Journal 85 Sad, Serious and Pressing Things
Dear girls,
What a week. How are you holding up?
In one week, I have heard multiple unbelievable news in America. During the 2016-2020 administration, permanent residents, green card holders, from certain countries were barred from re-entering the United States. As a former green card holder, I found this scary and shocking. It’s a green card, not a yellow card! You can’t change the rules mid-go.
In the past few months there is shocking news like that everyday. News so shocking it is hard to process. Potential visa applicants will have their social media presence analyzed. People without a social media presence will have that counted against them. I don’t have a social media presence. My whole family doesn’t have a social media presence. I would not qualify for a visa today. That does not sit well with me.
Furthermore, physical fitness will be considered for visa applicants. “We only want fit slaves.” So the sixty year old academic researcher, a youngster in her field, who takes blood pressure medication will not quality? Perhaps if she poses with a forced smile next to a McDonald’s cheeseburger and posts it to Facebook this will help her chances.
Unlike a natural-born American, I made the decision to become American. I teetered for a few years. But when I came to live in the New York City area, I felt a love and admiration for America that I had never felt before. It was inspiring to see so different people living peacefully, not bothering each other. Being able to carry on their customs more than in their native country.
At the end of the naturalization ceremony, they played a message from the president. That now it was my duty to stand up for American values. I felt that America was my home now and I had to participate in taking care of it. So I do my best to make America a better place and be a brave American and speak out when things are going wrong. And right now, they seem to be going very weird and very wrong... Starting with those stupid ICE face masks.
I want to talk about these sex crime files that are being exposed, and how there is a simultaneous bizarro-world happening in the cartoon art world. All of it hurts young women, and all of it can benefit predators.
Lately these criminals are saying that the minor female victims in these sex crimes should be called “young women” not “girls.”
This is such a crappy time to have this conversation. It’s like something esoteric and vaguely valid but ultimately unrelated someone desperately bursts out when they are losing an argument.
Coming from a normal person, maybe it’s nuanced and understandable, but from these people, at this time, with this scandal, it’s so creepy. Referring to a teen girl as a young woman by a normal person is generally not creepy. Many cultures have coming-of-age ceremonies during the teen years before the common legal age of adolescence. And some have them after.
About a year ago, my partner read aloud a headline that China was lowering the marriage age by three years. I don’t like to tell other cultures what to do, but even I was shocked. “They’re letting fifteen year old girls marry?!” Little did I know that in China, the marriage age was twenty-five, and had just been lowered to twenty. My Western brain could not possibly have imagined that the marriage age was twenty-five.
In reality, teen girls have to start thinking like women. I have wanted to talk about this situation of modern adolescence and how our social structures are ignorant and unsupportive of the natural development of girls.
Girls have to start thinking like women even if the world tells them they are still girls. In so many ways. The body doesn’t care. The brain doesn’t care. There is a primordial instinct to be a woman. These are literally the hormones that are flowing in the body.
For example, even if the parents tell the girl she is perfectly safe, her lizard brain is dealing with the reality of being a female, and anytime she is near a male a deep alarm goes, “A male! A male!” She has to learn to feel situations for herself and protect herself because has the potential to get pregnant. She will also have a drive to find a mate. In these ways, she has a right to be a woman. But because she’s young, she needs protections. Traditionally, young unmarried women were known as maidens and did have this social cloud of protection.
For these reasons, I think in an ideal culture, teen girls have room to grow, and also have protections. These need to generously overlap and require the engagement of the whole community. The nightmare scenario is being overly protected, and not given protection when needed. That is an abusive way for a family or a society to treat young women.
I do wish “pedophilia” was separated into two or three different words to refer to predation before, during, and after puberty. Although all three types are horrible, the worser predators need worser words. It can help more accurately condemn and address predation on young people, and to call bluff when it is simply parents who are opposed to their son or daughter’s relationship.
Traditionally, predators of young women were called seducers and it was a recognizable act of predation. They preyed on young teens up to women in their twenties. This is were modern words and culture are failing. The act of seducing an unworldly virginal twenty year old girl with promises of love and marriage then abandoning her is not far away from seducing a seventeen year old girl with promises of love and marriage then abandoning her. People don’t like to use words like virgin, maid, or maiden anymore but I think these words are more accurate and less cruel than whatever is going on now.
Recruiting eighteen year old girls into pornography and prostitution is morally wrong, even if they are legal adults. There should be a way to socially condemn this without infringing on the young women’s right to have sex or get married.
The legal age of eighteen for adulthood is necessary, and I think it is the perfect age. However, there are exceptions so that young people do not get harmed by age-of-consent laws. The United Nations itself makes exceptions for when young teens have sex with other young teens. And many states have “Romeo and Juliet” laws to protect young couples in situations where one person is a legal adult and one is a legal minor.
So it is frustrating to hear “don’t call them girls, call them young women” coming from these criminals. And yes, I do wish “pedophile” was exclusively used for predators of pre-adolescent children and more accurate words existed for those who used to be known as seducers.
The last-ditch attempt to scramble words does not change the reality of their crime.
I believe the recent art censorship laws are a countermove from these the type of men listed in the sex files. They are all buddy-buddy: men who run social media sites, webcam sites, pornography sites, apps that offer ways for older men to communicate illicitly with children, and send money to children for illicit content. There are also the rise of AI sex chats, which have been documented engaging with children. The AI sex chats have been documented targeting young girls specifically, encouraging them to “try new things.” All have exploited women and girls, staying a few steps ahead and avoiding regulation and penalties.
I would be very curious to see if some of the criminals mentioned in the files are the same people whose companies produced bizarre shows like “How to Catch a Predator.” A series that seems good, but something feels off. After what I call Pedo-Psychosis overtook American society, and people started to second-guess any interaction they had with a child, I think it made America less safe for children. The statistics show many children are having sex at alarmingly young ages, as young as eight or nine. Then as teenagers they turn asexual.
As a young millennial, I feel like I barely managed to develop sanely. I was uncomfortable watching kissing scenes in movies with my parents, middle school was a never-ending gigglefest of sex jokes, and in high school I met my partner. Nowadays, the teenagers watch the sexy TV show with their parents, and turn asexual with their peers. Something is not right.
Mainstream pornography largely does not appeal to women. But self-published art, comics, books, fanart, and fanfiction created by women and consumed by a mostly female audience have been facing attacks globally. Self-published erotica has been taken down from major online booksellers and erotica sites due to recent “anti-pedophilia” laws. There are already laws against child pedophilia. This isn’t child pedophilia.
If encryption is broken, all content on people’s devices will be scanned for “child pedophilia.” Including art? That is an insult to victims of sexual abuse. Pixels on a screen or a sketch on a paper is not a real person. The purpose of these laws is to funnel people’s sexual interests into the latest creepiest Big Tech crap. And to make people self-censor their art. And to make it impossible for artists to work.
So now we will have a surreal reality:
If one of the victims from these files wanted to create a comic documenting her experience to warn and help young girls, she might face accusations of “child pornography.”
Wow-wee!
One more thing. Lately I have been hearing words like hetero-fatalism and man-keeping. Good grief. This is a scam. One I probably would have fallen for just a few years ago. Marriage makes you happy and healthy in the long run. Giving your time, helping someone through stress, and listening as they tell you their innermost thoughts is what a husband and a wife do for each other.
Okay, that is all. Thank you for listening.
Please have a safe and happy week, and let’s try to all be brave.
Asya