Is “Grooming” Just The Regular Courtship Process?

[BeeZee]

I came across a video the other day that I’ve been thinking about ever since. It features a young adult woman telling her story about being “groomed” by a 19-year-old when she was 12. The video is interesting because it shows not just how these relationships form, but how they later get reinterpreted.

Over and over she talks about how at the time she was truly in love with him. She says he made her feel “special,” like she was “the cool girl in middle school who had the older boyfriend,” and she describes being deeply attached to him. The things he did were pretty standard romantic gestures: gifts, love letters, telling her things like “I think you’re so special… we were meant to be together.” According to her own story, those are the things that made her fall for him. For years she believed he loved her and that they had a real connection.

The reinterpretation only seems to happen later, when other people start telling her she was “groomed” or “taken advantage of.” That’s when the whole story starts getting reframed.

To me this looks like a pretty clear case of retroactive victimhood. The behaviors she describes are basically the same strategies men use when trying to win a woman’s affection. The only real difference here is that the “target” was younger.

She was a vulnerable girl from an abusive home, and he was the first person to make her feel seen and cared for. They were two people in “love” (she even admits to this herself), existing in a bubble that was only popped when the outside world's morality was imposed upon it.

Even in the comments, you see her repeating these thought-terminating clichés like “turn yourself in to the police immediately” to anyone who casts doubt. It’s a complete 180 from how she originally experienced the relationship. At this point she seems to have fully internalized the new interpretation. Drank the Kool-Aid, if you will.

This is where the hypocrisy starts to stand out. If a 19-year-old gave emotional support and stability to a 12-year-old from an abusive home in a purely platonic way, most people would probably praise him for helping a struggling kid. The moment the relationship becomes romantic or sexual, those exact same actions get reframed as manipulation. Nothing about the behavior itself changes, but the narrative flips, and the girl’s own feelings of love and happiness get retroactively rewritten as “trauma.”

It also reminds me of the research by Rind et al., which argued that much of the harm associated with adult–child sexual experiences may come less from the acts themselves and more from the social reaction afterward: condemnation, intervention by therapists, and pressure to adopt a narrative of victimization. Interestingly, the woman in the video even says her foundation for love was damaged because every later relationship was compared to the one she was later told had been “abuse,” not the one she originally experienced as love.

The whole thing starts to look like a process of social identity reconstruction. Instead of simply reflecting on the past, she ends up adopting a new identity as a “victim,” which just happens to be one that is heavily validated in the current cultural climate. The video itself almost feels like a performance for an audience that expects a particular narrative of trauma and empowerment.

The irony is that, in the name of protecting her, society may have convinced her to reinterpret a period of her life when she felt loved and special as a time when she was actually a broken victim.

So the question becomes: who is really doing the harm here?

I’m curious what others think about this, so I made a poll. Feel free to vote and explain your reasoning. I believe this is an interesting case study highlighting many points I’ve seen floated here and on Newgon.

[DANAT4T]

Perfect example of how age of consent laws disproportionately effect 'young' men.

[John_Doe]

I voted "Most of the harm comes from society forcing a trauma narrative onto experiences that were originally positive" only because you specified "...in cases like this." In general, I think "It depends on the specific individuals and circumstances involved" but I don't think that contradicts my assuming that internalizing cultural attitudes about AMSC primarily explains the harm that people like this woman experience later on in life.

[zarkle]

I voted that it is societies conditioning and I think that is the case most of the time

I talked about something similar on another girl lover website and I'd like to copy and paste it here.

--copy and pasted info from zarkle's online activities elsewhere--



https://x.com/sullibible/status/2025490914622193807

Tweet Attached highlights 127K+ likes on bul selling the gospel of victimhood to a former excited and curious teenager brainwashing her into thinking she is a victim

- Meet Sophia Turner an actress from Game of Thrones, when she was 13 she was reading a script behind the scenes that had a reference to oral sex and she was fascinated by it. She did not find it traumatizing or horrible. She was very interested to learn adults had sex that way from reading the script. However the feminist and conservatives on X are in both strong agreement she is a vicitm in retrospect just for reading a script about oral sex. *author's note this matches BeeZee's retroactivity victimhood*

I see ZERO EVIDENCE that Ms. Turner is a victim but I do see evidence of them trying to indoctrinate her the gospel of victimhood. Just as leftist try to sell racial minorities and homosexuals the gospel of victimhood they are doing the same for women and girls.

Most girls and teens have no idea non-coercive sexual exploration is dirty until cultural peer pressure tells them. In worse cases they base their entire identity on victimhood politics like certain survivor identities.

Now I will tie back vicitmhood mindsets to evolutionary psychology.
There are three things going on from the perspective of evolutionary psychology

1) Signaling for help :

In ancestral times humans who were being maltreated by other members of the tribe needed to signal out they were being harmed, such as someone stealing food from them or harrasing them in some way. In 20,000 BC Not speaking out back then means you don't get a slice of caribou meat. But in the modern world those ancestral pressures are less common and now they are repurposed as vicitmhood identity. Though to be fair they are used in cases of speaking out against bullying and work place harrasment accurately.

2) Identity politics :

This is by far the biggest driver. Humans like to divide the world into tribes based on literally any category such as nationhood, race, gender, sexuality or even one's favorite baseball team or favorite video editing software, and get all tribal in debates over it which choice is better. Severity of bad behavior varies, tribal conflicts over a favorite video editor won't lead to violence where as tribal conflict over race can lead to severe violence and genocide. This is what happens with certain political views. A clear feminist identity ingroup vs the rapist pedo outgroup.

Leftist also do something unique, they compete among each other to prove who is the biggest victim. Feminist, trans people, the disabled and blacks who are brainwashed by this compete to prove who is the largest vicitm and replace meritocratic attitudes with a system of whoever has the most victim points.

3): Group think:

In ancestral times disagreeing with the tribe and pointing out nuance about other tribes meant risk of being ostracized which could mean getting kicked out of the tribe, starving to death by not having access to food and shelter. Today disagreeing with the normies 127,000 likes on X leads to social osctracism as well.

Feminist and conservatives both want to brainwash Ms. Turner (then 13) into thinking she is a victim when she is NOT! I stand in full intectual opposition to anyone who pretends she is a victim.

--end of paste--

Good job identifying victimhoodism BeeZee.

[bnkywuv]

My "mother" with diagnosed NPD is a STRONG anti, even accusing my dad on multiple occasions of sexually abusing me and my sisters as kids. That's why this is so prevalent in many of my posts here. I've lived with an abusive anti for 37 years which has spurred this research that I'm now applying to antis. I still live with her and she still treats me as though I'm a "stupid and irresponsible" child who shouldn't be allowed to make decisions.

I was groomed (nonsexual) by her into feeling sympathy and affection for her which she later weaponized and used to get her way, I'd say classifying grooming as harmful or beneficial grooming depends on context. Some people groom out of genuine love, but others use it to win the target's affection to hurt them and use them later.

In the case of 'protection' the protection isn't so much about actual protection but preventing the person from seeing anyone else BUT THEM as their source for protection, and certain narcissists apply this to everyone who they see as a target even if they are not their kids. They know that kids are impressionable, eager to please adults whom they admire and will use them to carry out their own wishes and needs and do not like them developing much of an independence, as they would lose their power and authority over them. So "protection" is a good weapon for them. This is exactly why the children they claim to "protect" are some of the most miserable people one could even encounter. Protection should never be about total control and stripping someone of their autonomy and ability to make decision. If it is it's not truly protection but coercion it's effectively grooming.

This doesn't just apply to children. Even adults can get groomed by secretly toxic and abusive people such as in my situation but not ALL grooming is predatory. Just as you said and i voted in, it was the culture and society (possibly also a lot of toxic people) who didn't like their affection who started refraining her situation to victimize her in order to suit their own idea of how romance and affection should be.

However not all of the backlash is done by toxic people. Some who are simply uneducated would take this narrative and run with it. The difference is how they respond to evidence. If you provide enough evidence that grooming and age gaps are not inherently harmful, the "normies" would look at it differently whereas the toxic types would be more prone to stick with their beliefs and get even more outraged. The so-called "protect the children" fanatics are more invested in how "caring" they appear to others to boost their own image rather than caring for what they say they do, the welfare of children, which is downright grim. Sadly, it's super effective because they prey on what people want to hear, effectively "grooming' them. Most of us want to protect children and that becomes weaponized to oppress children, something I hope gets exposed over time.

However this does sound like something else I've posted here, which is my own fear of children. After I learned that an adult having these kinds of feelings for children wasn't socially acceptable in this part of the world, I developed extremely violent fantasies and nightmares of being assaulted by children while also acting like an anti. The difference is I'd go to bed doubting being an anti and feeling bad about my actual attraction to kids. People would use this as a way to claim that I was sexually abused, but I wasn't (unless you count sexual suppression which I do). So the fear was CREATED by SOCIETY, not by a specific incident. Retroactive trauma is nasty like that.

[Learning to undeny]

My answer:
The relationship may have been harmful, but social reactions afterward probably amplify the damage.

Explanation:


There are troubling aspects. Apparently the man believed that "god meant them to be together for life", a delusion that he tried to convince the girl of. The delusion is culturally conditioned, but he didn't have to impose his ideas like this.

Having to keep it a secret is another problem. Of course, if it weren't for society, they wouldn't have to keep it secret, but again he resorted to manipulation to keep her mouth shut (at least according to the girl; we can't hear both sides).

Perhaps he believed he was a positive influence for her just because they were in love for each other. I guess it's common that, when some MAPs realise that the narrative that they can't have a positive relationship with a young partner is wrong, they just follow their instincts, but the problem is that they can get no feedback since it has to remain a secret, so if there's something wrong they are doing and they don't realise it, they have no "observer" to tell them. Thus, it's much harder to create a healthy relationship.

So there are problematic aspects in the relationship itself. But then, people like her may get convinced of the uni-dimensional nature of the "abuse", and this just isn't helpful, for people can learn even from negative relationships.

I find his actions forgivable and understandable, and probably he genuinely thought the relationship was positive, but in this case he could have done better.

[TheHamilplexOfficial]

i chose "Most of the harm comes from society forcing a trauma narrative onto experiences that were originally positive" however, we do think ALL of the harm came from pushing the trauma narrative. it was clearly positive. nothing harmful or non consensual was being done. its was society pushing these false narratives onto this girl who was finally being given love, then made her think it was actually trauma. I truly hope she doesnt believe that she was being "groomed" forever

fck society

- Rusty | It/Vamp/Star | AAM | Main Host 1 | "History Has Its Eyes On You"
- Alexander | He/It | Zoo and MAP | Main Host 2 | "PAY YOUR FCKIN TAXES"

[RoosterDance]

BeeZee, I believe you've explained it all quite accurately. And thus, I also chose "Most of the harm comes from society."
That said, there's always factors we can never be 100% sure of simply because none of us were involved.

people can learn even from negative relationships.

Also agreeing with this because I believe that this is a super important point that people constantly forget.

[Grunko]

Intentions being misinterpreted

Many individuals may feel they been groomed, exploited or abused even though the older person may not have had these intentions and they genuinely loved them and had a thing for them and didnt want to cause them harm
I think that’s another thing to bear in mind that intentions were misinterpreted

[Learning to undeny]

Intentions being misinterpreted
Many individuals may feel they been groomed, exploited or abused even though the older person may not have had these intentions and they genuinely loved them and had a thing for them and didnt want to cause them harm
I think that’s another thing to bear in mind that intentions were misinterpreted

Intentions are important when judging him, but not so much when judging the relationship, which can have serious flaws even if both people have good intentions.

In my opinion, such lies as "you are so special", "we were meant to be together" are dangerous even if they are widespread and accepted. Even if the partners are the same age. And if she was at a hard point in her life, she could have been more susceptible to taking them seriously. The fact that the people around them did not see anything wrong does seem to suggest he tried his best, at least at presenting a good image, but I'm sure he generally wanted the best for "them" (perhaps more for "them" than for "her", but nothing rare anyway).