This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
#”We’re coming for your children.”
The LGBTQ+ movement kicked out NAMBLA, genuine pederasts, in the 80’s in order to get sodomy laws aimed at consenting adults off the books. The American anti-pedophilia majority took a generation to accept this disavowal at face value.
The Pizzagate section of the Q or QAnon movement revived the bailey that gay people generally want to rape children to cultural relevance, and did so around the time the trans rights movement was pushing acceptance of transition. The motte version is that the gay community reproduces through social memetic contagion since they won’t reproduce sexually. One potent variation is the ironic and practically self-parodying “trans genocide” meme
The drag queen story hour program made the idea scarily realistic even to parents who didn’t subscribe to any of that conspiracy theory nonsense. And now there’s a new twist.
As chronicled by NBC News:
In the 21-second clip, circulated by a right-wing web streamer channel, dozens of people march in the streets and are clearly heard chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going shopping.” But one voice that is louder than the crowd — it’s not clear whose, or whether the speaker was a member of the LGBTQ community — is heard saying at least twice, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”
To conservative pundits, activists and lawmakers, the video confirmed the allegations they’ve levied in recent years that the LGBTQ community is “grooming” children.
But to Brian Griffin, the original organizer of the NYC Drag March, if that’s the worst they heard, it’s only because he wasn’t there this year.
Griffin said he chanted obscene things in the past, like “Kill, kill, kill, we’re coming to kill the mayor,” and joked about pubic hair and sex toys during marches. People at the Drag March regularly sing “God is a lesbian.”
“It’s all just words,” Griffin said. “It’s all presented to fulfill their worst stereotypes of us.”
The “coming for your children” chant has been used for years at Pride events, according to longtime march attendees and gay rights activists, who said it’s one of many provocative expressions used to regain control of slurs against LGBTQ people. And in this case, they said, right-wing activists are jumping on a single video to weaponize an out-of-context remark to further stigmatize the queer community.
Conservative politicians and pundits have increasingly referred to advocates for LGBTQ rights as “groomers,” associating people who oppose laws that restrict drag performances or classroom discussions of gender identity with pedophiles. The charge is an echo of a decades-old trope anti-gay activists have used to paint the community as a threat to the country’s youths, an allegation that some advocates say endangers LGBTQ people. And the intense reaction to the video has scared some attendees, who insist the quip has been taken out of context.
“It’s really scary to us,” said Fussy Lo Mein, a drag performer and activist who was at this year’s march and declined to give their real name because of safety concerns. “It doesn’t represent everybody — it represents that individual. I thought it was a dumb idea, and I started chanting on top of it with alternate verses.”
This seems to be equivalent to the Charlottesville “White Rights” event where “Jews will not replace us” was supposedly chanted. The outgroup only hears “WE ARE A THREAT TO EVERYONE YOU LOVE AND EVERYTHING YOU HOLD SACRED,” while the ingroup appreciates the nuance and gets a bit freaked out at the outgroup seeing only the surface level interpretation.
Holly Math Nerd (by her accounts a victim of rape as a child, and hence hypersensitive to this kind of thing) has argued that child gender transition is a covert attempt to normalize paedophilia/child rape by alternate means. Her argument goes: if you think a small child is mature enough to consent to a mastectomy, surgery which will permanently sterilize them, and hormones with a host of side effects - why wouldn't you then think that they are mature enough to consent to having sex? Having sex with someone (even someone twice their age) seems like small beer compared to sterilization.
A few years ago I'd probably have scoffed at this argument as a paranoid far-right conspiracy theory. After learning that a senior member of Mermaids, a widely praised* UK charity for trans children and teenagers which has received public funding, is an outspoken pro-paedophilia advocate, I'm not so sure.
There could be a bit of a bootlegger-baptist coalition going on. The baptists are people who sincerely believe that trans children are in immense psychic distress for whom medical transition is the best option available. The bootleggers are the medical and pharmaceutical companies who stand to make a packet off surgeries, puberty blockers and lifetime hormone prescriptions; and people like the Mermaids guy above, pursuing the agenda for ulterior reasons.
*By everyone from Emma Watson and Harry & Meghan, to Starbucks and Wagamama.
The rather obvious problem for the LGBT community and the rest of us is that we cannot even point out the bootleggers without being labeled. No matter how nicely you point out the connection between letting small children make sexual decisions (or that the adults are pushing, often covertly for sexual discussions and books without parents consent) the answer is you are a horrible bigot for even thinking like that. Which means either you have to reject the Baptists outright or accept them and everything they want to do. This hurts the Baptists because people don’t want strange adults teaching their kids sexual content, especially without their consent.
Maybe the reason why I keep getting baffled by all those "actually this elite progressive is a pro-paedo" is that on the ground level, I see pretty much no increase in tolerance towards paedos. In fact the age gap taboo keeps expanding to cover age gaps between adults. If all those elites are pushing LGBT for the nefarious purpose of adding P, they don't seem to be doing a good job at all. Their successes, if any, of 50-100 years ago are completely negated.
Tolerance and enacting justice against are not always the same. If the surrounding edifice of the movement means one guy gets 10x the sentence he would have, but 100 that would have been detected slip on by, the criminal movement, as a whole, prospers. And that seems to be the result of the LGBT ideology. They engage in actions indistinguishable from true sexual grooming and molestation, unless you have a mind probe and a camera in the room.
Be specific. What actions and how are they connected to the LGBT movement?
Distributing erotic literature featuring sex between adults and children, that is so raunchy that members of the school board interrupt reading from it, out of concern for the children who might be present at the meeting.
It is connected to the LGBT movement because the literature is written, published, distributed, and defended when it comes under criticism, by LGBT activists.
Sounds more like 1 guy slipping by reading raunchy literature, while 100 guys get 10x sentences for anything more serious.
I don't follow what you're even saying? The person reading was a woman trying to raise awareness about the books available in school libraries... how did she slip? Who is getting 10x sentences? What does that have to do with actions indistinguishable from grooming?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's not baffling to me. If a 30yo dating a 20yo becomes taboo, it is essentially put in the same category as a 30yo dating someone even younger.
It's already there in some ways with the taboo on admitting attraction to literally anyone younger than 18. Both a person attracted to a 16yo and a person attracted to a 6yo are called pedophiles.
That baffles me. A 12 year old is mature enough to be sure of their gender identity and sexual orientation and so can ask for puberty blockers.
A 22 year old woman who sleeps with a 40 year old married man who, surprise surprise, does not dump his wife and kids to marry her is a poor little blossom who was groomed and taken advantage of by an older man.
Make up your damn minds. If 14 year olds are mature enough to fuck, get pregnant, and get abortions without their parents' knowledge or consent, then 22 year women are mature enough to realise that 30-50 year old men are not interested in them for their brains.
You're looking for consistency on the wrong axis. It's not "children are mature, adults are vulnerable". It's "this claim suits my agenda, and this separate claim suits my agenda too".
It appears to me that their mind is made up and it says that old trad white male capitalist able-bodied neurotypical cis hetero normative patriarchal [progressive stack intensifies] is the enemy; the source of all that is evil. It's a totalising blend of identity politics plus politics as identity. It's "are you with us or are you one of them?"
That's true. Incoherence is no barrier, it's a weapon.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't this more a problem with the overloaded term "groomed"?
I feel comfortable saying that the 22yo was taken advantage of, that it was a bad thing, and also that there should be no criminal and limited social consequences. That's because, as you note, she had the maturity to know better, or at least to carry on without lasting damage.
Calling that "grooming" is fine, but it doesn't make it equivalent to the other use of the term: soliciting underage kids for sex. The same 40yo hanging out by a playground and convincing children to get in the van is categorically different and should be condemned in the strongest terms.
These two positions are consistent. It's conflating the two terms, or defending against such a conflation, that leads to mental gymnastics.
I don't think that a 40 year old guy having sex with a 22 year old woman is grooming in any sense. It might be taking advantage of her, it might be even murkier depending if she's a vulnerable person (is emotionally fragile, has been misused in the past, etc.) or if the older man is in a position of power/authority (I don't think Bill Clinton was right in what he did with Monica Lewinsky, even though Monica was old enough to know that fooling around with a married man was wrong).
Grooming children is a much more serious matter.
Agreed on all counts.
I'm saying that misuse of the term "grooming" is a side effect of the definitional fight, rather than people refusing to make up their damn minds.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
So is this elite person a 16yo-pedo advocate or a 6yo one?
More options
Context Copy link
Ultra progressives still believe the latter is worse than the former, and this is reflected in the law, in discourse, in wider society.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't housing convicted male sex offenders (who have raped or assaulted children) in women's prisons when they claim to be transgender (even if they have made zero effort to medically or even socially transition) a perfect example of the increasing tolerance afforded towards paedos under this rubric?
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/11/karen-white-how-manipulative-and-controlling-offender-attacked-again-transgender-prison
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11193987/Judge-sends-serial-sex-abuser-born-man-not-legally-recognised-female-womens-jail.html
https://reduxx.info/toddler-killer-quietly-moved-to-new-york-womens-prison/
https://web.archive.org/web/20150531080143/http://www.tamworthherald.co.uk/Sex-change-man-abused-young-girls-jailed-16-years/story-26584788-detail/story.html
https://reduxx.info/exclusive-rapist-quietly-transferred-to-washington-womens-prison/
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/woman-appears-dumfries-sheriff-court-8566714
No. That's a vulnerability towards fake trans claims, not towards paedos.
It's a vulnerability towards fake trans claims which numerous paedos have benefited from.
Nevertheless, it does not benefit them because they are chomos. This sounds like a soldier argument against LGBT policies and not a real attempt to get at the mechanism of what it does.
Well, it would put my and a lot of other people's minds at ease if male convicts serving time for sex crimes were expressly forbidden from applying for transfers to women's prisons, a policy which was recently implemented in England and Wales. There is precedent for more women-friendly and less pedo- and sex offender-accommodating revisions to these policies. The failure of other jurisdictions to do the same does little to assuage my concerns that the trans lobby takes concerns about the effects of their policies on women and children seriously.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No, because I doubt any protagonist thinks of being housed in a women's prison as a perk or mercy or thinks much of the involved perpetrator at all. The thinking is that this is a great opportunity to grandstand for the principle of trans acceptance (further amplified by toxoplasma), and anyone trying to distract from this by making other considerations more salient (such as the nature of the crimes committed and what other principles they may pertain to) is concern trolling/not arguing in good faith.
I don't understand your comment. A convicted paedophile doesn't think being housed in a women's prison is a perk or mercy compared to being housed in a men's prison?
I contend that those in society that approve or argue for such housing don't think of it as a perk or mercy (because they don't think about the reason the person was imprisoned to begin with at all). Therefore it being offered does not imply a softening of societal attitudes towards convicted child abusers.
I think if you took a poll and asked people "would you prefer to spend 1 year in a men's prison, or 2 years (or 3, or 5 etc.) in a women's prison?", you would be hard pressed to find a respondent who would willingly select the former. Everyone knows they'll have an easier time in a women's prison. Child molesters presumably weren't the intended beneficiaries of the policy of housing trans women in women's prison, but they're often beneficiaries nonetheless.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If he’s not attracted to adult women then why would it be a perk? The only answer I can think of is so he doesn’t get beaten or killed by the other male inmates in a revenge attack, but in any case progressives (and many non-progressives besides, myself included) believe that extrajudicial prison violence is an embarrassment on the US prison system anyway, so that’s not a specific enough argument.
The canadians put a guy who raped a baby to death in a prison housing mothers with their babies. And then threatened the mothers who reported that he was telling them how much he wanted to rape their babies, because they were being transphobic, which is a crime.
There is no limiting principle to any of this. Any extreme thing you can imagine is already happening.
More options
Context Copy link
Sounds like a pretty big perk to me!
"Alright, but apart from completely negating my likelihood of being penetrated by a fellow inmate against my will; effectively nullifying my likelihood of getting beaten up or murdered by a fellow inmate; and affording me copious opportunities to intimidate, assault or rape fellow inmates - what have the Romans ever done for us?"
Even if these groups think it's an embarrassment, progressives need to justify why, in determining whether a given male inmate should be exempted from the possiblity of this happening to them, the sole deciding factor is "do they have the audacity to claim to be trans?"
Child molesters don't necessarily target children exclusively, and several of the people listed above had been convicted of raping/assaulting both children and adult women. "Karen White", for instance, has convictions for raping/assaulting both children and grown women, was incarcerated in a women's prison, and then (shockingly) assaulted several of his fellow inmates.
More options
Context Copy link
????
That's a big perk.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Straight women (who play a critical role in setting progressivism’s sexual agenda) are incentivized to keep the acceptable age gap range as narrow as possible. A 30 year old doesn’t want to have to compete on the free market with a 21 year old. So that’s another reason to expect LGBT to not turn pro-P.
There’s plenty of room for straight women to support, condone, tolerate, or turn a blind-eye to big P Pedophilia while playing the bootlegger when it comes to older-man younger-woman relationships, especially when there are LGBTQIA+ or other ipdol considerations in play. Hence why online discussions of Henry Caville, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Elon Musk often feature female seething, but it was crickets from the women when it came to discussions on Rotherham. Always funny when the guy who literally plays Superman, a generation-defining actor known for smashing supermodels like clockwork, and the richest man on the planet and father of ten get accused of being creepy de facto incels for dating younger women.
Targeting pre-pubescent children is the central example of pedophilia and the actual dictionary definition. However, pre-pubescent children are not a source of sexual competitive threat and anxiety for 30-year-old women like 21-year-old women are.
Just-so arguments can easily be made on a Who? Whom? basis. Drag queens wanting to mix with preschoolers is Stunning and Brave, because drag queens are valid and beautiful and children (especially those of other people) should learn as such. Thirty-year-old men wanting to mix with 21-year-old women is Gross and Problematic; such men are pathetic losers who can’t handle a woman their own age so they just want someone easy to manipulate (but at the same time, young women are totally Strong and Independent #GirlBosses). After all, everyone who’s not a creepy incel knows that 30-year-old women are just as beautiful and fertile as 21-year-old women, plus their additional education and experiences only make them more desirable partners.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link