childsafe
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something i've been thinking about for a little while - why is it so adulthood has been so limited, what's the relation of that to the pedophilic culture, what's the relation of the pedophilic culture to capitalism, what's the relation of the limitation of adulthood - especially female adulthood - to capitalism, what's the relation of all that to self-infantilisation particularly among autists and the lgbt... i think i was able to mostly connect the dots, now that i'm sitting at home sick with nothing better to do. excuse me if this isn't the in depth analysis on my usual level; i am sick, as i said, and only grasping on these ideas now, so i decided to keep it lighter.
shrinking adulthood
one may have noticed in the last few decades the popculture is getting more and more teenager-centered. this is because teenagers have gained more agency since discovery of the child as a person and discovery of the teenager category at all, which unironically happened in early 20th century, as mortality decreased and psychology developed (years back i wrote an essay about it which for multiple reasons i can't publish), and have been discovered as a new untapped market. it's also because teen-centrism pretty much suits the patriarchal view on women. you may see that as anything ranging from younger gen-x to older gen-z (which encompasses the entirety of millennials), especially as a woman, it might be difficult to find media with characters like you which aren't the 20th century soap operas your parents watched or, like, 'bojack horseman'. it's also difficult to find clubs which aren't filled with teens, but also aren't the local senior clubs. you may have also been told you're too old for a social media or other online space you have been on since you were a kid yourself. life's tough, alright? i'm 25, so it's not that bad for me, but i see it.
years back, you would see a lot of characters in their 30s-50s, and you would also see a lot of spaces for these in their 30s-50s. these don't suit you, because they were catered to the older generations - the older gen-x, the boomers and these before them; culturally, you share little with them, and as human lifespan increases and life stages 'slow down', they'll probably feel old to you even if you're supposed to be the same age. they'll look old. they'll act old. because they act like your parents. kids were dismissed in the world of back then. dismissed too much. up to this day, we struggle to provide the kids age-appropriate agency. this has shifted. now we have tons of media and spaces that cater to kids and teenagers. financially, that's probably worth it. for the capitalists, i mean. kids can get the money out of the parents, and will come back as adults, when they develop nostalgia. concerns for child safety grew in the west nowadays - perhaps even too much, to the level of 'helicopter parenting' and 'child-centrism'; this has to do with demographic decline. alongside that, the first generation who grew up online, often with unrestricted access on account of having parents who weren't too tech-savvy and didn't know how to parental control, started having their own kids.
you may see, though, that more and more things are expected to be child-safe, and allow children in. 'adult' has been effectively equated with 'sexual'; 'adult spaces' are seen as inherently focused around sex and/or violence and/or drugs. adults are expected to censor themselves everywhere on account of a kid who may accidentally walk onto it. people refuse to take responsibility for their own kids - they exhibit a kind of entitlement which makes them put said responsibility on the shoulders of everyone; perhaps something to do with the state or species focused mentality which perceives kids as a common good everyone needs to protect. 'all ages' spaces are a tragedy, spaces with wide brackets such as 16-30 comparably so. unless they're family, local community or strictly interest/hobby-focused, these spaces enable grooming and undesirable exposure of the kids to content shouldn't see. often accidentally. malice isn't necessary, although when a 30 year old flirts with an 18 year old it's typically present. adults interacting between each other tend to adjust the conversation, and that means taking in patterns they express around other adults - even if they don't post hentai, they may make sex jokes at each other, mention sexuality, 'difficult' topics and their own trauma, substance abuse and mental health issues, et cetera; the kids in the shared space will read it. they may try to fit in. they may feel the need to help the adults and carry a weight beyond their capability. it's that or the adults watching themselves to be pg13 literally all the time, and the conversation not flowing naturally. 18+ spaces? 21+? tend to be for the porn. god forbid a bunch of 30+ year olds want to hang out specifically with people their own age.
peter pan the omnipresent
not long ago, i was complaining to a friend of mine about lack of graphic lesbian sexual desire in media. 'oh, but there's little graphic sexuality in media overall' - he said. i disagreed. there's a lot in the media i read, which is as a rule, mainly classic literature, horror or noir thriller. therefore; books written before ad 2000, or books with violence. graphic violence. there sure as hell is sex in there. why? because they come from pre-childsafe era, or because they contain violence. yes, graphic violence is still considered a mark for 'adult', and thus it is assumed that kids won't read these books. kids won't read them, so i can have sex scenes in them. there's gore. cool. everything else, kids are assumed to read, so better watch out. simultaneously with adulthood being limited to sex and taxes, everything else must be completely devoid of sex and taxes. children's media aren't media with child characters and specifically catered to children anymore: they're any media without sex and violence now. by default. if there's no sex - you better stay away with the violence. if there's no violence - there better not be sex, or else. keep your damn taxes away. no one wants to hear about taxes, okay? 'books for kids, intellectual pretentious books or books with graphic violence' shouldn't be the only options, generally.
although there still is a lot of good, modern literature catered to 21-50 year olds - which i do find in the bookshops profusely and read - i find that it's in majority 'intellectual', artistic literature (sans the ones with sex and violence). if a book is 'difficult' - which to a lot of less intelligent people means 'boring' - it is also allowed to be for adults, and contain sex and violence. cool! cool for me, but not everyone has to be intelligent. really. not everyone has to be smart, frankly, most people aren't smart and they would still benefit on reading, and they're still are affected by the aftermath of this phenomenon; i mean, not even intelligent people always want to read high shelf literature. sometimes they may want to chill. there's my violence books, by the way, if you want that. they work pretty well for me, personally. otherwise? it can be difficult.
i don't know how the case is with the tv shows, since i mostly read. i heard it's better, but then it's far worse with anime, since japan is pretty badly affected by the culture of neoteny. i know it's bad online. 30 year olds on tumblr and in similar places have been laughed at and told to leave... the communities they were in from the very beginning. yes, i get it with tiktok, which was a zoomer place from the beginning; even i, a zillennial born in 98, would feel uncomfortable on tiktok, even as a lot of people my age are there. tiktok isn't for older people, let the kids have their spaces. why would they leave the spaces they grew up in, though? and where would they go? to neocities? seems like it, i see plenty of 30+ year olds here. dreamwidth... other spaces that resemble web 1.0 and 2.0. they may soon also become populated with kids, though, and then they may be told to leave. leave and go where? porn sites? boomer circles they won't feel comfortable in because they're not boomers? in turn, adult spaces become oversexualised in an attempt to drive the kids away.
girlhood: go be 30 somewhere else
infantilisation of women has been a thing for... a while. it surprised me to find out in early 20th century a common method of straight female flirting was babbling and babytalking like a small child and pretending to have a childish lisp. pedophilic culture within capitalism is 'naturally' (logically, not that it isn't fucked up) generated by the institution of marriage, which in turn is a post-settlement invention; interestingly, humans are known to be slightly-polygamistic or serial-monogamistic in 'nature', meaning that they would form monogamous couples, but for a limited time - normally of a few years, and even then many had episodic contacts outside of it. therefore, as a proven fact in evolutionary biology, most females the early human males would try to impress were already mothers, and some speculate this - winning the favour of the chosen one's children rather than biological fatherhood - is the origin of fatherly instincts in men (miller, 'mating mind'). in fact it must be said, other primate males find females with offspring more attractive, likely since they survived the pregnancy and childbirth, and are known to be capable to bear healthy young - this is the opposite of the belief in most human cultures that motherhood makes women less attractive to men inherently.
with invention of monogamous marriage, however - which meant one woman was only supposed to be partnered to one man for the rest of her life, and he was the only one supporting the family the materially (again not a thing in hunter-gatherers; the patriarchal divison of labour originated post-settlement). therefore: he wanted the maximal number of kids from one woman and had an interest in them all being his, or else he would invest in someone else's child and lose on that, in the evolutionary sense. that created the value of virginity, and virginity as a construct in general. (to these puzzled by how it's a construct: many lesbians never have penetrative sex. if a woman had sex with women for ages, but never had her vagina penetrated and has an intact hymen, is she a virgin or not? there you are. not only a construct but highly heteronormative construct too).
this in turn created this... well, belief in high sexual value of teenagers, enhanced on capitalism which would benefit on exploiting women reproductively the earliest possible; in late capitalism, fetishisation of girlhood became more overt, as childhood/girlhood and the concept of teenagers became more defined (once again, the first paragraphs). infamous campaign of love cosmetics it kinda only went downhill. more and more traits of neoteny are desired in women - such as hairlessness and thinness; 'early aging prevention' in beauty industry now starts at 25-30. i could write about it for ages, but it's not ultimately about it, and i don't have the energy; it's a rather known feminist topic, easy to get sources on.
now alongside 30 being allegedly the death of a woman's sexual attractiveness, it's also the age where your personhood ends. many women i met have felt this way - that beyond 30, they could only exist or someone's mom or an ugly bitter hag with four cats (nothing bad about a good cat, though...). the beauty industry has made money on women's wish to prevent aging for a time now - additionally, nowadays you can also make money on adults, especially girls and women, wishing they didn't grow up culturally. you can appeal to adults and kids with one product - sanitized young adult media - and get a greater amount of cash with less effort. avoiding specification allows for products to be more mass-targeted, and therefore earn better while saving on the costs of production and marketing. very easy, isn't it. there's less and less space left to be 30. better go to it somewhere else, but where?
neoteny
to no one's surprise, the same kids who tell me i shouldn't get excited about horror or skincare at 25, are terrified of turning 25. or 20. or even 18. constantly being told that high school or university years are 'the best years of their life' and they won't get anything better than that particularly damages the kids whose childhood was miserable for whatever reason. gay kids. neurodivergent kids. transgender kids. mentally ill kids, traumatized kids from bad households. how does it feel to escape hell at 19 and feel you're several years short of losing your last chance to be not only desirable and desired, but also complex and happy, forever? awful. i would know, i've been there.
you may find that a lot of autistic and queer/lgbt people seek to escape adulthood. you may see them on social media, and other spaces. they dress in 'kidcore' or 'clowncore', have zoomer aesthetics in their late 20s and 30s, and claim to be 'immature' openly like it was a good thing. you may see that many trans men seek to be 'boys' at 30, and many trans women seek to be 'girls' and experience the idealised (not real) girlhood. you may find that... yes, and that's because they have interests - generation-appropriate interests, not the interests their parents had at their age - and wish to maintain these, and they see little place for themselves in adulthood. it's often the people who have lost their childhood - they infantilise themsleves in attempts to make up for the years they have lost, because they don't see the new, coming years as worth waiting for. after all, they'll be old, soon, very soon, or already are. being 'a child again' is the only way out of misery; they also feel they fail as adults, failing to meet the standards for adulthood their parents set due to economic factors. they won't be having cars at 16/18, won't be moving out at 18, and won't be having kids at 25 (for the better, most people my age aren't mature enough to be parents - complex intelligence and things such as childhood trauma don't develop proportionally with fertility at the same pace in evolution). they won't have a two floor house of their own at 30. failing that, they feel clinging to childhood may be the only alternative; being an adult is not only miserable, being an adult is also continously failing to meet the standards of these who set them up for failure.
in conclusion: we should make more non-sexual and non-sex-focused spaces - both online and irl - for adults or even adults within certain age brackets, and make adulthood cool again. adulthood being an elite club is good for everyone. it encourages kids to be mature and do better rather than encourage adults to infantilise themselves, and it gives the kids something to be excited about growing up - and gives the adults freedom of expression and peace. peace becomes increasingly valued as one ages, so this is a really good investment. for our own wellbeing since we aren't getting younger if for nothing else.
ps: this site isn't and will not be childsafe.