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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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I'm going to stop you there, and I think this indicates a bit of juggling with a hidden agenda.

We need to stop assuming hidden agenda on this topic.

Like it or not lots of people can't distinguish between:

17 year old female with 25 year old male (lets say a college drop out guitarist in a band and a high school senior).

18 year old female with a 48 year old male (lets say a sleazy manager at a bar who sleeps with college waitresses for better shifts).

8 year old male with a 53 year old male (literal raping priest).

These are all wildly different but the dismissive rhetoric results in people failing to acknowledge that and putting everyone in the same bucket.

For an example of where this might be relevant - 27 year old guy goes to a club, assumes the girl he meets is over 21, but oops she used a fake ID and now he's a rapist. To me (and perhaps most of the posters here) this guy is obviously not a pedophile, but to say my mom "he should have known better, he must be a pedophile" is the obvious interpretation, and trying to engage results in a complete collapse.

Assume a poster has ill intent makes it much harder to actually engage with the substance.

I somewhat agree. I don’t think anyone including the 16 year olds father believes her 18 year old boyfriend having sex with her is a pedophile. Sure, maybe a cad but not a pedo.

Now if she is 16 and the guy is 25? That’s a lot more questionable (though far from having sex with kids).

I think the problem is we only have this ham fisted language of consent to separate good and bad sex. Once you have that as the only dividing line, you need to tie yourself in pretzels explaining why consent isn’t consent.

Instead, I would say pedos are people having sex with prepubescent kids. Such people should be killed. Grown men havint sex with post pubescent but young ladies should be viewed as bores. Fathers should protect their daughters from such people and society should shun them. But they aren’t rapists.

One of the drivers of reduced fertility is while fathers do indeed want grandkids, they don't want their daughters actually having sex.

I doubt many want to think about their daughters having sex but I doubt many fathers are upset about their daughters marrying a good man at an appropriate age and building a family.

Yes, but for them an "appropriate age" is probably 35. Overprotective fathers of daughters are a meme for a reason.