MAP Forum

An older article that recently cropped up on social media during the Megyn Kelly thing.

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/hitler ... pedophiles

There’s a lot of stupidity in public discourse, and most of it is not worth paying attention to. But once in a while, there is a kind of stupidity that is so grotesque that its very existence to any substantive degree tells us something about our culture.

In late December, a right-wing account with nearly 16,000 followers posted a video of a young adult Demi Moore making out with a 15-year-old boy. It went viral, with as of this writing over 8,000 likes and nearly 4,000 retweets. The account followed up the next day with a poll over whether there was something wrong with what the actress did, with two-thirds of 38,000 participants saying that there was. Many of the replies and the quote tweets refer to Moore as a “pedophile,” which shocked me into doing a long rambling thread in which I said this kind of attitude managed to combine “the stupidest fascist impulses of the right with the stupidest feminist arguments that exist on the left.”

I don't agree with everything in this article. It strays too far into naive biological essentialism in regards to gender differences.

However, I think it's basically correct to say that ignoring the differences between men and women(whether you regard these to be socially constructed or biological) and adopting an agnostic, gender-blind attitude towards age gaps relationships is a mistake.

There is scientific evidence that on average, women who had age gap relationships as minors with adult men are significantly more likely to have negative self-perception of the relationship in hindsight compared to men who had similar relationships with adult women. From what I remember gay male-male relationships were somewhere in-between, not as negative as girl-man but not as positive as boy-woman. In other words, highschool boys really are objectively more likely to enjoy hooking up with their teachers and look back on it fondly compared to highschool girls. I don't remember if the study I'm thinking of collected statistics on lesbian relationships.

I guess this might be seen as good news if you're a straight female pedo or a gay male pedo, but unfortunate if you're a straight male pedo. It makes sense when you think about it though. As antis love to point out, power imbalances can create the potential for abuse and coercion, and there are a myriad of socially constructed factors stemming from patriarchal norms that probably make girls more likely to feel shame at having had sex with a man compared to boys who are more likely to see it as a conquest, as well as factors that make girls more vulnerable to men who do have genuinely predatory motivations. I'll grant that it's possible biological factors like physical intimidation or risk of pregnancy could maybe play a role as well.

Still, I think the difference comes much more from socially constructed attitudes and norms than any essential biological factors.

And also it should be added that subjective experience (whether you liked a certain thing or otherwise) is no proxy for psychological harm or any other negative outcome, nor does any of that say something about true freedom of choice at the time.