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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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There is no "steelman" for pedophilia, unlike for racism (freedom of association), sexism (traditional gender roles), and homophobia (traditional sexual morality).

There absolutely is, and, somewhat ironically, it was something pushed by the pre-"woke" and even pre-"SJW" progressive leftists certainly in the late 00s. I still see some of it now, with the woke-natured push to retire that word and replace it with Minor Attracted Persons.

The steelman is pretty simple: pedophilia is a sexual orientation like any other, a sort of innate characteristic of someone that they're helpless to change, and finding something attractive doesn't imply actually doing anything to fulfill that attraction. As such, pedophiles deserve compassion, not condemnation, along with the structures to help them never make their attraction come to fruition in a healthy, non-shameful way. This wasn't a popular topic of discussion, but it absolutely was one among college leftists when I was a college leftist, involving things like future realistic androids or future VR experiences. I remember listening to a friend who was a psych major talking sympathetically about some therapy recording with a pedophile he heard in class, and how that man was clearly in pain and suffering due to his helpless feelings of attraction, which he knew he had to suppress.

Blood Rain, of course, is a video game that uses computers to generate imagery by modeling a virtual world, so it's pretty akin to the VR experiences mentioned above. Assuming that Evie were actually child-looking (a judgment I disagree with, but that's irrelevant here), it's perfectly defensible to have a game that overtly sexualizes her, and plenty of people have indeed defended such a notion.

Sorry, my comment was sloppy. You're right about the MAP thing. I didn't mean that there was literally no possible steelman, I meant that there was no steelman that would be convincing to the mass of normies since aversion to sex with children runs too deep for the vast majority of people.