"Pride" and what it isn't · 6:01pm Jun 29th, 2021
As we close in on the end of Pride Month, it may be worth taking a second to consider what we wish to include under that heading. This reflection is important, I think, because no cause or identity can survive without being discriminate about what it onboards, and any cause or community that grounds its values in inclusiveness will inevitably encounter bad actors who think that being "inclusive" is a license to push the inclusion of that which is clearly not intended to fall under the cause's purview and is unacceptable.
To be concrete here, what I'm talking about specifically is the attempt to frame sexual and/or romantic attractions between minors and adults as falling somewhere in the "LGBT" spectrum. This crystalized today in a story about this topic, pushing a justification for such relationships (in this particular story's case, between an adult and a foal self-described as "almost eleven" years old) as a matter of "no one can tell you who you're allowed to love."
This is reprehensible and disgusting. There's no more nuanced way to say it, so I'm not going to go at length trying to dissect nuance here. That's it. Plain and simple. Reprehensible and disgusting.
And no, I won't link the story, because I don't want to give it any more traction.
The author has been deleting critical comments, too. Nonetheless, I left one, for reasons that the comment itself, preserved here where it can't be deleted, will make apparent:
The more comments the author deletes, it more it just leaves a longer and more condemning record of the community not considering it appropriate or acceptable to promote the idea of romance between adults and minors as a good thing or somehow justified as a matter of "no one can tell you who you're allowed to love."
Which makes sense, because, you know, it's not.
Pretending that this falls under the LGBT pride umbrella and deserves the same respect and acceptance as legitimate relationships between adults with the competence and ability to consent is a hideous, perverse farce. The very fact that the story here has to be framed as between teacher and student - ie., a situation with an inherently unequal power dynamic presenting obvious potential for coercion and other abusive manipulations borne from conflicts of interest, a category which relationships between children and adults ALWAYS fall into - is in itself evidence of that.
I expect this post to be deleted, too. But I want that deletion to be part of the record, showing what this author had to resort to in order to pretend that this is somehow "okay."
Pride is important.
Equally important is speaking out against these attempts to abuse and corrupt positive movements for nefarious purposes and co-opt them for the benefit of badly-intentioned abusers.
I know who you're talking about and I agree. It sick that they use Pride month to push something that sick
It's not a point of pride, it's a point of sickness. People who use the Pride month to try and argue, "hey, we're in there too!" with this idea are disgusting.
Slight correction: the fic's comments have since been outright disabled. You can't say anything there anymore.
(That being said, I imagine the bulk of our potential comments would've been instantly deleted anyway.)
It's only a matter of time before The LGBT community permits Pedophiles, the reason is simply reading the literature that argues we should support faggots and dikes, the enviable andlogical conclusion is that those that support non-Hetrosexuality monogamous relationships must at the end of day support pedophilia.
5543330
Yeaaaaaaahhhh, no, buddy, I don't think so.
This kind of slippery slope panic, proclaiming that "Those people support relationships between consenting adults that I don't personally happen to like, so that means they'll support anything!" is just that, a nonsensical slippery slope argument.
No one in the LGBT community is seriously suggesting that consenting adults and the permissibility of their relationships with each other somehow magically equates to the permissibility of relationships between adults and minors incapable of consenting.
In fact, with consent and sexual health and safety being such a cornerstone of many parts of the LGBT movement, relationships with minors who cannot competently consent are anathema to the whole philosophy - ie., you could not be more wrong here.
Reminds me of that Fimfiction 18-year-old user who online dated a 14-year-old on the site.
Well they just posted a blog saying they're going to kill themselves
THE AUTHOR OF THE STORY JUST POSTED A SUICIDE NOTE:
https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/954592/ive-decided-to-kill-myself
Regardless of what you all think about what they wrote (and believe me, I found it just as repulsive as the rest of you did), this is not good.
Just quoting this in place of the blog upvote I can't give.
Yeah, strictly speaking, it may indeed be true that who one loves can't be controlled, by others or even by the self. But how one acts on that can, and "love" alone is not a sufficient justification for an action that also does harm; if someone loves their neighbor's happily married wife, that doesn't give them the right to murder said neighbor to get the new widow back on the dating circuit. And, sure, there can be a grey area even on this particular topic (Should the age of consent be 18? 16? 21? What if it's technically legal, but one person is just old enough and the other is decades older? What if it's technically illegal since the two are on opposite sides of the age, but the age difference between the two is only two months? In what ways should the restrictions be less (or more!) firm when being applied to interactions between fictional characters rather than real people? How much should children be informed, and when and from whom, about this aspect of human biology and sociology, that they'll neither get too much too early nor be left unprepared for puberty and adulthood (or, less happily, have their ignorance make them more vulnerable to predators)? Etc. (Please note that I am not interested in getting into a discussion about these complicated and controversial questions here, just pointing out they exist.)), but from what I've heard of the story in question (which I did also see myself briefly, before realizing just what the subject matter was and swiftly going elsewhere), it was actively trying to make sure it wasn't in that grey zone, and also actively making sure it wasn't confining the core notion to fiction. And then on top of that tried to insert this into Pride. Which is, uh.
No. Please do not do that. That very much does not strike me as a good thing.
(The author of the particular story in question did/does clearly seem to have had... not a very happy life, though. I do hope that their situation ends up better in the future, for them and those around them, one way or another.)
5543826
This is not love. Child sexual abuse is not love, it is narcissistic self-indulgence. There is no "love" for the actual child anywhere in it, the child is merely an object used to fulfill a deviant fantasy. Calling it "love" is just another attempt to euphemize and romanticize child abuse.
That said, I hope this is just an attempt at emotional manipulation, and not an actual suicide note (it reads like the former); and that the person is able to get decent mental health treatment as a result.
5543330
*Yawn* Oh look, more edgelord homophobia. That "queer=paedophlie" meme was old and tired 20 years ago, try joining the rest of us in this millennium.
5543924
...Sorry, I'm not sure why you're replying to me, there? Did you mean to be?
5543962
Yes. The post I was responding to started with this:
The story that this blog post is a reaction to was about romanticizing child sexual abuse. Characterizing that as "love" is... disturbing to say the least. Disclaimer: I'm a victim of child sexual abuse.
5543932
Read Engel, you know the the other half of the Communist Manifesto
5543339
Read Engel, you know the other half of the Communist Manifesto duo. He argues for the acceptance of Homosexuality and Pedophilia, anything in fact as long as it tears down the Christian Nuclear Family unit
5545230
That was truly pathetic. Maybe you should take your own advice, since you got just about everything wrong. For starters, it's Engles, not Engle.
For anyone who isn't a mindless troll parroting fascist talking points, here's the actual history: Accusing Marx, Engles, and other early communist writers of supporting paedophilia was a very common tactic of right-wingers. Some of the early communists actively supported homosexuality as counter to the reactionary cult of tradition so beloved of the fascists (which was steeped in homophobia, despite several prominent fascist leaders being homosexual); and many of the early communists were in fact homosexual. Many cultures and governments of the time were still very religious, and a very common tactic for demonizing homosexuals was to label them all paedophiles. This was common practice of the Catholic Church, and pretty much fascist political organizations. By supporting homosexuals, therefore, the communists were said to support paedophilia as well.
Unfortunately, as part of their "strong families" policies, some of the authoritarian communist governments also took the same attitude toward homosexuality -- most notably Stalin's USSR.
It's also rather telling how many anti-homosexual right-wing political figures and preachers get caught sexually abusing children.
5545230
Foxhelm, you need to stop. This blog post is my platform, not yours, and the point here was not to invite an open question about whether or not pedophilia / child sex abuse falls under the LGBT umbrella. It doesn't. That's NOT up for debate, and you're not welcome to come in here trying to turn it into a debate in order to serve your personal politics. What you're doing in trying to open this question is really scummy and, ironically, very similar to what the author of the story in question tried to do with that story. The difference is in the motive: your goal is to use the persistent lie about an association between the LGBT community and pedophilia to spread disinformation and hate propaganda in an attempt to create (false) guilt-by-association and tar and feather the legitimate LGBT pride movement with the same negative emotions that pedophilia rightfully elicits, simply because you were taught by someone to hate anyone LGBT (who, by the way, you refer to with classic anti-LGBT hate slurs, namely, "faggot" and "dike").
This is hate speech. Needless to say, I will not have hate speech on my blog platform.
At this point, I'm going to need to ask you to refrain from posting on this blog any further. Thanks.
5544120
Ah! Thank you for the clarification, and sorry about the wording issue, then. Yes, "love" was used there because of the quote I was going off of; if I was writing a similar statement from scratch, I expect I'd have used phrasing using "urges" or the like instead.