the whole thing hilarious rather than creepy because she didn't have any personal influence over me. But if my history teacher had suggested it I'd have just asked him what color he wanted, so I'd rather like if we could draw a bright line here for the benefit of future mes who might be tempted into doing far more harmful and permanent things than wearing a bit of lingerie for a nonce.
That we can't completely validates the entire groomer narrative in my eyes.
Look, if you want to assume that everyone who didn't respond personally to your emotive anecdote to say "That's not okay" secretly believes it's okay, I can't stop you, but you've been told by several people now why that is not, in fact, a good faith litmus test.
Several people have told us that they think a clear case of grooming a kid into weird sex shit doesn't actually count as grooming to them, which tells us all we need to know about the whole conversation.
It's just another Virginia school bathroom rape story. "I don't support that, besides it won't happen, and even if it did happen you're weird for still caring about it, yikes". Pure fucking tribal ass covering, and an absolute embarrassment to watch. The whole "groomer fragility" meme is actually true, isn't it?
Please point me to the actual post in which someone said grooming a kid into weird sex shit doesn't actually count as grooming to them. I don't want to read your dishonest paraphrasing, I want to read the actual words you are claiming mean that and ask the person(s) who posted them if that is indeed what they meant.
I assume you are referring to @FiveHourMarathon's reply to you below.
"I don't support that, besides it won't happen, and even if it did happen you're weird for still caring about it, yikes" is not an honest characterization of what he said. The fact that you stealth-edited your comment after he replied makes it clear that you're not actually seeking authentic responses here.
Nobody here is defending grooming, or the behavior of your high school teacher.
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I'm just going to say, I don't know that I have a dog in this fight really, but I will basically never engage with someone who brings up a highly emotionally charged experience like that in an intellectual discussion. Especially online. It's likely to lead to extreme discourtesy and hurt feelings. Whether affirming or disaffirming, it's just stupid to reply to that.
I'm highly anti-war, my politics are all basically downstream of "Iraq was a horrendous multi-level failure that cannot be allowed to be repeated." I've been going to anti-war protests for twenty years now. I don't bring that topic up around veteran friends, they've staked their lives on their position, it would be crass for me to toss off my little Noam Chomsky anecdotes or Pat Buchanan monologues to men who lost friends or body parts in that particular mistake.
I could explain to them that their youth, and perhaps the rest of their lives too, were wasted in an imperialist venture that benefits no one but the Islamic Republic of Iran. I could wax poetic about the post war international order, the failure to understand the Shia-Sunni conflict and balance of power, the absurd belief that inside every Iraqi is an American trying to get out. But I don't, because I don't want to be an asshole to a friend who still has friendly fire nightmares.
So that might be why no one would engage with your story. I sure wouldn't.
I... Don't really understand the "emotionally charged" thing? It's one of the funny anecdotes I tell about my retarded school that was well ahead of its time, like the trips to Cuba to witness the glorious communist future, or the Buddhist convert teachers who never realized the monks were laughing at them behind their backs.
If it's a war story, it's the mildly embarrassing one about finding out that one guy wasn't just really good at gay chicken only after two dates and a very awkward shower.
But if you think it's a serious issue worth being emotional about, why can't you come out against teachers doing it?
Let's say I brought up being raped as a child in a discussion about abortion or parents' rights or something. Any individual should be able to have precise intellectual conversations about that, one with strong disagreement, clear claims, and details - in principle, right? But unless you frequent 4chan or WPD, that's just not gonna happen - it's a taboo topic and saying anything other than "that, and 6 degrees of kevin bacon from it, are cursed ground and must be righteously condemned lest we harm the victim" is just not okay.
In order to discuss the topic, we need to consider how the your teacher telling you to wear girls' underwear might, actually, be good. (note the immense cringe it takes to type that out - i'm basically a pedophile for saying it!). Sure, it isn't, but there are multiple ways something can be bad! And not being able to consider that it might be good means, essentially, you can't discriminate between the ways that it's bad - because "realizing it's not bad in one way" and "realizing it's good" are, in the moment, rather hard to tell apart. After all, if the reasons you previously believed it's bad are mostly wrong ... And there isn't any "uh, it's still actually bad though" you can fall back on to ensure you're safe from "dangerous questions", because that's just an empty claim that prevents you from finding the real reasons.
Notably, that teacher doesn't actually want to have sex with you. At all. Which makes it ... not ... grooming. And not pedophilic. At all!
It can still be bad for being sexually degenerate or anti-nature or a simulacra of appearances or something, there's lots of approaches. But it's not pedophilia. And if it's not pedophilia, why is it grooming?
And this is just a struggle session. You need to personally condemn the outgroup, or you're as bad as them! What? What does this have to do with ... figuring out why something is happening, what its causes are, why it matters? Why does any person need to "come out against" anything? This is a discussion forum, not a cult.
Do you actually think it's bad? Why? Isn't it a good thing to nurture and encourage children's "gender expression"? If we look at all the teachers on Reddit talking about "hatching their little eggs" by doing this kind of thing, they and their supporters obviously don't think it's wrong.
And you are using a much narrower definition of "grooming" than anyone ever used during Me too. Why is that? Why do you constantly manipulate definitions like this? What do you even gain from it?
If I gave you a representative sample of my statements about trans people across all platforms, you'd recoil in horror at how much of a disgusting reactionary I am.
Please stop the personal accusations. It doesn't matter at all if I'm morally disturbing for wanting to groom trans people or anything. Let's just discuss the actual physical events that occur, the people who are transitioning, the circumstances under which they do, motivations, effects, etc.
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Yeah, not how I read it this time or the first time I read it, and I don't have access to your emotional state so I'm going to avoid guessing. It reads more like something I saw regularly on Reddit in the past, where someone would derail a debate about the exact borders of consent or a prominent rape allegation with a post that similarly challenged the reader: "OH, so you're saying it was ok that man raped me while I was blacked out drunk?" Discrediting someone's victimization rarely persuades anyone, and especially not the poster. And you risk inciting an outburst.
Anyway because the only details provided to me are in the one sentence challenge comment, while the poster challenging me has all the details, it's a no-win situation for the reply, because even if you think you analyze it properly the poster can always just reply with new details which weren't in the original post. Like, if you reply to the above hypo "Well, if you chose to drink and your boyfriend didn't know things had changed;" she'll probably just reply "Actually it was a stranger and he slipped everclear into my drink."
If you really want to use your personal experience, you need to provide that kind of context in advance. Like "Hey, this wasn't traumatic for me at all, I'm just presenting it as a narrow hypothetical, no additional facts."
What would be your "well what if X made it ok" in that scenario then?
That's why I asked the question: what would make a bunch of people who were super into "Me Too" and abolishing any potential for sketchy behavior in school and the workplace suddenly get so evasive about this?
If It's never ok for a 25 year old professor to talk to a 22 year old student without the office door open for fear of grooming, why the reluctance to call out weird sex stuff with leftist teachers and kids? Because to an observer the explanation looks an awful lot like "we don't want to prevent that, and oppose any attempt by concerned parents to prevent it until it's fully normalized."
Quibbling over the terminology and trying to prevent any word being used to describe the behavior is just Freddie's "please just tell me what word I am allowed to use" post in action yet again.
Well the premise is false, so who cares? A->B is always true, and usually not very interesting, if ~A. If we're willing to lynch witches on obviously false accusations, why not lynch my neighbor for calling me an asshole, which he at least did do something wrong? If those communist democrats love their violent black soros-funded mobs so much, why can't we firebomb a few abortion clinics? If my grandma's a monkey, then i'm a mixed-species freak of nature, and I can make billions by selling my tissue to biolabs. These are stupid statements! You know the former is a dumb left-wing thing, and is being done for stupid, hypocritical reasons, so - why bring it up - and what does it prove about the latter? They could entirely hypothetically correctly understand the latter doesn't matter, and that the former doesn't matter, and just be delusional about the former - and be in the wrong only in the former case.
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A teacher who independently "goes rogue" and talks to a student about their underwear should be reprimanded and the incident should be investigated. But that is also the case for a teacher playing a multiplayer videogame with a student, or driving the student home, being alone in a closed room with them, etc. Those actions are not intrinsically evil. Whether they are "grooming" depends on the intent which is unknowable. So schools have protocols to regulate student/teacher interaction to make sure teachers never do anything that gives the appearance of foul play. When teachers break protocols, they (should) get investigated, disciplined, and possibly fired.
My problem with "groomer" is that it is motte-baileying. It is equating secretive intimate behavior like you're describing with (a) a trans activist teacher talking about transgenderism informally with students, (b) school psychologists helping transition a child through formal channels with the full knowledge of school admins and their colleagues, and (c) generally, encouraging children to abandon their birth gender or addressing the child as their non-birth gender, in general.
For the record, I do not support (b) and only partially support (c). However, activities (a), (b), and (c) cannot reasonably be called "grooming" and calling them that is using an intentionally inflammatory insult IMO.
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Insufficient information. Intent to abuse was part of "grooming" prior to redefinition.
Whether or not this behavior should be called "grooming" is totally seperate from whether teachers should be engaged in it. (And they shouldn't in my book).
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