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That is the status quo they are fighting against though. In their ideal world, "flaunting sexuality" wouldn't make you appear as a sexual object to other people unless you intend it to. The fact that it does today is seen as a problem and rather than putting the onus on women/children to not flaunt their sexuality, they prefer to put the onus on the men/pedophiles to not perceive them doing so as sexual.
The trouble is that such a thing is impossible. The sex drive is one of the strongest biological drives except maybe food. To ask a person to not notice a person displaying secondary sex characteristics is to ask a hungry crowd to not notice a plate full of hamburgers. That’s just not how biology works.
Adults like to tell themselves that other people shouldn’t notice their sexual displays, but unless the person has very little real-world experience, they understand perfectly well that people don’t actually work the way they want to believe they do. And so while most adults have learned to mouth those platitudes in polite company. But those same people are absolutely not behaving as if they believe that. No business allows overly sexy clothes in the workplace because it’s a distraction. No woman wears skimpy clothing casually to places like the post office or the grocery store.
And again, kids and for that matter adults with autism or other learning disabilities don’t necessarily pick up on this. To a ten year old, if grownups are telling them it’s okay to dress in a sexual manner and that “the adults won’t see you that way” that’s about the end of it. They don’t get that people lie out of a need to formally maintain the narratives they hold dear.
I think that most people are capable of showing restraint; strong emphasis on "most". You also have shit like burkas and Victorians being aroused by women's ankles...and on the other hand, you've got hippies at Burning Man running around buckass naked and calling it good.
Victorians also had porn and it wasn't confined to ankles. There's a lot of post-Victorian bashing of their immediate predecessors that gets repeated in pop culture as "how it was" and it's not necessarily so (as the song goes). You probably wouldn't have much chance of seeing a woman's ankles in ordinary life as women wore boots in the daytime, so seeing ankles would be confined to intimate moments, and that's where the prospect of prurience comes in. The swimsuit covers of Sports Illustrated are not simply showing off female athleticism, after all. In this NSFW article, you can see a postcard of two women with a man, one of the women is wearing boots, and it's not their ankles they are showing off.
Besides, the era of full nudes in art (much debated) isn't swooning over ankles alone.
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If the position is that people shouldn't perceive others flaunting their sexuality as a sexual display, then I'm not sure what kind of sensible argument there is to be had. I don't even think anyone actually believes that.
This is one of those arguments that is useful in some contexts but will be immediately abandoned in others. It's not a principle or rule, but a tool that is brought out to achieve a particular job and then shelved when it's no longer useful.
In the next breath, we'll be told how it doesn't matter what the speaker meant but rather how it was perceived by the listener that made if offensive.
With this degree of incoherence, it worries me even more that they're pushing sexuality on children, because there is no principle holding that back from going in any direction with it. It's like introducing an uncontrollable pitbull to a room full of toddlers. Sure, he might just play gently with the children, or he might not. Better to keep him from the children in the first place.
This kind of insane idealism can be worse than malice.
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On Pitbull owners it’s sort of a test for me for stupidity (maybe mean and too hot). It’s either people bad at math, lacking empathy, or just never saw the statistics. While pits going out and hurting/killing a loved one isn’t a gigantic risks it does happen a lot. And you have a ton of other options of mid-sized family pet dog where you don’t run risks your entire family hates you for life because you dog maimed mom it seems like an easy decision. I don’t know the exact probabilities of that happening but removing a .1% chance of that happening for basically free seems like a good deal.
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I think I saw someone go through the dog statistics ages ago, but I'm guessing dog attacks just havent been in the news lately. Wait until the next time there's a high-visibility culture-war adjacent dog bite or police shooting of a dog, and I'm sure it'll be plastered all over the thread.
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Roughly 50% of the adult population believe that enough to try and impose policy preferences based on it; this is why the claim of "victim blaming" is effective in the first place. This view skews massively female for obvious reasons.
To be fair to your other point, though, the people who believe this also form a core part of the same demographic that's currently "pushing sexuality on children"- which is also why that claim is a bit incoherent, and perhaps more accurately stated as "treat the young as if they were all women, especially the boys; man bad/foreign/unstable, women good/domestic/stable".
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