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One worrying trend I've been seeing in the modern world is the social outlawing of any form of permissible contact between older people and children. It seems that with the obsession modern western society has on children's sexuality, all of the sudden the default position when an adult interacts with a child that isn't related to them by blood, is that the adult is a sexual predator.
Especially on the motte there have been a lot of recent concerns about 'grooming,' which as a thread below mentions is an extremely muddy and useless term. In my opinion it should be tabooed from these discussions.
This issue becomes especially salient when you look at the rise of internet addiction issues, and the mental health/suicide problems that come along with it. Many kids go to internet forums like this because they don't have role models or guides they respect in life. They end up forming parasocial relationships with internet celebrities that are probably more likely to be predatory and harmful to the child, as if the habit of going on the internet all day isn't bad enough.
We as a society are losing vast amounts of illegible knowledge every day as older people die, exit the workforce, or suffer cognitive decline. There are many areas where 'book smarts' can't teach you everything, especially when it comes to emotional issues or social issues. The rise of inceldom, trans, and other social movements primarily focused on social issues of young people are a prime example.
My question is: How are adults supposed to offer guidance to children in the modern world, especially adult men? There are numerous stories of a child's father having the police called on them because people think the father might be a sexual predator, in this environment why would any man risk the reputational and legal risk of mentoring a kid?
Is it worth losing any realistic relationship between the young and old because of vague fears of sexual predation? Does the current hysteria even help sexual predation, or does preventing children from having good role models make them more insecure and vulnerable to bad actors?
Ideally by cracking down on grooming or grooming-adjacent behaviours so hard that nobody questions that there could be any ulterior motive at play. If we show that we take it extremely seriously, then people will have more confidence that innocent interactions are indeed innocent. If we excuse or refuse to punish or god forbid even encourage, especially with things like attempting to shut parents out of school curriculums and encouraging kids to keep secrets from parents, nobody is going to trust a single thing to be above board. Responsible parents don't take chances with their kids.
Consider the quoted example in this post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/02/social-censorship-the-first-offender-model/
Simply replace "mugger" with "groomer".
The crux of the matter is that the authorities have lost a massive amount of trust and they need to do things to win it back. The ideal form this would take is stringent vetting, better transparency and swift and obvious punishment when guidelines are transgressed.
Correct, and also discouraging divergent sexuality themselves. If 99.99% of coaches of the boys team have no incentive to diddle the boys, all the mentorship, ass slapping, gum chewing, shower monitoring, etc can happen in a safe, healthy, mentorship arena. I am a happily married man with no plans on ever cheating, but if you made me head coach of the women's volleyball team at a local high school and part of my job was going into the locker room and preventing bullying etc, I think that would be an incredibly uncomfortable situation for everyone involved. AS IT SHOULD BE. I might know the girls are 16 and illegal on some intellectual level but my penis certainly doesn't. Being "Coach Boner" would be the best possible outcome. Which is little comfort. Particularly when the actual job of coaching volleyball does require coaches to make physical contact with players from time to time.
Explain...how does “cracking down on divergent sexuality” keep the hypothetical straight male coach in check? It seems like the implied answer would be straight female coaches.
Either way, the number of “straight” men who decide to abuse boys is surprisingly high.
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it’d probably be better just to have some sort of eunuch caste that’s responsible for mentoring kids, that way you don’t have to worry about any of this shit in the first place.
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