Hey guys, what do you think of how we use the word "pedophile"?
I have worked in the justice system, and I have known many victims of pedophilia, in the clinical/legal meaning of the word.
I've certainly seen some horrible horrible horrible things that have been done to children, 6,7,8,9, and the vast amount of horrifying physical damage is sickening.
I found it a little bit strange when that label was applied to any and all age related sex crimes. Now everybody calls me a pedo sympathizer for saying this, but I need to be clear, I'm not defending or justifying grooming or sex with teenagers in any way whatsoever, but there is an incredible difference between these sorts of sex crimes. I'm not saying that preying on teenagers shouldn't be demonized, it absolutely should, but to me it's not the same category. The people that prey on 6 or 7 years olds have a much more broken and sick set of compulsions in their brains, and rehabilitation is essentially and meaningfully 0. Their victims are mrore vulnerable (not saying teens are not) and often don't even understand what they're being made to do. These people don't tend to have all the pieces to even make a human being, just monsters.
I think groomers and teen predators are monsters too, but not intrinsically the same way. Even looking back in my lifetime, age of consent is something that (thankfully) is taken far more seriously than when I was young, and the attitudes behind it were shit, too. American Beauty was considered a masterpiece and nobody even mentioned that Lester pursuing a high school girl was fucked. To me, that means this is something we can fix socially, and applying the pedophile label is counterproductive to that - we can teach people to not be predators, we can use social pressure and law to ensure victims are heard and perpetrators are punished, and we could potentially create a society where those types of behaviors are recognized as horrible things to do to people. Pedophiles aren't something we can solve in this way.
To me, this distinction matters, not because I support grooming, it matters because the label "pedophile" to me removes the social responsibility, removes the parental influence, the school influence, the role model influence, and just labels the scum defective forever like it's pathological. No, it's what we taught this guy by having rappers like Kid Rock sing about statutory rape in a positive manner doing fucking fitness videos at the white house. Our role models, our justice, and the messages we send is how we root this out of future generations more and more and more.
When we look back in time at different parts of progress at different stages of development it's even tougher for me to use the word. I don't want to call out an entire country, but they're about 20 years behind where I live with age of consent laws and social attitudes. Do I say that country is a pedophile country, or hell, did I used to live in a pedophile country?
Now I'm just wondering something, since I've never once been able to have a conversation about this without being called a pedophile, is it possible that it just isn't a distinction that holds any meaningful value in normal conversation? Or if it is, how to we indicate it?
I think sometimes when we try and rigjtfully harden things age of consent through making it indistinguishable from something else universally horrible, we accidentally soften the other end and everything ends up in the middle, or worse, everything ends up softer.
Or am I just a lunatic here and nobody cares about this in normal conversation.