Just as with the pincer attack conservatives have launched against both race directly (instead of sotto voce) and liberalism at the same time—now they do the same with female personhood, via attacks on abortion (criminalizing sexuality after the fact) and then also by this oblique attack upon the LGBTQ+ community in the form of decrying the sexualization of children. This has the effect of making it difficult to defend sexual liberation and, indeed, sexual liberty/agency, for fear of being portrayed as a molester or predator.
But of course, women aren’t predating their own bodies.
Much like, as krb here has said, the war on Christmas IS the war on Christmas, this campaign that facetiously accuses others of sexualizing children is itself helping to sexualize children. I guarantee you that average Americans would never put those two words together as they go about their normal day. Nope, not until they see some deranged road sign or picket protest demanding that Disney (of all entities to be so accused) stop sexualizing children do those citizens see and link the words sexualize and children. Most regular people would never have made such an association. Now it’s linked up and floating in the back of their heads as a vague possibility.
The sum total of this makes it difficult to affirm agentic sexuality at all. The tenor and moral hysteria make it so that rational discussion and policy focus are swept aside in favor of demonization of sexuality across the board. By default, the only acceptable sexuality that emerges from this agitation is hyper-heterosexuality and enforced heterosexism, where the man initiates contact in courting, controls his mate’s fertility, and is in complete ownership once property/custody rights have transferred. In this world, female sexual agency is deviant and abhorrent.
It’s a pincer attack.
Of course, the people taking the brunt of this attack are LGBTQ+ folk, who are being unfairly tarred with this label of pedophile and this allegation of “grooming”. Never mind that the vast majority of people who commit such crimes are heterosexual males. No, the LGBTQ+ folk are a constant and convenient target, maligned throughout history, often used as the tip of the spear in efforts to gut human rights on a mass scale (up to and including genocide).
These Qrusaders clothe themselves in “What about the chiiilllldren?” with the attendant rending and gnashing. Their actions do nothing to protect children. Their actions distort the world in children’s eyes; in that sense, the Qrusaders are deforming them. Their campaign of repression is what ultimately will harm these children in the long run, telling them to conform, to repress themselves, to deny intrinsic parts of their own identity. In short, it’s soul-murder as social control.
