Eric S. Raymond@esrtweet
We need to talk about the accusation "Matt Gaetz is a pedophile."
I know little about Matt Gaetz, and don't have an opinion about whether he is a qualified nominee to be Attorney General. I'm also not here to make a pro-Trump or anti-Trump political point; I want to address an issue that's bigger than the political flap of the week.
I know a lot about the manipulation of language. There's a nasty one going on here that people need to be aware of, because when a propaganda tactic is successful it tends to get repeated.
There isn't a single good term in English for people who are post-pubertal but below the legal age of consent or majority; for the rest of this discussion, I'm going to refer to them as "tweeners".
I'm going to stipulate one thing for purposes of this rant: when Matt Gaetz was an adult man, he had sex with a tweener girl (the specific allegation I keep hearing is that she was 17; note however that in a majority of U.S. jurisdictions age of consent is 16). If that's not true, the analysis I'm about to do stops being very interesting.
Now let's talk about the word "pedophile". If you ask your friendly neighborhood AI what that word means it's going to tell you that a pedophile is a person who desires to have sex with prepubescent children.
Unless the society you live in has a major totalitarian episode, it is not likely that you will ever encounter anything that is as evil, sick, and degenerate as what pedophiles do to children. The concept horrifies people. I'm going to assume it horrifies you.
Because the concept is horrifying, "pedophile" can be used as a propaganda word of power.
Now let's get back to the case at hand. How likely is a 17-year old girl to be prepubescent?
Note that by asking this question I'm not trying to make an excuse for Gaetz's behavior. There are reasons we put a taboo on sexual contact between adult men and nubile women below the age of majority. I am stipulating that Matt Gaetz is probably guilty of statutory rape (not certain because of jurisdictional variations) and should be in jail.
But. The distinction between pedophilia and what I stipulate Gaetz was doing (technically, "ephebophilia") is an important one.
Ephebophilia ranges from being a mere malum prohibitum to a minor crime, depending largely on how sexually and psychologically mature the victim is. It's not the deeply perverted, sick, damaging thing pedophilia is.
People who run around yelling "Matt Gaetz is a pedophile" are doing something harmful and wrong, and should be called on it. They are confusing behaviors with very different moral weights, and they are doing it to mess with your head.
Their aim is to use the current atmosphere of moral panic about pedophilia among the rich and powerful
to recruit you into a consensus demand that Matt Gaetz be lynched.
This is dark propaganda. This is bad.
It is not very relevant to my logic whether that moral panic is justified or not. I'm not even going to state a position on that, because it would be distracting.
I'm also not going to state a position on what the upper age limit on tweeners should be, because that's not relevant either.
You should ask yourself: do you want to live in the kind of society where men who have sex with tweener girls can be equated with men who rape infants, and destroyed that way?
I advise against this. I'm not going to write down a detailed argument here, except to point out that it would create an opening for people who want to normalize actual pedophilia. In fact, it may already be doing that, and I wish I were sure that nobody is doing this intentionally. There are some very evil people with very long time horizons out there.
If you don't want to live in the kind of society where power word "pedophile" can be used to lynch people who are not in fact pedophiles, you should (1) stop abusing the word if you were doing so, and (2) talk down other people when they do it.
Thank you for your attention.
