Dreiko said:
Why does someone who thinks I'm wrong have to care if I think that about them. All they have to do is adequately show me to be wrong and with that they'll dispel any aspersions that may be cast upon them. Anyhow, most people here seem to think it's not sexual and some understand why there could be some others who find it sexual so we can have a discussion about why someone is a degenerate with even these confines just fine. We don't need to pretend something is valid or healthy to analyze it. If someone is really self-conscious about this that's also kinda weird. Would you think it normal to be equally worried about if someone paints you with the cannibal brush? Cause to me both would be equally absurd and not something to worry about.
With all due respect, that's a bit of a self-centered perspective. It's less about the opinions you yourself might hold than it is the fact that you're trying to convince others to adopt those opinions.
To draw from history for illustration, when I was nearing the end of my years as a Boy Scout, one of the newer members took to calling me "Hitler" by the end of his first meeting. Now, I naturally don't feel that I ever actually earned that epitaph, but on the whole I only cared about what's going on in his head to the extent that I care about self-improvement. I suspect that it was just trying to be cool by showing up an older kid. With that said, I cared greatly about the fact that he'd made it a point of publicly calling me that, to the point of shouting it when when I was up front during that same meeting. I didn't care that one kid took an immediate dislike to me, but it ceased to be about his personal perspective the moment he declared me to be Hitler to a crowd. At that moment the question ceased to be "what do I care what he thinks about me" and became "what do I care that he's
saying about me", which is a very different question.
To your question of the "cannibal brush". That's a bit of apples to oranges as cannibalism is generally viewed as an exotic fear, something extraordinarily rare, bizarre, and usually explicable as desperation. Consequentially such accusations tend to ring incredibly hollow. Concerns about pedophilia, however, are close to home (see
Roy Moore, the
Catholic Church, etc) and accusations of such tend to work people up spectacularly (see the
McMartin Preschool debacle) and are taken
very seriously.