Not sure if this is an okay place to say this, but holy shit, I just realized that the whole “Throwing around heavy terms like ‘Pedophile’ to describe ship art of things you personally don’t like,” has absolutely numbed me to any online accusations that could actually be TRUE. Like. I saw a post that goes “I am calling out blah blah for being a pedophile,” and to my horror, I immediately sighed and went “Which ship and fandom is it NOW,” before catching myself and realizing wtf I was DOING.
People– the people who are doing this unwittingly, rather than those doing it on purpose– need to realize that this is what normalization ACTUALLY is.
By throwing around accusations constantly, they are numbing people and training them to expect a certain outcome.
Normalization is about actions in the real world that affect other people, not about tropes in fiction that everyone know are stories.
The real “normalizers” are the ones throwing the words around to the point of making people think something is pedophilia when it is NOT. watering down the term so much that EVERYTHING HAS SOMEHOW BECOME PEDOPHILIA. It’s disgusting. There are teenagers in here that think they’re pedophiles because they crush on their classmates. There are people on here that think an 18 year old and a 21 year old is pedophilia. There are people here that think a 40 year old and a 50 year old is pedophilia. Absolutely no one knows what it actually means anymore and as a CSA survivor it’s so fucking horrifying to me.
A 13 year old in the anti community got called a pedophile for having a fictional crush on a 16 year old
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