Okay so basically everyday for a week I’m going to spark your imagination with a rare pair from the Homestuck fandom. Your challenge is to write a fan fiction about them in 24 hours. Have fun messing with these pairings! Here is your first pairing for the week – Rose<>Gamzee!
The right has set a pretty neat trap in that any discussion or acknowledgement of children’s sexuality will have you potentially labeled a groomer or a pedophile, not just by the right, but a non-trivial amount of people from all over the political spectrum. They also define “sexual” and “sexuality” in very vague, self-serving ways. Saying a boy’s female playmate is his “girlfriend” is not seen as sexualizing children, but anything even vaguely gay is seen as inherently sexual.
What is sexuality? We’ve all had crushes before our first sexual discoveries. And people on the right are almost universally against children exploring their sexuality together if they happen to both be girls or both be boys, even though several of them seem to see nothing wrong with an adult man marrying an adolescent (or younger) girl. They’ll call comprehensive sex ed “grooming” even though it’s been shown to actually help prevent grooming and molestation.
as even the popular left wing discourse becomes more and more sexually conservative, particularly in regards to children and teenagers, it becomes more and more important to have frank and honest education about children and teenager’s sexuality.
reactionary suppression of information and discussion in response to fear of being associated, however tangentially, with pedophiles, is another form of respectability politics and thus doomed to fail. they do not need a “reason” to call us groomers and pedophiles, and we will not prove to them that we aren’t by providing a squeaky-clean popular narrative where children and teenagers are entirely divorced from sexuality and the queer experience. forcibly repressing information and discussion about children’s sexuality directly harms children and enables grooming and other forms of abuse–which, in a heterosexual amatonormative context, actively benefits the right wing, because they want to preserve the nuclear family as a nexus of child abuse; the “groomer” accusations are a defensive smokescreen.
playing by the rules of the trap they have set is still walking into the trap.
