These threads can be hard to read through as honestly, I'm at a point with transactivism where I inherently mistrust more or less 100% of them and genuinely believe it's a toxic combination of male sexual entitlement with the sinister corporate backing of those who would seek to eliminate any trace of effective working-class political mobilization. I'm in the US where much of this is absolutely bleeding outwards from, and it's not lost on me that voters here are essentially trapped between a rock and a hard place when it comes to the Democratic vs Republican two-party system. It's either the Christian right who think women are human incubators, or the looney "left" who couldn't answer the question of what a woman is if their lives depended on it. As a sort of homeless left-of-centre sort myself, I feel like I'm the one taking crazy pills half the time these days, it's so bizarre to be so utterly surrounded by it. Thankfully my DH is on the same page as me politically and is a very staunch supporter of women's lib himself, as if I didn't have him to talk to about it I think I'd have gone mad by now.
We have one of those disgusting kid's drag shows occurring near us some time soon, and he was telling me that on all of the posts on social media about it, the response to any critics of the event was dismissive of the possibility that this was sexual exploitation of a child as that is apparently the type of thing only done by priests. It occurred to me that this is incredibly ironic as a way to dismiss such criticism, due to my nationality (from Ireland originally). They manage to miss the point so spectacularly it's incredible, really, but so typical of them. I'm old enough to somewhat remember the public tide really turning on the church in Ireland in the 90s as a result of the spiralling child sex abuse scandal, and like most Irish people my extended family includes several victims of the "hush-hush" culture on pweirdo priests of the preceding decades. The stupidity of people, thinking that the groomers among the "tolerant left" of today are any different just because they don't wear cassocks is utterly stunning to me.
Paedos have sadly always existed - there has always been a disgusting subset of adults who harbor sexual feelings towards children, for whatever reason. Why they do, IMO, is beside the point - we know that they have existed, across time and space, in basically every human culture, to varying degrees of tolerance and/or consternation from the rest of us. Ireland was not crawling with kiddy fiddlers for decades because there is some kind of inherent tendency towards paedophilia among Catholic priests, or because seminaries specifically teach you to molest children. It happened because in Ireland, we allowed a culture to be fomented that permitted for a special caste of persons who were above suspicion or reproach. For a very long time, the Catholic church was simply considered to be off-limits for public criticism. No matter how much you knew, or how many people knew, or how many Soviet parades' worth of red flags your local priest threw up, you could not say anything. Anyone attempting to raise the alarm about suspicious behavior, or an excessive interest displayed in children, was subject to intimidation, harassment, and mockery. How dare you say that about Fr Murphy? He's a good man. He's only showing god's love. Maybe you're the one with wicked thoughts for such a thing to have even occurred to you. You and your family are filthy liars.
...sound familiar at all??
The only difference between the hooting adults draped in rainbow flags stuffing dollar bills into an eleven-year-old's underpants at a "children's drag" event, and the scout leaders and "overly enthusiastic" priests of yesteryear is that if anything, the groomers of today are even more emboldened and overt about it. We've just designated a different group of people whose alarming and inappropriate behavior towards children we are expected to purposely ignore against all of our screaming protective instincts. The behavior is exactly the same, the rationalizations are the same, and when all is said and done - the tidal wave of damaged, angry victims wondering where the duck the real adults were while they were being exploited before their very eyes, will be the same. It honestly makes me so angry when Irish people my age and older can't spot it, in particular. The parallels seem so blindingly obvious to me that I feel like you have to be purposely looking away not to see it.