There’s a lot of stupidity in public discourse, and most of it is not worth paying attention to. But once in a while, there is a kind of stupidity that is so grotesque that its very existence to any substantive degree tells us something about our culture.
In late December, a right-wing account with nearly 16,000 followers posted a video of a young adult Demi Moore making out with a 15-year-old boy. It went viral, with as of this writing over 8,000 likes and nearly 4,000 retweets. The account followed up the next day with a poll over whether there was something wrong with what the actress did, with two-thirds of 38,000 participants saying that there was. Many of the replies and the quote tweets refer to Moore as a “pedophile,” which shocked me into doing a long rambling thread in which I said this kind of attitude managed to combine “the stupidest fascist impulses of the right with the stupidest feminist arguments that exist on the left.”
If this was just one stupid Twitter account with a lot of stupid followers, it would be one thing. But in 2017, Bill Maher was accused of “defending pedophilia” for in the 1990s speaking out against a teacher going to jail after having been impregnated by one of her students. In another demonstration of how weird we’ve gotten about age gaps, this time involving consenting adults, it’s become a recurring theme in entertainment coverage to talk about how strange it is for Leonardo DiCaprio to keep dating younger woman.
There’s been a cultural shift over the last two decades in how we think about human sexuality, one in which we’ve simply lost touch with biological realities. The idea that teenage boys can be victimized by older women, like the demand that men only be attracted to women of their own age, can only exist in a culture in which many aspects of heterosexuality are repressed, if not demonized. Blank slatism is the common thread here, and it’s warped the culture in ways that I suspect are tied to the sex recession, the decline of marriage, falling birthrates, and general misery among young people.
The Fascist-Feminist Synthesis on Victimized Teen Boys
When there’s a synthesis between a right-wing position and a left-wing position, there’s a tendency to believe that the end result is something better than either view was on its own. Sometimes, though, a synthesis ends up taking the worst of each side and combining the pieces into a new monstrosity. Something like this has happened on the issue of “pedophilia.”
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I wonder to what degree compulsive lib owning leads to cons accepting the lib Equality/blank slate framing. In my early 20s I was at a party where a drunken girl French kissed me before passing out. The next several times I saw her I told her I was traumatized by her sexually assaulting me to which she profusely and sincerely apologized. I wasn't actually bothered at all, but I wanted to stick it to a lib. I eventually gave up and "accepted" her apology since I felt guilt about my needless, partisan driven sadism. It was only later when my dad said "she was probably into you before your stunt" that I realized I might have fumbled a chance to have sex with an attractive, nice girl because I wanted to own the libs.
Hard to disagree with this essay. A lot of unpopular truth bombs. I'd add 2 points:
1) The biggest problem with the teen boy older woman dynamic is the fact that a teen boy can't fully think through the ramifications of pregnancy. If my teenage son got a teacher pregnant and she chose to keep the baby, there is nothing I could do about it even if I wanted her to terminate the pregnancy (which, hypothetically, I would not). " But Jose!" you say, "Your son could just as easily get a classmate pregnant!". But me being the authoritarian patriarch that I am, I can control to some extent my son's ability to spend alone time with the opposite sex. A teacher attracted to my absolute Chad of a son could potentially manipulate circumstances beyond my control in order to seduce him.
2) With respect to fertility, traditional Christian teaching on sexuality had a pretty awesome track record prior to the sexual revolution and contraception, and I think it will continue to outpace the Nietzschean libertarian rationalists. Let me know if Aella successfully raises 2 children with active fathers and I'll buy u a beer.