Yes, people unironically using “Minors” as a coherent category to identify with is weird, and there is category creep, I just saw a post like “protect girls in their early 20s from grooming by older men”

Honestly you know the idea of “child pornography” as some utterly beyond-the-pale thing this metastasized from didn’t really come into coherence until the 80s and 90s. (People looking at ESR and being like “oh, I forgot libertarians actually did emphasize a pedophelia/ephebophilia distinction” miss that’s a very specifically 90s thing because it was still being hashed out then)

Legal regulation of pornography used to revolve around the category of “obscenity”, which was famously “know it when you see it” hard to define in a legally robust way as people just stopped trusting The Man’s judgement, they had to try to specify it.

“Redeeming social value” - basically, “no, don’t fucking ban Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Tropic of Capricorn, that’s worthy”, but in effect it meant “if you mix your porn with culture, that’s fine”, that’s why those erotic pulp novels I compared to Salon headlines were framed as sociological investigations, that’s why Playboy had articles, that’s why 70s porn had plots like Hollywood

They tried “community standards” but that was kind of unworkable, “Obscenity” as a category was dead by the Clinton administration, the fact that the internet is regulated under something called the “Communications Decency Act” was a last gasp, part of the hilarious thing about the Dubya administration was John Ashcroft and absolutely no one else cared

But at the same time the 70s “gee it is great and healthy for everyone involved to sexualize teenagers” really was going pretty far, I talk about Brooke Shields like, we very much did have a big mainstream star whose brand was “fuckable 13 year old” doing shoots in Playboy publications and doing movies where she was naked the whole time and doing famous ads for Calvin Klein seductively saying she wasn’t wearing underwear

It’s not til New York v. Ferber (1982) that the Supreme Court even suggests it’s constitutional to ban child pornography, only Osborne v. Ohio (1990) that it’s permissible to ban mere possession, as contrasted to actively producing and distributing. And the decisions are pure handwaving clearly to get some excuse to have some tool to push back on this.

In preventing more Brooke Shields, I suppose they also prevented more Traci Lords, who got a fake ID for her porn career and was reputed as one of the best dirty talkers in the industry

So like, this stuff as the master-concept of sexual morality is pretty fucking recent, the millennials are really the first ones to grow up with it enforced with heavy sanction.

Also makes sense why so many of them got off on the taboo nature of it, one of the reasons I’m talking about “sexual media” is to remind people that actually, there is a huge boom in teenagers openly identifying as sexual and even pornographic beings that’s central to the coming culture wave, I first noticed this a few years ago where I searched on a tag that was apparently also used by the “tc community”, or “teacher crush”, which was students coming together to identify around really wanting their teachers to fuck them and being validated in that identity.

Also like, one thing in the last few years, a veil’s come off and it’s completely clear that “sexual access to teenagers for winners” was an absolute load-bearing element of every part of society, and a vital interest of like every center of elite power that they would spend quite a bit of energy to defend! And the idea of them as off-limits was the facade all along, and when you separate a facade off its underlying structure it is not the facade that stays standing.

Like, the growing notion of the young as an off-limits class can’t keep going on forever, and when something can’t go on forever, it stops. If you’re like “haha what, the libertarian pedophile/ephebophile discourse is back”, its means the idea of pushing a dividing line back to puberty is a live option again.