Re: Feminism or youth rights? Time to choose.

"The rainbow alliance advocates cannot ignore the fact that in practice one colour in the rainbow is rather more powerful than all the others, and consequently they must constantly suck up to it." No, or else the "TERFs" would not have become marginalized by the trans activists. The Left's predilection for championing the cause of minority rights is tied to how easily they can smear the Right for being bigoted against those minorities. It's a lot harder these days to smear modern day conservatives as outright misogynists (except perhaps on abortion which is really a whole other discourse of its own). But it's easy as hell to smear the Right as being transphobic and so that's where the white saviors go to draw their battle lines. Or at least that's how it shakes out on this side of the pond. "What other explanation could there be for our continued exclusion?" Uhhh, because no one wants you buggering their kids? You cannot seriously believe the notion that society's arbiters of morality had only begun to oppose pedophilia because some college girls started burning their brassieres, do you? "A narrative of male sexuality as manipulative is at the heart of modern feminist discourse." And it has been at the heart of paternalist discourse for thousands of years prior. No one has historically been more suspicious of male sexuality than fathers. The refrain of "Lock up yer daughters!" didn't arise from feminist concerns. "male sexuality is not intrinsically evil" This is worthy of note. I have often thought that one avenue of attack could be in leveraging the cultural double-standard of straight boys being considered "lucky" to bag an adult woman in a way that is not afforded to girls. In this respect boys are still, though vanishingly, thought of as being unharmed by sex. However, this neglects to account for the source of the alleged harm as opposed to its recipient. Both victim and victimizer narratives must certainly be questioned. "It must understand that males and females have different sexual needs..." I have no idea what differences in "needs" you're referring to or why maintaining a double-standard like that would benefit anyone. If you're trying to preserve the notion that girls are harmed by sex out of some misplaced desire to simply decouple their alleged vulnerability from that of boys, that would still infringe against the sexual choices of boys as Etenne's article demonstrates. I had thought you were arguing that the sexual freedom of boys was being dragged down by the alleged sexual victimhood of girls and that your intent was to question that, but perhaps you're not really questioning anything and are simply pushing an ad hoc argument for boys. We live in a world where girls are now free to accomplish things that had once been reserved for boys and the presumption that such double-standards are justified is no longer tenable. If anything, the "war on boys" narrative (which I am skeptical of) suggests that it's boys who are the weaker sex and who merit protectionism. How ironic that it may be the masculinists who are pushing for treating boys like they're the ones who are emotionally fragile and in greater need of "safe space" bullshit. Do you really imagine that pedophiles will be allowed in those newly built safe spaces? "... and that the masculinity of boys must be affirmed along with the femininity of girls." Sounds like you're just indulging your conservative cultural preferences instead of actually substantiating any need for such concepts as masculinity or femininity.