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The new House Speaker, Mike Johnson, is an Evangelical Christian that has positions and stances on homosexuality that I do not share (I confess, I remain a Millennial lib that has no problem with gay people doing gay things). Nonetheless, this CNN video where they discuss his positions on homosexuality and conversion therapy just seems so bizarre to me. In it, they refer to the idea of someone going from gay to straight as "debunked", quote Johnson saying, "there's freedom to change if you want to", and "homosexual behavior is something you do, not who you are".
Despite my own inclination to completely accept gay people qua gay people, I find nothing objectionable about Johnson's statements and see them as a much more accurate model of reality than what the CNN crew is expressing. I have zero doubt that sexual preferences and predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition. I'm agnostic on whether this could allow someone who has a natural inclination towards homosexuality (or heterosexuality) to groom attraction for the sex that they didn't initially prefer, but it's not obvious to me, and I don't think there's good reason to say that it's deboonked as though this is just a common stylized fact. Likewise, even if it proves impossible to change one's underlying preference, it certainly remains true that one can elect to follow a different pattern of behavior than their natural tendency. I might have a natural tendency to hook up with a flirtatious woman at the bar while I'm on a work trip, but Mrs. O'Dim wouldn't appreciate this and I value her so much more than some stupid hookup. Were I a religious man, I might be inclined to view my religious obligations through the same sort of lens.
But really, the thing that keeps hitting me with dissonance isn't even the above points, which I can at least countenance reasonable counterarguments to, but the incongruity with the belief that gender itself is a mere social construct that is fully malleable to an individual's stated preference. A man attracted to other men cannot become a straight man, but he can become a straight woman. Do the people articulating this view not notice that this is at least a difficult pair of propositions to adhere to? Do they see no conflict? Do they understand the conflict, but believe that it's a question that's been solved by The Science, so better to just trust The Science and move on? Cynically, I think it's mostly that expressing the opposite view will get you bullied and fired.
The thing is, we're expected to believe that conversion therapy works for paedophiles (or Minor Attracted Persons, if I'm getting on the new euphemisms bandwagons):
Here are people who don't choose their sexuality, whose inclinations are fixed, and who are treated by society with contempt, fear and loathing.
Here are sympathetic people in the psychiatry, psychology, and social sciences fields who want to help these pariahs, and part of that is appealing for our understanding and to put aside our reflexive reaction of "they're criminals and perverts, lock them up!"
So what can we do to help and support them not to offend? Well, lots of (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-022-02377-6) therapy, it seems.
I know I'm a cynic, but I fully expect MAPs to go the same way as homosexuality: a lot of political influence behind the scenes to get it re-classified as 'not a mental disorder', then the PR push about "See? Experts say it's not perversion! Trust the Science!" and eventually therapy to 'help stop the MAP from acting out his attraction to those below the legal age of consent' will be considered every bit as much offensive, and we'll get the same pop culture stories of "they put a hot wire to my head/because the things I did and said/they made these feelings go away/model citizen in every way".
Give it twenty years to get across, child-fucking is a harder row to hoe than two guys wanting to fuck each other. But it'll go that way, they're already putting in the spade work about "no it's got nothing to do with child abuse" that happened with legalising and normalising homosexuality. It will undergo the same "trying to change someone's innate sexual orientation to one deemed acceptable by society is abusive" shift.
And before anyone jumps in with "but being gay is perfectly fine and normal, it's not the same thing at all!", weren't we told that 10% of the population was LGBT so this means it's normal and natural? Well, same goes for being MAP!
5% is more than transgender at the moment. As we were reminded constantly during the gay rights campaigns: someone you know, someone you work with, someone in your family, is gay and you don't know it. Aren't you willing to be compassionate and loving? Love trumps hate! Change that to "MAP and you don't know it" and run the same campaigns, and I'm sure there will be "but being MAP is perfectly fine and normal, it's got nothing to do with child sex abuse" talking points put out there as well.
Well we can look at the facts, which are that since the 1980s gay rights have become widely accepted, gay marriage legalized across the West; homophobia seriously reduced, and yet at the same time ages of consent have risen (substantially in parts of Canada and Europe), punishments for abuse of children have hugely increased, many more people are in jail for these crimes, and - perhaps most significantly - it’s much less socially acceptable for a 25 or 30 year old man to have a 15/16 year old girlfriend in 2023 than it was in 1973 or 1993. That’s a good thing (in my opinion), but it suggests that things are moving further against the direction you suggest is likely.
Ages of consent may have risen, but we're much more accepting of sexual activity at younger ages. Think of "Romeo and Juliet" laws, or the constant tub-thumping over "we must teach sex education at [age whatever] because by age [a couple years more] they're going to be experimenting with sex". That used to be "by sixteen", now it seems to be trending down to "by twelve".
While repugnance around thirty year old man has sex with six year old child will persist, I'm not so sure that "thirty year old man has sex with sixteen year old" will. After all, if some are pushing to reduce the voting age to sixteen, and we accept that a sixteen year old can have a twenty year old boyfriend, then that means we think 'legal minor' may indeed be mature enough to decide such things.
I'm not saying it'll be easy or fast, but I do think there will be a swing back, as with many things, so that the rise in age and the reset of it that you mention may be seen as an over-reaction, and we must correct in the opposite direction, so if Judy is seventeen and eight months of age, why shouldn't she legally be able to have a relationship with thirty year old Tom, what magic happens with waiting just another four months for her to be legally adult at eighteen?
Sex education works at reducing teenage sex and pregnancies, as advertised, by emphasizing the consequences of having sex. If you wanted to encourage teenage sex you wouldn't tell them anything and let nature take its course.
This is ironic because your second scenario is legal in most of the world, including most of the US and has always been so and in the places where it isn't it's because of feminist campaigning.
The progressive movement that exists today is overwhelmingly sex negative: they are in favor of raising the age of consent (to 25), against age gaps, against workplace relationships, against flirting in public, or in bars, or everywhere except designated dating apps, against prostitution, against pornography (except onlyfans), against sex comedies, against sexy women in video games, against revealing clothing in movies.
Play some of the wokesploitation games (Dream Daddy, Goodbye Volcano High), for example: everyone is some kind of queer but no sex, not even hinted at, maybe a (one) kiss, maybe the farthest they get is holding hands.
The trans kids stuff is the second most successful mass sterilization project in the world. Puberty blockers likely cause permanent inability to orgasm, what has your church done that's as effective as that at preventing teenage sex?
The progressive movement that exists today can be summarized as "Straight male sexuality bad, everything else good!". They are in favor of raising the age of consent, but deny that women actually need to get consent from men. They are against age gaps, but deny behavior of older women toward younger men is sexual. They are against men flirting with women unless the women desire it, but think women should be free to flirt with men whenever they wish. They are against any media that panders to the sexual desires of straight men, but are okay with media that panders to the sexual desires of others.
"Sex positivity" has always been tied up in Feminism and thus has always only cared about ensuring sexual outcomes are positive for women.
Sex postive feminists existed at one point, it's just that after they lost the feminist sex wars, the sex negs flayed them and wore their skin to hide their puritanical, hypocritical nature.
Sex positive feminists won the feminist sex wars though. Sex positive feminists were never supportive of male sexuality except so far as it could be exploited by women.
No, that's what "they" say. My conspiracy theory is that the sex positive feminists actually lost. Modern feminists do not like porn and prostitution. They are very fond of sex negative terms like rape culture and objectification.
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