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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30414 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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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?

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.

I find that "groomer" here is usually used to refer to adult authority figures and sexual situations, which is a lot narrower than you say.

"Taboo your words" is not supposed to be used to deny people the vocabulary to discuss something. If you don't like "groomer", what word should be used instead?

Points taken, but the definition of "groomer" has recently expanded to cover activities that are not sexually grooming children. So I'm going to say a taboo would be valuable.

Is someone claiming that an adult is preparing a child for an illegal sexual relationship or are they claiming that somehow LGBT material is being discussed? These are two very different things.

Sexual material is being discussed or otherwise involved. It's only specifically LGBT because the people who've tried it have usually been LGBT, not because it wouldn't count if they weren't.

Sex education has been controversial for years. Calling it "grooming" is new, and this form of demonization didn't get used before it was specifically the LGBT content that people were angry about. I think it's reasonable to suspect that this tenuous claim of sex/sexuality/gender-related education leading to pedophilia did not just happen to occur when the controversy was about LGBT topics instead of about sex education more generally.

Calling it "grooming" is new, and this form of demonization didn't get used before it was specifically the LGBT content that people were angry about.

Or alternatively, until children were taken to adult venues to watch sexualised adult entertainment. I don't remember any class trips to Hooters going un-objected to in years gone by.

i think i was exposed to my fair share of sexualized adult entertainment as a kid. lots of cheerleaders, dancers, shit like that, not much different from what you’d see at an establishment like Hooters.

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