Basically every moral panic is just trying to not address how pedophilic mainstream US culture is by targeting a minority

I’m possibly very wrong about this, but this is an angle I haven’t heard yet. I first noticed the pedophila moral panic emerging at around the same time there was increased mainstream discourse into consent and feminism. Somewhere between 2005 and 2015, that timeframe. A lot of it was reemerging feminist discourse that had been going on since the 1970s though. That’s around when a lot of folk might have heard “rape culture” for the first time. It’s when there was a lot more media criticism about depictions of women. There was a lot of discourse in that time too about sexualizing minors, but from a more sensible angle, not these bizarre child kidnapping conspiracy theories.

A lot of what American conservative paranoia does is latch onto ambient feelings to twist them, re-normalize them to better serve standard American bigotry. In this case I think white suburban ideology latched onto the ambient growing concerns about consent, boundaries, women’s empowerment, all of that, and did trial and error twisting it until landing on something indefensible: Pedophiles. Surely pedophiles don’t respect consent. They’re the worst type of person imaginable, and they tap into that growing discourse. But instead of the discourse focusing on anything liberatory, or talking about patriarchy, or white supremacy, it became a way for conservative ideology to express ownership over children. It’s repackaged queerphobia too, like you said.

It has to be connected to conservative ideology worried about children too. Each of the moral panics in previous decades centered around the autonomy of young people set upon by some social shift.

The 60s hippies were kids who rejected things like the Vietnam draft, or rejected the suburbanization they were destined to be a part of. The 80s were a reaction to more women entering the workforce, relegating childcare to daycares or babysitters. You’ll notice that was reflected in the media too. So many of 80s horror movies are about children left alone in their suburban home while the middle class parents are out, while a working class coded murderer stalks the neighborhood with a big knife. There was a general panic about children being unaccompanied or being left with strangers. The Satanic Panic was a panic over what might be going on in daycares, now that more women were workers instead of rearing children all day.

And now in the 20s, more children are expressing autonomy through the internet. You can’t control who your kid is in contact with anymore or what they’re reading. But who knows where that leads, so the panic is all about brainwashing or secret cults or scary people in masks who will kidnap your kids in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

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.

its quite simple. the Right uses a separate definition of pedophilia. to them, anything that can possibly compromise the dominion of the Patriarch over the sexual or even just independent lives of their children/women is pedophilia. this is why its so universally applicable for them. Sex education, probably the single most effective preventative of actual pedophilia, is itself -to the right- grooming, because it’s perceived to open the possibility for the kids to have any kind of sex that isn’t under the watchful eye of God and Marriage. Also when a Patriarch does actual pedophilia its fine because the victims are their property

on the Left we’re at least clear on what pedophilia actually is, but because of our inherent mistrust of coercive & traditional institutions we do tend to go a little overboard. i don’t think this is a huge problem when its mostly making people angry at the ruling class

I don’t think you understand how organized pedophiles are. You can apply a lot of your intuitions about white supremacist organizations to pedophiles and it would be pretty accurate. Lots of dark money donations. Front websites that seem edgy but innocuous but their core usership is full of pedos who have dedicated back channels which control moderation (these tend to also be Nazi safe havens fwiw). TikTok is full of pedos and so is Discord. Not because these platforms are particularly bad, but because they are internet platforms and we have almost nothing in terms of established social norms for protecting kids online. Parents don’t understand the risks. Corporations wanna “offer parental controls” to essentially offload the responsibility onto parents who have no clue those half assed tools exist.

Children’s rights advocacy is difficult because children can be very difficult to organize without a centralizing commonality like abusive child labor to bring them together. But they are one of the most abused demographics in existence, systemically and interpersonally. I know a shit ton of people who were groomed online and have looked back on it like, “oh yeah I guess that’s what that was”