As with TERFs echoing right-wing pundits when it comes to trans panic, it’s so interesting to me how many aphobes and antis echo right-wing voices when it comes to moral panic over consent education and (later) age-appropriate sex education for minors. What these alt-right people are saying is so similar to shit I’ve seen aphobes say about children and sexuality, from believing that children should be kept in the dark completely about consent and anything age appropriate that might pertain to sex even a little bit, to making up strawman “translations” that misstate what sex ed advocates and consent advocates are actually saying.
None of this is surprising.
When you set up a baseline of ‘if someone claims someone is this, critical thought stops, nuance stops, human considerations stop’ the only thing you can be sure of is it will appeal to the kinds of people who don’t like nuance or humanity in the first place and they will abuse it.
Society has build a powerful direct response of grabbing pitchforks and no longer thinking for yourself at the word ‘pedophile’. Of course harmful people are abusing it.
Or should I say ‘using it’, because I have a strong suspicion that
the panicky witch-hunt sentiments behind how society deals with pedophilia were never about protecting children, and always about ‘building a tool to villify something sexual without anyone daring to criticize us because we used the p-word and no one wants to be seen defending that’.
Thank you for articulating something that’s incredibly important.
I still remember when society considered “homo” to be synonymous with “pedo” to be synonymous with “predator”, and I’m not that old. It’s not that hard to slide back. Hell, schoolteachers still get fired for being gay. It feels more and more like the endgame of all of this is a return to the level of homophobia and transphobia we’ve seen in past decades, (maybe with an in-built exception for monogamously married vanilla gays), and it’s incredibly disturbing to watch young LGBTQ* people buying into it – like watching them dig their own graves.
Echoing @queeranarchism’s post, I would also like to point out the number of know people in the “alt-right” who have propositioned, made advances towards or otherwise behaved predatorily towards young teen girls. (I’m on mobile right now but will provide links later if anyone wants– I know one was just in the news, too)
They have no desire to protect people who ate underaged. They just don’t want them educated because it makes them less vulnerable.
Yeah, although I am very very wary of any accusation along the lines of ‘all the far-right are pedos!’. For two reasons. The first one being that the power of the accusation rides on the same ‘if someone claims someone is this, critical thought stops’ impulse that I hate so much. The second one being that, from my observation of far-right spaces, it’s just not true.
There are segments of the alt-right online community, particularily the part that sprang up out of 4chan, that have normalized the sexualisation of children as part of their ‘shock value’ humor and as a result they created safe spaces for pedophiles within their ranks. Does anyone still remember when “every man secretly watches cp” (child porn) was the baseline assumption behind half the jokes on 4chan? For real, that was a thing. Google ‘CP Meme’ if you want to not sleep for a few nights from the sickeningness. So yeah, there are alt-right communities that are accepting of child porn consumtpion in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink-we-all-do-it-lol kind of way and obviously these places will be full of child predators..
But there are also far-right communities that use intense hatred of pedophiles as one of their rallying points. They use “let’s hunt down and kill pedos” as bait to attract people who like the idea of dealing with their problems by killing them and they win these people over to far-right ideas by presenting the groups they hate (LGBT people, muslims, etc) as the secret promotors of child abuse. As a result, a lot of the people who come in to their groups and end up being the groups really really really passionately hate child abuse and that hatred really really really passionately drives them to hate LGBT people, muslims, etc. This is a radicalisation process I’ve seen quite a lot and these spaces would NOT tolerate a child abuser in their ranks. At all.
So yeah, it’s a complex situation out there in fucked up fascist-vile.
(Of course I am not writing this in a ‘not all alt-righters!’ kind of way. We’re talking about groups that support fucking genocide. What their real position on child abuse is isn’t all that relevant since once you support genocide you can’t really reach any moral high ground anymore. I’m just writing about these differences because knowledge is power and we can fight fascists better when we know how they recruit and operate.)
Alt-Right Mob Falsely Accuses Teen Vogue Of ‘Normalizing’ Pedophilia
QueerAnarchism 