furi.blog

I could write a book about this if I were more put together as a person.

I could research this phenomenon and make myself even more angry and upset during that process, probably. I could get a PhD in a relevant topic if I devoted enough resources into it.

But I won’t.

I’ll write a blog post about this instead, and I know that only a handful of people will ever bother to read it, but that’s ok. I need to let this poison out and speak.

It must be a sort of open-secret. We don’t talk about this because it’s not proper to do so. We don’t want to seem like loud, angry, man-hating feminists. And this statement I am about to write; it’s awful, offensive, and upsetting. Triggering. We like to keep things casual and not speak about serious stuff.

tw: child sexual abuse 

(please stop reading if you do not wish to be hurt by the discussion of this topic, because I am about to discuss it)

Fuck all that, though, because I get one life to live and I am going to live it being true to myself and my values, goddammit. I will not let my sense of propriety prevent me from saying the following statement out loud:

Many men want to have sex with children.

That is rape, yes; because, as we all must be aware, children cannot consent.

Yet, this awful statement above is true. Men seem obsessed with having sex with young women. There is a line we draw as a society in which we make it against the law to abuse those most vulnerable (minors, we say, are defined as those under the age of 18.) There are ways to get around these laws in certain places, and the age of consent varies, but that’s a long discussion we can have some other time. I want to make sure I narrow my focus here.

Why does our society promote and normalize pedophilia?

I do not know the answer to that. Maybe it’s some extension of patriarchy, or a cursed relic of ancient times. I don’t know. But let me explain something if you happen to disagree with my statement. Let me describe in a brief way, using a few specific examples, how our society promotes and normalizes pedophilia.

This is old news. Here: I am embedding the video below, but if you cannot see it, this is a link to a 1980s Calvin Klein jeans commercial I saw today for the first time. I ended up watching this ad at the end of my hyperlink journey as a result of coming across some online discussion about the controversial “good genes/jeans commercial” featuring Sydney Sweeney, that people have been talking about recently.

I will not be talking about the Sydney Sweeney commercial much within this post, as I think it is a different topic. But there are some similarities to this one that aired in 1980, and that is how I ended up watching this video.

Both commercials got a ton of attention. They sparked outrage (for different reasons) and got people to see their ad and talk about the brand. A win for both companies, regardless of how the critics may feel about the matter.

In the video above, Brooke Shields was 15 years old. She is portrayed in a suggestive or mildly sexual manner, and it works. This ad campaign was a major success, because of and despite the controversy it stirred.

Watching that video made me feel sick in my stomach with a mix of disgust, anger, fear, and despair.

Afterwards, I read her Wikipedia page and also discovered that she portrayed many scenes where she was nude or partially nude throughout her acting and modeling career, as early as when she was 11 years old. I am not faulting Brooke Shields for this. I am faulting the world for normalizing the sexualization and exploitation of children.

We live in a world where child actresses are the objects of clocks counting down to when the creeps are legally allowed to openly sexualize them.

Are we supposed to pretend as if they were not thinking of these girls that way before they were “legal”?

And here in the US, our government is led by a man who sexually abused children and women.

The world is sick.