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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.
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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