What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

glitchlight asked: i've calmed down and i'm sorry i misread. pedophilia makes me see red. what bothered me was using DSM (a flawed metric) for pedophilia when adults pursuing teens is still pedophilia in most people's eyes, including my own. You talked about how 'conflating' predator and pedophile hurts people, but I'd disagree strongly; a 23 y/o dating a 17 y/o is inherently predatory. plus, your criticism was uncannily similar to redirection that pedophiles really do, by focusing on definitions and the like.

I completely understand getting worked up about it: as I said in my original post, it’s a topic I think people should be passionate about precisely because of what it means. 

I don’t know if you read my original piece or just my response to the comment I received about it, but to reiterate: one of the reasons why I felt moved to discuss this in the first place is that, in my late teens, I dated men in their twenties, and I can say personally that what I experienced was neither predatory nor paedophilic. In fact, this is how I met my husband: he’s ten years my senior, I’d just turned eighteen when we first became friends, and I was nineteen when we started dating. We’ve now been married over over a decade, together for nearly thirteen years, and have a school-aged child. The only reason I met him at all is because I dated his housemate first, a guy six years older who I first met at seventeen, which was how old I was the year I first started at university. 

That being so, I’m hoping you can understand why I tend to react very, very strongly to the claim that teens dating twentysomethings is always and inherently badwrong/predatory/paedophilic. I’m not remotely trying to claim my experiences as universal: I know damn well that people mature at different rates, both physically and emotionally, and that what was true for me isn’t necessarily true for someone else. But at the same time, this is why I think it’s so important to make the terminology distinct: because if everything gets tarred with the same brush, then my actual lived experience of meeting the man I love is deemed gross and criminal, which I know for a fact it’s not.   

This is also why I brought up the DSM for paedophilia: not because I don’t understand the difference between the clinical and casual usage of words, but because there are instances where you really can’t change the clinical meaning, even for the ease of everyday use, without fundamentally misapplying the concept - often with dangerous consequences. This is what happened with the word theory, whose casual variant is often used to mean the exact opposite of the clinical term. In science, a theory is only a theory if it’s proven to be true, but in common parlance, a theory just means a hypothesis that could be wrong or right. By deliberately ignoring this distinction, religious anti-science advocates promoted the idea that the casual meaning was the only meaning, arguing that, as the theory of evolution was only a theory, and not really a fact, then they should be allowed to teach creationism in schools, while science teachers should stop acting as though evolution was true. With so many people ignorant of the distinction between the clinical and casual meanings, the anti-science side won, which is why creationism is now a thing that many American schools are legally allowed - or in some cases, obliged - to teach. 

Distinguishing what is actual paedophilia from stuff that we find skeevy, gross or inappropriate is important. I’m not asking anyone to start promoting teen/twentysomething romances as an inherently wonderful idea, or trying to argue with anyone who thinks they’re gross in real life. All I’m saying is that our language has distinctions for a reason, and that fiction, while able to both influence and be influenced by reality, is ultimately fiction: reading or writing about a thing does not mean you condone it in real life. 

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