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Boise Pride cancels "Drag Kids" event after a number of sponsors withdrew, with a predictable dose of corporate doublespeak.
I have a lot of thoughts about this, but what is actually bothering me most right now is the coverage. Particularly this gem:
As far as I can tell, this is a publicly-funded news organization actively spreading outright disinformation--FUD, really--about the term "groomer." It reminds me of when "cultural Marxism" became an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory" practically overnight (no big deal, the term "critical theory" recaptured the energy). It reminds me of the sudden fluidity of online dictionary definitions every time a Democrat politician tells an obvious lie. It reminds me of Clarence Thomas being referred to by Harry Reid as a white man.
"Groomer" is effective rhetoric, so I can understand why certain groups want it killed. But like... how is "Drag Kids" even remotely plausibly not grooming? Some of the talking points I see floating on Twitter are, like, "What about child beauty pageants?" But this moves me not a single iota--I hate child beauty pageants for exactly the same reason. It's weird! It's creepy! Or to put it in less emotionally-charged terms: it's not something kids do, when they grow up in loving, healthy, stable environments. At best it's a symptom of deeper troubles; at worst, it's a direct cause of some of those troubles. I mean, yes, emotional and physical and sexual abuse, but also just long term psychological problems. Have you seen the stats on child movie stars? Olympic athletes? I don't think it's necessarily fair to insist that we strip away the culture war angles entirely, but if I'm steelmanning "Drag Kids" the best I can come up with is "this is a new manifestation of an old and widespread form of child abuse, namely, using children for adult entertainment, often by putting inappropriate pressure on them to participate." Are we really going to say Hollywood isn't rife with child abuse? (Hmm, they're also mostly Democrats...) And when someone says "Drag Kids is sexualizing children" only to be met with "no, you're making it sexual, you right-wing pervert, we're just having silly fun"--it's maddening. Like, really? I'm supposed to believe that you're putting your kid in a leather thong for silly fun? Be serious. If that's not grooming, nothing is.
Am I ranting? This feels pretty ranty. But I do have a serious question. What's the appropriate mistake-theory response to strategic abuses of language? How should I react, if not with ranting, to a transparent attempt to tar people who clearly want to protect children from manifest harms as mere conspiracy theorists? I am a bit old school, I learned to hate the phrase "think of the children" before many of you were born, but surely sometimes we do, in fact, need to protect children. Not incorporating child-sexualizing events into our civic religion seems like a pretty obvious way to do that.
And, I suppose, someone will point out that Boise Pride's "Drag Kids" grooming hour did indeed get canceled! The system works! The subtext there being--what am I complaining about? Well, in brief, I'm still complaining about the news coverage, which has very big "Republicans pounce" energy. I would like to be able to seriously criticize that sort of thing without actively culture warring, but I don't feel like I have a lot of good mistake-theory tools to respond with. Maybe that's the point, I guess--to try to maneuver people into a position where they feel sheepish for acting like an "aggressor" in the face of kids having "silly fun." Which seems, to me, like an especially evil way of being a conflict theorist.
I’ve been using “so-called” to call my opponents liars when they abuse language: so-called comprehensive immigration reform, so-called fact-checkers and journalists complaining about people using “groomers” to describe drag organizers putting little kids in leather thongs, so-called diversity of all-Black, all-Hispanic, or all-woman groups, and so on. It’s a tight little rhetorical trick which doesn’t sound like whining, acknowledges their words without accepting them, puts the burden of “well, actually” explaining on the other side, and blunts the edges of their words.
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To be fair, I don't think this is an accurate summary of what's usually going on with all these events. The Boise 2022 Pride Guide doesn't have much information on what Drag Kids was actually going to revolve around, but a follow-up "Drag Story Hour" references Kenni The Doll, which... I'm not a fan of the makeup and not going to try to figure out what's going on under any clothing, but it's not looking like leather thongs or most adult entertainer 'wear' (there are two other entertainers, but I can't find any clear images or references to them).
I'm not saying that leather thongs (or too-sheer, or too-short, or otherwise too-revealing clothes) never happen! But whether or not it's a central case for drag as a class, I think a categorical opposition to the topic needs to handle cases like Eddie Izzard, who isn't appropriate for kids, but in a British comedic swearing sense, rather than anyone getting aroused by it, or find a meaningful way to separate them.
And I'm not sure the latter option is solvable, exactly. "I don't want to know, and don't want to need to know, about your underwear" is absolutely a reasonable norm, and one I share and support, and I think you can get a very wide section of the American populace behind. As the discussion becomes more about "this style of dress is inappropriate" or "this style of dance is inappropriate", though, I think that level of agreement gets a lot harder.
For a less culture-war-centric example, the furry fandom gets a lot of askance looks for people who fursuit in public, especially where kids might see. After all, people have sex in (something that kinda looks like) those! Well, ok, bringing a murrsuit body anywhere near public is one of the ways to reliably get nuked by everyone else in the fandom, but just because people haven't had sex in that particular suit doesn't make it less sexualized. For example, there are some (very nice!) fursuits with very thick thighs and incredibly fluffy tails and highly pronounced toe beans. Which absolutely can be fetishized in actually-sexual ways, but are also things people just think are cool.
((Though to extend the metaphor, this doesn't make it ethically mandatory to permit: both for practical reasons and for credit card processor ones, there's a lot of restrictions on under-18 fursuiting, many not explicitly written down.))
The fandom's largely managed to set and evolve some norms around here (don't use murrsuit bodies for anything public or mixed-use private, full suits should cover as much skin as viable, partial suits that don't cover all skin should be worn with fairly concealing clothing, UncleKage will
murderban you if you turn into a PR debacle), but note that this is the fandom. Normies who run into the issue don't just come up with a different answer; normies come up with different answers from each other.And I don't think we have enough culture-wide communication to really build or even discuss normie-wide norms, anymore.
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I am going to give very controversial opinions now. Tighten seatbelts:
The modern day social system allows women to be both too young to be responsibly in sexual relationships with older men till the age of 25 ( Leonardo di Caprio is blamed for ditching his 25 year old girlfriends even though he has been doing it often enough it's not even a surprise anymore. Zero expectation from people that the gf also chose to be with him knowing his history.)while also at the same time constantly claiming sexual maturity to make her own decisions when it suits her. So now as an adult male you start off with don't have sex with anyone younger than 18, but then the rules start changing to any woman younger than 25 is too young if you are an old man it's always going to be the equivalent of grooming, along with the fact that depending on who you are talking to at the moment the rule is being arbitrarily changed.
This shift in the social contract multiple times within a person's life makes them more likely to not even take previous social contracts seriously. The thought process can be they already keep trying to raise the social age of consent every year, maybe they were bullshitting about below 18 being too young as well. So now we have two groups of people trying to tear apart the sexual consent and individual responsibility social contract in opposite directions.
Based on this years data, it turns out that it is almost impossible to stop Gay men from having sex. Taking into account the sexual assault accusation and jailing rates for Trans women, it also appears that transwomen have an equal or even higher libido than gay men along with a far higher ratio of criminal records relating to sexual crimes. Within LGBT communities there also seems to be an unspoken rule about how they are far more loose with what the age of consent is supposed to be. All of these statements are based on my limited knowledge of the LGBT community over the years. I started out as a genuine ally by the way.
Trans people are the more extreme elements of the LGBT community which is already more loose with their rules and attitudes regarding the age of consent when compared to hetero groups. ( Supposedly). So it comes as little surprise that a noticeable segment of the trans community has no problem with sexualizing minors.
There is an additional element of transgerderism actually initially being about mental illnesses, along with the fact that transgender groups have a comparatively very high number of autistic people. Autistic people as per my knowledge are already pretty disconnected from general social norms, on top of that now they are going through additional mental health issues relating to gender identity, meanwhile having the libido of at the very least the average individual of their biological gender, while at the same time being at the bottom of the barrel in terms of who is willing to have sex with them. At the end of the day all these factors taken together should come as no surprise that a segment of trans women would be more than willing to get sex wherever they can and however they can irrespective of general legal and social norms of society around them.
In conclusion - Hide yo kids from the aunt with a dick unless you can at a very personal level 100% vouch for them.
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They did bring it on themselves. Whatever your own personal opinion on Drag Kids, publicising that the act would include kids as young as eleven is handing your opponents a weapon, and would probably make ordinary people go "Hang on a minute there":
https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2022/09/08/idaho-drag-kids-700x420.png
"Bring drag to the younger generation? Uh, how young, exactly?" "Oh, eleven!" Even corporate sponsors are likely to turn a little sheepish about having their names associated with that.
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It is pretty rant-y. Speak plainly, and maybe don't try to sneak assertions that Democrats are into child abuse.
I think all of the following are more or less true:
"Grooming" is a real, terrible thing that should be prevented
Any event which gets children dressing provocatively on stage is going to appeal to actual pedophiles
QAnon does not have a monopoly on the term "groomer," and it's irresponsible for the news to imply they do
QAnon is correlated with using "groomer" as a general-LGBT slur
So the FUD about "groomer" is part of a battle over one of those strategic abuses of language. Q et al. would like to apply it to things which are definitely not child abuse, like telling students that homosexuality exists. LGBT supporters would like it to remain very selective. Yes, this does involve a false alarm/sensitivity tradeoff. No, I'm not convinced that Q is rationally setting the threshold--not when the rhetoric is so useful.
I don't know where you're getting news of "leather thongs," and I don't really want to go looking. I could imagine a perfectly chaste drag show which is purely about affirming the participants, about announcing pride rather than erasing it. Of course, that's not in line with historical use of drag, and I would expect provocative content from Boise's performance. That's a pretty damn good reason to keep kids out of it. Are supporters secret MAPs trying to get their rocks off? Or are they mistaken, and genuinely have a horrible blindspot for how pedophiles would get value out of their show?
The mistake-theory approach is not to wage war over the term "groomer." It's to convince supporters that their action is wrong and dangerous. You should be able to do this without relying on a single rhetorical flourish.
Maybe it's a boy scouts thing, but I see a drag show for kids more like a Summer Camp skit gone too far than anything about LGBT rights or whatever. Frankly, I could see having boys and girls dress up as and mock each other as stereotypes being a very normal, traditional activity.
Well, there's the famous kid Desmond Is Amazing, who was out there as a Drag Kid performing in shows aged 10, having first been noticed at the NYC Pride Parade when he was 8.
He (or rather they, the pronoun they now go by) is 15 now, which is at least a bit older. A true veteran of the scene at that age. May God have mercy on all our souls.
This is not harmless playing dress-up or the kind of cross-dressing for things like Hallowe'en which were traditional practices. I have to think that the parents (or at least the mother) was heavily involved in encouraging the kid along this path and bringing him out to these kinds of events and arranging the publicity around it. I would indeed be more inclined to call it pimping, but if grooming is forbidden, I suppose that is even worse.
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See also: Rudy Giuliani and Trump.
Culture is weird.
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To be clear, a lot of the stuff getting called ‘grooming’ does actually raise worrying grooming red flags- fostering secrets from a child’s parents is like thing #1 I was taught to watch out for when I took mandatory reporter training- even if the term is way overused. I was also unaware that Chris Rufo and libs of TikTok were Qanon.
I agree that there’s a better way to point that out, but culture war dynamics being what they are, it was going to go like ‘so you’re calling LGBT+ educators groomers!’ ‘Yes’ regardless of how well the initial critique was phrased.
No idea who Chris Rufo is, but I actually did think LoTT was explicitly pro-Q. Outgroup homogeneity bias in action, perhaps.
I don’t like being in a position where I’m perceived as defending actual groomers either. That’s the whole point of using the term as a portable motte and bailey, and it’s why LGBT advocates are so against it. If nara is serious about looking for the mistake-theory response, it’s to avoid the name-calling and make outcome-specific criticisms like “this will enable pedophiles.” I’d like to think that would be better received than proclaiming defenders want to abuse children.
Chris Rufo is the activist behind the anti-CRT push in Virginia that arguably got Youngkin elected. He has also been majorly involved in pushing the groomer/radical trans activists in our schools thing.
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It isn't. Grooming in the context of CSE means to try to position a child so that you can have sexual contact of one sort or another with them. If you convince a child to wear a thong via drugs or alcohol or love bombing or manipulation so that you can have sex with them, or derive sexual enjoyment from watching them, this would be grooming. If you did so for any other reason it really shouldn't be called grooming. It's probably a terrible idea and might open your child up to positions where OTHER people can take advantage or derive the sexual pleasure talked about earlier, but it isn't grooming in this context.
Just like having your child take part in beauty pageants (as you mentioned) where they dress up as adults, might wear swimwear etc, wear make up, is not grooming unless it is with the intention of taking advantage of them sexually. In both cases you may well find such activities attract predators and this is a real risk, but the mothers of these sexualized girls are not groomers either. Living out some strange projected idea of success and acceptance through their own kids? Sure. Depriving them of a healthy childhood? Almost certainly. Guilty of some kind of emotional abuse? There is a good chance. But those things aren't grooming as used in the context of CSE which is the link that the rhetoric is trying to make.
It's a rhetorical weapon, building off of visceral dislike for these behaviors. Just like calling right wingers Nazis. The vast majority of right wingers, voters, politicians et all are not Nazis. The vast majority of parents and organizers of Drag events or child beauty pageants are not groomers.
I used to work with social workers and dealt with and wrote reports on some CSE cases, including Rotherham et al, the people grooming kids in those situations were doing so, to literally rape them and then often prostitute them. So no, neither child beauty pageants or drag kids stuff are in and of themselves grooming, without that intent. Stupid and possibly psychologically damaging yes. Grooming no. There is a gap in between. Just like there is a gap in between "I don't like illegal immigration" and "I hate the Jews".
It's entirely understandable for it to be used in the normal context, it is an effective weapon. I'd certainly if I were still a political advisor be advocating for Republicans to use it as an attack strategy. I am a little disappointed it seems to be getting traction here. The behaviors can be bad without being actual child grooming. A mother who has her child wear make up, takes bikini pictures of her in suggestive poses and the like in order to offer her to her new boyfriend (a real case) is a groomer. A mother who does all the same things because she things it's progressive or because it will let her child experience new things or because she wants to live out her glory days vicariously is not. It is still probably a terrible idea regardless.
For those who deal with CSE, and hopefully for us here, that is a distinction worth making.
How overt and specific must the behavior be to be grooming?
Getting the kids and parents to self-select to participate in their further indoctrination to lifestyle with poor outcomes doesn't exactly seem like not grooming.
It's on par with many adult homosexual adolescent boy grooming scenarios. Often neither sees it as grooming. They've common interests and the boy is an old soul, mature for his age. The drag kids show itself may not be grooming, but it's where all the groomers hang out, and the behavior is normalized.
It won't help there's a group claiming of course this isn't grooming, it's just pride and fun. Indoctrination into the community makes it easier to fiddle the kid later. That it's done with a guise of community pride, rather than prostitution is to many a distinction without a difference. Though I could see an argument that the pederast homosocial relationship is 'better' than being prostituted, murdered and served as kebab.
It's all fun until a groomer tempts you with word too large.
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Should we add Hawaiian Teacher to the same list of terms as Chinese Robbers?
Because the irony here is that this guy had gone on Twitter doing the whole "why do you accuse us of being groomers?" bit before the story of him being arrested for child porn and allegedly having sex with a 13 year old student broke. So "LGBT stuff is not grooming", while it may be correct in the vast majority of cases, does fall flat there.
Yes, both people who groom and those who do not will deny they are. Most people who deny it will not be, some who do will.
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Isn't vicariously experiencing sexual activities via your child rather explicitly using them for your own sexual pleasure?
Not unless you think the mothers are getting sexual pleasure from it, which does not appear to be the case in my experience. They focus on the pretty almost doll part I think.
I do think they are getting sexual pleasure from it, and further that it is not recognized as sexual specifically due to the sexist notion that women are pure. It is much the same as an exhibition fetish in my mind, but leeching off the attention directed at their daughters rather than at themselves.
This is actually kind of odd to me; I thought that the entire point of Pride was to go around dressed in some horrifically-ugly fashion and get attention that way. After all, everyone else there is doing that (the ones that are attractive, by contrast, were too busy actually having sex to attend).
Seems like a lot of work to get your kid to do that, who (if they aren't naturally on board with it) will probably at least temporarily resent you for parading them around for a day through the freak show where people say uncomfortable things to you while you wear an uncomfortable, poorly-fitting outfit (drag expression is not generally satisfied with "go to the clothes store and choose the distaff/spear counterpart of what you're currently wearing" and is generally as flamboyant as possible on purpose). Bonus points for boys made to sit still while you paint their faces far past the point of female sexual superstimulus (at least, I'm pretty sure that's why the stereotypical drag outfit has eye shadow rings the size of shiners and lips that make intentionally racist caricatures seem modest by comparison).
That's a lot of effort, cajoling, complaining, and whining to deal with just to get one's rocks off for a day per year; as such, while I'm sure there are some people that are into that simply because that's a constant to anything, the people who are taking their kids like that are likely doing it as a political statement in the same way taking your kids to abortion protests is.
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I don't think I agree with this. If a mother is, e.g., using psychological pressure on her child to tolerate her boyfriend's sexual abuse out of a sense of loyalty or even fear of the boyfriend, I would still characterize that as a central example of "grooming".
Sure as I said: "A mother who has her child wear make up, takes bikini pictures of her in suggestive poses and the like in order to offer her to her new boyfriend (a real case) is a groomer."
Replace the you or someone else can have sexual contact in the first sentence. If your goal is not for someone to derive sexual pleasure (yourself or another person) then it isn't grooming. otherwise people putting pictures of kids in the bath on Facebook, that someone then masturbates over is a groomer. They may be unwise, but that isn't the same thing.
Okay, take it another step back. The mother does all that same stuff, but doesn't have a specific boyfriend to offer her to. Instead, she does all the same things, because her social group praises her for doing it. Grooming or not?
It seems to me that shaping a child's sexuality in unhealthy ways that make them easier to prey on is the essence of grooming, and whether it's done on behalf of a specific person or just for the community of predators in general doesn't really change why that shaping is harmful or objectionable.
In your original example, the mother doesn't actually tell the kid that she's doing these things to get the kid to have sex with her boyfriend. Yet we consider these things harmful, even if the sex with the boyfriend doesn't happen, which is why we made a word for the "lowering kid's defenses to sexual exploitation" in the first place. The effect on the kid is the whole point.
Nope. If she doesn't have the intent of sexual contact from her child to someone else it is not grooming. She isn't preparing them for predators, she is behaving in ways that incidentally some predators like. Those are very different things. Like teaching your 12 yo daughter to wax her legs is in some way preparing them for adult grooming (in the other sense) norms but that doesn't mean you are doing it so that your daughter will attract predators who like underage girls. Will some sexual predators prefer her hairless? Most likely. But that isn't the goal. She isn't doing it FOR the community of predators, she is doing it for her own reasons AND the community of predators might like it. The fact that might increase risks should be a consideration IMHO but it shouldn't be called grooming (in the CSE sense). If I polish my expensive watch so it shines beautifully, then walk down a dark alley and get mugged for it, I may be stupid, but unless I intended for the watch to be stolen I am not grooming my watch for theft.
Otherwise grooming becomes so wide that its meaning is essentially lost. Which isn't normally an issue, except in that it might muddy the waters for agencies and people who want to prevent "real" CSE. Child grooming is a real and serious problem, that results in the abuse of many children in ways that will often impact them for life. If one wants to oppose Drag Kids or child beauty pageants because they do expose kids unnecessarily to risks because of people who do target those communities, I think that is fair and reasonable. But using groomer for the organizers and parents is a rhetorical smear. Which is fine in the proper context, as a politician it would be a weapon that would be hard to ignore. But I do think here we should be more nuanced.
Because if we can't be more nuanced than bloody politicians what are we even for?
I think your 'grooming' may be a term of art at which point the authorities have a reasonable likelihood of success legally when they intervene.
The local townspeople and I likly have a lower threshold for grooming as our actions may be more likely to be extra-judicial.
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I suspect both phenomena are largely fueled by gullible single mothers.
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I think it's pretty myopic to accuse those who defend/ignore the "drag kids" thing of being conflict theorists, while ignoring how the entire "groomer" label is a conflict theory superweapon being deployed by the conflict-theory part of the right. Were I an American leftist who'd never took a step inside a drag club, or even a Pride parade, my thought process would be something like "I will only disavow this when you stop painting me with the same brush. Otherwise, if you're going to keep implying I'm part of it, well, then I'm part of it. If the penalty for surrendering is death, and the penalty for losing the battle is death..."
Well, but this is the very question I'm asking. What's the appropriate approach, when the truth itself is a memetic superweapon? "Taboo your words" is supposed to be a way to increase clarity--to say, "alright, that word is clearly a sticking point, what if we describe it another way?" If dropping the word "groomer" would get us closer to putting an end to grooming behaviors, I'd be on board with that. But it doesn't seem like dropping "groomer" would win a single step forward in that battle. Rather, it seems like the attempt to tar "groomer" as conspiratorial thinking is an attack on some people's ability to express the problem clearly.
The word "groomer" literally someone engaging in behavior meant to prepare child for rape or molestation. Whatever one thinks of drag child pageants, we would need much, much more evidence that this is indeed their intent to declare the use of this accusation as "the truth itself".
I'm not sure this is right; there's an (older?) sense of the word in which an older person develops a (non-sexual) relationship with a younger (too young to consent) person, and then scoops them up for a sexual relationship once they turn 18. (or whatever)
So the drag-queen thing can be viewed in a similar way; get children who are too young for sexual purposes inculcated into your personal fetish, which will increase the supply of adults for you (and yours) to sexually exploit down the road; "stochastic grooming," if you will.
Well, the current most prominent media usage I can remember is references to the British (Pakistani) grooming scandal, which specifically included adult men grooming girls for molestation right here and now.
But even beyond that, it's still something where even you are saying "can be viewed"; one could indeed concot a scenario where that happens, or theoretize that this is the end goal, but that's still not enough to pronounce it as "the truth itself" without a lot more evidence of that actually happening.
What is the end goal of DQSH/Fabulous Drag Kids then?
Their stated end goal is increasing LGBTQ+ positivity. Considering that polls have shown that at least the acceptance of basic trans identity claims has gone down in recent years, it's questionable how well it is succeeding, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not enough to pronounce - once again - the "truth itself" that actual end goal is grooming them for sex.
Interesting that the LGB part of things doesn't seem to have much to do with the drag aspect -- yes drag is a gay subculture, but in today's context it seems to be mostly about increasing 'T' positivity. "Grooming kids to accept trans people as potential sexual partners" is not the farthest thing from "increasing trans-positivity".
If LGB positivity is part of the goal, why aren't story hours with ordinary gay people? (as such)
I'm not personally hung up on the 'groomer' label, but can see where people are coming from with it; I also don't think 'trans-positivity' is a very positive thing for kids to be learning.
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NPR told me Trump was 'groomed' by Putin. It just reveals what a bad-faith farce this debate is. NOW we need to have sensitive conversation about when it's kosher to use the word?
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Rather than drawing attention the groomers directly, perhaps a targeted prevention approach directed at those most at risk for grooming.
What would an updated version of this educational film be like?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fTn7ALbLYPI
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What I'm talking about is that when you aim a nuke at Washington DC because that's where all the warmongers of Pentagon and the alphabet sunglasses people sit and they did deserve as much, don't be surprised that the entire USA unites behind the warmongers of Pentagon.
It isn't the word that is the sticking point for me, but its usage (and association with its usage elsewhere) as a broad brush to smear my ingroup with.
Has there been any policing done by your in-group on this issue? What I mean by this is, has anyone inside the progressive caucus reported or made sure the kids of these kind of events weren't abused or is there a in-group watchgroup that does this?
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The entire reason 'nuclear weapons' are being deployed is because all others have seemingly failed. This never even becomes an issue in this timeline if the SocJus left had demonstrated any capacity to police its own and smoke out harmful ideologies amongst its ranks; if some figures of authority actually put their foot down and declared that this stuff is a bright red line that will not be crossed.
Instead, the Left just Presses X to Doubt and dismisses all criticism as conspiracy mongering, with mainstream support. And when their opponents start getting a little too mean, the Left says "Whoah buddy, I'd love to resolve this, but I don't think I can when you're this hot and bothered! Come back when you've cooled off!".
I see no reason why anybody should drop "groomer" from their lexicon in the face of this willful intransigence.
SocJus left do police their own. That their opponents are not satisfied by the criteria of what SocJus left constitutes potentially harmful is expected. But the more they cry "wolf!" in the forest when there is no wolf to point at, the less I trust their judgment.
Socially acceptable minimum age for sexual remarks has only been rising and socially acceptable age gaps have only been shrinking in the SocJus left-dominated society as far as I see. This is not a society that is exceptionally prone to molesting of minors.
Trivially, no, they don't. Policing your own isn't something you have to do when you have power- that's what "power" means. Power means that even when a member of your group is credibly accused of actual grooming, you can simply erase the people who call you that (this is described downthread) regardless of whether or not it's true.
This is only really true for older man-younger woman relationships, though. Laws accounting for "underage sex" tend to be very barely liberalizing; where there are exceptions for straight relationships across or under the boundary they're slowly being expanded to cover gay ones as well (California is a recent example of this)- you'd expect these things to be equally criminalized if the laws were tightening rather than the reverse, though the movement is barely significant.
Revealed preferences of SocJus (or more properly, third-wave feminism in general) are that the movement is primarily concerned with looting men for the benefit of women, so you'd expect them to become a sort of Junior Anti-Sex League. Men want younger women, older women want (older) men to be restricted to picking amongst them instead of being able to use their resources to impress the young women, and will leverage their political power to that end.
As far as men fucking men goes... well, gay men are a fargroup of women, and a minority of the population, so it makes logical sense for feminist women's anti-sex objectives to be couched using its former underdog-coded pro-sex views as a skinsuit. And sure, maybe it does mean an increase in men having sex with boys, but boys are just future men, so any collateral damage that arises from that is acceptable.
The Right is absolutely correct to pounce on this, even though it probably only arises as a natural consequence, and their blind spot (being that they don't actually consider anyone failing a paper bag test, in this case 'being 18', to be a human being) prevents them from mounting a proper defense. So, "groomer" it is...
Trivially, yes, they do, since I do not see a shortage of people in the left being slammed for, among other things, grooming. Perhaps they aren't real leftists?
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Conversely, I think the reason it's such a potent rhetorical weapon is that it comes pre-targeted. The cases where I see it being deployed are instances of people specifically organizing or supporting things where the accusation is plausible. No one is firing the weapon at, e.g. union organizers, or workplace feminism writers. It always comes up in circumstances of sex stuff targeted at children.
Like most every superweapon, it looks plausible from the outside. I guarantee the LGBT community can give you a laundry list of reasons why it shouldn't apply in a given case. Drag shows are definitely one of the harder ones to defend, though.
I think the Florida bill is the most salient example, and it's also one of the worst-targeted.
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Not very many people target ordinary honest Joe workers on the right specifically as "Nazis". Yet when they instead vaguely wave at the Red Tribe with the Nazi sign, I can see why the honest Joes shy away from them.
In some very red spaces on the front lines of the culture war, it was basically decided “if they call you a nazi, call them a groomer.” This escalation was intended not to change minds or win hearts, but to turn the rhetorical tables on “yes, all Republicans” posters.
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are you refering to the roman salute, or the OK hand symbol?
Referring to a metaphorical piece of cardboard with "This is a Nazi ->" on it.
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Assume Prisoner's Dilemma rules where you saw the other player pushed the "defect" button right in front of you?
But really, they only have two options, and one of them is praising murderism (i.e. it's blatantly sexual, but that's fine). And sure, you can punish them for being part of the tribe that poisoned the well with safetyism for everything that isn't their pet project, but they have the power and incentive to deflect and deflect they shall.
That said, the mistake-theory approach to drag kids, and its ultimate steelman, is "safetyism isn't all it's cracked up to be, take risks once in a while", which is why I (and I suspect this is probably close to the political center) actually have a difficult time outright condemning it under those rules. Put another way, I have legitimately no idea how "It's not going to lick itself" is supposed to seduce anyone capable of understanding what that phrase means.
If grooming is the intent, it's clearly not particularly effective, and isn't going to work on a straight viewer regardless. In fact, the Junior Anti-Sex League is incapable of grooming straight kids, and even gay kids should be beyond their reach for the same reasons; that would require attractive teenage same-sex participants, and as far as I'm aware, Pride has a shortage of them. (Nudists are basically never the people anyone actually wants to see nude.)
Every Boomer that I know talks about their parents sending them to music lessons where the teacher would whack your hands if you did it wrong. Now their children are doing the same thing to their grandchildren, except this time they leer at you and grab your ass instead. And while I would prefer this not happen to anyone, I can accept it not being anything more than surface-level harmful, and it's better for kids that suffer this to recognize that their authority figures put them into an uncomfortable situation for political reasons and update how much they trust authority accordingly.
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How do you feel about the Catholic church? I'm confident Catholicism has resulted in more child sex abuse than any "Drag Kids" event. I think quite likely more than Hollywood! Or maybe the Boy Scouts would be a better comparison.
Well... I'm not Catholic, so you could say I have some disagreements with them for sure.
In raw numbers, maybe. Per capita? I doubt it. It's astonishingly difficult to get reliable numbers on this sort of thing, of course, but every time I've tried, I've failed to find any evidence that the Catholic church leads to child abuse at greater rates than, say, public schools.
Anyway this feels like a similar gotcha to the child beauty pageants. Yes, there are other forms of child abuse--that justifies this one?
No, but do you call those other groups groomers? Do you characterize their actions as grooming when it has resulted in (at least alleged) tens of thousands of kids being sexually abused?
My point is that the "groomer" label seems to be reserved, in political discourse, almost solely for LGBT people and it's use seems quite disconnected from the actual frequency of child sexual abuse.
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LGBT rights and covid vaccines are the two issues that the left has no tolerance for dissenters, much more than other issues. I dunno why this is. These are the major third rail issues. Vox Day for example had his blogspot banned after a decade of otherwise non-stop attacking of the left, including even borderline antisemitic stuff and the whole SFWA controversy, only because of posts critical of the Covid vaccine. That was the final breaking point.
Locally, when vaccine mandates first became a topic for discussion here, the first group to absolutely gun hardest for vaccine mandates and use the harshest rhetoric against antivaxxers were Finnish centre-righters, both in the media and in the political sphere. At least outside the US, I'd say the COVID vaccine thing was above all an example of centrist authoritarianism uniting "responsible technocrats" both in the centre-left and the centre-right, rather than specifically a left-wing thing.
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No mention of the control group. Yeah, some child stars have mental problems as adults, but without a control group it's not like we can draw moral guidance from this . Celebrities, rich people may have fucked up personal lives, but so do plenty of normal people, too.
Totally! But why? Are you suggesting it's all just a toss of the dice? Or do you think it's possible to identify patterns of behavior that correlate with undesirable outcomes? In this case there is no control group, partly because wide scale human experimentation is impracticable, immoral, or both. Unless we decide to tacitly approve of it for whatever reason... as we appear to have done in this case, in spite of what seem to me clear risks.
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I'm not fan of drag kids but is this honestly the best steelman you can come up with? This is not a moral failure but one of creativity. Is it really so hard for you to believe some people have swallowed the lgbt+ narrative whole? These papers are bothering to print it and many people are quite credulous to their dictates. You think it's more likely that this many parents are abusing their children than that they genuinely have bought the meme that this is a totally harmless opportunity for their children to explore their indentities in a a manner they've been assured is harmless.
I should maybe have been clearer that it was the organizer's and advocate's positions I was thinking of, there. I mean, it's not like we haven't seen this in other cultures. Sure, some credulous fool is always going to be a True Believer. I'm just not sure it counts as a steelman to say "oh, I understand--those people are just stupid."
An actual steelman is that kid drag is like a fun costume contest for people who believe that breaking gender stereotypes around dress or expression is a worthwhile activity and that it can be a healthy way for kids to express parts of themselves they might not otherwise be able to. It's like theatre. This would be versus the traditional, competitive, demanding "child beauty pageants" that are about judging the worth of a child on their appearance and talents. Kid drag would be in stark contrast to this, where everyone is celebrated no matter what they look like or what they do.
You can disagree with these kids and say they don't actually know what they're feeling, or they're brainwashed, or whatever, but maybe... it actually can be a nice experience for some kids.
Sure, I can see how overly-zealous activists parents could use kid drag to force their 6-year-old boy to express his "divine feminine" side, but I honestly have no idea what the ratio of kids with leftists parents who are exposed to the idea and want to do it versus the activist abuser parents forcing their kids is.
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Because at least 95% of people who do "drag kid" shows do not, personally, want to molest the children involved. It may be 'grooming' in the sense that it's grooming to put a kid in violin classes or to 'groom a successor' for a company. It isn't grooming in the sense of manipulating a child into being sexually available. And the latter is a sense, and implication, that the term 'groomer' is primarily used for. Both may, in fact, be bad - just in crucially different ways.
This kind of rhetoric isn't useful, because it just distracts people from what causes kids to become trans, or gay, or whatever. "teachers / drag queens grooming them into being trans/gay/whatever" ... is not a common cause. Maybe /r/egg_irl is.
Same for calling it "child abuse". Child abuse usually means either beating or having sex, or sometimes 'severe psychological neglect'. Having a male kid get in a dress and dance - which can, still, be perverted, degenerate, and disgusting - isn't really child abuse in that sense at all, and calling it so is just distracting people with vaguely relevant but mostly meaningless assertions.
Sure, it isn't literally grooming. But it's a metaphor that points out the similarities--it has children being pushed into sexual things by adults.
And I rarely see criticism saying "It's not grooming, it's just adults treating children sexually, so call it something else". Usually, when someone says that it shouldn't be called grooming, they're trying to deny that it's sexual or inappropriate at all.
If you really object to "grooming" because it's inaccurate, but you aren't just doing this to keep people from having a way to talk about it at all, you should suggest something people can call it instead, without being too euphemistic. I can't think of anything; any phrase that fits would be as objectionable as "grooming".
Well, if it's not 'grooming', it's bad because it's trans, queer, gay, etc, it takes senses and desires that are effective at finding the best mates and having children with them and perverts them into meaningless noise. It's just as bad when children see it as adults. If it's fine for adults to see, and - let's say - nobody's almost naked, then it's probably fine for children too.
It's a very obvious argument, but not one conservatives agree with!
This is absurd. The idea that children shouldn't be exposed to or participate in sexual material, even sexual material which doesn't involve naked people, is widespread.
See my other comments - everyone is aware the "idea is widespread", but can you justify it independently of that? Kids seeing a drag show ... whatever. Why does it matter that much? If them seeing sexual material is a problem, television shows or internet advertisements or porn websites are much much much worse. Someone seeing a drag show, in practice, doesn't seem to have much impact!
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That 95% of people who do drag kid shows are enabling and providing cover for the 5% who do want to molest kids doesn't seem a great argument in favor of drag kid shows.
Also even the groomers see themselves as the heroes of their stories. They're welcoming the kids into the community or whatever the current euphemism is.
yeah but then this isn't different from any other community where a small percent are pedos.
Not sure I'd class 5% pedos as a small percent. I think of small percentages as winning the lottery, being struck by lightning and dying, being healthly 18 - 49 and dying of Covid.
Nor does the 5% pedos really address the larger cohort of homosexual men for which this sort of grooming behavior is normalized towards adolescents, pederastry. The behavior covered by some of the accusations against Kevin Spacey or the descriptions of George Takei losing his virginity at 13 to an attractive older man.
Many other communities that work with youth have specific proscribed safe-guarding policies in place to prevent inappropriate conduct. Parent volunteers in schools, scoutmasters, etc. are subjected to criminal background checks and frequently attend training on safeguarding vulnerable populations.
5% was a totally arbitrary number. Is there any evidence the rate of pedophilia or abuse among dragperformers is higher than that among a general population?
Drag performers specifically, I don't anticipate much data. That pederastry is not uncommon among homosexuals is fairly widely discussed.
A recent example; https://www.varsity.co.uk/features/20980
That while homosexuals are not more likely to offend, offenders are more likely to be homosexual has been discussed in the literature. The majority of the studies I've seen focus on pedophilia, rather than hebephilia or ephebophilia.
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Is taking a child to a strip club abusive? Is encouraging a 9 year old girl to get up on the stage and twerk around the pole while grown men throw dollars at her abusive?
We might quibble over the term "abusive", but does anyone want to argue this is an appropriate activity for a child?
My argument is, essentially, that "abusive" has no more content than "bad", and attempts to smuggle in unproven connotations.
Taking a child to a strip club is not 'abusive' in any sense aside from the extent to which a child going to a strip club is bad. If I had, at age 9, gone to a strip club - I'd expect that not to matter at all. Same for drag shows!
Also, the average 12yo will have seen several dozen naked women on the internet, so something drag queens is an ineffective way to prevent children seeing sexualized stuff.
This is just argument-by-appeal-to-social-taboo. Nobody wants to argue it, because the very concept is disgusting. Why don't you make the argument against it instead? And why do many arguments in this area sound like this - vague references to badness?
It may help to think of it as "argument by Chesterton's fence". Before you can reject it, you must understand why it's there.
"Abusive" means "bad thing done to someone by someone else who has power over them". I am not convinced that "teachers have power over children" is an unproven connotation.
The argument already is rejected by society as a whole, though. "That fence was there 50 years ago" isn't enough. You'd need to convince people to adopt it again. And if you can't provide a good argument for why it should be there, even if they do put it back, it'll be in the wrong place. The field has changed a lot!
Again, I'm clearly not arguing for trans stuff here, I just want people to make some form of useful argument arguments at all.
In another area, I often argue something like - school isolates children from depth, doesn't allow them to explore and take useful actions for innately-desired goals, and has one spend the majority of time when one's learning just doing rote, uninteresting exercises and taking orders from teachers who want you to complete the exercises and avoid anything too painful or complicated. This means they have no idea how to do anything useful, and their instincts for doing so are perverted or dulled, destroying the depths of human experience. Now, if I wanted to convince someone of that, I could - 1) write a long piece with examples, connections, to make the point in a detailed way, explain exactly what harms come from this, why it exists, etc. Or - I could say "school is child abuse school is bad doing bad things to children is bad you are hurting children that is evil it is bad very bad not okay", and then just repeat that a bunch of times. The former - probably better than the latter.
Yet, when a teacher gives a kid an undeserved bad grade, that is a "bad thing", yet isn't "child abuse". The thing debated isn't "teachers have power", the thing debated is how bad sex ed/drag story hours are.
If it was, it would not be necessary to hide these things from parents.
You claimed that "abusive" meant nothing more than "bad". This isn't true. It is a specific subclass of bad. Pointing out that it doesn't mean all bad things within that subclass does not change this.
I mean, does it mean anything more than "very bad act done to vulnerable group"?
It isn't necessary to hide it [specifically, drag and gay people, not children doing drag] from most parents!
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Tier 1: Some children of both genders would like to wear clothes and accessories traditionally associated with the other gender. This has been widespread for a long time, or at least I've ready many stories of parents coming home to their young boys dressed up in their mother's pearls. I dressed up as a woman for halloween in grade 6, one or two people did it most years. I'm pretty sure there's a picture floating around somewhere of me wearing my mother's heels, necklace and TMNT pyjamas, although I was too young to remember it.
Tier 2: We should tolerate such behavior. Rationally, there's nothing wrong harmful about men wearing dresses and makeup or women wearing overalls or suits. Even historically, fashion trends have been ephemeral and men wearing foppish or feminine clothes has come and gone.
Tier 3: We should provide a supportive environment for people who feel this way. People should be validated and feel positive about their chosen identities without being shamed by society.
Tier 4 (going to have to try and model this one): Sexual attraction is the ultimate form of acceptance/'passing.' The way we can best support/validate trans or gay children is to validate their attractiveness to the other sex...? Someone would have to explain this one to me as well.
Thing is, most events I've seen are somewhere between 1-3. It's likely that had the event happened, some children wearing makeup, wigs and dresses would have walked across a stage and been applauded and told they were beautiful, brave members of society with bright futures as the 'twerking with stripper poles and dollar bills' seems to have been the vast minority of such events. Mr. Burns immediately dialed it up to 10 the least charitable take and I respect his intelligence too much to think that he's doing anything other than culture warring, but maybe my expectations of someone living in a red bubble are unfair.
For the record, I get off the train somewhere between 3 and 4. If I had to guess I'd say that the worst excesses of #4 are driven by hyper-liberal moms thrilled that their children are brave culture revolutionaries rather than pedophile groomers, but I confess I'm not very close with people in those circles. The closest thing I've seen is parents pushing feminine toys on their boy-tots, only to be heartbroken that they want to play with monster trucks.
I think the steelman for this is 'sexual attraction' isn't really a coherent category, and a lot of things that social conservatives put into the 'sexual attraction' bin don't actually seem like central examples of what people are actually objecting to, but rather parts of t2 that just have additional cognitive loading.
The internally-used example here is something like the Jessica Rabbit: a style of dress and presentation that's charged... but not actually doing anything. Putting on thick lipstick and a sparkly dress isn't playing hide-the-sausage more than Rabbit playing pattycake was; to the extent the former is sexual and the latter isn't, it's because we've assigned a whole lot of identifiers-for-being-female-socially as sexualized (probably by a mix of taboos and mode expectations?) . But these same things remain as identifiers-for-being-socially-female, separately, and it's pretty common for trans people to glom onto them in that role, in ways that can exist separately from the sexual attraction (although sometimes it doesn't!).
There's a plausible argument that we don't get appalled over the same stuff when done outside of this specific culture-war context. Letting a pre-teen (cis) girl dress in gaudy costumes and make a mess with lipstick might get you shunned, but it's not going to turn into national news, and if we're talking your own kids, probably not get CPS called on you. We don't pass out prison sentences to everyone who lets a kid use an insufficiently-filtered internet connection. At the extreme object level, the serious harms caused by seeing someone's dick through their panties got Ace Ventura a PG-13 rating, and I'm not sure it was actually about that; RuPaul's Drag Race usually nets a TV-14 for broadcast. Or for non-sexual drag, Eddie Izzard probably isn't appropriate for pre-teens, but that's more because of the cursing than the dress.
This is a broader problem for the L, G, and B spheres, too (as well as fandom): it's not uncommon to see people worry about whether Pride parades allow under-18s, which makes sense in the context of Folsom Street Fair... but most parades aren't that, and the complaint remains. The nearest Pride for my situation's most adult situation is the rampant alcoholism, but that's shared with the nearest Nascar event, too.
((This is further complicated because a lot of advocates from either direction aren't aware how limited their understanding is, even as they're motioning about limitations in understanding. Progressives point to various young-teen or pre-teen beauty contests, except these are also things that the vast majority of socons find appalling, as naraburns points out. Conservatives point to endless twerkfests... but it's not like these are some unheard-of thing in straight culture. "Penis inspection day" is and was a regular joke on reddit and tumblr in relationship to trans politics, derived from an older UrbanDictionary meme, but it was also not an uncommon thing for schools to have either full-time staff nurses or contracted doctors who'd perform physicals in bulk, including the turn-your-head-and-cough bit, although this has thankfully fallen out of favor.))
The opposing steelman against is that just because something varies by culture and time doesn't mean we have to accept it in this culture and time, and you have to draw lines in the sand somewhere, and that socons have (sometimes even honestly!) drawn lines well before these points in the past.
Don't have much to say in response, but thank you for sharing your thoughts.
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I think there's a lot more involved there, when we consider the realm of "obvious and predicable next steps". One of the common gotchas I see coming back from leftwingers is to point out that children's beauty pageants are similarly creepy, objectifying, etc. But this is firmly in the category of "not the rebuttal you think it is", because I've heard mountains of scathing criticism of child beauty pageants for exactly those reasons. And while I doubt Honey Boo Boo's mom is trying to rape any kids, it's a common refrain that the adult male judges at these events look like a portfolio of "caught with 56 terabytes of CP" mugshots.
The point at which we normalize kid drag shows, obviously pedophiles are going to flock to those events.
The point at which we normalize teachers having confidential sex talks with kids, obviously pedophiles are going to flock to those professions.
Church leaders, boy scouts, sports coaches, karate instructors, tutors, etc, etc. We've spent decades building up a corpus of best practices to ward off the opportunities for people to take advantage of kids. If you want to validate a child as trans, it seems very obvious that you can do that in ways that don't sexualize nine year olds, or otherwise trigger Youth Protection Red Flags. Demanding that vast corpus of best practices be set aside because "bigotry or something" is wildly suspicious. Even the people who aren't doing anything directly wrong, who would never do anything directly wrong, have a responsibility to be aware of how they might be enabling other people who are and will.
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A lot of these child drag events seem to be number four.
Sure, they’re tacky and not plausibly seductive, but everyone knows the context of throwing money at a dancer onstage, or what ‘it’s not gonna lick itself’ means. Well, except probably the child drag stars.
And having kids act out a simulacra of adult sexualization, even in a tacky and ritualized manner, should make us all uncomfortable.
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What if they identify as White?
Then you should be shamed and excluded from the Hugo awards.
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This is mostly how I model this and a good writeup on it. A minor nitpick that I find important:
I don't think this is something that should be elevated to an identity. or more specifically identity is a strange concept in general. Do you remember the hubbub about disabled person vs person with a disability? Disabled person is considered bad because it raises the disability to the level of identity while person with disability is preferred because it doesn't. The way someone dresses is about as surface level as it gets, while I agree it shouldn't be something discriminated against and it would be better if no one cared when men wore dresses. This is all of course suspiciously similar to the other culture war rail, transgenderism. What's the actual blue tribe model of the separation of cross dressers/drag queens and transwomen?
Um, not sure if you were genuinely asking me as I assume you know at least as much as I do, but I can try in the event that you were.
I had straight male-presenting friends who would come to social dances wearing a dress or skirt and it was just a superficial thing independent of their gender identity as you mention above. Others were non-binary/queer and would do the same but it seemed more meaningful to them as their exterior gender presentation was matching their interior identity, although superficially it may not have looked that different from the outside.
Seems to get back to the classical tension between (some) non-binary folk who want to end the gender binary and trans people who find the gender binary affirming. Maybe someone, somewhere has squared that circle but I'm unaware.
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Too many things being conflated here; your Tier 1 example is very non-central to what we're actually talking about. Getting into your mother's jewellery box in the privacy of your own home is quite conceptually different from being invited to be dressed up by a third party in public and cheered by strangers, at least to me. In addition, doing it out of boredom is different than doing it habitually out of some deeper desire.
For the record, this is where I get off; it is never, ever my duty to validate anyone.
Maybe tier was a poor descriptor and it was more a train of thought or logical chain. I think 'children haven't been inculcated with our social constructs of who should wear what' is the least controversial and easiest to accept, even if it is a far cry from trans pre-teens.
If you'll forgive my assumptions about your gender and relationship status, do you ever feel like it's your duty to tell your wife that she's beautiful? Your child that they're smart or talented, your coworker that they aren't completely useless, your friends that They're Totally Right and their partner is being unreasonable?
We're constantly validating other people, often times even in the face of what (we see as) the truth - it's the lubricant that keeps the gears of social interaction turning. It costs me next to nothing to call someone by their chosen pronouns or accept their choice of clothes, and seems important to them, so why not? You can link Picard counting lights, 1984, or clips from They Live, but the truth is people pick and choose whom to validate all the time.
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Sure it is--the act itself makes the child sexually available, not for intercourse per se but for lewd interactions with the adult audience. You might as well say that strip bars aren't sexual. The act of Drag Kids itself is sex abuse per se--the same way that exposing children to pornography is sex abuse per se, even if you never lay a hand on them. I think I could probably have been a bit clearer about the way I framed this, but your problem here is you're engaging in amphiboly between participants, parents, and organizers. Do the kids think they're being made sexually available? Likely they don't understand the full implications of what they're involved in, which is an alarm bell all on its own. Do some parents think it's just silly fun? Probably--people are stupid like that. But Pride events have always, until recently, been chock full of sexualization. Wrapping kids up into that is sexualization per se, whether or not anyone gets physically assaulted.
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You're missing half of it. Which is that news organizations have given up any semblance of objectivity and have gone to full-on conclusory statements in their reporting. That is, "...the unfounded QAnon conspiracy theory...".
To discard mistake theory as erroneous.
It's also a lie. One needs not be a QAnon believer at all in order to think of these people as child groomers.
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It's not about being right or wrong, it's about finding a way to live in the world with others. I don't want to discard mistake theory; life is more pleasant when I can find ways to make it work.
But I admit my aspirational thinking doesn't necessarily make you wrong.
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I hate to say what is probably obvious, but I do have some insight as a resident of the Blue Bubble with many gay friends etc etc: but at least in my neck of the woods once any remotely tribal signifier is invoked (in this case "Drag") it just becomes pure confirmation bias all the way down.
Once anyone on Team Blue hears one of their tribal signifiers (and of course same goes for Team Red) I can immediately see their brains twisting to come up with any possible "hey, move along nothing to see here" defense.
The usual suspects are: it's just kids playing dress up having fun; it's just something you heard on Fox; Drag isn't sexual; or the old favorite, you sound like a Republican.
Sorry I guess I don't see a mistake theory way around this. After the whole Don't Say Gay thing, which was so drenched in Big Lie propaganda, Drag Kids is just another tribal shibboleth, and this is when the cerebrum gets bypassed for the amygdala.
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The quote you produced is disinformation all right for the "it's a QAnon reference" framing, but referring to people running "drag kids" events as "groomers" does seem like a serious accusation that deserves a bit more justification than the pointing and invoking of disgust reflexes that it is. The standard interpretation of "grooming", as I understand it, is gradual manipulation of the underage and otherwise mentally inadequate with the purpose of normalising the idea that they will be sexually abused or exploited by their adult handlers. I doubt that most people running or supporting those events are doing so with the intention of entering sexual relations with the kids that attend them themselves (and if "encouraging the target enter sexual relations I want to see more of with someone else" is sufficient to meet the definition of grooming, then it seems that a lot of things in our culture since times immemorial would count!), and if their right-wing detractors believe otherwise, the burden of proof surely should be on them. If they detractors do believe that all these progressives are actually in it because they hope to have sex with the ten year olds that they are teaching about drag queens and non-binary gender, protestations to the contrary and seemingly low rate of such sex actually happening notwithstanding, then yes, they are in fact entertaining a conspiracy theory (as there would need to be a conspiracy to conceal widespread pedophilic tendencies and/or actions).
(edit: Per something I found out downthread, there is in fact a legal definition of grooming in the US, which markedly does not cover "introducing children to icky and widely taken to be age-inappropriate sexual activity" on its own)
Seems like a good riddance to me, because the term was a massive footbullet. The term "cultural marxists" will be resolved correctly by (1) people on your side already and (2) actual cultural marxists, who are in the know about the academic definition drift of "Marxism"; to everyone else, and in particular garden-variety classical liberals who really ought to have been enlisted in the anti-woke coalition much earlier, it just looks like holding up a sign like "actually the main issue I have with my outgroup is that they are dirty commies who want to put limitations on megacorps".
That website is awful and looks like it was written by non-native speakers and definitely not lawyers. There may indeed be a legal definition of grooming in the US, but that website is not it. The citations in that article refer to anti-trafficking laws and, being Federal laws, require crossing a state line to be enforceable. It says nothing about grooming as anyone here has used the term.
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I commented on this a bit up the chain, but it bears repeating--I regard putting children in skimpy clothing and throwing money at them while they dance as sexual exploitation per se. You don't have to touch a child to sexually abuse them; in most jurisdictions, just exposing them to pornography counts. Participation in "family friendly" Drag Kids is grooming toward participation in more sexualized drag events. To my eyes, this is a comfortable fit for the term "grooming."
This is at least a very noncentral example of sexual exploitation, and by implication of grooming. The modal example that the term evokes, and that makes it work as a rhetorical superweapon, is something along the lines of "kid is made to watch as parents engage in 'swinging' and eventually 'invited' to participate" or recently "40 year old creep baits kids on Roblox into sending him nudes and eventually convinces them to meet up offline, keeping it a secret from their parents". If you can have "sexual exploitation" without the "exploiter" deriving a direct personal sexual benefit from it, then the tropey staple chill grandpa who tells the kids of a straight-laced household where in the attic to find the porn stash of his youth is also a groomer.
I understand that "groomer" is an effective rhetorical weapon, but I really don't think it lives up to the standards of discussion we were supposed to be striving for as a community.
In A Brave New World there is a comment about encouraging kids to play sexual games with each other as a normal part of schooling. Would you consider this grooming, even though the adults performing the encouragement are not the ones getting sexual pleasure? Would an adult standing over two five year olds, helping them get undressed, telling them where to put their hands on the other, be grooming?
I think most people regard any outside encouragement for kids to have more and riskier sex to be a Bad Thing, and the more severe and direct examples ought to be criminal. Absent any other criminal terminology, people use the word Grooming, regardless of who is getting sexual pleasure.
And yes, technically any adult helping any kid gain access to porn is grooming. Even the cool grandpa and the old fashioned magazines. It is illegal to show porn to minors. Do people forget this?
Not if it's not for their own pleasure, as I see it. I've seen something like this rule mentioned in the past in the context of advice for parents who are unsure if it's socially acceptable to do this thing or another (I think the example was "father applying lotion on female baby") - formulated as "if you do it for the kid, it's okay, if you do it for yourself, it's not".
No, I don't think it's standard to use the word "grooming" for this, and before the current CW battle, I've not seen it used outside of the contexts I mentioned. This was even though culture warring about "encouragement for kids to have more and riskier sex" is something that has been going on for decades now.
"Technically" according to what technicality exactly?
How is that a pertinent argument? It is also illegal to not pay your taxes, but that doesn't mean that tax evasion is an instance of grooming.
You are the one who brought up a grandpa showing pornography to minors as if it was something socially accepted and reasonable.
"Harmful to minor" laws prohibit showing obscenity to minors. Because it is considered harmful in and of itself. Showing pornography to minors normalizes sexual behaviors and is often used in the process of grooming.
Child advocacy groups consider showing pornography to minors as sexual abuse itself.
If someone shows a minor porn and is arrested and accused of grooming, how do they prove that they had no intention of sexually abusing the minor (when the action itself is considered sexual abuse)? Outside of education, which the law allows for, showing porn to minors will be considered grooming behavior.
Yes, it came up in a popular comic, which is probably as good an n=1 argument for it having been considered a reasonably common thing by some nontrivial set of people in the past as it gets.
There is no mention of "grooming" in the "harmful to minor laws" article you linked, nor in the "child advocacy groups" one. Conversely, the "abusers may also show..." article does not argue that each of the things mentioned on their own already amount to "grooming". Just because something is often used in the process of grooming does not mean that it amounts to grooming: Discord DMs and more generally one-on-one chats are also frequently used in the process of grooming, but most people would not use this to conclude that DMing a minor constitutes grooming.
By whom? I think this is what Wikipedia calls "weasel words". I looked this up, and it turns up that there is actually a legal definition of grooming in the US, which does not appear to cover showing porn to minors as written:
Is masturbating to pornography not sexual activity any more? And showing porn to kids is something "for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense?"
To your wider point that the Right has begun using the word grooming in wider and wider contexts, they are not the first to consider the similarities between grooming and political radicalization. Grooming itself is a broader word with multiple meanings - grooming a young politician for a higher office for example. It is not weird or purely waging a conflict for the word grooming to be used to describe persuasion, enticement, or cohesion to ingrain in children sexual politics their parents would not approve of (which is what schools are accused of.)
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"Cultural Marxism" seemed like a perfect label to me. My immediate reaction to the phrase, which I'm not sure is wrong, was that it took Marx's theory of class conflict, and applied it to cultural conflict. That was it's obvious, plain reading to me.
What does this mean? It's not marx was the first person to come up with "different cultural groups have conflicts". What specifically from "marx's theory of class conflict" is present in today's cultural conflict that wasn't in any other cultural conflict?
Now, of course they are related in that both are progressive. But the "marxism" part is a total distraction, "gender ideology" is about as marxist as a republican is
But people in academic fields like sociology or gender studies who use terms like "Cultural Marxism" or "Conflict Theory" tend to talk as if he did, or as if he formalized it somehow. Presumably because of a tendency towards a narrative where sociology is an advancing discipline of people building on prior ideas, coupled with Marxism having high status in academia (especially at the time) so people wanted to portray their own work as a descendant of it. Here's the second Google result if you search "conflict theory":
Understanding Conflict Theory
And then, the narrative goes, others built on Marx's insight by extending this idea to other groups:
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It's really hard for me to believe you don't know what it means. it's not 2010 anymore.
Yes, Cultural Marxists didn't come up with
"different cultural groups have conflicts" because Marx didn't come up with "different economic groups have conflicts"
The idea that we live in an exploitative system, where people are divided into classes, one designated the oppressor, and the other the oppressed.
This is the point - both are progressive, in that both want to liberate the tired masses or oppressed people. But the idea that's specifically "marxist class conflict", as opposed to generic progressivism / universalism, is misleading.
No it's not.
MLKs "I have a dream" is generic progressivism.
"Girls can do whatever boys can" feminism is generic progressivism.
"Racism = prejudice + power", and "patriarchy" are Cultural Marxism.
Clearly "i have a dream" and "girls can freaking do everything" are more wholesome than "racism = prejudice + power". Marxism, however, isn't when you suggest a particular group of people are bad, or that a particular group have to be fought against, or that one particular group is harming another particular group. It isn't even when you do that in a left-wing way. Was the french revolution culturally marxist?
So, what specifically about "racismprejudicepower" and "patriarchy" are more like marxist / class conflict than a generic mix of "progressive" and "not wholesome"?
Yeah, because like I already said, Marxism is when you suggest we live in an exploitative system, where people are divided into classes, one designated the oppressor, and the other the oppressed.
I gave you a definition, and I gave you examples proving this is not about generic progressivism. Why do you keep claiming that it is?
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This reminds me of endless discussions around the term woke which was first adopted by woke crowd as a positive label and suddenly overnight it turned into right-wing slur "somehow". As for cultural Marxism, this was also something adopted by the left. Just one example, in this paper named Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain. And from the "praises" of the paper it is obvious that Cultural Marxism term was viewed at the time in positive light. Here is one example:
Cultural Marxism itself is a cornerstone of Western Marxism, a branch distinct from Marxism-Leninism. It has to be understood that Marxism itself is by definition not static but dialectical philosophy that "evolves" until socialism leads into utopia - that is the "permanent revolution" concept: as soon as powers at be settle down creating their own power structures with their own contradictions, the revolutionary wheel has to turn again to revolt in order to resolve those contradictions. As soon as history uses the revolutionaries to move forward into progress, it discards them.
Specific cultural part was developed especially by Antonio Gramsci, who investigated why revolutions in late 1910s and early 1920ies failed in the west. His conclusion was that the main obstacle was so called cultural hegemony. He focused on the dialectical opposition of so called base/infrastructure vs superstructure in cultural and not only economic production. It is culture created by superstructure that reproduces capitalism and gives rise to so called "structure" to society. And in accordance with Marxist ideology the society reproduces the structural ideas, which create the society which create the idea and so forth. You may have heard of some of those "structures" and related theories - that were developed by later Critical Marxist or Identaritarian Marxists - here in CW thread: patriarchy, white supremacy, cisheteronormativity and so forth. That is the relevance of Cultural Marxism to gender.
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Well, how close to the American Right are your political sympathies? There's a whole cluster of memes that primes people like me towards the interpretation I suggested, but they are all fairly left-associated: US right-wingers are approximately seen as the tribe of Big Tobacco/scammy door-to-door salesmen/pouring toxins into the environment/exorbitant medical bills on the one hand and Jesus Camp and creationism in school on the other, and perceived to immediately decry any attempt to make the US more like a "normal civilised European country" in those regards as creeping communism.
(To be clear, I'm well aware of your definition and think it makes sense - after all, that's basically how the academic drivers of the ideology interpret it themselves. It's just that I really don't think the optics work, because for a lot of would-be allies "fighting against Marxism" sounds like standard code for "fighting against a large number of things that I strongly wish for")
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