I have the impression that there was a lot more pedophilia in previous generations. Like wife beating, people let it be kept within the family.
I get the impression there was a lot more child prostitution in the past as well, especially in minority communities. White cops weren't really out to protect non-white children safe.
For sure getting your hands any information you might want to get a hold of has never been easier and increased availability of kinkier porn has led people to explore things they never would have without easy access. I don't think we are seeing the crumbling of western society. The easy availability of porn to young boys isn't great for them, we had to work hard to get our hands on one or two dirty mags back in the day and I think that was for the best.
I don't think we're seeing the crumbling of society either. And while I have no lived experience with child prostitution there were absolutely teachers you weren't alone with under any circumstances. You 100% didn't raise your hand in Mr. Schachterle's class if you didn't want a dick to the shoulder. And then there's "Uncle Elliott."
I do worry that the violent, degrading nature of porn these days is giving young men the wrong expectations of how to treat women. And I do worry that there are knock-on effects.
Chicken? Egg? Either way, pornography used to be a positive-sum thing. It's always been exploitive of women but the women sure seem to "like" a lot more violence than they did 40 years ago.
there's latent violence and pedophilia in the relation between men and women, and sometimes it's not quite as latent as one might like, and somebody more well-read than me could probably talk a lot about it - but my opinion is that turning child rapists into the ultimate boogeymen has the side effect of making it into the ultimate perversion. that's where the grain of truth lies in the article.
when people talk about this i am constantly reminded of this album by whitehouse where they collaborated with an open pedophile. it has a "song" on it that is just recordings of victims discussing their abuses that he got off of normal-ass news broadcasts in the 80s and 90s. the difference between that voyeurism and the voyeurism of true crime is that he's literally masturbating to it instead of just obsessing over it. you don't need to delve into the depths of the Internet to indulge in this stuff cause if you have eyes to see it, it's everywhere
bouncing to something else: there is a lot of fiction written by and targetted at women that is truly heinous, and i understand the impulse behind writing and reading it. if i write a porny story about being assaulted by a doctor or being thrown in men's prison, i am defusing that fear in myself of being repeatedly screwed over by the people that keep my people down. people are drawn to the stuff that is over the line for the exact reason that there's a line to cross.
i just worry that anti-sex measures will fuel the fires of fetishization. the purest creeps are the ones who can veil it. it disturbs me that we can draw a line and say that an 18 year old is an acceptable target for your average Leo Dicaprio and a 17 year old isn't, or that buying a girl drinks to make it easier to fuck her is normal but paying her directly isn't, or on and on - and the more i stare into it, the more i start feeling like one of those second wave ladies who say that all sex is rape, which is concerning when my takeaway is still in the end a sex-positive one
i have no point in this other than i don't know where we socially go from here, and sometimes it scares me
mk among others love to throw out that Potter Stewart saw "I know it when I see it" because it's quippy and chinstroking without recognizing how fucking stupid it is. I'm not sure whether this got shared for the truth or the irony. The fact of the matter is, Jacobellis v. Ohio stood for two whole fucking years before the courts went "thanks a lot, Potter" and came up with a real fucking definition. Sixty years later and the hipsters are still going "I know it when I see it" as if it's anything other than an ex post facto justification of their vibes.
The problem is that society needs to draw a line so that everyone can argue about where that line is. That's basically governance in a nutshell - where do we interfere with personal liberties and where do we tut tut and publicly shame instead? Liberal jurisprudence tends to follow the victim - if there is no victim there is no crime. Conservative jurisprudence tends to follow the culture - if it's culturally acceptable there is no crime. Polite society doesn't need rules for every fucking thing because most of us will go along to get along until things get truly dicey. Unfortunately our conservatives have largely been replaced by reactionaries going "let's do horrible things because there aren't any explicit rules against it" and "let's make explicit rules against anything that offends our culture."
Getting a girl drunk to make it easier to have sex with her is legal because there's a long cultural tradition of disinhibition in courtship and because ultimately, the girl is putting the drinks to her lips. Roofing a girl to make it easier to have sex with her is illegal because there's no consent... but! "there's no consent" was a Very Special Episode of every fucking evening soap in the '90s. On one side, sure. "Moral panic." On the other side, my girlfriend got roofed in '97. Friend of a friend got roofed in '03. A third friend frickin' synthesized rohypnol in '98, ostensibly to trip... but I mean... it's not like we cruised bars together. I would argue we needed the Very Special Episodes because there was a real argument that putting valium in a cosmo was just Advanced Seduction.
The conservatives will always launch into anti-sex measures whenever they see culture shifting away from them. They always have. What's important is they always lose in the long run - every law thrown up to protect the culture gets torn down eventually because culture shifts.