Post by @HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
Many societies throughout history have imposed sumptuary laws. These are restrictions on which people—or, more specifically, which *kinds* of people—can wear or display certain markers of status.
These might be restrictions on who can wear certain colors, or fabrics, or jewelry, or who can publicly carry weapons, and so on. Wealthy and aristocratic elites get one set of public ornamentation and display, while everyone else gets another.
The idea is to create and sustain immediately obvious signifiers of class, status, and wealth—to create and sustain specific *kinds* of public people.
The reason for this is that hierarchical status doesn’t just *happen*. Wealthy elites don’t just stumble into power and wealth; they must first impose it and then constantly reproduce it. One easy way to do this is through public displays of category: I hold power over you because I am immediately recognizable as a holder of power, and my exclusionary access to these ornaments is by itself an element of that power.
(Hence military and police uniforms, the elements of which often bleed over into [primarily male] fashion.)
But the general abolition of hereditary aristocracies over the last few centuries and their replacement by capitalist elites, who are *at least ostensibly* not hereditary or otherwise protected by class-specific laws, has created a problem for the people who rule us: how do they set themselves apart from the rest of us in obvious and tangible ways, so that they themselves feel powerful and can signal their status to everyone else?
That’s the whole promise of liberal capitalism, after all: that we are all juridically equal, as all the old feudal privileges have been swept away.
This is where we come to pedocon theory: our elites are not just involved in sexual abuse at astonishing rates, but are vocally committed to defending and promoting sexual abuse among their own ranks, especially but not exclusively of children.
https://www.axios.com/2026/10/21/ramaswamy-ad-acton-mother-ohio
I struggle to imagine that pedophilia, as an actual sexual attraction to children, is really so common among the general public that *so fucking many* of the wealthiest and most powerful people in our society are either engaged in or are weirdly sympathetic to the abuse of children.
Which means that many of them have adopted it, not because they are themselves pedophiles but rather because, I suspect, it is a public marker of class status.
Capitalism makes virtually every consumption good available to anyone, at least in some attenuated form. Sumptuary laws restricted access to fabrics and ornaments, but now virtually anyone can buy and display at least a cheap knock-off version.
What’s left to elites to signal their status? Perhaps it’s the power to commit the worst abuses and violate our society’s strictest taboos, in public, without facing consequences.
This is a long-winded way of saying: it’s not a cure-all, but if you want to seriously reduce modern society’s sexual abuses and especially abuse of children, please consider supporting your local anarchists in abolishing the state and capital.
@HeavenlyPossum I also think the urge to do violence is overrepresented among these people and this is a particularly prurient outlet for it, it's giving Westworld
@kiwi @HeavenlyPossum
I think it's exactly that - to be a billionaire is itself inherently an act of violence. It attracts almost exclusively people who are attracted to that kind of violence. Seen that way it's probably not surprising they're also attracted to another kind of violence.
Yes, there’s a huge amount of self-selection involved; the sorts of people who are likeliest to become billionaires are also likely to be highest on those personality traits.
@HeavenlyPossum this makes a lot of sense, but I would also argue that the ability/privilege to break social taboos didn't just arise post-feudalism, but has instead been extant alongside things like sumptuary laws since the beginning?
spectacle has also always been a significant part of how the powerful signal that power and enforce it over others. mass executions, including executions done in particularly horrific or bizarre ways; the ownership and/or torture and/or killing of exotic or powerful animals; extreme acts required to prove fealty – and on and on.
Abuse of children seems to me to fit into some nexus of that spectacle/taboo-breaking that has been part of power displays ever since there's been highly unequal power hierarchy in human societies.
People who are attracted to power over others are generally interested in that sexually as well. They don't really have "attraction to children" as often as they have "attraction to people with no power".
paedophilia in popular culture
There are really a lot of songs from like pre 90s about wanting to fuck school girls or similar. Like any would be disturbing, but these were like for public consumption, they weren't even embarrassed.
@HeavenlyPossum this is a great thread, thank you for the think piece! something i thought of while reading it is that cannibalism was a sign of class as well. during the colonization of africa at least, not sure where it came from or when it ended (we know it didn’t)
@HeavenlyPossum #TIL the definition of #Sumptuary, which isn't to be confused with Laws regulating Gender expression through clothing in Colonial America, but rather consumption of, often, luxury goods.
