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It is grooming, though, isn't it?
I don't think it is "grooming."
You could call it "brainwashing" or something, based on one's ideological bent. But I think the prototypical case of grooming is an adult acting as mentor to a child in order to personally have a sexual relationship with that particular child.
To use an imaginary straight example, if a sex-positive progressive woman was trying to tell boys that their attraction to girls was fine, and that they should ignore Christian morality and pursue sexual relations with whatever girls will have them, we might consider that to be a bad sort of moral education, but that's not the same as her trying to butter those boys up for a sexual relationship with her (i.e. grooming.) She might just honestly believe that sexual liberation is a good thing for everyone, and not intend to ever personally benefit from the sexually loose boys she creates.
We should name harms correctly, and I've never heard a convincing, good faith argument that the conflation of traditional "grooming" and "grooming"-as-sexual-brainwashing was a good idea. It's like saying, "isn't it terrible the way that modern educators murder children?" and then I ask in surprise about what you're talking about, and you reply that many teachers teach kids pro-drug messages, which could result in their death, which is literally the same thing as murder. It might be a bad thing they're teaching the kids, but conflating two bad things is rarely a good faith argument tactic.
Grooming is a subset of brainwashing, or at least highly overlapping circles. Your distinction isn't as distinct as you'd like it to be.
You keep focusing on it being for personal sexual gratification, but it's not the case every time, even when it's about sex. You can groom a girl into being a prostitute, where your motivation is financial, not sexual.
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I don't think so. "Grooming" is a pretty flexible word to start with. One of it's definitions is very generic:
and I don't think you can argue the way it's being used by non-progressives doesn't meet that definition. You could argue that it's unfair, because it evokes the sexual meaning of the word, but
It's far less unfair than the word games progressives were playing for years.
There's a pretty broad definition for "grooming" as creepy behavior as well:
This also seems to fit like a glove. It doesn't help that mainstream publications were using "grooming" to describe consensual relations between adults.
I'd love to, but linguistic prescriptivism seems to have fallen out of fashion. But if we can get everybody else on board here's a list of words describing harm, that are used egregiously incorrectly, in my opinion. Not saying you have to go after every twitterer and tumblrina, but would be nice if we could get them dropped from academia and mainstream news:
systemic racism
misogyny
objectification
transphobia
trans genocide
islamophobia
wage slavery
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