General Discussion

Nevilledog

(51,112 posts) Sat Apr 9, 2022, 01:52 PM Apr 2022

The four stages of 'groomer speech'

Link to tweet

https://www.editorialboard.com/the-four-stages-of-groomer-speech/

*snip*

On Twitter, you offered an analysis of the rhetoric surrounding Florida’s new Don’t Say Gay legislation. That rhetoric seems to weaponize words like “pedophile” and “child predator” and other things beyond the pale. You outlined four items. Can you explain?

The basic thesis of what I’m calling the “groomer panic,” which I think is coherently understood as a moral panic, or sex panic, is that has the capacity to be significantly more dangerous than comparable sex panics in the past in which similar sorts of rhetorical weaponization of the terms “pedophile” or “child predator” had been deployed.

It has the possibility of spilling into actual political violence.

I made four points.

First, “groomer speech” is using the metaphor of child sexual abuse to describe educational content that rightwing forces disapprove of.

This metaphor of violent physical harm is being used to describe a disagreement over educational content and the underlying speech acts constituting that content. There is a confusion about different kinds of harm and a confusion about the difference between speech and act.

Second, this confusion means concrete evidence of child sex abuse is no longer necessary. Instead, the evidence is the speech act itself.

It becomes the case then that anyone can be credibly accused of being a “groomer,” not because there’s evidence of grooming, but because such person has dissented from a preferred framework among conservatives for the understanding of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law.

“Groomer” describes dissent from conservatism writ large.

*snip*