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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   25717 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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Major NYT opinion piece dropped this week. At the time of my clicking on it, it was under the headline "Born This Way? Born Which Way?" It is a tour de force of Current Thinking on all things sex and gender, covering trans issues as well as sexuality. Given that the title is so evocative concering the topic of my recent AAQC, I feel like I can't help but comment on the current state of affairs. Let's start with the history of thinking on sexuality, since that's the closest link.

For gays and lesbians, social acceptance and legal protection came as Americans learned to see sexual orientation as an innate and immutable characteristic. When Gallup first polled on the topic in 1977, just 13 percent of Americans thought gay and lesbian people were born that way. Now roughly half do, and in many ways it hardly seems to matter anymore. The frenzied search for a “gay gene,” a very 1990s preoccupation, has petered out. Believing gay people had no choice but to be gay was a critical way station on the road to accepting homosexuality as just another way of being in the world, and no one talks much about it anymore.

And later:

...like many queer people, I had many different romantic entanglements in my youth, and had I not met my wife in college it is not impossible to imagine that I might have ended up on another path. I certainly did not experience myself as being born any particular way.

Among people of my generation and younger, it isn’t all that uncommon for women who were once married to men to later in life end up in partnerships with women, and I certainly have known men in gay relationships who wound up in straight ones and vice versa. These people seldom describe themselves as having “lived a lie” in their previous relationships. I think most of us know intuitively that sexual orientation is not binary, and is subject to change over the course of our lives.

Finally:

We ended up with the born-this-way model because of the tension between the seeking of rights for an embattled minority and the broader search for liberation. But this tension is ultimately dialectical — it contains the seeds of its own destruction.

She words it differently, but the conclusion is basically the same as what I had said - it was importantcritical to force people to believe in Dogmatic Position so that political victories could be won, but in the Year of Our Lord 2023, basically no one even bothers defending it anymore; they don't have to! The political victories have already been enshrined.

Unfortunately, that's about all that the article really says about the "born this way" narrative and the political history around it. Fortunately, it hits on quite a few other notes that are highly related to things I've thought about and said for a while. The article opens:

When I was in sixth grade, I made a decision that changed the course of my life. I decided not to try out for the middle school swim team. I know that might not sound like a big deal, but it was. As a grade schooler I was a standout swimmer — strong shoulders and back, and well-muscled legs that powered me through the water with ease and speed. I was disciplined, obsessive. My form was excellent. My coach saw potential.

Had I stuck with it, my life might have turned out pretty different. I might have been a popular jock rather than a lonely weirdo. I might have become a varsity athlete who won admission to a top college rather than a barely graduated teenager who had to take remedial math at a community college to scrape my way into a not-very-competitive school.

And soon after hits the high note:

We allow children to make irreversible decisions about their lives all the time, ideally with the guidance and support of the communities that care for them. Sometimes they regret those decisions. The stakes vary, but they are real. So what are we saying, really, when we worry that a child will regret this particular decision, the decision to transition? And how is it different, really, from the decision I made to quit competitive swimming? To many people — I am guessing most — this question is absurd. How could you possibly compare something as fundamental and consequential to one’s life as gender to something that seems comparatively trivial, competitive sport?

Man, I can't even blockquote it without thinking about how many domains this thinking touches on. I'm sure it's been remarked on here, and I feel like there was an SSC/ACT post or some other significant post here where people ruminated on life choices, regret, and the human condition of our walk through a garden of forking paths, where every choice we make closes off an infinity of alternate possible realities. Like, this is so core to the the human condition that it's hard to imagine subjects that it doesn't touch on. Nevertheless, I can't help but think about the hot button ones - abortion, consent, child sex, and economics.

Abortion

Commonly, in discussions of abortion, a divide appears concerning what sex is about, how important it is, whether it's sacred or whatever, etc. I feel like a common perspective that is expressed by pro-choice folks is that it is wayyy less important/sacred than they think their opponents think it is. This opinion piece talks of competitive swimming, but I recall people saying that sex is like a tennis game. It's just a fun recreational activity that a couple of people show up to do together; they both consent to playing tennis; they just have some amount of fun; then nothing particularly interesting happens. In the era of ubiquitous birth control, they think that sex is totally just like this.

This is used to argue that abortion should be totally fine, and the only people who disagree are some crazy folks who still think sex has some meaning or implies some responsibilities/consequences and apparently want to punish women for basically playing a game of tennis.

Consent to sexual relations

We start to see some cracks in the full-on sex-is-tennis position already when it comes to consent to sexual relations. Imagine your boss really loves tennis and decides that he wants to have some team-building out on the court. There's plenty of perceived pressure to play. Maybe you don't particularly like it, but you feel like you should just suck it up and play. It's not that bad. Maybe you could even learn to kinda like it. Besides, you likely have other parts of you job that you like even less (friggin' TPS reports are the worst). Lots of people might think this is kind of a stupid thing to be part of a job, perhaps somewhat unprofessional. Who knows? I hear that some people feel like they have to play golf to make that sale, and they don't seem to think it's terribly unprofessional.

Regardless of how annoying/stupid/unprofessional you think it is, basically no one would argue that it should be criminal. But we absolutely would if it was sex! It seems to be significantly different.

Child sex

When it comes to the question of whether children can consent to sexual relations, the dominant position is that it is just trivial that they cannot. I mean, sure, they can consent to playing tennis just fine, but sex is completely and totally different. Why? I've steeped myself in the academic philosophy literature on this topic, and while it's a thousand times better than the responses you'll get from regular Joe, it still comes in seriously lacking in my mind.

Westen doesn't take a super strong position on the topic, but likely grounds it in what he calls the 'knowledge prong' of what counts as valid consent. A person needs to have sufficient knowledge of... something... related to what sex is, what it means, what the consequences could be, the cultural context... I'm not exactly sure what. I don't think he did the best job of really digging in to details here. This is perhaps the most fruitful line of inquiry for future academic work for those who want to salvage a consent-only sexual ethic, but right now it's seriously lacking. Any work will definitely need to distinguish from tennis, because I see kids out learning tennis at our local courts somewhat regularly, and they can hardly be said to understand the risks/cultural context/etc. of tennis any more than could be said for sex.

Wertheimer, on the other hand, doesn't even attempt a theoretical explanation for why children cannot consent. Instead, he views it as simply an empirical question of whether, in a particular society, children tend to be, on net, harmed by sex. The opinion piece writes:

[A]s categories, we experience [race and gender identity] in large part through the perceptions that others have of us, based largely on our outward appearances.

A disciple of Wertheimer might say that a large part of how children perceive sex, and whether they perceive it as harmful or not, may depend on the perceptions others have of it.

Of course, either of these approaches opens up all sorts of cultural engineering possibilities. If we team up the "sex is like tennis" folks with the "comprehensive sex education as early as possible" folks, it's easy to imagine how society could change to one where children learn the requisite knowledge and are not, on net, harmed by the sex that they do consent to. Some folks might cheer on this result, saying that society would be immeasurably improved to the point that it unlocks this new world of possible good things... but the "it is trivially true that children cannot possibly consent to sex" crowd would certainly disagree.

Economics

I don't have a better subtitle for this section, but my thoughts here are background shaded by the free market, Marginal Revolution style economics, which emphasizes that it's important to let people make choices, even ones that they end up deeply regretting. "Capitalism is not a profit system; it's a profit and loss system," they say. You have to let people choose to try things that may succeed and make them a boatload of money... but which may also fail and lose them a boadload of money. This is often justified by placing a possible governing agent in a position of ignorance - you just don't know ahead of time which choices are going to be spectacular failures and which are going to be spectacular successes. Pushing in an even more libertarian direction, many folks want to say that we should just let people do the most harmful of drugs, even though we can be 99.99% sure that it is destined to end in pain and hardship. The article wants to have a sense of this for individual gender choices. 'You know what? Even if they regret it, we need to let them choose, because we're in a position of ignorance.' The article begins concluding with:

I understand the impulse to protect children from regret. The fantasy of limitless possibility is alluring — who wouldn’t want that for their child? To forestall, for as long as possible, throwing the switches that will determine your destination in life, is tempting. But a life without choosing is not a human life.

Hits a bit different after a section on child sex, though.

Closing Thoughts

I don't have a nice tidy bow to put on this package. I have my personal beliefs1, but I don't have a nice clean way to just directly put together a story connecting these things in a way that will please any particular reader with their own inclinations on the various questions involved. Mostly, it just really stands out to me that lots of people have completely contradictory opinions, at their conceptual core, when we try to apply them to all of the above problem domains. I don't think it's "just the outgroup", either. I think we need careful work and reflection across problem sets to help people understand where their positions are sounding hypocritical and why there are serious, huge problems here that are fundamental to the human condition. Reductive slogans aren't going to work. "Shut up and mouth these politically-acceptable words or you're an X-ophobe," isn't going to work.

1 - If you must know, I think the transgender ideology is near incoherent philosophically and anti-science biologically; I think abortion is wrong regardless of whether sex is like tennis; I don't subscribe to a consent-only sexual ethic and therefore don't think the question is of all that much import for whether children should be able to have sex; I generally lean pro-profit-and-loss capitalism and less drugs.

This hits close to this widely downvoted comment I made on the topic.

I want to see people in the camp of 'sex is just like tennis' and even actually 'sex is just like tennis and tennis is a game you can play with a ball or not, and perhaps a racket but maybe not' explain it.

Why is 'groomer' a bad word to them? If open nudity, open fornication, children performing alongside adults in sexualized situations are all to be celebrated... then why not just admit 'yes actually we want to screw your kids' or at the very least 'if somebody else did we're okay with it'?

What is the contemporary justification that this is not okay?

If a father can be shamed for opposing their child dating somebody who is too dark, too male/female, or for deciding that they were the other sex all along... If a child rejecting the father's strict heterosexual, ethnocentric norms is to be celebrated...

Then why should progressives not shame a father for opposing their child dating an older adult who opened their mind about the beauty of inter-generational sexual relationships etc?

Then why should progressives not shame a father for opposing their child dating an older adult who opened their mind about the beauty of inter-generational sexual relationships etc?

They tried that already in the 70s, and you should never let them live it down.

Yeah, but OP managed to have a polite discussion without setting up a caricature first.

Why don’t progressives, believing X, endorse Y? The obvious answer is because X doesn’t imply Y. Consider some reasons age might be categorically different from race:

  • Children grow from young to old, but not from white to black. Judging based on the latter is less moral.
  • We already restrict the rights of children to engage in commerce and move freely. Imposing on another adult right is therefore acceptable.
  • Moral law, if one subscribes to any of the systems which proscribe pedophilia.
  • Without exception, adults were once children, but the reverse is not true, so there cannot be equality between adults and children.
  • The ever-popular power differential, which violates a consent-based ethics very popular among liberals.
  • It’s gross. You may not believe it, but your enemies are also capable of a disgust reflex.

Take your pick.

Consider some reasons age might be categorically different from race:

Race is not the elephant in the room, it's sex.

Children grow from young to old, but not from white to black. Judging based on the latter is less moral.

My point is that if schools, judges and the public can collectively go against parents for decisions their children take, why not regarding dating pedophiles. If boys can become women I don't see why white boys couldn't become black men if they so desired, or if Michael Jackson suddenly decided to identify as 'white', what the issue would be?

We already restrict the rights of children to engage in commerce and move freely. Imposing on another adult right is therefore acceptable.

Less and less in the area of sex change. There are progressives right now arguing that it's not parents' business if the kids want to see doctors and therapists, buy and take hormones, live in a safespace LGBT shelter etc...

Moral law, if one subscribes to any of the systems which proscribe pedophilia.

Which is my question, on which moral basis would a progressive proscribe the sexualization of children and pedophilia?

Without exception, adults were once children, but the reverse is not true, so there cannot be equality between adults and children.

What is the relevance in this case? Also progressives want us to believe that FTM transpeople are just as women as women that were ever only girls and women.

The ever-popular power differential, which violates a consent-based ethics very popular among liberals.

Then why is it okay for teachers and school administrators to tell kids that they can become girls/boys if they so wish? Isn't there a power differential there?

It’s gross. You may not believe it, but your enemies are also capable of a disgust reflex.

That was not a valid argument to prevent the legalization and acceptance of LGBT issues.

You asked why your enemies don’t do something. I provided a list of reasons. It only takes one for a progressive parent to stick with the status quo and say “fuck no, the kid diddlers won’t get my child.”

You might as well ask a Muslim how he can abstain from alcohol. Good Christians don’t drink to excess, of course, but how could a Godless heathen justify such restraint? He doesn’t even count 1 Corinthians as scripture!

Obviously, there is more than one way of coming to a similar answer. A Muslim has a long-standing, complicated tradition too, and it says no drinking. So, too, with progressives—and socialists, and fascists, and most modern Westerners—who have settled on one or another reason not to have sex with children. Removing your reason doesn’t leave us swinging in the wind.

I don't need somebody pretending to be ChatGPT to give me an hypothetical answer to a question when we have people here with the existing position to give us their actual answer.

You might as well ask a Muslim how he can abstain from alcohol. Good Christians don’t drink to excess, of course, but how could a Godless heathen justify such restraint? He doesn’t even count 1 Corinthians as scripture!

I understand that Muslims have rules similar to Christians and they follow these rules. They don't have to be identical to Christian rules' for me to understand where the Muslims are coming from. I can read a novel or watch a movie and disagree with a character's motivations and logic but still understand why they would undertake certain actions based on that character and motivations.

If we're discussing progressives, then we need to explain why they feel justified in saying certain type of gross behavior should be illegal when they've spent the last few decades telling us that people behaving in a gross manner should not be jailed or discriminated against.

So, too, with progressives—and socialists, and fascists, and most modern Westerners—who have settled on one or another reason not to have sex with children.

Well I'm curious to what that answer is, and if some kind of logic can be built upon if we want to understand the progressive's mind and where this ideology is taking us.

If we're discussing progressives, then we need to explain why they feel justified in saying certain type of gross behavior should be illegal when they've spent the last few decades telling us that people behaving in a gross manner should not be jailed or discriminated against.

Because in this case they see a reason other than grossness to make it illegal. It is certainly a progressive tenet, although one that many people who call themselves progressives often forgo, that one should not be punished only for behaving in a way that others find gross or distasteful. It does not follow that no behavior that others find gross or distasteful should ever be punished. AIUI (might be mistaken), the Bible forbids murder on the grounds that it offends God to destroy something that is created in His image. This rationale makes no sense if one does not believe in the divine creation of humans. Nevertheless, people who don't believe that still have reasons for wanting murder to be forbidden and prosecuted. It does little good to say "But you're fine with sinning against God's creation in this case [eating blood pudding], so why are you not fine with sinning against God's creation in this other one [mass shooting]?"

"Groomer" implies that the person is doing it for base selfish motivation (of future sexual gratification), when the people you call that believe they are doing it for the sake of the children and society at large. This is bound to be insulting to activists who come from a (sub)culture that denigrates selfishness and have built their internal narrative of purpose around doing what they are doing.

"Groomer" implies that the person is doing it for base selfish motivation (of future sexual gratification), when the people you call that believe they are doing it for the sake of the children and society at large.

"Groomer" has never been limited to sexual motives, and has always been used to describe manipulation/social engineering of the vulnerable for one's personal benefit.

Warm fuzzy virtue feelings are a personal benefit.

This is sort of true, but in the context of 'trans kids teacher lgbt disney grooming' stuff it's a haze of nonspecific meanings that mostly means the 'base sexual gratification' thing as opposed to the other meaning.

The accusation is neither hazy nor nonspecific, nor novel to this case. It is the common name for a pattern of behavior used to compromise the vulnerable, whether for recruitment to gangs or cults, or to enable emotional or physical abuse, or for sexual abuse. In all of these cases, the objectionability of the "grooming" action itself is distinct from the bad things it facilitates. Numerous examples of such usage abound, and have never been limited specifically to grooming for pedophilia.

Forming a special, secret relationship with a vulnerable individual and encouraging them to lie to others about the details and nature of that relationship is a profound violation of trust regardless of the motives. To do this from a position of formal power, as an agent of the state, is a profound abuse of power as well.

Forming a special, secret relationship with a vulnerable individual and encouraging them to lie to others about the details and nature of that relationship is a profound violation of trust regardless of the motives

You are conflating two things here. One is: a student goes to a teacher and tells them they are trans, wants to use the female name in class, and doesn't want to tell their parents. The teacher says 'awww sure of course sweetie'. Maybe they talk for three minutes at the end of class every other week. I think this happens for <10% of trans kids, but still does happen sometimes. The teacher plays ~no role, either in terms of direct causation or in terms of being a 'prime mover', in causing the kid to be trans.

Two: A teacher spends an hour plus every week or two talking to the kid about trans issues, sex, or porn. The teacher, causally and/or by intent, plays a significant role in the child realizing they're trans or deciding to transition. The teacher tells the child to not tell their parents. Maybe they themselves are trans, and like the idea of having more kids be trans, or maybe they just believe it because it's the wholesome LGBTQ+ thing to believe. Maybe the teacher also does sexual acts with the child.

I think two happens with <1% of the frequency of one.

Forming a special, secret relationship with a vulnerable individual and encouraging them to lie to others about the details and nature of that relationship is a profound violation of trust regardless of the motives. To do this from a position of formal power, as an agent of the state, is a profound abuse of power as well.

You are imagining that most cases of one carry some of the characteristics of the second, enabled by your engagement with the topic being very 'alienated' from the details of the actual people and causation involved. You're also imagining that cases of one are more common among trans kids than they are. Neither are true! To whatever extent children transitioning is bad, this paints a false picture that just makes it impossible to prevent anything bad from happening.

Maybe the teacher also does sexual acts with the child.

Why include this? I have explicitly excluded actual pedophilia from my statements so far, as it is irrelevant to the subject at hand.

You are imagining that most cases of one carry some of the characteristics of the second, enabled by your engagement with the topic being very 'alienated' from the details of the actual people and causation involved.

I observe that Blue teachers and administrators have put large amounts of effort into policies that specifically protect and enable your scenario 2, excepting the last sentence. I observe that scenario 1 would require no policy at all, but simply teachers keeping their mouths shut about something they've been told. Instead, these teachers have explicitly demanded lessons on gender identity, have specifically demanded a policy of actively facilitating queer expression at school while lying to parents about their kids actions, and their interactions with those kids.

I do not think such efforts would be necessary for <1% of <10% of interactions with a small minority of students, but they are absolutely necessary for the grooming behavior many teachers have publicly announced that they engage in, and that many more teachers and administrators publicly support and are taking specific steps to facilitate. I suppose it's possible that all these teachers and administrators are simply lying about the things they do, the things they intend to do, and the actions they support, when all they actually want to do is completely innocent and unobjectionable things. If so, they are too foolish to be allowed to keep their jobs.

I observe that Blue teachers and administrators have put large amounts of effort into policies that specifically protect and enable your scenario 2, excepting the last sentence

Can you name something Blue teachers have done that enables 2 but not 1? Ignoring the sex part.

Instead, these teachers have explicitly demanded lessons on gender identity

As far as I know, this is, like, one or two lessons per year in a group setting. Which is at most 1.

have specifically demanded a policy of actively facilitating queer expression at school while lying to parents about their kids actions, and their interactions with those kids

Again, this seems to be 1 to me. "Maybe they talk for three minutes at the end of class every other week" as opposed to, like, half an hour once a week or so. I think you need the latter for any grooming (in the usual sense) to happen.

I suppose it's possible that all these teachers and administrators are simply lying about the things they do, the things they intend to do, and the actions they support, when all they actually want to do is completely innocent and unobjectionable things. If so, they are too foolish to be allowed to keep their jobs.

I don't think they're doing that.

Warm fuzzy virtue feelings are a personal benefit.

That I think proves too much.

It's certainly possible for someone to do X so they feel good about it but I think that is stretching the personal benefit clause to breaking point. Otherwise any teacher at a Christian school who genuinely feels good about bringing kids into the flock of believers is also a groomer by your definition. It can't be anything to do with the fact they also actually believe the child will be better off as a Christian, or that they want the child's soul to be saved through Christ AND also feel good about it? In fact any teacher teaching anything who feels good about imparting knowledge is now a groomer? A patriotic teacher who feels good about teaching kids the national anthem and the history of standing up to colonial overlords?

At which point once more we have stretched the definition of grooming to nigh uselessness because feeling good about doing things you think are good is a pro-social human adaption. Most people feel good about doing (what they perceive to be) good even if they have other reasons for doing so (moral intuition, commandments from God, legal instructions to follow etc.)

It also suggests as long as we employ teachers who don't feel good about it, but do so because they are instructed to do so, would be A-OK? That seems a counter-intuitive take on the whole situation. "It's ok, we picked a bunch of teachers to teach the Gay/Trans/Sex Ed curriculum who really don't care about it at all, and in fact would rather teach something else, and thus will get no personal benefit whatsoever and therefore definitionally cannot be groomers" doesn't seem like it would be accepted as a counter-argument.

You seem to object to the technicality of 'grooming'.

But what if teachers did want to have sex with kids and did try to influence them to have sex with them?

They would proceed in the same manner that teachers are currently doing with the trans questions. They're finding the 'trans' kids and helping them come out to their actual identity that was hidden all along.

Except in this case they're finding the kids that just happen to really want to have sex with adults.

Not forcing any kids, just helping them find 'who they truly are' inside.

Would you be opposed to it, and on what ground?

But what if teachers did want to have sex with kids and did try to influence them to have sex with them?

Then that would be bad and then be grooming yes. Adults should not have sex with children, so I would oppose it on those grounds.

Adults should not have sex with children

Why not? What's your moral justification against it (and how does it not apply to puberty blockers)?

What about children with children? If the teachers were to have practical sex-ed organizing orgies between pupils? Perhaps filming for educational purposes as well.

Because I intuit that is wrong. If puberty blockers are a medical treatment for a medical condition then they are probably ok. But it would probably depend on the age of the child, the situation they were in and the opinion of medical professionals. I imagine sometimes they would be ok and sometimes not.

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At which point once more we have stretched the definition of grooming to nigh uselessness

No, we have seen people mutilate definitions and concepts to deflect criticism of teachers "hatching little eggs," because it's a bridge too far to justify grooming kids on the merits. You can tell that's the strategy being used because the response to "why is this teacher showing my kid porn and telling him he'd look sexy in a dress" is "woah, how is that any different than promoting patriotism, tu quoque!"

The only conclusion I can see is that it's a tactical argument to hide actual support for the grooming.

No, we have seen people mutilate definitions and concepts to deflect criticism of teachers "hatching little eggs

This mostly doesn't happen. There hundreds of millions of people so i'm sure it's happened, but >95% of 'trans kids' realize they're trans on the internet.

why is this teacher showing my kid porn and telling him he'd look sexy in a dress" is "woah, how is that any different than promoting patriotism, tu quoque

This is like saying Catholicism is a fundamentally Pedophilic religion because look how they cover it up!! Except actual generic pedophilia is 1000x more common (among both catholic priests and teachers) than teachers showing kids porn with intent to trans them.

According to a list compiled by the conservative group Parents Defending Education, there are thousands of schools in the US where teachers hide social transition from parents.

Most people probably only know the policies of a couple schools so it's hard to tell but this seems to be a pretty general movement across the US.

This mostly doesn't happen.

Are you against it? Or is the Law of Merited Impossibility striking again?

Would you be against teachers putting in the same kind of effort but to help their students hatch the egg of 'I really want to have sex with grown-ups asap'?

If yes, why?

see here https://www.themotte.org/post/780/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/166814?context=8#context

As I have said multiple times over the past so many years, I do not think there is a single trans person who should, from their perspective, socially transition or medically transition. I think the entire thing is dumb. I don't see why that means I must support whatever decentralized oppression mirage conservatives claim that's directionally similar to my position!

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Every time this issue comes up you excuse the teachers by saying it's mostly creepy discord moderators and tumblr influencers doing most of the grooming, but you don't ever talk about them except to dismiss criticism of the teachers.

And my criticism of SSCreader is that he is using the catholic priest coverup tactics while claiming to just be "(trying to) pull back the curtain on the culture war and discuss it, rather than wage it."
Why is he doing that?

Every time this issue comes up you excuse the teachers by saying it's mostly creepy discord moderators and tumblr influencers doing most of the grooming, but you don't ever talk about them except to dismiss criticism of the teachers.

This is assuming 'arguments are soldiers'. Am I wrong, at all?

Because I like arguing on the internet, and I think the position I am arguing against is incorrect, and here is one of the places we can argue very different things civilly. If I wanted to actually influence the world I wouldn't have quit politics.

You can tell that's the strategy being used because the response to "why is this teacher showing my kids porn and telling him he'd look sexy in a dress" is "woah, how is that any different than promoting patriotism, tu quoque!"

Yes, and that is why using groomer as an attack is effective and I have no issue with it. If I still worked in politics and worked for the Republican party I would certainly be encouraging its use. It is rhetorically impactful.

However here, we are supposed to try and pull back the curtain on the culture war and discuss it, rather than wage it. I am certain some people are defending actions that are wrong, just due to ingroup bias and tribal thinking. But that doesn't mean the vast majority of teachers who are trying to (as they see it) protect vulnerable kids from abusive parents are groomers.

No, I'm saying that you are using the tactic of confusing definitions into uselessness, in order to deflect criticism of indefensible behavior by teachers who get off on "hatching little eggs."

And I disagree, and say that the other side is confusing definitions into uselessness by using it as an attack against teachers with perfectly defensible behaviours.

Now what?

Otherwise any teacher at a Christian school who genuinely feels good about bringing kids into the flock of believers is also a groomer by your definition.

Any teacher at a Christian school who genuinely feels good about bringing kids to the flock of believers does not fit my definition. Neither does a teacher at a secular school who's real enthusiastic about teaching evolution. Enthusiastic teaching does not fit my understanding of "manipulation/social engineering of the vulnerable". It does not involve personal relationships outside the scope of the teacher's actual job, or encouraging the vulnerable party to keep elements of that relationship secret from those who care for and about them. Grooming for gangs, cults, and emotional abuse all center on such behavior.

Grooming is about establishing oneself as a secret authority figure over vulnerable individuals, outside the channels of one's official duties, thus guiding the vulnerable individual into forming and maintaining a double life insulated from normal mechanisms of accountability, about compromising the normal protections and safeguards we put in place to protect the vulnerable from abusive behavior. There is no excuse for such behavior on the part of public school teachers, no possible circumstance where such an action is reasonable or acceptable. Arguably, this holds true for all public servants. That is why so much of the controversy has centered around schools making it a policy to lie to parents.

At which point once more we have stretched the definition of grooming to nigh uselessness because feeling good about doing things you think are good is a pro-social human adaption.

Certainly it is true that when we ignore significant parts of the definition, what remains is less than useful.

It also suggests as long as we employ teachers who don't feel good about it, but do so because they are instructed to do so, would be A-OK?

Professionalizing fundamentally abusive behavior does not make it less objectionable. Personal benefit is attached to the definition because that is generally the only reason one would ever engage in such behavior, not because encouraging children to lie to their parents stops being objectionable when one does not enjoy it. The closest analogue would probably be a "handler", in the espionage sense, which goes to show how far afield one must go to find comparisons to this incredibly bizarre and objectionable behavior. I do concede that this would be a different behavior, requiring a different solution; in such a case, the problem is not the teachers, but the people giving them orders.

"Personal Benefit" is objectionable for the same reason a math teacher ditching their lesson and reading kids' fortunes for five bucks a pop would be objectionable: They're being paid to do a job, they're not doing the job, and instead they're doing their own thing to acquire additional value. They're double-dipping, in short, and the fact that the activity they're double-dipping into is egregiously objectionable just makes it worse. Deriving great satisfaction from doing your job is not objectionable. Deriving great satisfaction from not doing your job is extremely objectionable, and should result in the immediate loss of your job, and when one is a public servant, probably prosecution.

In any case, that is clearly not the situation we are presently faced with, since these policies appear to be a grass-roots effort by the teachers themselves, not any sort of carefully-planned or -deliberated policy promulgated through the usual legislative channels.

Do you think teachers should form personal relationships with their students, lie to their parents about the existence and details of these relationships, and encourage the children to likewise lie to their parents about such details?

A Christian teacher of an atheist child whose parents refuse to let them learn about religion, and who honestly believes both that the child would be better off being taught and that it would save their immortal soul has a good argument they should instruct the child secretly.

And even I as an atheist can accept that if they are doing so out of honest belief and faith, they aren't grooming the child. If they did so, instead so they could convert the child to some Opus Dei (?) style flagellation cult so they could derive pleasure from beating the child themselves, this would be another matter. But I wouldn't consider them a groomer, if they did the former but also got fuzzy warm feelings about helping save their immortal soul. And even if their conversion caused them to go to Church and be put in contact with an abusive priest, that is so far from what was intended that it can't logically be held against them.

I do also want to point out just because something isn't grooming doesn't mean it can't be harmful. If the Christian instructing the child is right, they have saved their soul (potentially), if they are wrong they will potentially have the child making choices that are not in its best interest and may have harmed the child's future prospects and damaged their relationship with their parents for nothing, but whether it is grooming is seperate from whether it is a good idea or not. I'm not saying what you are opposed to is necessarily directionally good, I am just saying it isn't grooming without specific direct nefarious intention of the teacher in question.

A teacher who honestly believes a particular child is trans and that their parents would be abusive if they found out, and so hides this and supports the child secretly, can in fact cause great harm if they turn out to be wrong, but I wouldn't call it grooming. Whether they are correct to do so or not entirely depends on the facts of the case. If the kid was trans, and their parents WOULD have beaten them and the kid would have commited suicide, then the teacher was quite correct to put the needs of the child over the parents right to knowledge. It's not always right and it's not always wrong.

Your point also leaves open that someone teaching your child within the scope of the school and not creating a relationship outside of the school one, if it is endorsed by the school, and is part of their official duties to keep it secret from parents, then it does not meet much of your criteria. If a school makes it a policy to lie to parents (as by your own example), then it is by definition part of the teachers official duties to do so. They are NOT operating outside their defined role in a personal context, they are operating within the accountability matrix of their school. You can certainly argue there should be some oversight process to this, where it is documented and perhaps the principal has to sign off on it, but they aren't operating personally. Now, can that be taken advantage of by the nefarious? Absolutely and that should be accounted for, but the idea that all of them are groomers is just a rhetorical weapon (albeit a good one!).

To put it bluntly, our kids are not only our own. Societal indoctrination and engineering is part of the purpose of schooling, whether that is into civic nationalism, Christian nationalism, Progressive ethics or whatever else. And that means teachers have a relationship with kids where they may be teaching them things we do not agree with, and must consider the impact of what that information being disclosed to parents will mean. Whether they are correct in any given case, depends on the facts in those cases, not some blanket rule. Sometimes the right thing to do will be to disclose, sometimes the right thing to do will not. If a group of hardcore Muslim parents are complaining that their kids are being taught that it's ok to be gay in a secular school, then I consider it completely appropriate for them to be told to keep their noses out, and if necessary outright misled, if that is the civic secular position. That's how you work on their kids assimilating towards the taught culture for the next generation.

Public servants are not servants of any particular member of the public, but to society as a whole, that means they can (and arguably should) lie to and mislead some members of the public in furtherance of the needs of overall society. Police can lie to members of the public, politicians can lie, spies can lie, all in furtherance to the public good. Teachers are no exception. Whether they SHOULD lie or not is dependant on the situation. But the fact there will be some situations where they should is I think definite.

To be clear, I am not saying they should always lie either, I think hiding things from parents should be thought through carefully, and there should be specific mechanisms for that decision to be checked at the very least at a school level and it may well be true that the dangers in this scenario are overblown. But I also think the criticisms of it are also overblown. Supporting a child that you think is trans or gay, and hiding it from the parents if you think it will be harmful, particularly as part of your official school policy is not grooming. Which doesn't, to repeat myself, mean that it is good. If the teacher is wrong, their decision may well be harmful itself.

A Christian teacher of an atheist child whose parents refuse to let them learn about religion, and who honestly believes both that the child would be better off being taught and that it would save their immortal soul has a good argument they should instruct the child secretly.

No, they don't. Saving souls doesn't work that way. Further, I defy you to show me an example of a Christian doing this, and our society accepting and enabling it as official policy, and then attacking anyone who objects. I do not believe for a single moment that you or any of the other progressive posters here would ever accept a public school teacher organizing secret bible studies for their students during their working hours, explaining to the kids that they will go to hell unless they repent and are baptized and become Christians, and that they should lie to their parents about all this, and justifying their actions as saving children from hell. Were such a thing ever done, the response would be immediate firing and quite possibly prosecution. If actual, serious harm befell children roped into such a scheme, the response would be apocalyptic.

And even I as an atheist can accept that if they are doing so out of honest belief and faith, they aren't grooming the child.

And even I as a Christian accept that they are, in fact, grooming the child.

I can show that my definition is commonly used for a wide variety of end-goals, including explicitly ideological ones, not merely for enabling pedophilia. I have described how the specifics of the act itself is innately and deeply objectionable, regardless of motives. The Progressive insistence that "grooming" is only used for sexual abuse is entirely specious, and it has reached its current level of fixation because Progressives would find it very convinient were it were true, have a sufficient megaphone to drown out objections, and have little compunction about lying early and often. I am not compelled to play along with the charade here, and so I decline to do so.

I'm not saying what you are opposed to is necessarily directionally good, I am just saying it isn't grooming without specific direct nefarious intention of the teacher in question.

Cult leaders can genuinely believe that their cult is in their followers best interests. We still call it grooming. Emotional and physical (as distinct from sexual, but them as well) abusers can genuinely believe that their abuse is in their victims' best interests. We still call it grooming. That the groomer's moral compass no longer functions does not make what they're doing not grooming. It doesn't stop being grooming if you think it's a really, really good idea: forming secret relationships with the vulnerable, secretly inculcating dependency, insulating the victim from others who care about and have a responsibility to them, these actions are part of a well-known and well-studied pattern, and they are unacceptable in all cases. The act is done with intention, and the act itself is nefarious.

Your point also leaves open that someone teaching your child within the scope of the school and not creating a relationship outside of the school one, if it is endorsed by the school, and is part of their official duties to keep it secret from parents, then it does not meet much of your criteria.

To the extent that this is made official policy through official channels, with all the legal procedures followed, the problem simply kicks up a step. The school system exists to serve parents. If the school system decides to treat the parents as adversaries, it should be promptly destroyed and all participants punished to the maximum extent of the law. To the extent that the law cannot accomplish this, then the law has failed, and it is time for more stringent measures.

You can certainly argue there should be some oversight process to this, where it is documented and perhaps the principal has to sign off on it, but they aren't operating personally.

It should not be legal for school employees to lie to parents about their children. To the extent that this is not actually legal, I would imagine it would be because no one ever dreamed that such a law would be necessary. Obviously we underestimated the nature of Blues, and should remember this lesson in the future as we work to patch up the walls of civilization.

To put it bluntly, our kids are not only our own. Societal indoctrination and engineering is part of the purpose of schooling, whether that is into civic nationalism, Christian nationalism, Progressive ethics or whatever else.

Indeed. To the extent that they are not my own, they are my family's, and beyond that my Tribe's. They are not the school's, and they are in no way yours.

We created the school system on the assumption that we shared a common understanding of the values to be indoctrinated and engineered. Clearly that was a terrible mistake, and it must be corrected immediately. Since indoctrination and engineering are a core part of the mission, and since the idea of strict neutrality in our purportedly shared institutions is clearly a pipe dream, either it must be my tribe's values being inculcated, or the indoctrination machine must be destroyed. Blues cannot be trusted with control of shared institutions; those institutions must be either captured or destroyed. Certainly it is not reasonable for my tribe to finance with our taxes an institution that treats us as an enemy to be defeated.

If a group of hardcore Muslim parents are complaining that their kids are being taught that it's ok to be gay in a secular school, then I consider it completely appropriate for them to be told to keep their noses out, and if necessary outright misled, if that is the civic secular position.

No, it isn't. The School exists to serve the parents. It has no interests beyond those of the parents. To the extent that parents' interests cannot be reconciled, the school should limit itself to those interests all parents, or at least the vast majority of parents, have in common. If this requirement cannot be satisfied, if the school cannot be prevented from picking favorites in deeply contested controversies, it should not exist.

If the school thinks the parents are doing something illegal, it should call the cops. If the parents are not doing something illegal, the school has no valid role beyond assisting in their parenting, according to their values. The school has no valid perspective, no room for values of its own, no principles, no point of view.

And again, if I am wrong, then the school's perspective, values, principles and point of view should obviously be mine, not yours.

And again, if I am wrong, then the school's perspective, values, principles and point of view should obviously be mine, not yours.

Absolutely! You'll notice I am not arguing that you shouldn't be voting for, or otherwise trying to influence what is taught, and why I point out you absolutely should use "groomer" because it does have rhetorical traction, even if i don't think its really accurate. Were I still a political consultant and working fir the Republican party, I would be hammering that hard in many places (while downplaying abortion probably). That's entirely normal! I am talking about the tactics here which can be used in service to whatever ideology. Indeed I think one of the reasons the US has a fracture in culture is because it hasn't been effectively mandating the same thing in every school in every state. Your whole set up is basically designed to not create a single shared culture/tribe, because Texas gets to mandate different things to New England or Oregon and vice versa. Your ideas about only teaching what all parents agree on would be even worse in that regard. You need cohesion.

I will disagree that schools are for parents though. They are for the whole of society. Thats the whole point. What I want from a selfish parents point of view is for my kids to get the most attention, to get the most resources, to go to the best schools regardless of anything else.

Society is the answer to a distributed coordination problem, that if we all attempt to horde the most resources, to ensure our values are the ones taught, that means you cannot have a cohesive polity. Its a hedge against our (entirely understandable!) selfishness.

And the deal is we are on average better off with the coordination even if some individuals and blocs do not get their preferences met. Instead our selfishness is channeled into a struggle for the control of the culture and institutions.

Your preferences are currently losing. But they won't always be. It's the nature of movements to push too far and then lose support. Thats how the more conservative bloc lost control to the current more progressive one in the first place. But they too will push too far and lose support, quite possibly over the very issue we are discussing.

The answer is not to flip the board (so to speak), it's to realise these mechanisms evolved for a reason and that in the long run we are all better off on average. My kids are adults now, and they were educated in many ways with values I think are incorrect. And that's ok! I still got my chance to put forward my values as well. They were still better off with a stable system, even if it wasn't my preference of stable system.

Biden has historically low ratings and it is quite possible (perhaps even likely at this point), you'll have a Republican president, probably Trump. If they back off some of the abortion stuff you have a good shot at holding the Presidency, Senate, House and Supreme Court all at once.

At State level places like Texas and Florida are pushing back against what you dislike in education, alobgside with electoral success. The feedback mechanisms exist to change the things you dislike and there is evidence, they are being used AND support for your positions (or at least some of them) is growing.

If you burn down the things doing what you dislike rather than fighting to control them, then your kids grow up in flames. I think you are absolutely entitled to fight for what you want (figuratively speaking) but if you aim to burn down everything, you harm everyone. To the extent your opponents are trying to do the same, they are also wrong. But mostly they are and have been trying to control the culture and institutions not destroy them. And that is business as normal.

Sorry, I've not addressed all your points, I've focussed on those I find most interesting, which has moved us away from the groomer thing. Though I'm not sure there is much more there to learn about our respective positions there in any case!

Surely some of these activists are acting on selfish motivations 'I shouldn't get arrested for selling hormones online to teenagers'.

'Huge moneymaker' gushed one doctor involved in sex-reassignment surgeries at Vanderbilt in 2018.

Is that doctor representative/typical of, or even represented among, those who loudly protest being called groomers? The vast majority of progressive activists do not operate clinics or hormone-selling businesses.

Why is 'groomer' a bad word to them?

It's historically been an effective weapon against advocacy for gay people. Activist PTSD?

Well this made me try and find out why exactly the LGB(T) organizations decided to distance themselves from NAMBLA & co, and from this single source, I don't really see a reason.

If anybody knows why in the 80s-90s, suddenly LGBT activists decided that kiddie-diddlers were not part of the coalition anymore, please let me know.

Here are 2 quotes from it:

In San Francisco in 1987, the Eureka Theatre Company—the institution that would later premiere Tony Kushner's play Angels in America—was positioned to march directly in front of NAMBLA. One bullhorn-toting Eurekan took the opportunity to periodically yell "We're not proud of you!" and "You're disgusting!" at the chicken-hawk contingent behind them. In New York, according to the Seattle Stranger, a sadomasochist group issued a press release condemning NAMBLA's "disgusting, illegal sex which brings shame to our community."

Both of these are pretty bewildering to me.

One argument that this article makes is that in some cases LGBT activists ended up on the same side as the diddlers because anti-LGBT laws were based on age of consent, ie age of consent for homosexual acts were higher than heterosexual age of consent, so lowering the age of consent was a way to bring about 'equality'.

Another argument is that making homosexual lifestyle illegal / disapproved of encourages adults to take advantage of teenagers in poor situations, and is less likely in a more tolerant society, so supporting people engaged in that lifestyle is not as important to the community.

it wasn't extremely unusual for a gay man's personal story back then to include a part like this: When I was 15, my parents kicked me out for being homosexual, so I hitched a ride to Castro Street, found a more welcoming community—and had sex with some of them. Precisely because gay relationships are more accepted now, that sort of background is much rarer; queer kids are more likely to stay home and happily, openly date people their own age.

In California, specifically, the law did (and still does) have a strict age of consent at 18, with the close-in-age exception only reducing the offense to a misdemeanor, dating back to the 1913. It was even gender-neutral, by text! But in practice, police and prosecutors overlooked the typical teenagers boinking; prosecutors focused on late-20s or 30-year-olds knocking up 14-year-olds, particularly severe embarassments of the upper class, and places where other sexual offenses would be complicated to demonstrate or taboo to discuss. Some of the limited tolerance for diddler-adjacent arguments in the 60s and 70s reflected the ability to deflect onto those less-controversial matters -- two sixteen year-olds giving handies may or may not be moral, but it was nowhere near the same class of bad behavior as the Breendoggle.

And a lot of the early US LGBT movement was from or downstream of California, so it had an outsized impact.

((There's a small remnant of this disagreement when people bring up underaged sexting, same-age relationships, and sometimes the libertarian ephibophilia paradox. But for wildly obvious reasons all but the dumbest of these groups now very clearly demarcate their positions.))

That said, the bigger cause was just that a lot of the modern understanding of child sexual abuse as damaging in itself, not 'just' gross or immoral or something done along with conventional physical harm, is a result of surprisingly recent research. Abuse before the 1970s could sometimes be further demonstrated by physical harm, usually in around a stereotype of a violent stranger kidnapping and dumping a victim, but especially outside of such extreme (and extremely rare) versions most of the focus remained on reputational harm or moral standards, because that was enough. Even in those cases, the victims were expected to not understand or even remember what was done to them. Corruption of a minor was at most understood as making these immoral acts tempting to the victims(!).

(This wasn't helped by the most visible groups for academic being the then-newly contacted non-Western cultures with ‘ritual’ abuse, which charitably investigators weren't always familiar enough with the language and close enough to the victims to hear about dislike, and less charitably associated a lot of less-immediate harm with other cultural practices/race.)

It wasn't until the 1960s that gathering serious information about the prevalence of child abuse really happened at an academic level (yes, arguably, Kinsey did it in the late-1950s, but he wasn't very believed and his methods and reporting were garbage), and the 1970s for a national standard to be set. This made studies of sexual abuse victims possible: rather than searching for extremely rare survivors of stranger rape, psychologists could argue that one-in-four women were subject to such abuse, and they could use standard study recruitment methodology.

When they did, they discovered what Reason euphemistically quotes a once-NAMBLA-supporter as calling "developmental issues" in tremendous quantities. This seems obvious in retrospect -- they were being attacked in some of the worst possible ways by trusted figures, early in their emotional and social development, often for lengthy periods of time! -- but it absolutely flipped the board. This is why you see even opponents of Breen during the Breendoggle focusing on character or mental health of the perpetrator with occasional mentions of physical risks, in a sense that is absolutely alien and repulsive to look at today.

From a more... cynical perspective, the growth of divorce in the 1970s also presented a very large number of extremely uncontroversial targets: perpetrators (almost all men) whose ex-spouses could now report crimes after having legally separated and achieved a level of independence, while those perpetrators could have potentially been awarded some level of custody during divorce hearings.

Thank you for the explanation. I suppose the issue with pedophiles is that they constantly need to get new recruits.

I feel like some of the 'harm' arguments could be leveled against MSM as well, but that's a different problem I suppose.

So it’s got a bad denotation, worse connotations, a history of being deployed as a smear, and everyone currently using it is open about their disgust and their philosophical opposition to the targets.

Rounding that off to lingering bitterness feels a bit disingenuous.

then why not just admit 'yes actually we want to screw your kids' or at the very least 'if somebody else did we're okay with it'?

Loaded question, they don't.

Anti-progressives keep acting as if "adults having sex with children is okay" must follow from "adults providing children with info about sex is okay" even as all trends point to high-and-increasing discomfort with the former idea among the modal progressive. It's motivated thinking. Meanwhile the most conservative societies on Earth generally appear to be very comfortable with adults fucking minors (child marriage in the open, child prostitution on the down low).

they don't.

Why not?

What is the difference between

  • A - a middle-school teacher giving a few lectures 'perhaps you look like a boy/girl but you're actually a girl/boy' and then asking every pupil if they want the class to start referring to them as the new sex (opposite to the one their parents put down on their enrollment form)...
  • B - a middle-school teacher giving a few lectures 'sex feels great, maybe we should all have some' and then asking every pupil if they want to sign up for an orgy instead of PE this afternoon...

It's all consensual, if a pupil feels uncomfortable about A or B, then they don't have to sign up. Parents don't have to know because they could be transphobic or anti-sex-liberated-kids.

If you have an objection with B because orgies are totally different in degree than the soft 'social transition' that progressive schools are facilitating all over the country, how about dirty talk?

If you sign up for B' then adults at the school are going to tell you how cute your butt looks or some other sexualized comments, and encourage (or even force) other kids to do so as well.

If you have no issue with option A, do you have any issue with option B (or B'), and if so, why?

Anti-progressives keep acting as if "adults having sex with children is okay" must follow from "adults providing children with info about sex is okay" even as all trends point to high-and-increasing discomfort with the former idea among the modal progressive.

It's more "adults who feel entitled to provide kids with information about sex that their parents would be opposed to them having (and, even worse, feel entitled to hide it from parents)" is a good description of how actual groomers work.

The insistence on doing this despite vociferous opposition from parents also doesn't help. Also a groomer thing - it's actually more understandable that they'd take the risk, frankly.

Conservatives know that most of these people aren't going to actually fuck their kids but they've decided to behave like zebras; through their complicity they weaken child safeguarding norms and allow actual sexual groomers to hide in their midst. While also basically admitting they want to push kids towards a certain political orientation that suits them.

Combine it all and you get "groomers". Probably not kosher in any sort of formal debate but it's not one and I'm not particularly sympathetic.

Loaded question, they don't.

You're missing the point, which is: why? If "sex is just like tennis" what exactly is the issue? If I accuse you of liking to play tennis with children, even if you don't, are you going to get outraged, and ask me how dare I make the insinuation?

Anti-progressives keep acting as if "adults having sex with children is okay" must follow from "adults providing children with info about sex is okay"

It's not that it must follow, but surely you can understand people's suspicions when the "info about sex" includes all sorts of kinks and fetishes.

even as all trends point to high-and-increasing discomfort with the former idea among the modal progressive. It's motivated thinking. Meanwhile the most conservative societies on Earth generally appear to be very comfortable with adults fucking minors (child marriage in the open, child prostitution on the down low).

Oh please, and this isn't motivated reasoning? I can also cherry-pick things like the Taliban's reaction to Bacha Bazi and contrast it with various child sexualization initiatives of the progressives.

You're missing the point, which is: why? If "sex is just like tennis" what exactly is the issue? If I accuse you of liking to play tennis with children, even if you don't, are you going to get outraged, and ask me how dare I make the insinuation?

This is a bad-faith gotcha.

To use the tennis analogy, you would probably find something at the very least off if Serena Williams casually challenged a middle-school aged boy who was curious about tennis but had no real awareness of it beyond theoreticals of how to play, then proceeded to destroy him because she's that much more experienced. Something about that would strike most people as fundamentally different and possibly bullying, since the absolute destruction he faces might turn him off from the idea altogether and leave him upset. But if the same boy played someone only slightly more experienced, that would not necessarily come off as problematic.

Likewise, sex between children amongst themselves might not be a pro-social thing, but it's not wrong because it's unlikely either is that much more cognizant of what they are doing than the other. Ditto on predation, both are probably just fumbling and curious without any intent to exploit the other.

On the other hand, if Serena Williams taught a middle-school aged boy how to play tennis by playing with him, I would find that wholesome. I would think the same if whoever hell is the male best player did the same with a girl. By contrast I can't concoct a scenario when anyone would teach a child about sex, by having sex with them, without the whole thing being predatory.

It is not a gotcha, it is not bad faith. It is a valid analogy/question.

Why can't there be a teacher, acting in good faith, showing a child/teenager how to use a condom or what a birth control pill looks like? Maybe even outright demonstrating sex to show how this looks in practice.

Put another way, the suspicion on any adult talking sex to a child seems like a practical line drawn to make the best of an imperfect reality. I think if we had a surefire way of knowing a person's intent, we would absolutely not have a problem with some people getting to depict graphic sex to children on the basis of teaching them what it's actually like.

Why can't there be a teacher, acting in good faith, showing a child/teenager how to use a condom or what a birth control pill looks like?

Because it violates the terms of the analogy. That's like teaching tennis by explaining the theory, demonstrating proper forms with videos and mannekins, or whatever. It can be a lot of things, but what it is not, is teaching tennis by playing with them.

Sure. What is fundamentally predatory about adult-child or adult-teenager sex which couldn't be negated if neither party is sexually interested in the other?

More comments

If "sex is just like tennis"

That's an uncharitable summary that OP made of one section of one article taken out of context, not a universally agreed-upon progressive maxim.

To defend my level of charitability, I didn't actually present it as a summary of any section of the article. I said that I had commonly heard other people use an argument that treated sex like tennis in other arguments and that this setup reminded me of those arguments. The author of this article seems to think that transitioning is a very significant decision, often irreversible, and generally much more grave of a choice than deciding to quit competitive swimming. However, she does liken the two in one feature - both choices forever close off vast swaths of alternate possible worlds. And on that ground, she argues that we should let people make the choice.

I'm remarking separately that how seriously we consider things like sex are is often highly variable and unfortunately seems to vary within particular individuals depending on what type of argument they're wanting to make. We have no indication from this article concerning how serious the author thinks sex is in any of the settings I discussed. Nevertheless, all those areas still have in common the feature of making choices which shut out a variety of alternate possible worlds. I think the point I was kind of trying to grasp at is that we do need to think long and hard about the seriousness of the choice in question and a variety of other theoretical characteristics to come up with any sort of consistent rules for how far we can get just by observing that making choices shuts off alternate possible worlds.

However, she does liken the two in one feature - both choices forever close off vast swaths of alternate possible worlds. And on that ground, she argues that we should let people make the choice.

Well, perhaps I should have added a meta-layer where people are recharacterizing you characterization.

People are using you characterization of the belief to make arguments of the form 'if you would play tennis with your sister, why wouldn't you have sex with your sister?!?!' which does not logically follow from the limited formulation you offer here about them being 'alike in one way, but seems to be where most of the conversation has gone now.

Again, I would just point out that 'closing off possible worlds' isn't the only factor used in moral reasoning, there are lots of other reasons to oppose something.

And it's not charitable to say (which I'm not quite accusing you of, but it's where the overall conversation is trending) that if someone wrote an article about a single moral consideration and didn't talk about any other ones, and that singular moral consideration on its own has nothing to say about pedophilia, that the author must be in favor of pedophilia/is being hypocritical if they denounce pedophilia.

That's just a weird place to go to, and the movement seems more related to culture war rhetoric than anything it would be normal to conclude form the article itself.

If someone said that tax evasion was bad because it violates Social Contract theory, responding with 'Well, Social Construct Theory on it's own doesn't tell us why pedophilia is bad, so why don't you just admit that you approve of pedophilia?' I think we would all recognize that as an improper argument.

If someone said that tax evasion was bad because it violates Social Contract theory, responding with 'Well, Social Construct Theory on it's own doesn't tell us why pedophilia is bad, so why don't you just admit that you approve of pedophilia?' I think we would all recognize that as an improper argument.

Yeah, I didn't do that sort of thing, and I don't think anyone here is doing that, either. (I haven't thoroughly followed all of the discussion that has followed.) In your example, there seems to hardly be any conceptual link whatsoever between the two items. I attempted to construct a core conceptual link between several topics of discussion, which is ruminating on how seriously we take various activities/identities in different contexts and how that affects our willingness to simply let others make choices on those issues. I think it is that link that is sorely missing from your attempted analogy to Social Contract Theory/pedophilia. (Though if someone could come up with an interesting conceptual link between the two, I would be interested to hear it, not knowing yet whether I would ultimately view the link as compelling.)

You're missing the point, which is: why? If "sex is just like tennis" what exactly is the issue? If I accuse you of liking to play tennis with children, even if you don't, are you going to get outraged, and ask me how dare I make the insinuation?

Again, you may not have boiled it down to such a simplistic analogy, but the people I'm responding to did.

But:

Wertheimer, on the other hand, doesn't even attempt a theoretical explanation for why children cannot consent. Instead, he views it as simply an empirical question of whether, in a particular society, children tend to be, on net, harmed by sex.

You are acknowledging that, while Wertheimer isn't putting forward a coherent narrative on why children can't consent to sex, they are still strictly against pedophilia based on harm-reduction principles.

Other people ran with your statement to say 'since progressives don't have a coherent account of why pedophilia violates consent, they must be in favor of pedophilia and should just admit it'.

This latter stance is akin to my analogy, where they are looking at the lack of a consent-based (Contract-Theory based) reason to reject pedophilia and failing to find it, but not bothering to look at all the other reasons against it (harm).

More comments

There are people who believe that, some of them are even in the thread. If you disagree with the idea just say it, rather than accusing him off loading the question.

We have been answering your question.

Your question for several iterations has been 'If progressives believe what OP says they believe, then they should also be fine with pedophilia, so why don't they just say they're fine with pedophilia?'

And the answer is, they don't believe what OP says they believe, so nothing following from that premise is material.

That's not dodging your question ,that's directly answering it.

I think what Arjin is getting at is that a lot of people believe something like "if two people want to have sex, they should. it's fun, they'll enjoy it, get some powerful emotional experience and deep human connection, that's what life's about, it's not your place to judge them". A conservative might believe something like "sex is sacred, it serves an important role in building families and having children, treating it casually undermines that and harms the people involved and society". The former is "like tennis", it's fun, you do it whenever you want. The latter isn't. My guess is you support the former and not the latter view, and maybe could continue the conversation by defending that view? I think people often get stuck arguing by throwing clever quips / weak-men / reductio ad absurdums / unexplained references to internally held beliefs at each other and never make contact with their actual disagreements.

You're the only person that answered me that doesn't seem to believe that sex is like a game if tennis. Cool, we agree. I'm interested in talking with people who don't.

Why is 'groomer' a bad word to them?

Because it's opposition to the concept that they have the legitimate right to change how your kid thinks about gender relations, just like how they freak out when you cut off the transition pipeline for children of non-progressive parents simply because it limits their political power (whether that will work as well as non-progressives think it will is, of course, an open question).

Then why should progressives not shame a father for opposing their child dating an older adult who opened their mind about the beauty of inter-generational sexual relationships etc?

Well, progressives already intentionally conflate men having sex with 5 year old girls with men having sex with 25 year old women, so provided that child is female they already act functionally identically to conservatives in this regard. If the child is male, that's a different story entirely; any negative effects are going to fall on the gender they already actively discriminate against so revealed preferences are that they're perfectly fine with advocating for this (the highest-profile cases of "children celebrated for doing sexually-provocative things" are male).

And... that's kind of the thing, isn't it? People tend to trot out "but that German academic experiment in the '60s proves progressives are pro-pedophilia" but that's a dishonest view of that; what that actually was, if you read the reports, were a bunch of evil women handing over boys (that nobody would miss) with the explicit intention they be raped by other men so they "didn't grow up to be Nazis". Same gender dynamics at play today, same justifications (with the occasional case of this expanding into underclass girls when the rapists pass a paper-bag test i.e. Rotherham).

The liberal counter to this is something seemingly-obvious but nobody ever brings it up for some reason: sexual attraction's a two-way street. "When demands for sex are unilaterally imposed in some way that takes moderate to severe effort to escape, that hurts kids?" That hurts everyone subjected to it, regardless of age or gender for reasons I really shouldn't have to explain. It's worse in this age category, since the number of group-unaffiliated people a kid will ever know is actually really limited, so the overwhelming majority of cases have the degrading "you should sleep with me because if you don't this will make things awkward with your folks/they aren't going to stop me from trying so I'll just constantly badger you about it until you give in" character that women rightfully complain about when it happens to them at work or other social gatherings.

The scenario where little Dan Savage successfully propositions his crossing guard crush, where tweenage self_made_human gets his milf, or any other scenario meaningfully-prefaceable by the words "Dear Penthouse," is arguably not on balance harmful specifically because disengaging from that if things go sideways is costless (which is the underlying assertion classical liberals are making when they claim casual sex is not actually bad, the room temperature for '70s sexual mores, why that view depends on birth control and no incurable STDs, why the double-standard exists between early male and female sexual activity, and why critics of this generally have nothing better than "but casual sex exposes society to dangerous [se]X-rays" as a rebuttal).

This is, as one other poster puts it, "tennis at a kid level", sex as a toy. Most people who manage it at that age, provided they're not lying on the Internet, seem to explain it similarly. No major cost-benefit analyses required, just yes or no. Sex-positive people, most of whom are men, tend to operate this way by default; their goal is to drive the price of sex so low as to inherently make all sex the kind of sex kids already manage with each other. Newlywed couples that are going to be long-term successful generally have this outlook on sex for at least the first couple of years, too.

What I am concerned about is that same kid whose parents intentionally deliver them into the hands of people who will sexually harass them (which was the justification for the original '80s panic about daycare workers, and part of why some people avoid public schools today), tell them they have a duty to give into the [revealed] sexual demands of their caregivers/family friends/family members (including and up to outright rape- usually associated with "Mom's boyfriends" and older stepbrothers), or whose parent tells them it's "stunning and brave" to be doing sexual things with people they'd rather not be in the first place, because that gets right back to the progressive genesis of "you should accept being fucked by people you don't want to be fucked by because man bad muh Nazis".

This is "tennis at an adult level", SaaS sex as a service. This is primarily cost-benefit (if the sex is pleasant is less relevant), be that for money, social status, social justice, retaining a significant other, friend, or other relationship, not being beaten, sleeping out in the rain tonight, or killed; or all of the above at the same time. Sex-negative people, most of whom are women, tend to operate this way by default; because they believe all sex is adult sex, their goal is to drive the price of sex so high that selling it once to a single man will set them up for life (this also squares with their assertions that women sleeping around doesn't devalue the sex they eventually plan to sell in this way, but most women aren't taking this to its logical conclusion).

(Which also properly explains how the feminist claim of "all sex is rape" is motte-and-bailey: the motte is that all sex is inherently of this type, and the bailey is that it's abusive that tops men don't just give bottoms women whatever resources they want for free. The claim of "sex work is real work" is the mirror image of this.)

But the modes of thought about this are important if any non-progressive actually wants to coherently unpack why what progressives are doing- which is the crime of imposing adult outlooks and an undue importance on sex onto people that genuinely shouldn't have to deal with that- is abuse. For the liberals, yes, you do have to accept the entire argument about sexual liberation; the traditionalists should probably keep in mind that this is why Biblical gender dynamics are the way that they are in the first place and re-emphasize that the entire point of getting married in the first place is that that is the best chance of having a relationship for which these dynamics no longer apply (even though they still do, it's a slower burn, at least).

Well, progressives already intentionally conflate men having sex with 5 year old girls with men having sex with 25 year old women

Sorry, what? If you’re talking about people demonizing age gaps among consenting adults, I think 1) that receives orders of magnitude less opprobrium than child molestation, and 2) it’s not particularly progressive-coded. High confidence on 1), but I’m not so sure about 2). I tried to look for sources, but quickly ran into a minefield of creepy subreddits.

If you’re not talking about age gaps, then I have no idea what you mean.

Anyway, I think you’re on to something regarding the unilateral demands. Adult-adult relationships usually come with exit rights that are missing from adult-child relationships. Given that we actively close off some of those exits by keeping kids with their parents, etc., we have an obligation to close off some of the avenues of abuse.

I wonder if there’s ever been a study comparing marital protections societies with and without divorce. That’s the elephant in the room for adult exit rights. I think marital rape laws have become less prevalent over time, which doesn’t really fit my theory…

Why do you think pedophilia is bad?

Their honest answer is probably pretty close to your honest answer, if neither of you are trying to play rhetorical games at the time you give it.

I think pedophilia is bad because kids are not adults and adults should shield children from sin by showing them what is right and what is wrong and by keeping them away from situations in which they would not be able to make good decisions.

Adults are to gradually give more responsibility to children to teach them how to behave as good Christians.

Even if a progressive leader (teacher or other) was persuasive enough to convince one of my children that they want to use their body with an adult, I would try and get them away from that situation as that is not what God intends for us to teach our children. Depending on how quick the progressive gets to them, they may not even have been taught about the importance of chastity yet.

I would not necessarily put a hard limit at 18 years old, perhaps 16 years old if my daughter is mature enough and the prospective marriage partner is an amazing deal... I doubt my son could get married at 16 unless he already has his own business running or some other proof of being able to support a family that would secure a wife that I would approve of.

I will not approve of fornication even after 18, because I don't think sex is tennis.

I think pedophilia is bad because kids are not adults and adults should shield children from sin by showing them what is right and what is wrong and by keeping them away from situations in which they would not be able to make good decisions.

If God said that sex isn't actually sinful, that was a misunderstanding, or was obviated by the new covenant: Would you no longer have any objections to pedophilia, or would you still think it was bad for other reasons?

My guess is you would still have objections, those remaining objections are your real reason for being against it, and you share those reasons with the people you're interrogating.

But maybe I'm wrong, let me know.

(note, this goes back to Penn Jillette's line about atheism and morality - religious people ask him why, if he doesn't believe in God, he doesn't go around raping and murdering anyone he wants. His response is 'I've already raped and murdered as much as I want to, which is zero, and if the only thing holding you back from that is your belief in God then please stay away from my family.'

I don't think that is the only thing stopping religious people from doing horrible things, I think their rhetorical reason is God but their actual proximal reasons are more about preventing harm and respecting autonomy and being a good person and so forth, same as everyone else)

If God said that sex isn't actually sinful, that was a misunderstanding

God doesn't say sex is sinful, as long as it's in the right context.

Would you no longer have any objections to pedophilia, or would you still think it was bad for other reasons?

I think that there are people who argue that God says things like that, and I do not listen to these people. The scriptures and tradition I choose to believe in are the ones that are congruent with my vision of what is true and right.

His response is 'I've already raped and murdered as much as I want to, which is zero, and if the only thing holding you back from that is your belief in God then please stay away from my family.'

Does he count abortion as murder? Does murder by proxy count? Would voting for abortion (or say, bombing Gaza) count?

Would any woman be able to #MeToo him (does he follow the Pence rule?) or is he the only judge of what counts as rape or what doesn't?

What about sterilizing people? Is that something wrong in the eyes of Jillette? Progressives get a lot of people sterilized these days, and they claim that it's all consensual and good, but it seems debatable to some.

I think their rhetorical reason is God but their actual proximal reasons are more about preventing harm and respecting autonomy and being a good person and so forth, same as everyone else)

Well there are wild disagreements on whether killing an unborn baby is murder or not, or whether sterilizing teenagers or MAID are a good idea, etc. One could also argue that Christians also believe that spiritual life is more important than the world, so avoiding offending God is more important than avoiding physical harm (ie hypothetically dying of hunger is better than taking the only available job at the abortion clinic, or more commonly, refusing to engage in sinful urges is better than enthusiastically embracing your 'LGBT identity').

The tennis people were honest about their view on child sex in 1977 and in 1979. This has only hurt them since.

To assent to this demand for honesty would be a mistake, politically speaking.

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