Lovely article, and I think you make some really good points. If I could just add as a bit of a side observation, I do feel accusations about "pedophilia" that don't even qualify as pedophilia are overwrought sometimes.
For example, sexual age of consent for young people in the UK and most of Europe is 16. In the UK, where the heterosexual age of consent has been 16 for practically forever, a big part of the modern struggle for LGBTQ equality has been to equalize consent ages for queer people. For example, when homosexuality was first legalized in in the UK a couple years before Stonewall, the age of consent for male/male sex was set at 21. Decades passed and eventually that age was lowered to 18, but there were still a 2-year age difference between the homosexual and the heterosexual ages of consent. Then more recently, after lots of fighting and struggling, the age was finally equalized at 16, putting the UK in line with most of the EU. Most people in the UK saw that as a victory for justice.
This can shock a lot of Americans, many of whom presume that 18 is a god-given age at which sexual autonomy can even start to be considered.
You can see this in some American reaction to the gay film, "Call Me By My Name," which some people, even liberal queer people have called "pedophilic" given the younger of the romantic pair in the story is only 16. Charges of "pedophilia" get thrown around, often by women critics, but rarely by gay men, probably because most of us at least privately acknowledge our own adolescent sexuality. We don't want to stigmatize memories that most of us experience as positive.
But given how intensely society reacts against real pedophilia (which of course is good considering how vulnerable children have been and how prevalent child sex abuse has been) discussions become very difficult to have.
Oh, actually I'm thinking of another film. "Sequin in a Blue Room," which garnered rave reviews in 2019. Was filmed in Australia and has been quite popular in the UK, but it's kind of a non-starter on the American festival circuit because the gay lead is 16 years old, and is presented as legally engaging in sex with much older men. It's an important film not just artistically, but as an examination of the implications of anonymous sex in our new digital world. But all that gets lost through an American lens, which primarily reduces the film to a tale of "pedophilia," which it is certainly not.
The fact that the Atlantic Ocean acts as a sort of border between ideas about when adolescents should be legally free to be sexual is something most of us agree just not to talk about. Except when films like "Call Me By My Name" force us to.
