I think it’s fundamentally a consequence of the sort of entitlement and predatory outlook most men have towards whomever they’re attracted to. Like I see this core undercurrent that seeps into absolutely everything with a lot of them, where it’s like this libertine chauvinist entitlement where everything and everyone must be subordinated to their own desires whether this is media treats or people. You can also see this in action with how absolutely weird and rabid they get about gooner shit in games or TV shows.
This means that when they’re attracted to someone, that person’s own agency doesn’t really play into it except as something that can get in their way. They look at adult women (or young men, for some of them) this way, and since the key problem with an adult having a relationship with a teen is the latter’s comparatively limited agency and life experience they can’t comprehend that actual problem and instead see the risk to themselves from legal or other community consequences as the real problem. So they do “legal” entitled gooner shit or try to do “legal” groomer shit to their chosen target, breathlessly awaiting the time when the law no longer gets in between them and their desires.
I think that’s also why a certain type of guy is so very insistent on splitting hairs between pedophilia (as colloquially used to refer to the crime of an adult preying on minors) and pedophilia (the specific psychiatric disorder of being attracted to prepubescent children): they see their own attraction to and feelings of entitlement towards teens as “normal, but illegal” and are very offended by being lumped in with icky “disordered” people; they don’t see the problem as violating someone’s agency and consent, so they view the law as the problem in one case (it can hurt them if they break it) and the ickiness they feel in the other, rather than the unifying problem that minors cannot legitimately consent and lack a great deal of personal and legal agency with children just being an even more extreme subcategory of this with them being unable to reciprocate or consent and having even less agency.
I think it’s fundamentally a consequence of the sort of entitlement and predatory outlook most men have towards whomever they’re attracted to. Like I see this core undercurrent that seeps into absolutely everything with a lot of them, where it’s like this libertine chauvinist entitlement where everything and everyone must be subordinated to their own desires whether this is media treats or people. You can also see this in action with how absolutely weird and rabid they get about gooner shit in games or TV shows.
This means that when they’re attracted to someone, that person’s own agency doesn’t really play into it except as something that can get in their way. They look at adult women (or young men, for some of them) this way, and since the key problem with an adult having a relationship with a teen is the latter’s comparatively limited agency and life experience they can’t comprehend that actual problem and instead see the risk to themselves from legal or other community consequences as the real problem. So they do “legal” entitled gooner shit or try to do “legal” groomer shit to their chosen target, breathlessly awaiting the time when the law no longer gets in between them and their desires.
I think that’s also why a certain type of guy is so very insistent on splitting hairs between pedophilia (as colloquially used to refer to the crime of an adult preying on minors) and pedophilia (the specific psychiatric disorder of being attracted to prepubescent children): they see their own attraction to and feelings of entitlement towards teens as “normal, but illegal” and are very offended by being lumped in with icky “disordered” people; they don’t see the problem as violating someone’s agency and consent, so they view the law as the problem in one case (it can hurt them if they break it) and the ickiness they feel in the other, rather than the unifying problem that minors cannot legitimately consent and lack a great deal of personal and legal agency with children just being an even more extreme subcategory of this with them being unable to reciprocate or consent and having even less agency.