Itâs a qualitative study looking at the ways that Tumblr antis define the word âpedophiliaâ. Itâs pretty interesting stuff because the definitions are so unique to Tumblr anti culture. Iâll have to go through my coding more thoroughly, but I think Iâve broken them down into four categories:
1. Legality based arguments where theyâre very stuck on the idea of Age of Majority. Usually these people believe that itâs pedophilia if an 18 year old dates a 17 year old because they view age 18 as a hard and fast line from childhood to adulthood.
2. Psychological-readiness based arguments are a lot more subjective. These people often use arguments about differing life stages as a reason to call something pedophilia. Some even bust out that âpeoples brains donât fully age until 25â factoid. For this group, age gaps are a real no-go, even if both partners are legally consenting adults. The acceptablity of age gaps varied.
3. Physical appearance based arguments are focused against people who like young looking or young acting characters, even if those characters are adults. These people define pedophilia as an attraction to the perception of youth. This belief is strongly correlated with anti-DD/LG posting.
4. Iâm having trouble naming the fourth category. Itâs based around an argument of sneaky pedophilia or maybe an uncovering of the fan creators hidden desires? These antis argue that aging up characters past canon ages and shipping them is pedophilia because they believe that the shipper REALLY wanted to ship the child but didnât because they were worried it wasnât socially acceptable. In this instance, the character is portrayed as an adult by fandom and there is nothing childish in their appearance or mannerism. Because the character was depicted as a child in canon, however, the anti believes that the character must always be depicted that way in fandom and that only tricky pedophiles would be interested in exploring that characterâs future.
Similarly, I noticed a newer trend of calling adult ships between people who canonically knew each other as children/teens to be called pedophilia or at the very least jailbaity, predatory behaviour. This is particularly true when the characters are a couple years apart. The idea there is that, if they knew each other as children, theyâd never be able to see each other as adults. So if they have sex as adults, theyâre mentally thinking of the child version of their partner and are therefore a pedophile. I wonder if this is a projection of the beliefs from #4. Perhaps it is the antis who, once introduced to a child/teen, are never able to see them as anything but a child and therefore they believe that everyone else must feel the same? Thatâs only a guess. I only saw this one a handful of times and it was all pretty recently, so I didnât include it in the data for my paper. It does seem to indicate a level of escalation in these definitions though. Iâll have to check in again at a later date and see if it sticks around.
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