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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?
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Again, you may not have boiled it down to such a simplistic analogy, but the people I'm responding to did.
But:
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).
Unfortunately, I will likely only defend my own statements. Sorry if that's not the most satisfactory to you.
So, the context of many of my comments here, and which I did mention a couple times, is that there are an extremely large number of people who believe in a consent-only sexual ethic. They want that to be enshrined in law, and they argue for such a thing. I would even say that Wertheimer is in that camp. Therefore, perhaps more circumspectly stated, I would argue that Wertheimer's position on child sex (among a few other similar positions) is a gigantic fault line within his own project of mapping out a consent-only sexual ethic. It is instead perhaps a "consent-dominant except for some other cases where it's something like harm reduction or some other consideration" sexual ethic, which may end up being fine on its own terms, but it is not a consent-only sexual ethic.
I would argue that the position of someone who claims to follow a strict consent-only sexual ethic across the wide variety of problem domains but then wants to switch from that only for this domain is untenable. It's part of the reason why I would not currently say that I ascribe to a consent-only sexual ethic. As such, I do actually think that your characterization is quite close to a legitimate complaint. When you say:
I think the modification which makes it a biting criticism would be 'since progressives don't have a coherent account of why pedophilia violates consent and they claim to hold a consent-only sexual ethic,' well, I don't know that I'd quite say that they must be in favor of pedophilia and should just admit it... but I would say that they got some 'splainin' to do.
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