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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.
It seems unlikely that lesbians, in particular, would molest enough girls to create the next generation of lesbians for the ‘far-right’ / conspiratorial theory to be true. Even for males, the evidence for the “gays reproduce by molesting kids” canard seems quite limited.
The mechanism by which this is suggested to happen, in particular, is usually some framing of highly discredited Freudian psychology that, perhaps ironically, proponents of this theory would rail against in any other form.
Maybe lesbians are created when straight men molest girls.
How does that make any sense? What’s the causal mechanism there?
Straight man molests girl, permanently damaging her trust and comfort with men. She then becomes either asexual or lesbian in practice.
This is what some lesbians (usually of second wave feminism flavor) say, at least, and I do believe it's plausible that something like that could bump some Kinsey 4s up to 6s.
But presumably you also want to say that boys getting molested by men turns them gay. So why does it have the opposite effect on boys that it has on girls? How come, instead of the boy’s trust and comfort with men being permanently damaged, he instead becomes hyper-attracted to men and seeks out even more intimacy with men?
(Also second wave feminists thought that being a lesbian was pretty much the most virtuous thing that a woman could do so it strikes me as odd that any of them would try to link it to trauma.)
I used to know a woman who got raped in the past and continued to regularly have casual sex with strangers in an attempt to "regain control" of her sexuality (unsurprisingly a psychology student in the same year as my wife, yes all the stereotypes about different study topics are true). She occasionally admitted that it's mostly stupid and never actually led anywhere good, several of these encounters even have ended up kinda rapey and made everything worse. But she just couldn't not do it, as I understood her she constantly feels threatened by men and going partying, targeting a specific guy, getting him to buy you drinks, getting him to focus on only you the entire night, and then "rewarding" him at the end, all completely on your own schedule made her feel powerful. Especially if he afterwards gets obsessed with her.
I'm mostly rephrasing @Terracotta here, but there's always different ways to deal with a perceived threat. If you get beat up, you can either get buff - fight response - or forever avoid - flight response - every situation where it might possibly happen again. And the more extreme the (perceived) threat, the more extreme the reaction is usually.
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Traumatic experiences can have that paradoxical effect, though, where some victims become intensely avoidant while some victims go the opposite direction and obsessively repeat the trauma. Show a bunch of 5-year-olds a scene from a scary monster movie, and some will become so terrified of monsters that they can't even handle* Sesame Street*, while some others will get painfully hyperfocused on that type of monster and deliberately seek out all the possible media about it that they can find- not joyfully, but with an anxious kind of obsession. I've personally observed both reactions, and both make sense in their way. One effect of fear is to focus the attention, so it makes sense that kids would develop a compulsive interest in processing or making sense of the trauma by repeating it on their own terms.
Mapped onto sexual trauma, that would mean that a boy molested by a man might become a sexually voracious gay dude, or might flee into borderline asexuality. A girl molested by a man might become a sexually compulsive straight woman, or might flee into lesbianism. All four of which do seem to match at least my anecdotal sense of the real-world outcomes for these cases.
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Well, no, as a matter of fact I don't.
To be fair you did make the argument that sexual abuse leads to homosexuality.
No, I made the argument that it leads to loss of attraction to the opposite sex, provided the abused belonged to it.
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Probably because boys are not girls and girls are not boys and there's no reason to think that they are equivalent or interchangeable, especially when it comes to sex.
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Male and female sexualities are asymmetric in more ways than one, so I wouldn't consider it the most shoddy prior that males and females are more/less likely to come away with different experiences of the same thing.
Yes, I agree that men and women are different. But are we allowed to invoke that as an explanation whenever we want to? Sometimes men and women behave the same, instead of differently - what then? Do we just say "sometimes men and women are the same, sometimes they're different, and that's all there is to it"? It would give you unlimited explanatory license to justify whatever you wanted in regards to theories of gendered behavior, without ever having to address gaps in the theory.
My concern is that people are starting with the conclusion they want to prove ("gays are icky and pedos are icky, therefore they must be linked in some way") and then working backwards. So you end up with a just-so story that adds more and more epicycles to prove the desired conclusion.
Now this is an honest question and not meant to be snarky: When?
I just genuinely cannot think of a single situation in which men and women behave the same. Not one. Not when studying in school, not when walking to the bathroom, not when sitting down for lunch, not when speaking in a business meeting. Maybe I'm just not thinking broadly enough?
Currently though, I'm liable to think the proper heuristic is "men and women literally never behave the same in any situation ever, and if anyone says they do they're either smoothing over differences or autistic." If there are some weird exceptions then those seem to fall more under the "exception that proves the rule" than anything else.
This doesn't give unlimited explanatory power, but it does require every single generalization about people to be split into two more specific generalizations, which I feel will cleave reality much closer to the joints.
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The little bit of data I've found seems to align with the original hypothesis (that homosexual molestation is much higher for both sexes):
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