In the old days evil Pedos "recruited" boys, now they "groom" girls. What shifted in the Anti rhetoric? Why don't they declare a "ring" of Pedophiles trading "recruiting" tips?
The concepts bear some similarity. Both deny that any child's sexual interest in adults or sexual response to adults originates in the child's sexuality. ( In a way that they wouldn't declare that male and female "groom" or "recruit" each other for the purposes of heterosex, despite their different sexualities. )
But they differ in key factors that render the outmoded unsuitable for use in the shifting narrative of adult interference and subsequent harm.
Recruit: to enlist into an organization.
Gays find boys and through their predation MAKE them homosexual. While this has come down to us in the form of "zombie bite theory," it is largely useless for girls, as "homosexual" is an invisible category and aging is inevitable. So dirty old men make dirty young men who become dirty old men.... seems plausible. And note, the BLers general interests in hebephile BL make this notion seem even more plausible.
However, if you join forces with those engaged in a gender war whose victims are female and whose predators are male, then "zombie bite theory" begins to fall apart. Dirty old men will never make girl children into either males or adults. They cannot be "enlisted" into an army of dirty old men.
Further, "recruit" suggests some sort of authentic response to the call to enlist, which might not've been heeded if the call had not been made; but which still resided in the respondent. We see it also in the "tempted to sin" notion, where the tempter is to blame for occasioning the sin, but the sinner is seen as giving into something already within.
The "recruitment" model then exists also because those promoting it are males too. And they may have all sorts of views on male sexuality, but "males are asexual" is not one of them. Its hard to deny the evidence of a sexual response to stimulus in the boy. One cannot say that he was entirely incapable of being aroused but feigned an erection while being fellated because of his desire to please.
In fact, the predatory recruitment model states that the ability of boys to be aroused at almost anything makes them vulnerable to being "turned."
Still, the preference of the Antis is to deny childhood sexuality wherever they can, and to argue that any sexuality or sexual response involving adults is created by outside interference. What better than a response which can be deemed entirely inauthentic?
Groom: to train for a specific purpose.
When the category of "victim" shifts predominantly over to the "most vulnerable" ( read, girls, ) then all manner of options for denying choice present themselves. Notions of purity have long denied that females of any age have sexual appetites or a sexual response ( "lie back and think of England." ) This then creates an even fiercer bogeyman as it precludes any possibility that the child was interested in the sex or sought it out.
In training an animal you reward it for unnatural behaviours you want with something it wants. Hence in the grooming model, anything affirmative on her part can be claimed to be a response to things the Antis can conceive a minor of wanting: ie bribes of some sort. She can clearly want, and it can still be denied that she wants what she claims to want.
And if she is still defined as asexual after her interest in or response to sex, then, while this might be problematic for the innocence fetishist, it is ideal for the "victim advocate." Unlike recruited boys, she never becomes "one of them;" she can be defended as pure ( yet sullied, ) and she remains a victim for life without ever being a predator unless she chooses an underage partner herself ( and sometimes not even then. )
This notion is ideal in a world which allows for different sexual orientations, because it allows for a perfectly healthy sexual interest in adult males to continue through the rest of life without the alteration of anything excepting the persecution of the adult who responded to this when she was below and arbitrary age barrier.
Both of these models have more to do with inherited religious concepts of sin and purity than with human sexuality and the complex cultural factors that play into its expression.
But they are different. And an analysis of changing theories of who lacks agency, how they lack agency and which sexual minority is to blame when they display agency tells us much about how Anti thinking has
Dante