Shooting The Messenger

If you comment on certain topics, you get called a racist or a pedophile. That destroys productive dialogue.

A while ago, I had some articles raising concerns about how non-offending pedophiles are treated. Non-offending pedophiles are those who have not committed any crime—who haven’t offended against children—but who are sexually attracted to children. I argued that these people are demonized objectionably, making it hard for them to seek help because if it’s revealed that they’re attracted to children, their life is ruined. It’s also immoral; people should only be subject to blame for immoral things they do, not for proclivities they can’t control. This is, in fact, roughly the standard line about homosexuality—having homosexual inclinations isn’t immoral in itself, for one can’t control it. It’s acting no it that’s immoral. I obviously don’t agree with the Catholics that acting on homosexual inclinations is immoral, but I think the basic framework is right.

This is a claim that you can agree with or not. Various people argued that the level of stigma against non-offending pedophiles is justified—that it’s important to have a very firm fence of stigma around anything nearing pedophilia. But more common than people objecting was people not engaging and claiming that I was a pedophile—a claim only evidenced by my writing those articles (because obviously if one was a pedophile they would write provocative public articles about the poor treatment of pedophiles). When I had my run-in with the debate community, one of them wrote a long article claiming that I was a racist and a pedophile, based on that.

No one wants to be called a pedophile, obviously. Even if only 5% of people think—or claim to think—that one who raises concerns about a topic are pedophiles, no one will raise them in polite company. Other people see that if you raise this topic, lots of people will say you’re a pedophile, and so they don’t talk about it. This is an absurdly effective way of shutting down any discussion of the topic.

This has historically been used to stifle people sharing various views that we now take to be obviously right. Prior to gay marriage being legalized, those who advocated it were accused of being gay themselves. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being gay, but this accusation served to stifle discourse on the topic and make it so that a law banning gay marriage supported by nothing approaching a rational argument was able to last so long. Regular, normal people who didn’t want to arouse suspicions that they themselves were gay didn’t speak up.

Walt Bismarck has an article arguing that girls are going through puberty earlier than previously and that this is bad (resulting in, among other things, lots of men acting inappropriately towards young girls). But as he notes, no one talks about this, in part because it’s poison for any man to talk about:

But most men aren’t going to touch this with a ten foot pole, because whenever you point out this phenomenon around normies you inevitably get some hatchet-faced schoolmarm going “WELL MEN SHOULDN’T BE LOOKING AT YOUNG GIRLS ANYWAY” and implying you’re a pedophile for even talking about this. Men are extremely afraid of being called pedophiles, so this shuts down all discussion.