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Notes -
Nolan got kicked off the Pizza Party Podcast almost three years ago, so it's certainly "old news" at this point, but a comic someone made about the incident surfaced on my Twitter feed this weekend, as someone was using it to illustrate the concept of fetish mining to people who are unaware.
The first link is the original posting (AFAIK) of the comic. The second is what appeared on my feed. I'm including the second because the person's bio says "Transmale Aro Ace/ He-They", which is interesting given the circumstances.
I'm starting to lose track of grooming and why it's bad.
My understanding is that grooming is the act influencing kids to make decisions they're not prepared to make, with the implicit understanding that they technically won't make these decisions until they've reached the age of consent, even though they've already been acclimated to the concept for years prior. This is why some consider teaching kids about gender to be a form of grooming, and why an adult talking to a minor with no clear intent of romance is seen as potential grooming.
Commissioning an underage artist to draw a character wrapped in a spiderweb is so many steps removed from sex that, regardless of whether the commissioner gets off on it, I don't know why it's any worse than just talking to the child about cartoons. Nolan was openly talking to children on social media before he was #cancelled because most of the fans of the podcast were children. It only became a problem when he commissioned artwork for his niche fetish from them.
If anyone can provide a steelman against Nolan that isn't based on disgust, I'd be interested in hearing it.
(Also, I don't think grooming is a black or white thing, a "you did it or you didn't do it" thing. There's no clear line that makes something grooming or not grooming. Defining it by intent is pointless, because you can't prove intent, and defining it by outcome means that you can't identify grooming until it's come to pass. It's always a judgement call, unlike actual child molestation, which I'm sure we can all agree refers to engaging in a necessarily sexual act with a child.)
If I have an apple fetish - I get off on pictures of bright, shiny apples - and I especially liked having kids draw me pictures of bright, shiny apples, then clearly there is no direct "damage" being done to the kids, and there is nothing wrong with pictures of apples. But I think people aware of my fetish would be rightfully disturbed that I wanted to involve children in providing kink fuel. Regardless of whether I had any intention of "cranking it up," as that cartoon puts it, it's definitely a valid concern. If I just want to get off on apples, why I am bringing kids into it?
So the argument isn't that he's doing any harm in the present, but that his decision to solicit children to produce his artwork, rather than adults, is a red flag. That makes sense.
The red-flag works on two levels. At the object level, you cannot be sure that @Amadan specifically and his specific apple arrangement will remain purely channeled as he describes without any leaks.
On a broader level you are regularlizing and normalizing a fundamentally very unstable system. Providing open channels for to regularly interact with adults in two-way exchanges and providing, while normalizing adults requesting erotic-adjacent material from the former group, and destygmatizing then entire frame work around eprsonal kink shame, is basically asking for abuse all over the place.
One of the biggest concepts of conservatism vs liberalism is maintainance of the broad social value of institutional infrastructure and moral framework. When you erode that because isolated instances don't cause harm, you ignore that the only way to allow those isolated "harmless" incidents was to either open the same exact gate that does allow the harm or to be coupled with an extreme totalitarian surveillance against any harm.
Essentially you can't have safe, high trust neighborhoods, and no locks, and no social reprecussions for trespassers. You can only pick two. But the trespasser then points to harmless trespassing and uses something somethign "moral disgust" as a frame for why proscribing trespassing is arbirary.
You have a fence, a chesterton's fence. And some people believe they should be able to harmlessly pass through the fence. It is in fact an affront to their freedom that they cannot. Of course there are people who would do harm if they could pass the fence. So your choices are to 1. keep the fence, 2. remove the fence and accept, address, or police the harm on the other side of it, or 3. Put a high security gate in the fence.
Any version of 3 that still let's harm through is just a flavor of 2.
One might, in an appeal to liberty suggest that 2 is the only righteous solution. OK, make that argument, though I vehemently disagree. But we cannot frame 1 as simple disgust, aesthetics or moral dogmatism.
Some people, conservatives and progressives, prefer to live in a society with strong hegemonic barriers against harm whilest allowing a different kind of freedom and security inside the society dependent on that scaffolding.
On another level, this is probably your 'moral disgust' level. Regardless of whether @Amadan 's example would ever harm someone, what he is doing in the hypothetical is disordered. And is further involving a minor in their disordered act and there should be the highest reasonable obstacles from him doing so. Different definitions of reasonable are going to be socially navigated (you'll have burka's in one culture and open decadence coupled with a Terms of Service click through in another). I don't think reducing this social proscription to disgust or aversion tells the whole picture, remotely.
What, exactly, is the point in having a high trust society if you still need to act as if you're living in a low trust society?
The point is that you don't if there are social repercussions for trespassers. High trust society doesn't mean no consequences society.
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Brilliant analogy. Thank you for your post. I'd aware a delta if we did that here.
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