I wrote this for a selfish reason: the hope that articulating the fear would help me bear it better — with more stoicism, and less despair. I usually write for selfish reasons: sometimes for clarity, sometimes from a toddler-like need to name reality and remind myself I’m allowed to. Writing is one of my main mental health tools, and writing this made me both more and less depressed.
As the weather warms, I plan to spend as much time offline, outside, and buried in paper books as I can. So my posting schedule may get more erratic — or you might get more travelogues, another short story, or a handful of meandering thoughts. You will definitely get more book reviews. Or maybe not; I’m fairly unpredictable to myself right now.
But writing still helps. And while I would write either way, I do write more because I'm being read. So, thank you.
Wow. Lots to unpack there and no time to do it sufficiently. You’ve touched on a number of issues I’ve been thinking about for quite some time, including our misunderstanding of evil and how we learned the wrong lessons from the Civil Rights era, of the critical role that Christianity has played in creating the West, and the consequences of it falling (partly corrupted, partly rejected for claims of conflicts with science and bad behavior from some of its leaders), and so much more.
I would definitely say that we are losing our way as a society, and we’re full of people whose only thought is to tear it all down.
"There’s a part of me that still hopes this is just another glitch in my brain." - I think you are correct to be concerned and it is important you can see it coming, just as you can see the flaws in Dave Smith's arguments and the dangers the right cannot see. Murray has a formidable mind and an incredible work ethic. The attempt to knock him down after this interview look feeble and desperate. Kisin, as you have, have been reliably consistent in your writings and views.
I remember the cuties fiasco, and took full part in the outrage. Oh, there's nothing like a good, moral outrage to get the blood pumping in the morning. But aside from a few things here and there (the ridiculous tuck swimsuits at Target in kids' sizes a couple of years ago) I haven't seen or heard much to make me afraid. I'm not perpetually online, I'm not on twitter/x, I don't participate in substack notes, so maybe I'm just missing what's going on.
On the other hand, kiddie diddling was the entire raison d'etre for postmodernism. Michel Foucault, the most sited scumbag in all of academia, and his sick comrades actively lobbied the French government to remove age of consent limitations for sexual contact. They failed, but they have continued working nonetheless towards this for decades anyhow. If I must engage once more in outrage then I will engage once more in outrage, because I'm not sure there are many worse things in the world than child molestation (it has to be bottom three).
I think you are outlineing a real problem, the upside is that peadoohile positivity isn't everywhere like it is on twitter and ted talks. So if people take this as seriously as they should we can help the people around us.
Holly, have you considered trying to turn some of these essays into a book and going on the podcast circuit to talk about this stuff? Maybe you could go on Rogan and get the warning out before your prophecies come true.
Two places to look for the damn breaking all together is whether and how it is classified in the DSM and how it is it discussed (if at all) in grade school curricula. One positive that may help prevent the latter is that parents on the whole (due to the trans issues) are more aware of the enthusiasm with which school employees think it's their duty to "guide" children through their developing sexuality. And I believe push-back is increasing. Your point about not wanting to be judgmental is, IMO, the whole thing in a nutshell. A child should judge everyone around them. How they judge and their ensuing actions and for discussion, but telling children it's wrong to judge people is telling them they are not capable of navigating the world around them and other people should do it for them.
If it is in the DSM (it is implied as it paraphilia)and is not a crime then there is societal justification to use antiandrogens and surgery. As they do in Iran.
DSM 5 betrayed all the grass roots expectations of what DSM 4 Rev had promised its review committees the last four years of its existence. Comical, as the same fake out was committed for DSM 3 to be rewritten into the final DSM 4. All those years ago, discussions were had on the rise of bestiality and pedophilia by organizing cults.
I don't think you are wrong, but I don't think Joe Rogan will be the vector for this. More likely to come from the trans-adjacent crowd. That's not usually the same as the MMA crowd (although it has it's own problems, see Andrew Tate).
I'm old enough to remember the 1970's so this isn't entirely new and has gone back and forth. This isn't a perfect example but Roman Polanski went from being viewed as a victim by most of Hollywood for decades and then underwent a reappraisal as part of the Me Too movement.
Part of the problem with the situation that has evolved with Rogan (not necessarily his show itself) is that so many other institutions are completely discredited that his being one of the ones remaining that people find credible thrusts it into a role that wasn't meant to play.
An analogy would be taking Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo journalism as the last word on politics. It's better read as a critique against the limitations of the more authoritative coverage like the New York Times. But for that to work, the Times itself still has to be credible and the two have to be read critically in tandem.
"The right has been culturally silenced and shamed for so long that it now clings to any voice that breaks through — not with discernment, but with desperation."
That is unfortunately true, and for the very reasons cited in just war doctrine, known in psychology circles as tit for tat. There have been many duplicated studies that show how people learn to get along peacefully without getting taken advantage of through repeated interactions with each other.
My wife also had he gift of discernment, that enabled her to judge people's ill intent from even fleeting contact. It also might have come from childhood abuse (although not as bad as yours), but that thought never occurred to me. I just knew enough to trust her and act quickly if she said so. She had other friends who dismissed her council come up to her months or years later and ask, "How did you know?" Like you, she had no scientific explanation.
I have it too, maybe because I’m a visual person I can just see it, when it’s good it will be a bright shining cast to their faces, and when bad they seem gray and dead, awkward, angry, contemptuous, or wooden; not quite right expression-wise, and their faces look “closed” as if they are carefully not broadcasting any information. This also will sound crazy but it’s what my brain coughs up: Epstein had this, and I think he and Ghislane both = an actual look that makes them appear cold, like animals, if that makes sense. Jared looked like a cardboard cutout or made of plastic, somehow wrong, toothy, a bad imitation. They all look like actual animal predators to me.
Then sometimes I’ll see someone and later when remembering their face it will have one of these qualities or they will look just like something disturbing or good and valiant. And what I am seeing is not their appearance but something about their spirit or intent. It isnt overt, and usually nags at me. I can’t always interpret it immediately. But I see it.
Weird, I know. Sorry for the tangent, just validating what you said. I grew up upper middle with no abuse and became a Christian as a college student 30 years ago at age 25. It has never failed me.
What you said about Jared is the first tiny little glimmer of insight I've had -- THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, I cannot thank you enough. The cardboard cutout effect you describe is at least *some part* of how I knew -- there is a parallel there to the paradigm of the pedophile who blighted my own childhood. He was "caring" and "loving" to me in performative ways, ways that were impossible to distinguish between the way normal adults are a little bit performative towards kids and performative in the way that someone acts when you are being fooled. And the narrative around Jared, that he was just a normal guy who got famous for losing weight in an unusual way, created a similarly plausible narrative -- maybe he looked fake because he was faking, or maybe he looked fake because celebrity is not easy, and he was just nervous AF. That inner conflict, the instinct screaming THIS PERSON IS FAKE vs the obvious, plausible narrative to explain why the instinct is wrong -- that was part of it, part of whatever happened in my brain in the split second between seeing his picture and bursting into tears because I *knew*.
It is not weird Jen X. It is your mind's eye view assembling what cops and MPs call "gut feeling" when encountering a psychopath or other form of unclean spirit. Their deportment and speech are rarely hid to the sophisticated observer.
I don't know if I'm going to articulate this well, so apologies if not. But I want to acknowledge that one thing I think you are perhaps rather unique in is realising the *possibility* that what you are seeing and fearing comes from a trauma filter. This allows for nuanced, sane consideration. Honestly if half of Internet traffic is now bots, at least another half of that is people screaming from an activated place of trauma and calling it reality.
I also don't think you're wrong. I hope you are. But I'm incredibly disturbed (perhaps through my own brain quirks) at how the world seems somehow more child-centric than ever but only in ways that are filtered first through adult wishes and identity. It's hard to articulate what I mean, but the closest I can get to it is describing how most parenting advice is about *being a good parent*, not about *attending to the needs of your child*. I see it in the assumption that "more daycare funding is automatically good", not "what is good for children and what do they need to thrive". Sometimes I read a thread about this and count how many comments I get through until someone points out that research is really clear about what is best for children, even if it is very inconvenient for many agendas. Usually it is dozens if not hundreds of comments, and they are shouted down as being antifeminist and out of touch.
This is all to say that I can see a world in which adult feelings are prioritised to the detriment of the vulnerable, and people who are concerned about this are written off as deranged "think of the children"! types.
God, do I see and feel you on this one. The world looks more child centered than ever because it is more and more full of adults play acting as children and being catered to as if they were children. The actual needs of actual children are so far away from being a cultural priority that it's sick.
So tired of “mommy’s boyfriend” ruining children’s sense of safety, self-trust, and sometimes entire lives. Got children? Raise them. Don’t bring men you don’t know well into your home. And even the ones you *think* you know well? Sorry: you probably don’t.
I think it will depend on the areas. Idaho and Florida have laws now executing sex offenders. I'm in a red state that evicted the woke nonsense from schools before Trump 2.0 arrived.
And I'm a normal gun-carrying parent.
Then there is California, as mentioned below.
This week in New York, a Buffalo SVU detective who's also a currently serving combat veteran and YouTuber, Richard Hy called out the school district for destroying evidence of harm coming to students.
They are being slammed, along with local news, by the internet for the neglect and lack of coverage, just the district saying it's "untruths."
The anti-semitism thing I've been watching grow, like its the one thing that certain factions on both sides agree on though they probably won't admit it.
I seriously doubt that your schools are as free from the garbage as you think they are. I hope that you're right, but I tutored Math all through undergrad. The education majors were the most woke of all and it wasn't even close. They would tell me, in total earnestness, how much they enjoyed talking to the people at the homeless shelter where they sometimes volunteered — about the homeless people's white privilege.
Your school may not fly a trans flag or do a land acknowledgment, but unless they found some magical source of sane teachers, I suspect that it's just getting through in less obvious ways. Again, I hope I'm wrong.
I think you are spot on with your prediction re: pedophilia. This has been in work for quite a while. Some European psychologists were advocating for it to be normalized over 20 years ago. I remember discussing it with one of my left-leaning progressive coworkers around 2013. He was clueless about it and thought I was crazy to think it would become normalized.
A few brief comments here, but this piece may prod me to do a longer response as a post.
Mary Harrington argues that transhumanism in the West began with the advent of the pill. Her argument is (and I confess I think she's onto something) that the pill was the first widely accepted medical treatment which intentionally interfered with the proper functioning of the human body.
An argument can be made that by decoupling sex from almost any possibility of procreation we have made sex, for the most part, inconsequential. It became all about the feels. So if there is no longer anything consequential about sex between a man and a woman, there's no real justification for insisting that sex be confined to only that between a man and a woman. Maybe the ballooning numbers of gay and transgender people is an inevitable artifact of making sex trivial. (I have heard Harrington speculate that the popularity of "50 Shades of Gray" with its predominately female readership may be rooted in a female intuition that sex should be dangerous. The **ahem** "themes" of that book acting as a perverse substitute for the consequentiality that women perhaps instinctively know is connected with sex.)
All of this is just prelude to agreeing with you, but with a side-helping of conjecture as to why. It will be very hard to mount a defense against pedophilia in a culture that is holding fast to the view that human beings can be self-defining generally, but especially in regard to sex. If there is no telos, then there are no boundaries. I think it was Dostoyevsky who said, "If there is no God, then everything is permitted."
And, oh my, this: "We already live in a world that, at every turn, sacrifices the needs of children for the comfort of adults." Sooo true. You are right up on it with that statement. No one has been louder or more insistent on this point, over the last few years, than Katy Faust.
Of course Katy is a Christian, as is Mary Harrington for that matter. So there's that.
"So no, I don’t think pedophiles are going to start bringing casseroles to the PTA. This isn’t that kind of slippery slope."
Actually, I am concerned that the level of 'normalization' will occur; and that that exact event (or equivalent) will actually happen. If children are allowed to be sexualized in school classrooms and at school-supported events (and at libraries), I don't see even ostensibly parental organizations as being immune to this monstrous devolution (I'm struggling for a better term, but so far, I only end up yelling at my computer).
I have seen nauseatingly similar behaviors in the families of friends and acquaintances where a known predator was still accepted and allowed to interact in gatherings as if nothing was amiss. "oh, we don't talk about that" Fair enough, it's horrifying and traumatizing... but why are they still present? No contrition, no apologies, no penalties.
Thank you for your excellent writing, and the courage, insight, and intellect you bring to these subjects -- they're important and it seems that few are willing to look at what is going on (and what has been allowed to go on for years and years).
I wrote this for a selfish reason: the hope that articulating the fear would help me bear it better — with more stoicism, and less despair. I usually write for selfish reasons: sometimes for clarity, sometimes from a toddler-like need to name reality and remind myself I’m allowed to. Writing is one of my main mental health tools, and writing this made me both more and less depressed.
As the weather warms, I plan to spend as much time offline, outside, and buried in paper books as I can. So my posting schedule may get more erratic — or you might get more travelogues, another short story, or a handful of meandering thoughts. You will definitely get more book reviews. Or maybe not; I’m fairly unpredictable to myself right now.
But writing still helps. And while I would write either way, I do write more because I'm being read. So, thank you.
I have a similar sense. And I will. Thank you!
Wow. Lots to unpack there and no time to do it sufficiently. You’ve touched on a number of issues I’ve been thinking about for quite some time, including our misunderstanding of evil and how we learned the wrong lessons from the Civil Rights era, of the critical role that Christianity has played in creating the West, and the consequences of it falling (partly corrupted, partly rejected for claims of conflicts with science and bad behavior from some of its leaders), and so much more.
I would definitely say that we are losing our way as a society, and we’re full of people whose only thought is to tear it all down.
"There’s a part of me that still hopes this is just another glitch in my brain." - I think you are correct to be concerned and it is important you can see it coming, just as you can see the flaws in Dave Smith's arguments and the dangers the right cannot see. Murray has a formidable mind and an incredible work ethic. The attempt to knock him down after this interview look feeble and desperate. Kisin, as you have, have been reliably consistent in your writings and views.
I remember the cuties fiasco, and took full part in the outrage. Oh, there's nothing like a good, moral outrage to get the blood pumping in the morning. But aside from a few things here and there (the ridiculous tuck swimsuits at Target in kids' sizes a couple of years ago) I haven't seen or heard much to make me afraid. I'm not perpetually online, I'm not on twitter/x, I don't participate in substack notes, so maybe I'm just missing what's going on.
On the other hand, kiddie diddling was the entire raison d'etre for postmodernism. Michel Foucault, the most sited scumbag in all of academia, and his sick comrades actively lobbied the French government to remove age of consent limitations for sexual contact. They failed, but they have continued working nonetheless towards this for decades anyhow. If I must engage once more in outrage then I will engage once more in outrage, because I'm not sure there are many worse things in the world than child molestation (it has to be bottom three).
I think you are outlineing a real problem, the upside is that peadoohile positivity isn't everywhere like it is on twitter and ted talks. So if people take this as seriously as they should we can help the people around us.
Holly, have you considered trying to turn some of these essays into a book and going on the podcast circuit to talk about this stuff? Maybe you could go on Rogan and get the warning out before your prophecies come true.
I write well. I speak terribly. I’d lose a verbal argument on 2+2. I’m doing what little I can by writing.
Dang. I can relate though. Maybe you need an emissary for your work? Someone to go talk about it on podcasts etc.
Apparently, this is already happening. https://substack.com/home/post/p-162371218?source=queue
Two places to look for the damn breaking all together is whether and how it is classified in the DSM and how it is it discussed (if at all) in grade school curricula. One positive that may help prevent the latter is that parents on the whole (due to the trans issues) are more aware of the enthusiasm with which school employees think it's their duty to "guide" children through their developing sexuality. And I believe push-back is increasing. Your point about not wanting to be judgmental is, IMO, the whole thing in a nutshell. A child should judge everyone around them. How they judge and their ensuing actions and for discussion, but telling children it's wrong to judge people is telling them they are not capable of navigating the world around them and other people should do it for them.
"is whether and how it is classified in the DSM"
This.
If it is in the DSM (it is implied as it paraphilia)and is not a crime then there is societal justification to use antiandrogens and surgery. As they do in Iran.
DSM 5 betrayed all the grass roots expectations of what DSM 4 Rev had promised its review committees the last four years of its existence. Comical, as the same fake out was committed for DSM 3 to be rewritten into the final DSM 4. All those years ago, discussions were had on the rise of bestiality and pedophilia by organizing cults.
I don't think you are wrong, but I don't think Joe Rogan will be the vector for this. More likely to come from the trans-adjacent crowd. That's not usually the same as the MMA crowd (although it has it's own problems, see Andrew Tate).
I'm old enough to remember the 1970's so this isn't entirely new and has gone back and forth. This isn't a perfect example but Roman Polanski went from being viewed as a victim by most of Hollywood for decades and then underwent a reappraisal as part of the Me Too movement.
Part of the problem with the situation that has evolved with Rogan (not necessarily his show itself) is that so many other institutions are completely discredited that his being one of the ones remaining that people find credible thrusts it into a role that wasn't meant to play.
An analogy would be taking Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo journalism as the last word on politics. It's better read as a critique against the limitations of the more authoritative coverage like the New York Times. But for that to work, the Times itself still has to be credible and the two have to be read critically in tandem.
"The right has been culturally silenced and shamed for so long that it now clings to any voice that breaks through — not with discernment, but with desperation."
That is unfortunately true, and for the very reasons cited in just war doctrine, known in psychology circles as tit for tat. There have been many duplicated studies that show how people learn to get along peacefully without getting taken advantage of through repeated interactions with each other.
My wife also had he gift of discernment, that enabled her to judge people's ill intent from even fleeting contact. It also might have come from childhood abuse (although not as bad as yours), but that thought never occurred to me. I just knew enough to trust her and act quickly if she said so. She had other friends who dismissed her council come up to her months or years later and ask, "How did you know?" Like you, she had no scientific explanation.
I have it too, maybe because I’m a visual person I can just see it, when it’s good it will be a bright shining cast to their faces, and when bad they seem gray and dead, awkward, angry, contemptuous, or wooden; not quite right expression-wise, and their faces look “closed” as if they are carefully not broadcasting any information. This also will sound crazy but it’s what my brain coughs up: Epstein had this, and I think he and Ghislane both = an actual look that makes them appear cold, like animals, if that makes sense. Jared looked like a cardboard cutout or made of plastic, somehow wrong, toothy, a bad imitation. They all look like actual animal predators to me.
Then sometimes I’ll see someone and later when remembering their face it will have one of these qualities or they will look just like something disturbing or good and valiant. And what I am seeing is not their appearance but something about their spirit or intent. It isnt overt, and usually nags at me. I can’t always interpret it immediately. But I see it.
Weird, I know. Sorry for the tangent, just validating what you said. I grew up upper middle with no abuse and became a Christian as a college student 30 years ago at age 25. It has never failed me.
What you said about Jared is the first tiny little glimmer of insight I've had -- THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, I cannot thank you enough. The cardboard cutout effect you describe is at least *some part* of how I knew -- there is a parallel there to the paradigm of the pedophile who blighted my own childhood. He was "caring" and "loving" to me in performative ways, ways that were impossible to distinguish between the way normal adults are a little bit performative towards kids and performative in the way that someone acts when you are being fooled. And the narrative around Jared, that he was just a normal guy who got famous for losing weight in an unusual way, created a similarly plausible narrative -- maybe he looked fake because he was faking, or maybe he looked fake because celebrity is not easy, and he was just nervous AF. That inner conflict, the instinct screaming THIS PERSON IS FAKE vs the obvious, plausible narrative to explain why the instinct is wrong -- that was part of it, part of whatever happened in my brain in the split second between seeing his picture and bursting into tears because I *knew*.
Yes. Yes. That explains it in a way I think I needed to hear - performative in certain ways. You are welcome. ❤️
Thank you Jen for sharing that. My wife never tried to describe it. She just told me when we needed to leave or do something.
She had no words for it until an older Episcopal priest told her that she had the gift of discernment.
It is not weird Jen X. It is your mind's eye view assembling what cops and MPs call "gut feeling" when encountering a psychopath or other form of unclean spirit. Their deportment and speech are rarely hid to the sophisticated observer.
Yes, I completely agree, just saying what i accept unconditionally might seem weird to others.
I don't know if I'm going to articulate this well, so apologies if not. But I want to acknowledge that one thing I think you are perhaps rather unique in is realising the *possibility* that what you are seeing and fearing comes from a trauma filter. This allows for nuanced, sane consideration. Honestly if half of Internet traffic is now bots, at least another half of that is people screaming from an activated place of trauma and calling it reality.
I also don't think you're wrong. I hope you are. But I'm incredibly disturbed (perhaps through my own brain quirks) at how the world seems somehow more child-centric than ever but only in ways that are filtered first through adult wishes and identity. It's hard to articulate what I mean, but the closest I can get to it is describing how most parenting advice is about *being a good parent*, not about *attending to the needs of your child*. I see it in the assumption that "more daycare funding is automatically good", not "what is good for children and what do they need to thrive". Sometimes I read a thread about this and count how many comments I get through until someone points out that research is really clear about what is best for children, even if it is very inconvenient for many agendas. Usually it is dozens if not hundreds of comments, and they are shouted down as being antifeminist and out of touch.
This is all to say that I can see a world in which adult feelings are prioritised to the detriment of the vulnerable, and people who are concerned about this are written off as deranged "think of the children"! types.
God, do I see and feel you on this one. The world looks more child centered than ever because it is more and more full of adults play acting as children and being catered to as if they were children. The actual needs of actual children are so far away from being a cultural priority that it's sick.
So tired of “mommy’s boyfriend” ruining children’s sense of safety, self-trust, and sometimes entire lives. Got children? Raise them. Don’t bring men you don’t know well into your home. And even the ones you *think* you know well? Sorry: you probably don’t.
I think it will depend on the areas. Idaho and Florida have laws now executing sex offenders. I'm in a red state that evicted the woke nonsense from schools before Trump 2.0 arrived.
And I'm a normal gun-carrying parent.
Then there is California, as mentioned below.
This week in New York, a Buffalo SVU detective who's also a currently serving combat veteran and YouTuber, Richard Hy called out the school district for destroying evidence of harm coming to students.
They are being slammed, along with local news, by the internet for the neglect and lack of coverage, just the district saying it's "untruths."
The anti-semitism thing I've been watching grow, like its the one thing that certain factions on both sides agree on though they probably won't admit it.
I seriously doubt that your schools are as free from the garbage as you think they are. I hope that you're right, but I tutored Math all through undergrad. The education majors were the most woke of all and it wasn't even close. They would tell me, in total earnestness, how much they enjoyed talking to the people at the homeless shelter where they sometimes volunteered — about the homeless people's white privilege.
Your school may not fly a trans flag or do a land acknowledgment, but unless they found some magical source of sane teachers, I suspect that it's just getting through in less obvious ways. Again, I hope I'm wrong.
My son will have to go into special ed next year when he starts kindergarten but as soon as he’s in a place where I can homeschool him, I plan on it.
I’m definitely going to keep as close an eye on it as I can. Volunteer and be nosy.
I think you are spot on with your prediction re: pedophilia. This has been in work for quite a while. Some European psychologists were advocating for it to be normalized over 20 years ago. I remember discussing it with one of my left-leaning progressive coworkers around 2013. He was clueless about it and thought I was crazy to think it would become normalized.
A few brief comments here, but this piece may prod me to do a longer response as a post.
Mary Harrington argues that transhumanism in the West began with the advent of the pill. Her argument is (and I confess I think she's onto something) that the pill was the first widely accepted medical treatment which intentionally interfered with the proper functioning of the human body.
An argument can be made that by decoupling sex from almost any possibility of procreation we have made sex, for the most part, inconsequential. It became all about the feels. So if there is no longer anything consequential about sex between a man and a woman, there's no real justification for insisting that sex be confined to only that between a man and a woman. Maybe the ballooning numbers of gay and transgender people is an inevitable artifact of making sex trivial. (I have heard Harrington speculate that the popularity of "50 Shades of Gray" with its predominately female readership may be rooted in a female intuition that sex should be dangerous. The **ahem** "themes" of that book acting as a perverse substitute for the consequentiality that women perhaps instinctively know is connected with sex.)
All of this is just prelude to agreeing with you, but with a side-helping of conjecture as to why. It will be very hard to mount a defense against pedophilia in a culture that is holding fast to the view that human beings can be self-defining generally, but especially in regard to sex. If there is no telos, then there are no boundaries. I think it was Dostoyevsky who said, "If there is no God, then everything is permitted."
And, oh my, this: "We already live in a world that, at every turn, sacrifices the needs of children for the comfort of adults." Sooo true. You are right up on it with that statement. No one has been louder or more insistent on this point, over the last few years, than Katy Faust.
Of course Katy is a Christian, as is Mary Harrington for that matter. So there's that.
"So no, I don’t think pedophiles are going to start bringing casseroles to the PTA. This isn’t that kind of slippery slope."
Actually, I am concerned that the level of 'normalization' will occur; and that that exact event (or equivalent) will actually happen. If children are allowed to be sexualized in school classrooms and at school-supported events (and at libraries), I don't see even ostensibly parental organizations as being immune to this monstrous devolution (I'm struggling for a better term, but so far, I only end up yelling at my computer).
I have seen nauseatingly similar behaviors in the families of friends and acquaintances where a known predator was still accepted and allowed to interact in gatherings as if nothing was amiss. "oh, we don't talk about that" Fair enough, it's horrifying and traumatizing... but why are they still present? No contrition, no apologies, no penalties.
Thank you for your excellent writing, and the courage, insight, and intellect you bring to these subjects -- they're important and it seems that few are willing to look at what is going on (and what has been allowed to go on for years and years).
I’m more concerned about the other, but…yeah.