Though the ”Don’t Say Gay” political brouhaha in Florida is a serious matter, I confess to finding much of it rather funny. Why? One-word answer? Grooming.

So much for Twitter and the comedy. But what about the serious issue regarding the ”groomer” charge? Well, you can always count on Mr. David French for the loopiest quasi-conservative take:

You may not be aware, but right-wing media is swarming with allegations that anyone who, for example, opposes Florida’s House Bill 1557 (the bill misleadingly termed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by Democrats and many in the media) is either a “groomer” or in league with groomers. A groomer is a person who specifically targets and uses “manipulative behaviors” to gain access to victims. The rhetoric is absolutely omnipresent. It’s relentless.

David French, ”Against the ‘Groomer’ Smear” (Substack, April 5, 2022).

I’ve never liked the term “groomers,” which I first heard in the Pakistani/Brit context of Rotherham. Edward ”Jolly Heretic” Dutton used it in his book on the Finnish experience with Muslim men turning teenage Finnish girls into their whores. I had sort of got used to it by that point, but never completely. 

What we are dealing with appear to me to be two semi-distinct things:

1. The training of youngsters into a state of sexual willingness to fiddle around, sexually, sans parental chaperones and with a variety of partners some of whom might be adults, and

2. the training of youngsters into states of sexual willingness to specific sets of adult clientele.

The latter would be ‘grooming’ proper; the former, a looser form of ‘grooming.’ 

Interestingly, all instruction of youngsters into sexual relations — including No Sex Acts Until Married — is a kind of grooming. Note the word ‘groom’ as in ‘bride and groom.’

It seems to me that parents should want to control this kind of instruction more closely than they would on matters of, say, learning math or literature. And surely only the most servile fool of a parent would welcome paid agents of the state to encourage their youngsters to develop active sexual behavior before puberty, or orient themselves sexually towards adults rather than a special compeer of the opposite sex.

So I do not see any major problem using the term ‘grooming’ in the looser sense. Sure, grooming has been understood as the activity of training children to become sexually active with specific adults. But the more general activity, of training kids to be more generally accepting of specific adult panderings, propositions, flirtations and the like. Think of it like the normal case for schooling: while job training is usually used as a quite specific term for educating students to perform in a specific job, the usual instruction in schools is widely understood to be a more general form of a job training program — job training not for a specific job or industry but for ‘jobs and industry’ in general.

Sex education in First World countries seems to have become, to a shocking degree, a program of job training in that looser sense: educating youngsters to accept sexual partners and sexual positions that would formerly have been called perversions.

Sex education started out as a ”family planning” agenda — excused to prevent unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases — but morphed within recent memory to “gay acceptance,” and not only encompasses the encouragement not merely of something that hardly needs encouragement (namely masturbation) but also ‘trans gender’ sexual apery, all based on the half-baked pseudo-science of ‘gender theory.’

I am now a strong advocate for positive heteronormativity, and believe non-heterosexual people should be on board with this position too. Sure, I’m against negative heteronormativity. But my backing of positive heteronormativity has indeed been reinforced by my fear that the recent Norming of the Queer is going to produce a new reaction in the form of a strong, society-wide negative heteronormativity — that is, the kind of norming of heterosexuality that entails the persecution of homosexuals and bisexuals and the sexually weirder — queerer — yet.

twv