i agree with your post about kink, and how women are in their right to consent and certainly aren't going to be unaware of what they're consenting to or desire, and it's misogynistic to say so. but I still specifically criticize certain fetishes--admittedly on a moral ground, perhaps a fearful one, especially regarding what seems to me, role-playing noncery. (cgl? ageplay? I believe.) you seem well educated on these topics, enough for me to want to ask you for your opinion on my own opinion. (as wordy as that sentence was) am I in the wrong for my criticism? am I in misunderstanding, is it puritan of me? I'm not asking to feed my own ego or start a debate, I want to keep an open mind and consider other perspectives. it feels rude and unfair of me to apply moral labels on others based on their kinks, yet it's hard to avoid that gut reaction when im fearful of what it may mean or may normalize. feel free to ignore my moral crisis if you wish, (/lh) I'm sure an independent thought project of mine alongside research could serve the same purpose

hey, thank you for asking this & for being willing to entertain other viewpoints—i used to feel similarly, so i v much do understand where you’re coming from. i think my bottom-line position is that you don’t have to be comfortable with something like an ageplay kink, but you cannot fairly translate that discomfort into a position which calls for all its practitioners to be regarded as indistinguishable from pedophiles and treated as such, which is what the discourse surrounding it tends to do. so rather than worrying about whether you’re a bad person for feeling uncomfortable, it’s more worthwhile to ask how you want to respond to your own discomfort and whether you actually believe the kind of assertions that your discomfort is leading you towards.

for one thing, what we call “ageplay” is a v broad bracket under which varying degrees of socially acceptable vs unacceptable practices can fall, and where those lines are drawn is heavily informed by proximity to (or distance from) normative social relations—calling a sexual partner “daddy” or “mommy” is ageplay, but those are also terms that exist in the zeitgeist with a relative lack of scrutiny, particularly when used by cis, heterosexual people. there are many fair criticisms to be made of lana del rey but very few people seem to be claiming that she’s an out-and-out pedophile apologist who ought to be removed from public life and hounded out of all social circles if her career trajectory is anything to go by. so i think it’s worth highlighting the fact that where our discomfort lands may have as much to do with our preexisting tendencies to view certain demographics as more inclined towards predation than others as it does with the act itself, and where social punishment for participation in the kink lands is equally disproportionate.

i think people trip up on the very basic assertion that to consensually roleplay a scenario is meaningfully different from having that scenario play out in real life. this is actually a very simple idea—what’s being done is an agreed-upon fiction, and the relationship between that fiction and the real-life enactment of equivalent acts is about the same as the relationship between a scripted conversation acted out onstage and that same conversation taking place organically in the real world, or between writing a fictional murder and carrying out a murder for real. as in, there is none in any material sense; nobody is raped when consenting adults do CNC, no child is assaulted when consenting adults do ageplay. so if we’re just talking at a very literal level, to participate in ageplay is not to carry out a pedophilic act, because, tautologically, it is not a pedophilic act. yet the idea that ageplay is a telltale sign of pedophilia or pedophilia apologism remains prominent! why?

so people tend to argue that participation in ageplay (or an abstract desire to participate in ageplay) is necessarily indicative of pedophilic desire, and thus marks someone as a pedophile. this is basically the discursive equivalent to taking a detour to get from point A to point B when point B is accusations of pedophilia and your original route was the claim that participating in ageplay is indistinguishable from literally committing a pedophilic act; and, again, i don’t believe it holds water, the same way i don’t believe the claim that someone participating in CNC holds a desire to commit rape or else espouses rape apologism, or someone with a detrans kink wants to forcibly detransition people in real life, or like, whatever other examples you can think up. there’s a particular property ascribed to questions of sexuality which i think crops up less frequently in less overtly sexual sites of discourse, wherein one’s enjoyment of X, Y, or Z must necessarily translate to a statement about one’s ethics and practices; where does this distinction between kink and, say, interest in a fictional depiction of something come from? like, do we assume that anyone who enjoys reading fiction with torture and murder must therefore be an apologist for torture and murder to such a confident extent that we can, like, write a callout post claiming that they endorse torture and murder? should we be taking steps to avoid anyone who seems slightly too interested in horror films? yet many people who would understand these sorts of claims to be unsubstantiated (and often even consider themselves to be enjoyers of “fucked up” content cf. post #234578 about sexy cannibalism on here!) would then turn around and say that sexual interests are indicative of ethical stances to such a definitive degree; so, like, why carve out this exception for sexuality? 

certainly someone who participates in ageplay can be a pedophile, but we absolutely cannot take this as a given and proceed accordingly; we cannot generate a categorical imperative which rests on the claim that all participants in ageplay are necessarily pedophiles. it’s also nonsensical to look to kink spaces as the primary sites for weeding out predators—pedophilia tends to be enabled by a complex network of social systems which reifies the nuclear family as a cudgel by which the parent or blood-relative can retain control over the child; it’s enabled by the systemic stripping of children’s autonomy and the denial of self-knowledge by which the child could understand and communicate what is happening to them and the paucity of support networks that can safely remove a child from an abuser. you talk about a fear of ‘normalisation’ through destigmatising these kink practices, so i think it’s important to call attention to the fact that pedophilia is already normalised, and that that normalisation has taken place at these sites far more than it has taken place through kink practices. i really think you should challenge yourself on what ‘normalisation’ actually looks like and what you think kink can do that the superstructure cannot or does not. there’s no reason to be looking at an all-adult space as your first port of call for figuring out where the pedophiles are; this is an example of the translation of discomfort and disgust into a falsely actionable politic that i alluded to at the start.

the problem is that people do take the idea that participation in ageplay marks someone as a pedophile as a given and proceed accordingly—and they proceed according to their own preexisting biases about who is the most likely to be a predator and who “deserves” the kind of social murder that can be imposed if you rally enough people together with enough vitriol. this is why lana del rey can sing about her daddy boyfriend with no seriously significant repercussions but people who are already easily marked as predatory pedophiles in online communities (in almost every case, trans women) can then be cut off from those same communities if they’re caught doing ageplay (or what passes as ageplay which is frankly a v generous scope in these cases; or else they’re caught doing CNC, incest roleplay, whatever else), which can mean not only loss of friendships and social spaces but also loss of access to vital income and resources, to say nothing of the toll that having dozens or even hundreds of people swarm on you to call you a pedophile, rapist, etc. will take on your psyche. this process of ‘calling out’ someone for problematic kinks is one of sexual harassment; it involves nonconsensually spreading information about that person’s private sexual practices, and tends to result in people sending graphic rape threats to the individual in question. and like, people die because of this shit; it’s not drastic to call these things murder attempts.

so as i said above, this doesn’t delegitimise your personal discomfort—you are entitled to your boundaries. however, it’s about what you do with that discomfort—do you allow vulnerable people to be cut off from community lifelines for their participation in a kink that is alleged to mark them as predatory? do you make the leap from that discomfort to the assumption that anyone who doesn’t share your discomfort must be a pedophile? that’s the instinct that i think you ought to be challenging in yourself.