What To Do About Pedophilia?

On 2/16/2021, a woman named Jo Luehman posted a thread on Twitter arguing that religious “purity cultural” enables pedophilia. On 12/10/2021, Norman Young, a conservative Twitter user, found this thread and posted a response arguing it was secular cultural that enables pedophilia.

The two threads put together go like this: Jo finds something in religious cultures that could be seen as enabling pedophilia, such as the following:

Some of the standards of purity culture are innocence (pretty much ignorance about sex), submission (for women), virginity as the ultimate standard, and “modesty” (for women that is wearing clothes that don’t reveal their adult curves)

Norman replies by posting examples of similar things in modern secular cultures:

Beauty standards of secular culture include makeup that reduce age-related “blemishes” and hair removal products designed to make women look pre-pubescent. The ultimate standard are often European anorexics with no “adult curves” to speak of.

Of course, Norman never really debunks what Jo is saying — the most he does is simply point out that similarities exist between what Jo is talking about and our modern world. Despite this, it seems like Norman never comes out and says what should be the obvious conclusion: That any culture can enable pedophilia because pedophiles — and those who wish to enable them — have existed in all cultures.

In the United States, the age of consent was between ten and twelve as recently as 1880. The famous horror writer Edgar Alan Poe had a wife — who was also his cousin — that was thirteen when they married. If anything, it seems like modern secular culture has constantly resulted in higher ages of consent and greater hatred towards pedophilia. This is not to say that their aren’t examples of pedophiles taking advantage of our modern culture, but this is to say that the fact that they need to take advantage of loopholes as opposed to operating openly — as they used to be able to — is a sign of progress.

At one point, Norman name drops Jeffery Epstein as an example of a pedophilia modern civilization enabled. However, although Epstein’s crimes did spawn many years, the evidence right now points to many people only tolerating it out of ignorance and nothing more…