I’m sure everybody in the US has already seen this article about an 11-year-old and her sex offender “drag mom” bit I’m posting a link for overseas readers. As an aunt to a 12-year-old girl, I’m shaken by this account of what is clearly child abuse.
I’m such an old woman that I remember when sexualization of children was considered a bad thing. And now it’s all cool and edgy.
“sexualization of children was considered a bad thing”
from the late 1970s to now…
first an edgy thing, is it bad? is it good? is it in the middle?,
then a bad thing, a very bad thing,
now… a great thing…
How people can fail to recognize “drag kids” as an on ramp to normalizing the commercial sexual exploitation of children is beyond me…
Years ago, a friend of mine walked into a bar with her 9-year-old for 2 minutes to hand over the office keys to me. The barman almost called the CPS because kids shouldn’t be inside bars. And that wasn’t a fetish bar but a regular sports bar. That was in 2002. Look how things have changed, my God.
He’s doing great research. A very brave guy.
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I like him. I hope he doesn’t get killed by one of his research subjects before he’s fifty. That was just the first time that story had crossed my screen with the kid’s face blanked out. Mixed feelings actually. The kid’s expression in 100% of those photos tells you everything you need to know. But rules for exploited minors should still apply.
People live on a different planet. They sit there with small kids – what are they thinking? And why? This is neither aesthetically pleasing nor fun in any way. It’s boring, tawdry, and pathetic. When I was growing up, we had a guy in the neighborhood who did that kind of thing in front of kids. Then a bunch of dads caught a glimpse of it and he never did it again.
There are real drag shows for adults, in bars. There’s real singing, real costumes, real performers. You go, have a few drinks (no kids, obviously), it’s fun. But this way?
I shudder to think about it.
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The stuff of nightmares.
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…but I suspect it’s rather like the people who argue that going to public school and being bullied there is an important part of growing up, and how will kids ever learn to deal with “the real world” if they aren’t run through that meatgrinder (barf). As a homeschooling parent, I encounter this argument with depressing regularity. The only thing I wonder about the people who say such things is, were they bullied kids who internalized the self-hatred? Or were they bullies who enjoyed it and want to ensure a perpetual stream of victims, and dislike the idea that people can opt out of this? Does the continuance of the system help them justify their own behavior? Is there an internal logic that says “What I did is completely OK, because if it wasn’t somebody would have done something about it by now?”– which means that parents removing their kids from the school system threatens their sense of themselves as decent folk?
A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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