Stranger Things was really not an accurate depiction of the 1980s in that of the adult characters who took the teenaged protagonists and their world seriously such a high proportion would try to help them and not just fuck them
it actually goes beyond elon musk unbanning the guy who posted CSAM not only are blue checks saying that it’s the right thing to do because the guy is definitely “fighting against pedophilia” by circulating CSAM on social media, but they’re also giving each other tips on how to post more CSAM and bypass moderation!
A weird thing of this whole episode is 2010-web-worker-left-hangover types speaking like, from industry-side experience with user-generated content. Because it’s like
Yes, I think you are definitely on to something here in that QAnon circles are well-exposed to this “CSAM” stuff and in fact hold it central to their subculture not even to jack off to but as sort of a secret guild knowledge that is used to move their passions and justify their self-understanding as the guardians and reformers of social order. And that that is – even if distinct from your stereotypical playground-lurking perv – kind of weird and really does not recommend them.
But, when then you’re like “oh yes these specific images – which we all know but I won’t name – the exact kind of reason why you can’t let allow the enemy-tribe Musk disrupt our regime of control over the public sphere"…
Like, without getting into "equivalency” discourse you have to appreciate that with the strength of your attack you’ve undermined your own position there.
I have for a while said that a major characteristic of the next major cultural shifts will be a move away from post-70s concepts of protecting youth from adult sexuality (and sexual adults) and part of it is they’ve been so deeply incorporated into society that it has been adopted as a core part of the self-understanding of both sides of various fights that at least one is gonna have to make sense of losing
(Whereas last cycle it was something you could transcend divisions to unite around)
Always funny to see someone casting shade on “defending pedophiles” turn around and praise teachers’ unions.
I bet they still think the majority of institutional bureaucratic apparatus in America dedicated to protecting against punishment and advancing the interests of men who had sex with underage children is Catholic!
There are about 37,000 priests and 750,000 male public school teachers in America (and as Barstool reminds, don’t count the female ones out!)
So new post-#MeToo theory of the ‘90s is that as institutions from businesses to the Senate and Presidency of the United States “grappled with sexual harassment” and started reorienting against it and trying to sort practitioners out the NY and LA culture industries held out effectively, relying on tight internal relationships and captive legal and para-legal institutions (“privilege” meant “private law”).
Other norms too – I cannot emphasize enough how in the 90s fucking teenage groupies was accepted and celebrated as definitional of rock stardom – this was where you first saw “new economy” companies generalizing “rockstar” to “elite and valued employee”
This differential sorting left the culture-shaping industries of the time consisting of, and thus the culture guided by, a cohort that was significantly higher in both desire for human exploitation and skill at human manipulation than the rest of society, over and above the dynamics you would normally expect pressing in that direction, and this is critical to understanding '90s culture in retrospect.
And for whoever’s hammering my inbox, no, when I was Hollywood I did work with a management company that had a line in kids/teens but really I didn’t see any dirty stuff
the “dirty, exploitative” gossip I heard was how aspiring stage moms would pay to go to “talent expos” in, like, Hawai’i, where agents would be paid to fly in and sleep with EACH OTHER and have a vacation and AT BEST some of these kids would get a chance to move to LA to try to make money for the agents
for all that there WERE hypersexual 14-year-olds with moms who vicariously enjoyed the attention
and the most earnest stage parents who would bend their morals - I remember an evangelical family who didn’t want their elementary-age angel in stuff that said mild curses, but when Scientologists solicited him for an internal campaign that paid, and I called up saying “you probably aren’t interested but it’s my job to ask?” they were like “welllllll”
The sexualization is probably hardest on girls 14-18 in part because of all the “protective” regulations on young actors, as the result of which they’re part of a set-aside-from-normal life system to accommodate, with all sorts of structures and dynamics and local elites that don’t really interact with anything outside of it, but at that point the parents aren’t a load-bearing part.
But to complicate, actresses that age are selected on being able to (sexily) appear younger, for characters of that age you just cast runty 18-year-olds with a lot less regulatory hassle.
Like not as if without regulation child stars wouldn’t be enmeshed in a parallel world full of scumbags, but point being the existing system was co-opted long ago and is in no way a relief from that.
Also note that this dynamic affects how we think of the maturity of teenagers: if you go off mass media depictions and picture an 18-year-old you’re probably thinking of a 22-26 year old (or older – Luke Perry famously developed a receding hairline while playing a high school heartthrob on the 90s teen nighttime soap Beverly Hills, 90210) and your image of “a fifteen-year-old” is really 18 or 19.
And for whoever’s hammering my inbox, no, when I was Hollywood I did work with a management company that had a line in kids/teens but really I didn’t see any dirty stuff
the “dirty, exploitative” gossip I heard was how aspiring stage moms would pay to go to “talent expos” in, like, Hawai’i, where agents would be paid to fly in and sleep with EACH OTHER and have a vacation and AT BEST some of these kids would get a chance to move to LA to try to make money for the agents
for all that there WERE hypersexual 14-year-olds with moms who vicariously enjoyed the attention
and the most earnest stage parents who would bend their morals - I remember an evangelical family who didn’t want their elementary-age angel in stuff that said mild curses, but when Scientologists solicited him for an internal campaign that paid, and I called up saying “you probably aren’t interested but it’s my job to ask?” they were like “welllllll”
The sexualization is probably hardest on girls 14-18 in part because of all the “protective” regulations on young actors, as the result of which they’re part of a set-aside-from-normal life system to accommodate, with all sorts of structures and dynamics and local elites that don’t really interact with anything outside of it, but at that point the parents aren’t a load-bearing part.
But to complicate, actresses that age are selected on being able to (sexily) appear younger, for characters of that age you just cast runty 18-year-olds with a lot less regulatory hassle.
Like not as if without regulation child stars wouldn’t be enmeshed in a parallel world full of scumbags, but point being the existing system was co-opted long ago and is in no way a relief from that.
Hey there was a movie, in the last two years, and it was a woman looking back on the sexual relationship with her track coach’s husband she had in high school, and part of it was the flashback scenes had one actress and then in the modern day timeline the character’s mother was like “oh no that was several years later” and from then on the “then” one was played by an actress distinctly younger, and there were bits with “then” screaming at “now” about how repugnant she was for growing up to be one of THEM who wanted to control her, and can anyone remind me what this movie is?
Anti-abortion Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert has said that her 17-year-old son will make her a grandmother in April. She also gave her thoughts on abortion rights and praised the “rural conservative communities” that “value life.”
Boebert was talking at an event hosted by conservative non-profit Moms for America, as per a video shared by Twitter account PatriotTakes. She said that one of her four sons, 17-year-old Tyler, and his girlfriend are expecting a baby boy.
“Now, any of you who have young children who are giving life, there’s some questions that pop up. There’s some fear that arises,” the 36-year-old Colorado congresswoman said.
“There’s something special about rural conservative communities,” Boebert continued. “They value life. If you look at teen pregnancy rates throughout the nation, well, they’re the same, [in] rural and urban areas. However, abortion rates are higher in urban areas. Teen moms’ rates are higher in rural conservative areas, because they understand the preciousness of a life that it’s about to be born.”
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), teen birth rates (births per 1,000 females aged 15 to 19 years) have been declining since 1991. However, the U.S. remains one of the countries with the highest rates in the developing world. The CDC recognizes that there are geographical differences in teen birth rates but it finds social determinants such as low education and low income levels of a teen’s family to have the greater impact on these numbers.
A 2012 study by Physical Review B (PRB) found that teen girls of lower socioeconomic status in regions of high-income inequality were more likely to get on with the pregnancy rather than seeking an abortion.
A 2019 study published in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) suggested that teen birth rates in rural areas might be higher than in urban areas because teens might be vulnerable to “local conditions that limit unintended pregnancy management options.” Teens living in rural areas often face large geographical barriers to access abortion providers—a difficulty that’s been exacerbated by a proliferation of abortion bans in Republican-led states.
The CDC also reports the impact that teen pregnancies have on the girls’ lives: only 50 percent of teen mothers receive a high school diploma before the age of 22. Among women who don’t give birth in their teens, this number goes up to 90 percent.
A 2008 study mentioned by the CDC also studied the impact of teen pregnancies on the children. The offspring of teen moms are more likely to have lower school achievement or drop out of school; have more health problems; be incarcerated in their teens; and give birth as teenagers themselves.
Boebert was a teen mom herself and had to drop out of high school because of her pregnancy.
So within two days of each other, Fox News writes an article comparing aromanticism and asexuality to pedophilia, and then Matt Walsh releases a video saying asexuality is a mental illness and asexuals are tricking teenagers into having depression.
Not sure what’s going on right now over in Conservative World, but it’s a hell of wild U-turn for them to suddenly switch from “Oh no! The left is sexualizing our children!” to “Oh no! The left is asexualizing our children!”
Over the last decade have looked back at the whole ‘90s “kids having kids!” freakout, daytime talk and all, how it was kind of framed (condoms in schools!) as if it was about young couples, enabled by a decadently permissive culture, fucking instead of Waiting For Marriage. But it was really about The 70s having worked their way through the culture so thoroughly that teenage working class girls everywhere were getting knocked up by older men.
Some of which might have been fucking them on an American Beauty neighborhood dad or teacher-groomer basis, but a lot of which was really more of a Dazed and Confused thing – blue-collar men graduate high school but don’t leave town and stay in the same automobile/intoxication-based social scene and as they grow older the girls stay the same age.
You should check out the Reason article “ A Modern History of 'Groomer' PoliticsThe social changes that paved the way for gay and trans acceptance have made pedophile acceptance less likely, not more.” Relevant to your interests
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.
[…]
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.”
*speaking to discord mods* You are aware, good sir, that Scooby-Doo is a fully sapient adult dog capable of perfectly intelligible communication, and therefore passes the Harkness Test, and in many versions and incarnations Mystery Inc. are teenagers, so if ANYTHING, the art I posted in #nsfw is unethical on SCOOBY’S part.
Your LibsOfTikTok/Matt Walsh/even Wesley Yang types clearly operating off a memory of the “Moral Majority” 80s backlash in going after schools over trans stuff but there’s real differences.
The mainstream may have come out of the 70s practicing a “teenagers and gays should FUCK” ethic but they never really preached it as a congealed ideology, whereas there really had been a culturally conservative “sex should only be within male/female marriage” ideology the whole time.
In contrast today, as libs enjoy pointing out, the lumpen right doesn’t even practice “adolescent students shouldn’t be treated as sexual beings by adults”, but “everyone should be comfortably affirmed in their chosen gender identity” really is commonly preached as a component of middle-class morality.
Likewise I’ve seen rightists put forward some parents who understand school-pushed gender modernity as something to protect their children from, but I’ve honestly seen more parents supporting their child’s gender transition and seeking an affirming environment for them as an act of child protection.
And anyway just like “teens should FUCK”, “people born with dicks should be understood as boys, who grow into men” was always treated as implicit, while much like 80s cons with “Christian morality should be followed”, modern libs really do hold “sex and gender individuality should be respected” as something schools should teach children.
Reevaluation of the ‘90s Aerosmith-starring gun game Revolution X, on the premise that the New Order Nation’s beef with the boys relates to the fact that from their groupie-tastic '70s origins to their Alica Silverstone/Liv Tyler (Steven’s daughter!) video '90s, their brand has always revolved around fucking teenage girls
