Question about pedophila, prompted by the furor over Cuties

[conuly]

So you know how people are all talking about this movie and the messages, marketing, and/or filming thereof.

Several people known to me have expressed the opinion that showing children, tweens, or teens doing things which adults know look "sexual" is clearly something "designed to appeal to pedophiles".

But what I want to know is - is it? Obviously everybody is different, even people who are sexually attracted to children, but is it the case that people with those desires are, in general, more interested in this sort of scene than pictures of kids acting less overtly "sexual"?

I don't even know how to find this out without ending up on some sort of watch list or, worse, seeing things I actually don't want to see.

Note: this is a separate question from "are those scenes appropriate in this, or any movie" and "whether or not they'd be appropriate in some movies, are they appropriate when acted out by actual children" and anything of that sort. Those are all good questions which people are arguing strenuously over everywhere.

Comments

[siderea]

Several people known to me

What an interesting descriptor. :)

But what I want to know is - is it?

No idea. But something I am increasingly suspecting is this: use of the word "pedophilia" as a topic of concern, and as opposed to "childhood sexual abuse" or even "child abusers" or "those who sexually abuse children", is an orange flag for someone being either a Fox-news following, QAnon-believing, right-wing culture warrior, or a faux-feminist WoLF/Rowling-style crypto-TERF/SWERF in cohoots with the former to bring back the 1980's Satanic Panic.

Those people are not on our side. They do not care about preventing child abuse. They're just looking for a population they can get away with persecuting, and by "get away with", I mean "which the left will let them", from which basis to launch a moral panic.

I suspect you don't need to worry too much about how actual pedophilia works. If you're interested, of course, go for it – far be it from me to try to rein in your curiosity! But just wanted to mention you can expect a lot of unknowable/unprovable/unanswerable garbage statements about pedophilia forthcoming, with which to whip people into a frenzy and which conveniently distract from what is going on.

But how American political moral-panic witch-hunts work has suddenly become super relevant. Alas.

[conuly]

No worries here on arguments with them - I'm interested for the dispassionate sake of being interested. I think "Listen, whether or not these scenes are harmful to the kids who filmed them is entirely different from the question of whether or not somebody, somewhere got their jollies on watching it" is even less likely to lead to a productive conversation with them than "Just FYI, most child molesters aren't pedophiles and some unknown percentage of pedophiles never act on their desires, but wow, this sure is an understudied population!"

Though I'm tempted to throw both those comments into the water to see what happens. Sometimes you just gotta poke that anthill.