chapotraphouse

And I mean I fundamentally dislike and distrust men in general and find the way they dehumanize, fetishize, and try to control women (or other men for that matter, because cis gay men--particularly richer ones--do it too) repulsive, but the counter to that isn't declaring that some adult women are literally children because they might hypothetically become the target of some creep's lust, it's giving women more agency, rights, and education and trying to prevent the actual power disparity in our patriarchal hellstate that heavily enables abusers to prey on women in general, not just younger women. Is a middle aged man specifically pursuing college students or recent college graduates a creep? Probably, especially if he's actively setting out to do it and it's not just some incidental meeting, and it probably ties into gross youth-fetishization aspects of our culture, but it's also not "literally pedophilia" nor can we can unilaterally say "actually this adult woman is not trusted to enter into this relationship for herself and so it must be prohibited on her behalf, as we have determined it's some percentage more likely to be an abusive relationship than the baseline chance of abuse that a closer-in-age relationship has, which is also sickeningly high because we live in a patriarchal hellstate that teaches men to prey on women and grooms women to submit to this."

Genuinely, I do agree with all of this, and my point really was that I want more conversations about this in particular. The point I was making is that, rather than being able to talk about the issues frankly like this, and how the patriarchal status quo we find ourselves in is the larger issue here, every single time instead the comments are full of jokes taking this to the extreme that effectively throw the baby out with the bath water. Whether or not my word is taken for it, I'm rational about this - I full understand the spectrum of human intelligence and agency, and I agree that in an ideal world this would not be something we worry about. I'm not so black and white in my thinking as to genuinely believe we can draw a line and say 'That's good enough' with any conviction. I'm just jilted that any time this comes up, we get lost in comments about 'oh in that case my relationship should send me to the gulag', which I think we can agree is actively not helpful towards this conversation - I mean, in this comment section alone, how many comments are just variations on that joke, let alone the other comment section just 4 days ago. If I'm being honest with myself and with the community, it's the response here that has me worried more than anything - the instant air of dismissiveness just rubs me the wrong way. Like at no point am I even bringing up pedophilia, but everything seems so centered around how such a thing would affect individuals here personally, instead of discussions that feel genuine about an issue whose discourse contains some 'ultras'.