Trans-gressions - How Far Is Too Far for the Activist?

The current cultural conversation that involves children, their potential harm, and their needed protection is one that promises to outrage the most moderate thinkers. Our outrage over the harm to children angers us and of course, it should anger us, to such an extent that dispassionate conversations cannot take place in real time, especially when and where they are needed the most.

I say this as a bit of a throat clearing before approaching the most serious of current affairs- the treatment of children by adults, a topic I covered from a broader angle in my piece Nose Ring Politico.

The term grooming, as far as this generation is concerned, came into (or back into) popular discourse as the events surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and his notorious "Pedo-Island" parties became fodder for dark legend, infinite newspaper headlines, and even a Netflix documentary special. With all the uproar, details from the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell (Epstein's former grooming partner) went rather quietly into the void. One has to wonder what happened there?

Long before the world was aware of Jeffrey Epstein, there were the allegations against Michael Jackson and R. Kelly's notorious recording. And long before them, there were Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. And long, long ago, it was Hades who raped the young Persephone and held her captive in the underworld. It seems every generation is likely to have its own notorious characters that personify the pedophilic instinct.

For this generation, however, there seems to be a suspicion that this time the conversation and its rhetoric are vying for the mainstreaming, the de-stigmatizing, the normalization of what many consider to be the highest crime of any land, the sexual abuse of a child. 

Perhaps there is a movement of normalization at the fringes; there is some evidence for it. The term "MAP" (Minor Attracted Person) is slightly euphemistic in its ring when compared to the phrase "pedo" or "pedophile", and perhaps the furthest logical conclusion of the new left's sexual liberation agenda.

The term MAP has been trending only very recently but because the new left has been so sloppy with its rhetoric about the normalization of just about everything (and an ironic disdain for all things that are normal), it is not easy to see where the line is drawn on anything; it's all a rainbow-tinted blur. Man or woman, gay or straight - sexual liberation, or sexual deviancy? 

As the answers to those simple questions become more consequential, the less it should be left up to the people who display a reckless disregard for definition-making in the first place. Sure, they can define to a surgical nuance the philosophies of gender theory, queer theory and tell you all about Trans Exclusive Radical Feminism, but when asked to simply define a "woman" the answers are backward engineered to a vague default of "not my job".