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Last week, right-wing gadfly David Cole wrote a banger exploring the parallels between the childhood transgender craze and the “childhood sexual abuse”/“ritual satanic abuse” panics of the 1970s and 80s. Cole points out the irony of the “say groomer” obsession on the right, and the larger moral panic in right-wing spaces about how the “trans kids” phenomenon is primarily about “sexualizing children”, given that the first wave of moral panic about the molestation of children was driven primarily by leftist women, which is the same demographic now primarily driving the movement that is in turn being accused of molesting children. I think Cole makes a very convincing case that the “groomer” thing is a red herring, a distraction which has blown up into a full-blown purity-spiraling moral panic in the hothouse ecosystem of the Extremely Online right. If you think that the people teaching kids that they’re trans are primarily doing so because they’re interested in molesting kids, why are they so overwhelmingly women?
His observations ring true for me; from the constant sharing of the Auron MacIntyre sign-tapping meme and the Sam Hyde quote, to Pizzagate and the obsession with Epstein, the right wing is proving that it’s every bit as susceptible to purity spirals and moral panics as the left wing. And as Cole points out, it’s especially odd because the “groomer” panic on the right is itself a response to the “trans kids will all kill themselves unless we affirm them” panic on the left. The “groomer” panic also features the same obnoxious and cancerous motte-and-bailey strategic-equivocation tactics that rat-adjacent rightists despise so much when it’s used against them; figures like James Lindsay, Rod Dreher, and even Marjorie Taylor Greene, are all involved in a linguistic shell game, wherein they use a word which they know for a fact is supposed to refer to grooming children for direct sexual abuse, and when pressed they retreat into “well, they’re saying that children have a sexual identity, which is kind of like sexualizing them, which is the same thing that child molesters do.”
There are certain topics that I won’t publicly touch even in a space like this; I’ve thought about one day trying my hand at starting a Substack and joining the right-wing online commentary/content-creation ecosystem, and there are certain subjects where I fear that if I deviate too much from the party line, I will be cast out into the outer depths before I even begin. The whole issue of child sexuality, how it relates to teen sexuality, whether or not queer theorists want to rape kids, etc., seems like the most high-voltage of any of those third rails. Being seen as an apologist for child molestation is a hell of an accusation to face, no matter how specious and lacking in credibility, and it’s nice to see a writer with some level of clout in right-wing commentary stick his neck out there and identify this moral panic for what it is.
I’m even hesitant to offer too much more of my own larger commentary on the issue, but I wanted to put this piece out there for commentary, particularly for those who do take the “groomer” thing more seriously than I do.
My take is that 'groomer' is not even a real thing that anyone (modulo lizardmen) believes -- the right is just casting about for weapons.
I don't think it's a particularly good weapon, but it's better than lying down and taking it I suppose.
My take is that the whole Loudoun County thing lit a fire under a lot of "normie" asses and that "Groomer" is absolutely a real thing and that the reason the woke-left and alt right are both trying so hard to paint it as a nothing-burger is that it has struck a nerve.
It's absolutely a real thing -- just not the right word for that thing!
Language-obsessed internet-fool -- out.
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Are you aware of things like the Catboy Ranch discord server?
Absolutely not -- you could sub "Catboy" for "Lizardman" in my OC if you like.
Catboy Ranch was a discord server run by keffals where minors would be invited and then pressured into taking HRT, which keffals would also provide.
The relevant threads on the farms have all the info you might want, as well as screencaps.
OK, that I believe -- maybe I phrased this thing poorly. I don't mean that zero groomers exist; I mean that essentially zero of the people accusing their local librarian of being a groomer really think that she is doing it for sexual pleasure reasons. Which to me is an essential element of the definition of the word -- the "you're such an egg" people probably have some element of that at least.
What the librarian is doing is also bad, I just don't think "groomer" is a good word for it. Other than trying to make the librarian (and her supporters) feel bad -- which probably won't work. But at least it's an effort, and if it makes the people slinging it around feel good I'm OK with it. At least it signals that not everyone supports the groomers, in a fairly unambiguous way.
I don't think it's an essential element, personally.
I don't think someone needs to be consciously grooming for their own use, I think it's sufficient merely that their actions have, as a byproduct, primed the victim to be more open to abuse from other sources. Teaching kids to hide things from their parents, that it's okay to have secrets between you and another adult that you keep from your parents, is the exemplar behaviour I'd point to to illustrate this. This is not, in itself, paedophilia, but it will make it a hell of a lot easier for paedophiles to prey on that child once they've accepted the concept.
Moreover, I can't really think of a better, more accurate word to describe that kind of thing.
Over on DataSecretsLox the problem has been noted, and they coined "flergeflamming" -- I'd like something that captures the essential evil of it more, but the idea is to promote rational discussion rather than shouting matches I guess.
"Medical malpractice" covers it for the doctors doing this shit, but I'm not sure of a pithy way to put it for their army of support staff -- "sexual genocide workers"?
Yeah, I'm sorry but I'm never going to accept that kind of term for it. Something that sounds like a word you'd smugly play in scrabble if you were in Middle Earth comes off as an attempted dismissal of the seriousness of the action. Names have power, and naming this manipulation of children after something that sounds like it would tumble whimsically out of Tom Bombadil's mouth after altogether too many extra strength pints doesn't cut it at all, I'm afraid.
This is even more hyperbolic and less accurate than just calling them groomers.
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Them: Obvious demons demanding their right for public sexual performances, insisting prepubescent children must participate
You: This is a nothingburger
Me: Jesus Christ, King of Kings, King of my soul, forgive my years astray in Satan's grasp, forgive us all, for we know not what we do.
Either you misunderstood me pretty bad, or I'm misunderstanding you -- to be clear, do you actually believe that a significant number of the teachers etc who go around 'affirming' transness are doing it for purposes of future sexual gratification? If so you are one of the rare exceptions, but I think it's a pretty uncommon belief even among those who are calling people groomers.
I (obviously) agree that it is, de facto, functionally, just grasping around for weapons, but I do think 80%+ of people who say 'groomer' genuinely believe that drag queens and teachers something children something sex. The belief is incoherent enough that rendering it into direct causal statements that aren't obviously false is basically impossible. But, if you're just a normal 100iq person who follows libsoftiktok or watches right-wing media ... what incentive do you have to explicitly lie or propagandize, mostly to your fellow normal right-wing media consumers, about grooming? They're just making what they see as actual factual they're genuinely upset about.
Compare to the satanic panic from OP, or the 'covid is killing our babies' people, etc
Fuck it, I'll draw the line that you don't seem to be willing to because frankly I'm with the normies on this one
This is not "teachers something children something sex". This is why are you taking elementary school kids to drag shows and talking to them about how to give a good blow-job if you aren't trying to sexualize them? Why are you urging them not to tell their parents if you didn't know that you might be doing something their parents would object to?
The abject failure to even acknowledge these very simple and obvious questions is how you can tell the "stop saying groomer" crowd are either idiots or "in the tank" with the LGBTQ+ types.
Let us speak plainly "Gender affirming care" (IE is things like puberty blockers, top and bottom surgery, etc...) is a euphemism for mutilating kids. Mutilating kids is bad. Those who do it, who enable it, or who simply run interference for those that do are bad people.
Yeah, this is my point. Teachers are not taking elementary school kids to drag shows, probably 1 in 300 progressive parents are. I'm not sure who specifically is talking to elementary school students about how to give a good blowjob - but I'd posit the rate of teachers doing that in a slightly-officially-sanctioned manner to random internet strangers doing that surreptitiously is at least one to ten thousand. But nothing like that is happening in even the 98th percentile of weirdness american public school, nor for the 98th percentile of weirdness trans child's experience in school. A combination of carelessness and intentional propaganda on right-wing media is smashing together dozens of different, rare incidents, folding the correct disgust at trans and queer perversion in with an incorrect claim of intentional predation by teachers to make it fit into the values of the average conservative parent. "Mutilating kids", "child drag shows", "elementary school blowjobs" do not co-occur in 99% of these situations, and the fact that those who say groomer claim they do, when they do not, is why the groomer accusation is stupid and distracting. And when you believe that, you can't figure out why kids are transitioning, and you try to stop it by homeschooling your kids or banning gay teachers, which does not work (a ton of trans people were homeschooled or had un-accepting authority figures).
They are though that's the thing, Prohibiting it is why DeSantis has been described by CNN the Washington Post and David French as "a Fascist" trampling upon American freedoms. Then there was that hilarious self-goal where having insisted that they weren't showing explicit material to minors, parents posting pics of the hand-outs got slapped down for posting explicit content.
The problem with the "Groomer" claim is not that it is stupid and distracting, it's that it has struck a corde with the normies.
I mean, if you have evidence of widespread "teachers taking classrooms of children to drag shows", "elementary school students being taught how to give good blowjobs", or even general efforts to make children queer or trans in schools that aren't that extreme but are still stronger than I say happen above, I'd just be wrong! And, if such exists, I'd want to see it. But "desantis is a fascist, says david french" is not that.
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Sure, I believe that too -- just that this is not really what "groomer" normally means.
One can try to pull off the leftist academic(/Red Queen) trick of redefining words to mean what you want them to mean, but I don't think the right has the institutional credibility to make it stick in this case.
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Regardless of whether "grooming" is literal grooming, it has enough aspects in common with grooming that the comparison becomes obvious; it's exposing children to sexual things and it's deliberately excluding the parents from being told. If you're going to do that, people are going to call it grooming regardless of any technicalities about whether it's being done for the personal pleasure of the groomer rather than in the name of ideology.
I'm not sure what, specifically, you're referring to here. I don't think keeping sex ed topics secret from parents is common. Do you mean the "a child can use pronouns or dress as the other gender and the school will assist with it without telling the parents"? That just doesn't feel like grooming.
This would be grooming: A teacher picks out specific students who have few friends / are shy / seem unusually influenceable, befriends them specifically, maybe shows them favoritism. They try to build (initially non-sexual) emotional intimacy. They'd spend some time in private doing shared, fun activities with the kid. They'd then move those fun activities to things like - dressing or acting feminine, doing weird (not sexual yet) things the teacher orders. If/when mild resistance occurs, pull the general friendliness temporarily. Then over time move more and more to more explicitly trans or sexual acts.
And - that's something that does happen, constantly! Sometimes with the explicit trans angle, although it's much more common w/o the trans angle. But the many-to-one nature of instruction, the generally regimented nature of school (there's usually somewhere you're supposed to be, doing the group activity), and the general cultural suspicion of authority figures being pedos makes it hard for a teacher to do that. But for a random old guy on the internet dming kids, all that reverses - 1 on 1 interaction is trivial, kids spend lots of time clicking away on their phones, many of them are lonely / don't have many internet friends, and you can start off making a connection just by sending memes or playing video games.
That's grooming! It describes a complicated and purposeful set of actions on the part of a specific individual towards specific, harmful ends. Alleged grooming in school is diffuse, done by different parties for small amounts of time, and is mostly just 'normal progressive stuff'. What part of "sex ed including gay/trans info", "kids can, if they choose to, come out in school if they want", "teachers putting pride flags up in their classrooms" is explained better by "grooming" than just "most people are progressives on gay/trans issues"?
Whether or not it's common is irrelevant. Murder and rape are uncommon.
No. Grooming has a much broader definition. The sudden restriction stems from it striking a chord.
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I actually believe that a significant number of teachers are sexually/satanically activating prepubescent children for the purpose of future sexual gratification. That does not necessitate the groomer is the ‘beneficiary’
People call Ghislaine Maxwell a groomer don’t they?
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Like I say, I think maybe one in a hundred people using the term right now agree with you -- that doesn't even mean you're wrong necessarily, just that lots of people will say stuff they don't quite mean if they think it will hurt their enemies.
I'm fine with it as an expression of hatred/frustration, but I don't think it's a way of winning.
It's just a personal preference, but I deeply hope you're wrong. Both about 'lots of people,' and the consequences.
Why the fixation on calling people groomers? If there are better ways of winning, why not use them?
Suggestions?
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