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I've gotten into some light twitter drama around Vibecamp, specifically whether it's appropriate to have a midnight nude pool party and a designated sex tent at an event where children are allowed, and even encouraged, to be brought by parents. Here's the full text of my tweet:
I've had this argument with the rat/post-rat scene before, and it always baffles me how strong the resistance is. I've had people directly say that no, having nudity and a sex tent LOWERS risks!
I've had multiple people saying that my evidence/argument are weak and burning man does it, so it's totally fine.
I'm genuinely trying to have reasonable discussions with people, but I just don't get this sort of thing. The inferential gap here is so large it's hard to fathom how to begin to bridge it. People arguing that it's actually good and healthy to have kids around nude adults they or their parents don't know seem extremely alien to me. Some of these people even have kids, apparently!
Either way, I love the rat/post-rat/EA/tpot scene, I've met many wonderful and awesome people there. Compared to the average normie they're generally intelligent, earnest, kind, and overall fun to hang with. But these sorts of fundamental moral disagreements are why I stopped running a local EA group, and why I just can't identify too strongly with the scene as a whole. I genuinely wish people in these groups had a more traditional sense of morality, a better understanding of boundaries, and generally just cared about Chesterton's fence and second order effects. I hope that these issues don't completely derail the movement (even more, after the FTX poly harem scandal) but I'm not holding my breath. It really is a shame.
I don't see how this is harmful. It's a little gross, but so is polyamory. I'm just not seeing the harm in skinny dipping? What if one of the kids accidentally sees (how old are the kids anyway, real kids or teenagers)? Who cares? The harms from sex are physical assault, unwanted pregnancy, STDs. Are any of those a risk? How?
Charitably, they genuinely believe youth is wasted on the young, but by guiding them to make better decisions, we could protect them from a lot of harm, keep them from bad choice road and help them develop healthy sexual boundaries (I suspect, around Christian morality). I would place @ThomasdelVasto in this category.
But for a lot of modern adults (many, many millennials), it's really a toxic cocktail of envy, control, and arrested development dressed up as compassion. They peaked in college, regret their own impulsive sexual decisions, and now project their failure onto the next generation. "If only someone had stopped me at 19..." becomes "No one should be allowed agency until they're as risk-averse as I am." Extending legal childhood keeps the fantasy alive that youth is this pure, fragile thing that must be bubble-wrapped, and their trauma could be pinned on an uncaring society that abandoned them when it should've protected them. The alternative is to take accountability, which is never comfortable.
We don't need to speculate how people would turn out in such a culture, just look at East and South Asian parenting and what kind of adults they produce, especially the men.
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OP could be American enough to believe that seeing a boob causes brain damage for anyone below the age of 18.
Allow me to namedrop Jack, there's a scene (non-sexual) between a grown, naked woman and a 12yo boy. And this was in 2014.
I don't believe in "both side-ism" but "both sides" do sometimes get in bed to package their insecurities in moral policing. Religious puritans (who probably feel guilty for watching porn) and woke feminists (probably dealing with body image issues) lose their minds seeing female nudity on screen. Think about the kids (which is beginning to include legal adults), keep the predators at bay!
At first I thought you were talking about the 90s bomb Jack, where Robin Williams plays a ten year old boy who looks forty.
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