friendshapedhole:

A modern history of ‘groomer’ politics

Each time someone tells this tale, it is less plausible than before. Nearly half a century ago, there actually were notable currents of radical opinion that wanted to normalize pederasty and abolish age-of-consent laws. The successes of the gay rights movement have not made such views more popular. If anything, they have become more radioactive. The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) no longer marches in pride parades, and gay papers no longer publish extended debates about whether such groups belong in the fold. Even the small handful of activists who do talk about destigmatizing pedophilia are much more likely to claim that this will make it easier for pedophiles to get psychiatric help than to suggest they’re doing nothing wrong. And the rise of trans rights has not changed that at all. (That’s why Rufo has to fall back on phrases like “groomed into a sexual identity"—they let him conflate two very different phenomena.) In fact, the increasingly dominant view on the left today is to oppose any large age differences in romantic or sexual relationships, even when both parties are of legal age.

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In her 2020 book Unspeakable, the University of Victoria historian Rachel Hope Cleves examines the life of Norman Douglas, a once-beloved but now largely forgotten British novelist who kept a private journal describing his deflowerings of thousands of boys and girls. Douglas did not hide his proclivities during his lifetime, which ended in 1952. To the extent they were known, they were regarded with the same mixture of bourgeois disapproval and bohemian tolerance that an uncloseted gay artist might have received. Borrowing the radical anthropologist Gayle Rubin’s metaphor of a "charmed circle” of socially acceptable sexuality, Cleves writes: “Identity categories that are distant from one another today—like loose women, lesbians, and pederasts—were more proximate when they were all outside the charmed circle. Pederasty was less taboo before the 1950s, in effect, because so many other behaviors were disreputable as well.”

Read this excellent article.