Grooming and predatory behavior toward minors are very real, traumatic, and deeply harmful issues. But online—especially on platforms like Twitter and Reddit—those terms often get thrown around to describe situations involving fully grown adults, like someone in their 40s, 50s, or 60s dating a person who is 22–26.
If someone thinks that kind of age gap is weird or uncomfortable, that’s their opinion. But using terms like “grooming” or “pedophilia” in that context is inaccurate and dismissive of what those words actually mean. Those terms refer to adults targeting children or minors. When people hear “grooming” or “pedo,” they understandably assume it involves someone going after literal children.
A 22–26-year-old is an adult—especially someone who is 24, 25, or 26. They are legally and developmentally old enough to consent to relationships and sexual activity. If a 25-year-old chooses to date or sleep with a 60-year-old, others might judge it, but it is still a consensual adult relationship.
There’s also a contradiction that sometimes shows up in these conversations. On one hand, people argue that a 25-year-old woman is a fully grown adult capable of making her own decisions. On the other hand, when she dates someone much older, some of those same voices imply she’s too naïve or childlike to consent—by using language like “groomed” or “predatory.”
Using words like “pedo” or “grooming” about a 25-year-old dating someone older essentially equates that adult to a child who cannot legally or ethically consent. That comparison minimizes the seriousness of actual abuse cases and can be insulting to real victims.
It’s fair to critique power dynamics or question large age gaps. But it’s important to use accurate language and not dilute terms that describe real harm.
It’s a freakishly less predictable online landscape today.
Gotta wonder how many people ‘under 18’ on roblox are just using voice changers and blending in with groups of kids.
I ran a CS 1.6 server in high school. We had some questionable folks, like the guy that made maps and then… made his workplace office as a map… (skull, where are you at these days you fucking long lost psycho?). I just can’t imagine the ways bad actors could sneak their way into vulnerable groups these days…
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It already has.
Too many people throw around both terms willy-nilly, for any kind of age gap. It’s fucking stupid, and it completely plays into the witchhunt hysteria mindset people seem to revel in.
Shit, I’m not even a fan of applying pedophilia to people into teenagers. It’s still shitty, but it isn’t the same thing at all as someone trying to diddle a child. Anyone that doesn’t get the difference is a moron, and if they also don’t get why conflating things in that way is dangerous, they’re beyond help. There’s terms for the different age groupings (and it isn’t based purely on age, for good reason) for a damn good reason. But that’s what happens when language drifts, so I’ve mostly learned to ignore it.
Honestly starts to feel less like protection from sexual predators and more like an attack on people’s rights. I’ve seen people legitimately want to move the age of consent up to 25, which is crazy to me.
At what point is it no longer protection and moves into keeping people without full rights for a significant chunk of their lifespans?
Watch as the mountain lion, the apex groomer of her environment, waits patiently for her next meal.
More on topic, when I was in my late 30s, post first divorce, I dated a woman in her early 20s who had just graduated from university. It only lasted a couple months. Physically it was fun, but holding a conversation made that age gap feel like shouting a conversation across the grand canyon. Sure, not illegal, but god damn.
- it’s a spectrum.
Someone my age ( 0.6 century ) forming someone half their age to be their pet/toy/partner IS grooming, even though the younger one isn’t a minor.
As Robert Kegan understood, and has written books about, unconscious-mind-development has multiple stages, & old/young relationships where 1 is 1 or 2 unconscious-mind-stages beyond the other, ARE profoundly assymetric-relationships: it doesn’t matter that a person is xyz-number-of-years, it matters what their unconscious-mind-development is! Domineer+doormat is a too-damn-normal “relationship” dynamic, “traditional”, but not healthy.
Please scroll down on this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kegan#The_Evolving_Self & see the table.
Some people are in what I call Kegan3, the absorbing-experience stage of unconscious-mind-development, until they die of old age.
Other people go into Kegan4 young.
It isn’t clock-years, it is unconscious-mental-development that’s the “age” that’s pertinent.
Ignoring that is like choosing to be colorblind, when all the capsules of medication one is sorting for one’s patients are only identified by colors.
- The Guardian had a brilliant insight: Epstein’s ability was in grooming insecure males in wealth/power.
That is important, & I wish I’d seen it without it being pointed-out to me.
I do not accept that that is a wrong-use of the word, or that it was insignificant: it was core to what was going on.
- different cultures will insist on their own, distinct, frames-of-reference, so that the rape-culture types will never tolerate that there is any real, or fundamental, problem with their assaults, whereas other cultures will have their own, distinctly-different reactions.
That is normal, but modern society exponentiates that with filter-bubbles, algorithmically-amplified ideologies, etc.
- inner-age’s important, & I’d tried to be in relationship with women who were the same inner-age as me … which meant 2x my calendar-age.
Since that’d now be 120-yo, there’s obviously no point, anymore, so I’m aiming at parting my personality from the soul/continuum caught-in-it, so as to release this-continuum/soul from its current stuckness/prison, through the concentrations/meditations.
That can’t make any sense to people who live in materialism’s world, but it’s real for some.
There’s no inner-age equivalent/match, so … there’s no partner.
It’s just a sick joke, after awhile.
The last person I spoke with who understood … was my 106-yo grandmother.
Oh, and a guy who’d spent 3 decades being crushed by cancer also understood, so there’s 2, in the last decade.
How can people partner with someone who’s mentally … not in one’s frame-of-reference?
( all the “daddy/little” stuff just feels wrong: like indulging in mental-illness or street-drugs, or something )
- physically-developmentally-old-enough ISN’T identical with unconscious-mind-development-age, … but there’s another dimension, in there, too: cultural-age…
“The Coddling of the American Mind” is a book on how preventing entire-generations of population from actual-growing-up creates PROBLEMS, & I’ve not read that book, but the concept it’s on, absolutely is true.
It’s why the naive are such easy prey for human-traffickers/organized-crime.
Cultures that work to ensure that their people are incompetent, are … normal, nowadays … & the evil they make their people easy-prey-to oughtn’t be helped by ignoring/denying culture…
Have you ever wondered that all sorts of countries won’t tolerate youngsters to have social-network-sites for themselves … but they WON’T legislate against the hypersexualization of those same kids, through advertising, mass-media, manga/anime, etc??
Selective “vision”, that has huge costs…
Sorry this isn’t precise, more rambling, but yes, “grooming” & “predator” are blunter instruments than the “only applies to specific clock-ages” principle wants to believe, & I’m backing that with Kegan’s understanding of unconscious-mind-development.
Please read “Immunity to Change” on our unconscious-mind’s fighting-off of growing-up, & the tools/levers required to get past that, to have our lives grow-up…
Their ( Kegan & Lahey: he’s the theorist, she always figures-out how to make new theory testable ) book is important-enough that I want it being required for all graduating highschoolers, so that when they NEED the levers in that book, then they’ll KNOW to go digging into it, again, & wrest their lives free from the won’t-grow-up mechanism wired fundamentally into our minds.
Greater racial-maturity would be worth more than a trillion dollars, for this planet.
Some grow-mature young ( usually as a result of hardship, & it pretty-much ALWAYS has profound psychological-costs of that-path ), some NEVER grow-up.
That must be understood in one’s framing of “grooming”.
There are immature 87-year-olds in our world, who aren’t competent to understand & be-responsible-for life-decisions.
It isn’t that they’re psychiatrically-disabled, it’s that they never grew-up to the degree that they could go against social-pressure ( which is Kegan4, as I call it ).
Anyways, maybe you find none, or some, of this to be well-grounded meaning…
if so, hold-to the meaning, not to “me”: what is true is true, itself.
Be free, & realize as much of your meaning as you can, if that’s what you want.
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I wonder if there has been a shift in attitudes about this sort of thing as a reaction to the increasing generational wealth gap.
