okay i lied ONE MORE THING i want to get off my chest so feel free to scroll by TL;DR at the bottom etc.
i agree that the existence of the "pedophile" or the "rapist" as a rhetorical tool is a very useful way to dehumanize and unperson others, whether the allegation is true or not, and that having any such tool that can be used to unconditionally pathologize and class individuals and entire groups of people as automatically inhuman and undeserving of basic human rights (including life itself) is, in and of itself, a problem, a tool of oppression, like in the way that "criminal" or "felon" are used to justify horrible human rights abuses within prisons and elsewhere, because of the way that "who cares if those people have no rights they're evil and don't deserve them" is a very personally alluring and cathartic thing to say and believe to those of us raised up in carceral systems, even though no harm is being prevented or solved by pretending that these people aren't people. if anything, doing so inevitably causes more harm, because you don't need to address the roots of the harm being invoked (e.g. CSA) to justify it, you just need to believe that all you have to do to make the world safer is to dispose of certain types of not-people. you see where this logic very easily leads.
this is, in fact, ALL THE MORE REASON we should be committed to examining the ways in which our attitudes and behaviors may lead either to harm or the enabling/normalization of harm, especially within a social power structure that requires that harm be done to reinforce itself
that does mean, yes, checking the kneejerk punitive reactions we've been conditioned to have when we hear cries of "pedophile" or "rapist" and being curious about our feelings: where they are coming from, the context in which they're existing, and what they lead to,
and it ALSO MEANS checking our reactions towards the very real and very common issues of child abuse, incest, rape, etc. in the very same way, and being curious: why ARE these types of violence so widely fetishized and recontextualized into something pleasurable for everyone involved? why are these such common kinks, such popular porn categories, even as they are constantly decried by everyone we know in polite society? why, when we know 1 in every 5 women in the US have been harmed in this way? when the vast majority of these women experienced this harm as children? when over 25% of men in the US who have been assaulted experienced this harm when they were 10 or younger? when the vast majority of people who experienced this harm experienced it at the hands of a loved one, someone they knew? when these statistics multiply the moment you account for factors such as race, orientation, and gender status?
what does that tell us about the worth of a loved one's intent--YOUR intent--in the face of social structures that are known and built to enable and encourage these harms as a tool of its own enforcement, whose function doesn't even require your active participation to create harm, only that you accept its existence without protest; if not in all, surely in SOME circumstances? if it's "play" or "pretend" or "fantasy" or a "joke," surely, in this way, there can be no harm caused or enabled? surely it's only a problem once it's "real"? surely there is no need to cry "abuse" unless it becomes "real" abuse?
yes, we need to be curious about our feelings. ALL of our feelings. this is, in fact, the way by which we may reduce the potency of "the pedophile" as the rhetorical tool by which gay and trans people are bludgeoned into the margins: by recognizing that "pedophile" is not inherently A Type Of Person, that we each always have the potential for great good and great harm regardless of intent, and that everyone else is just another version of you: meaning that person labeled "pedophile" has as much interiority and humanity as you do, meaning that person who DID abuse and traumatize another person did not do something you yourself are ontologically incapable of doing, meaning we each need to understand where the specifics of our desires are built from, because no, we are not BORN with them, they are CREATED within us, and we can choose whether to keep, use, or discard them
the effort to make harm socially acceptable through specific tools and conditions is the common thread here: whether that tool is the invocation of the "pedophile" to automatically and uncritically make someone an acceptable target of structural violence, or of the "kink" to recontextualize an act of structural violence as something to be viewed as acceptable, pleasurable, desirable
this is why "pedophile liberation" makes no fucking sense, especially if you're not talking about the mechanisms by which CSA is enabled in the first place; mechanisms that you, i, ALL of us, are completely embedded in.
CSA/rape/incest is a widespread problem and a form of violence that we as a society are led to normalize and tolerate without even consciously needing to because it is baked into white supremacist patriarchal power structures for a purpose AND ALSO the fact that "pedophile" as a word is so easily and effectively wielded as a cudgel against "undesirable" populations like gay and trans people can and should be examined and requires an anti-carceral mindset to do so effectively AND ALSO the effectiveness of that cudgel depends on everyone believing that only Certain Types of People that are Designated Pedophiles can do harm and not realizing the myriad ways in which each and every one of us may participate in the normalization of that harm due to the structure of our very lives THEREFORE to make meaningful change happen in order to reduce harm we must always be examining and reexamining our beliefs and desires and make conscious decisions about what we do and do not want to contribute to or participate in and that's why your need to openly embrace your fucking rape/loli kink on tumblr is not valid and should be rightly scrutinized for the ideas it perpetuates which already permeate society at large and are why we have this fucking problem
