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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?
Modern western culture values the state of childish innocence, naive happiness and unbounded creativity of the uneducated mind very highly. Prolonging this state as much as possible is the number one duty of good parents and caretakers. Meanwhile it views trauma as something extremely damaging that persists through life and cripples a person.
It follows quite simply from these basic principles that adults should be kept away from children as much as possible and when it is inevitable to have them near each other, the adult should be closely monitored and audited. After all, at best, the adult will spoil the childish state of bliss, and at worst, they will inflict trauma.
This is quite an inhuman and unusual state of affairs of course. Almost every other modern or premodern society has certain implicit expectations or explicit traditions regarding children being introduced to various adult things as early as possible. Children crave this sort of thing (label anything as “adult” and teenagers will go out of their way to check it out) and many adults get real satisfaction from interacting with children and mentoring them.
Because it’s such a basic human need for both adults and kids, they will exploit any openings in the culture to create bonds with each other. Right now the LGBT ideology and feminism present just such an opportunity. While it’s normally considered creepy to talk about sexual topics with children without being exaggeratedly scientific and impersonal, it’s perfectly normal and encouraged to do so in the framework of LGBT youth, or getting into a mentorship arrangement to create new generation girl bosses or minority leaders.
Western conservatives are absolutely failing to satisfy this basic need and all they can do is to point fingers at some exploitative actors of the opposing side and call them names. It’s pathetic.
Is it any wonder that they are when western progressives actively tore down all the institutions that traditionally satisfied them?
Perhaps. But what you are describing is simply losing and being a loser is pathetic
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