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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 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.
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.
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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