I’m not talking about queer people getting called groomers. I know why that’s happening. I’m referring more to a more general fear of pedophilia instead of just repackaged homophobia.
I feel like I’m hearing about it like every other week. For instance, parent bloggers noticing that their engagement skyrockets when they post their kids eating hotdogs or in swimwear. Another example is an increasing trend of people on Pinterest creating walls and albums labelled “hot kids.”
I know that elite freaks are all pedos, but is pedophilia an actually growing problem among regular people? It seems to me like when suburbanites freak out about any other thing like BLM or immigrants marching through and razing their communities. Or the crime freakout in the 70s/80s.
Am I being naive and we actually need to be on high alert?
I think pedophilic culture is more common, intentional or not. Like hiring grown ass adults to play children in the media. Or porn being very weird about babysitters and siblings (blah blah blah kink shaming whatever).
And it is a problem. Republicans and Christians/Catholics have a lot of institutional power, and they have lots of pedos in their ranks. they are obsessed with teenage girls’ bodies and want to control it for the lord or whatever. Making it taboo to talk about periods, pregnancy, abortion, families, and so on makes it easier for an “authority” figure to groom a child into accepting terrible things, whether it’s a worldview or abuse by said figure
Conservatives used to freak out about Muslim grooming gangs in the UK. But recently the conservative government changed their laws to make it harder for illegal migrants to be protected against human trafficking gangs
hiring grown ass adults to play children in the media
this is nothing new, watch high school movies from the 70s and 80s and it’s even more blatant than today. Sissy Spacek was like 27 in Carrie, a movie that begins with a bunch of “high school” girls naked in a locker room
Personally, I think this is a fine practice (having older actors play younger people). I don’t really want kids anywhere near the famously groomy entertainment business.
The desire of directors and writers to have naked teenage girls is fucking weird though
Or porn being very weird about babysitters and siblings (blah blah blah kink shaming whatever)
Kink shaming is beyond the point. Incest porn got a major boost right around the time the porn sites were seeing a lot of pressure from their finance vendors to crack down on “exploitative content”. I quote that not because I don’t think they get rid of a lot of genuinely exploitative content, but because that monicker was used as pretense to disempower a lot of sex workers, but that’s a whole other topic. Bottom line is certain keywords got deprioritized or flagged as exploitative. As soon as “teen” became flagged, a bunch of fetish content that catered to situations where “teens” happened to be interacting got real popular.
So if people are into whatever kind of play that is, that’s their prerogative. But there are material underpinnings to the whole trend which are much more insidious than any individual kink.
Conservatives used to freak out about Muslim grooming gangs in the UK. But recently the conservative government changed their laws to make it harder for illegal migrants to be protected against human trafficking gangs
Because it was never about protecting kids, it was about protecting white/british kids.
Yes, the freaks are fretting about pedophiles, not the regulars, and did you know Jerry Seinfeld went on a date w a teenager 30 years ago!
I think it’s more an active de-normalization of existing trends. Like there have always been extremely strong tendencies towards sexualizing minors in mainstream American pop culture - I wouldn’t say it was socially acceptable, but more that it was seen as sort of pervy or disreputable on a level with watching porn, going to strip clubs, etc as long as it didn’t extend to (openly known) actual assault.
Like ~10-15 years ago reddit built its name on catering to pedophiles, necrophiles, zoophiles, and violent misogynists in general, even going so far as to openly honor the creep behind most of them. ~15 years ago there was actual earnest age of consent discourse still going on. 15-20 years ago it was common to have middle aged men sexualizing teenage girls on sitcoms, and it was at worst shown as pathetic and something to laugh at. Middle aged men carrying on affairs with teenage babysitters was considered an acceptable plot point in media in general, where the only problem was portrayed as being the adultery and not the predation. *Gestures wildly at literally the entire framing and discourse around teenage popstars going back decades.* There was massive amounts of adult men preying on teenage girls throughout Hollywood and the recording industries pretty much since their very inception, and the scorn it got was because of the lasciviousness or out-of-wedlock sex, not because it was a grown man preying on a child.
Literally the only exception from that time period I know of offhand was The Sopranos of all things having an episode where Tony wants to jump and/or kill a coach who he learns is sleeping with teenage girls, only to have his “morality winning out” moment and calling the cops on him instead. Fucking Tony Soprano had more of a moral compass than the mainstream pop culture.
I feel like there’s been a ground shift towards rejecting these :libertarian-approaching: tendencies in recent years, and that entails both noticing all the creepy shit :libertarian-approaching:s do towards kids and calling it out when it happens.
Gestures wildly at literally the entire framing and discourse around teenage popstars going back decades.
Looking back on Britney Spears is wild and how she was literally a fuck toy schoolgirl in her music video. I was a teen around the time so it was off my radar about creepy older men lusting over her.
There was massive amounts of adult men preying on teenage girls throughout Hollywood
This is literally a QAnon anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
I don’t think pedophilia has been any different than it was for years. It’s just more in the forefront now thanks to conservatives weaponizing pedophilia accusations and Q for blowing up with conspiracy theories about it. People are still as weird over teenage girls as they were in the 90’s and before, but now I’d argue there’s more people who can pick up on clues about creepy old men trying to advance on girls.
