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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.)
Moral disgust, like other kinds of disgust, is often best recognized as a heuristic. A general heuristic that [people who get off on kids' behavior are disgusting and dangerous to children] is a good one. Such people are far, far more likely to be predators than your average person.
That makes sense. And if you place a higher value on protecting children than on not shaming adults for their behavior, then I can see why shaming Nolan would be seen as justified. If I understand you correctly, the steelman wouldn't be that he hurt anyone or was trying to, but that there needs to be an enforcement mechanism to disincentivize this behavior. Am I correct?
This is a fundamentally different worldview than mine. "Shame" is a strong word, but I think consequences (including social) for people's actions benefit those people in the long run more often than not. Whether [shaming adults for their behavior] is negative at all has to do with what that behavior actually is, independent of any other factors.
I'd abstract a level further. Sexual abuse of children is bad (citation needed). We want to prevent it, so we disincentivize actions likely to lead to it. Involving kids in personal communication online is already bad enough, but then to make that communication sexual is way over the line, whether or not it actually leads to predation.
Other commentors have done a better job at describing this than me but honestly I'm puzzled what part of this is confusing at all to you.
Because I had a hard time imagining how the spider web thing would translate into him harming an actual child. They were very segregated in my mind, and my immediate revulsion towards anything that looks like cancel culture prevented my attempt to understand the steps involved in extrapolating harm from an abstract fetish.
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