So I ended up in this completely retarded conversation on Facebook in reference to this case in Sweden, in which a 27 year old had sex with a very physically mature 13 year old whom he thought was much older. Sweden, believe it or not, is relatively sane about this sort of this thing, and refused to prosecute the man for “child rape”.
Cue the idiots on Facebook.
Before we begin, I want to give you two thought experiments to consider as we try to make our way rationally through a topic that a whole lot of people cannot think clearly on.
Experiment 1:
A 35 year old woman, with the mental capacity of a 35 year old, has a medical condition which renders her body identical to a 10 year old girl. She has no secondary sex characteristics. No pubic hair, no armpit hair, no breasts, no hips. She looks like a child. She sets herself up as a prostitute to appeal to pedophiles: men and women who are sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children.
Is this pedophilia? Are the clients who pay to fuck a body that belongs to a child, with the mind of a fully cognizant, aware adult, pedophiles?
Experiment 2:
Heechy-keechy We have the ability to create a robot that looks and mimics the physical characteristics of child, and we have programmed that robot to sexually satisfy pedophiles. There is no way to tell the difference between a real child and the robot. Are people who pay to fuck the robot pedophiles?
If you haven’t read Paolo Bacigalupi’s Wind-Up Girl, I highly recommend it! It deals with a lot of these issues and is just an incredible story.
Just for good measure, make your way through this, too. In Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin sends very young men and women into situations we would consider decidedly adult. Rob Stark is fifteen when he goes into battle as the King of the North. His sister Sansa Stark is betrothed to Joffrey Baratheon when she is eleven years old, but her marriage cannot take place until she has her first period, as she is not considered an adult until that happens. In Martin’s world, girls become women at menarche and only women can marry. Is he writing child porn?
It comes down to this: what is a child? Is it a number arbitrarily assigned by the government? At X years and 364 days, you are a child. The next day – PRESTO – you are an adult!
Or is it a physical state of being? Adult = physically capable of reproduction?
Obviously, there are issues of maturity and preparation and understanding and cognition, but those are not something you can detect visually. Physical, adult characteristics, on the other hand, ARE indeed something you can detect visually.
Here’s the essence of my argument on Facebook: being attracted to secondary sexual characteristics is normal human sexuality regardless of the physical age of the person involved and not only is this not pedophilia, it’s the fucking opposite!!!!
The SJW hysterics that erupted around this seemingly innocuous declaration were truly surprising. SJWs are completely and utterly dedicated to understanding all men who find young men or women under the age of X pedophiles, and they seem incapable of seeing their own irrationality.
Gee, Jane Doe is hot.
JANE DOE IS X+364 DAYS YOU PEDOPHILE RAPIST!
Wait 24 hours.
Gee, Jane Doe is hot.
JANE DOE IS NOW OF LEGAL AGE YOU ARE PERMITTED TO SPEAK!
What the fuck???
SJWs and their allies like to throw out “why is it hard to understand you don’t fuck children” as the ultimate in moral authority, because really, who agrees adults should fuck children? The key issue revolves around whom SJWs are counting as children.
A 13 year old male or female with a sexually mature body still has issues of maturity and understanding that a responsible adult will notice and take into consideration. Some 20 year old males and females are immature as fuck, and that should be taken into consideration as well.
Being attracted to the body of a sexually mature 13 year old male or female is not pedophilia by definition!
Why is this even hard to understand? How fucking stupid do you have to be to get that human beings are sexually attracted to other sexually mature human beings? Obviously there are considerations about experience and maturity and understanding, but guess what? Those considerations do not magically disappear once an individual reaches the magic age of X. Twitter had a meltdown over a 25 year old rapper dating a 17 year old model because that’s a CHILD. Her birthday is in 48 days, and after that date, she will magically be NOT A CHILD.
What pisses me off about this kind of idiocy and pedo-hysteria is that it makes it easy for real pedophiles to hide. Pedophilia is a mental disorder in which normal human sexuality is twisted so that non-reproductive bodies become sexually desirable. It’s completely counter to normal human sexuality, and obviously, when acted upon, it causes enormous harm to victims, both male and female. When everyone stands around shrieking about sexually mature 15 year olds, pedophiles get access to six year olds and no one notices because they are too busy tweeting nonsense about how 48 days is the difference between pedophilia and acceptable desire.
It’s stupid. And stupidly dangerous.
I look forward to all the idiots who will now plaster social media with the message that “Janet Bloomfield defends men’s right to fuck children”, which conveniently ignores female pedophiles and male victims, and of course, is the exact opposite of what I am actually saying. I’ve written on this subject before, and I still think age of consent laws need two caveats:
- Age difference
- Mistaken identity
Two teenagers exploring their sexuality, consensually, should never end up on a sex offender registry, which is meant to identify sexual predators, simply because they failed to meet an arbitrary age set by the government. There is a world of difference between and 13 year old boy and his 15 year old girlfriend and a 13 year old boy and a 40 year old woman. But of course, that is not the scenario pedo-hysterics envision, is it?
It’s always the men who are older and the women who are younger.
Mistaken age, as in the situation in Sweden, is also a legitimate defense. A 25 year old woman who meets a hot guy at a bar has every reason to believe that guy is of legal age because he’s in a bar. If it turns out he is only 17, she has not willingly had sex with a minor.
But once again, not the scenario SJW warriors are concerned with, is it?
Pedo-hysteria has absolutely nothing to do with “protecting” children and everything to do with demonizing male sexuality. It is perfectly natural for adult humans to find other adult humans who have matured to the point that secondary sex characteristics are visible, sexually attractive. Germaine Greer herself had no problem perving out on extremely young men and most of North America continues to turn a blind eye to women who sample very young men sexually.
The hysterics only come out when men are involved, and generally only when those men are heterosexual. Gay men seem to get a pass when it comes to “protecting children” from dangerous male sexuality.
Let’s go back to those thought experiments.
The 35 year old woman with the body of a 10 year old: pedophilia or just a fetish? In my opinion, it’s pedophilia, literally. Her clients are sexually attracted to the fact that she looks like a child. But she is, in fact, an adult, and may therefore do as she pleases.
The robot? Also pedophilia, but a robot is not a human and what the robot’s owners choose to do with the robot is no one’s business, as long as they stick with the robot.
There. I just defended the practice of pedophilia in two different scenarios. Have fun SJW nitwits. Cherry pick to your heart’s content. I have literally described two scenarios in which I find the sexual desire for children’s bodies to be none of my, or anyone else’s, business.
Sexually mature young men and women are not children. And desiring them is not pedophilia. It’s creepy as fuck, and Germaine and her boytoy send shivers down my spine, but I don’t need to approve of whatever happened after that photoshoot.
That’s their business.
They’re adults.
They do not require my, or anyone else’s, approval.
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
thanks. it’s brave of you to deal with this issue. should the law be spending so much time on criminalizing adults who masturbate to images of the underaged who police and doctors will tell us have not laid a hand to any child nor likely would? or shouldn’t we devote all our resources to missing children and those who exploit and abuse children given a scarcity of resources and urgency of the situation?
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as interesting as your thought experiments are, a more immediate scenario (ie already happens) is animated/cgi child porn. Is it enough to argue that since no one is harmed it should be permitted? While I’m not saying that any sexual interest is chosen, is there not a case that by viewing such material you strengthen the desire via a pleasure/reward feedback? What, then, of e.g. rape porn.
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That’s the argument used against video games, right? By pretending to kill, you promote killing IRL. I don’t buy it.
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‘Windup Girl’ IS an awesome read! Definitely rated ‘R’, though.
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I think you’re being too kind to women who deliberately exploit the sexuality of children for their own monetary gain, that is, to extract financial value from men supposedly for benefit of children by appealing to guilt.
The mothers of various young child stars are all too often those who quite deliberately market those children to pedophiles with the exchange of money, time, energy a proxy (hopefully) for actual sexual contact even if actual sexual contact may in fact be present as well (a living public example would be the Honey Boo Boo family).
In short the demonization of male sexuality is like a perverse pandering such that only women–and Feminists–and Government–are allowed to exploit child sexuality. Anyone else who does so is evil.
Recently, my man was accosted in a Home Depot parking lot by a young woman and her all-too-sensually-dressed minor daughter. They wanted money from the obvious “working man” with his pick-up truck, signage, and tools. Just for fun he asked them, “What do you have to trade?”
The result was shock and indignation! How dare he! Chivalry must be free, you pervert!
A female pimp who doesn’t even deliver the goods could hardly be called morally superior to a pedophile.
At some point, however, I predict that the demonization of male sexuality will lose its power. There are only so many times that bitter, ugly, overage little girls can cry “wolf”.
Meanwhile, there have been many young girls and boys who have successfully used their own sexuality to achieve economic independence from abusive families and orphanages interested in exploiting the child’s youthful magnetism for their own ends. Such girls and boys are in fact “rescued” by “Johns”. Happens all the time. That’s not my way of attempting to legalize the process (all attempts to equalize outcomes for such risky endeavors shall fail) only that pigeonholing the actors of sexual roles is not a job for ideologues with obvious financial conflict-of-interest.
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“Pedo-hysteria has absolutely nothing to do with “protecting” children and everything to do with demonizing male sexuality”. BINGO!
Some truths are so good as to need to be repeated for those stupid idiots who can find their ass with both hands! Pity there is too much money to be stolen for reason and sanity to prevail and male sexuality will continue to be from the devil whereas women’s sexuality are ‘sugar and spice and everything nice’?
NOT!.
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As a mother of two girls who are both very tall for their ages and often get mistaken as older than they are, I have pretty much zero worry about them getting statutorily-raped out and about in the community. That’s easy enough to prevent by not sending your kids into situations on their own until such time as they know how to steer clear of inappropriate people.
My 14-year-old walks and sometimes takes the city bus to various places on her own now, and she’s gorgeous, nearly 5’10” tall, and slender, with long, wavy reddish-blonde hair, and she does sometimes encounter men who try to strike up a conversation with her. But guess what? She just abruptly says, “I’m 14,” and they quickly move on. ALL of them have thus far. If one didn’t, I have no doubt she’d find a way to get rid of him, such as by yelling, “Leave me alone you pervert!”
And no, I’m not saying that an adult who finds a 14-year-old body attractive is a pervert — but an adult who’d continue showing an interest after learning the age is pretty much not someone I’d sympathize with if he or she got humiliated in this way.
I’m more concerned about the adults whom we’ve entrusted to have more than casual access to our kids, so the example in the article of the teacher in his 40’s who had sex with his 16-year-old student was rape, in my opinion. And I’d see it as rape even if she’d been a couple years older and still in high school.
Kids can develop really strong emotional bonds with certain teachers — maybe with one who seems to understand them in a way that they don’t feel like anyone else can. I recall having my share of crushes on various teachers while growing up. Childhood and youth are emotionally vulnerable times and people who choose professions working with children need to be determined to protect them, and also determined to guard themselves against developing romantic attractions toward their students.
This is less clear-cut with university students — and I even heard an interesting story once from a woman who went to her high school reunion to find one of her teachers married to one of her former classmates. During her classmate’s senior year, she and the teacher realized they both had romantic feelings for each other and very discretely started spending some time together, and got married at some point after she graduated.
As a parent, I’d feel a lot more kindly towards a high school teacher who became my son or daughter-in-law, if this person had at least held off on having sex with my child until she was no longer a high school student — and as a citizen, I’d have tremendously more RESPECT for a high school teacher who was capable of drawing the line and of never having sex with any student.
But about the pedophilia examples you gave, where pedophiles could live out their fantasies without any children being harmed — I agree that this is nobody’s business but theirs. At the same time, child porn that uses actual children and not just people who look like children, IS harmful to children and should not exist. Period. Anyone who contributes to its continued existence is a criminal and should be treated as one.
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I don’t know what the exact nature of laws in Canada and Europe are, but it is important to understand that in America, Pedophilia is a specific psychological diagnosis: “the adult sexual desire for pre-pubescent youths”; while in most jurisdictions the crime is titled something like “unlawful sexual contact with a minor”. This is a very important distinction, as most psychological resources describe three different potential issues of adult sexuality towards what we consider minors, the first is pedophilia as previously described, the second is hebephilia which is “adult sexual interest in or contact with pubescent youths”, while the final category is called ephebephilia “the adult sexual interest in or contact with post pubescent youths”. For the most part the law isn’t interested in those distinctions. I have seen several sources state that pedophilia is vanishingly rare, and the more common hebephilia also isn’t very common. While one sex researcher once stated, http://web.archive.org/web/20110623130406/http://www.usccb.org/comm/kit6.shtml and it seems reasonable that he is right, that ephebephilia is normal and healthy if only acted on consensually; also it seems that when Janet is talking about sexually mature children she is addressing ephebephilia. That all said the law doesn’t distinguish between these conditions as they only care about sexual contact with legally defined minors, and let us not forget that at least in the United States (Europe and Canada have close in age exemptions which have been mostly abolished in the US) most of these unlawful contacts with minors occur not with adults but between minors. For me sexual consent laws seem more about denying sexual agency to people who clearly have it; rather than protecting children from real abuse and assault.
As a matter of course in your thought experiments, consensual sexual activity with the adult women with the antisenesence disease (of which we aren’t currently aware of any) would clinically be described as nonpathological pedophilic, but legally wouldn’t be criminal contact with a minor. The robot on the other hand probably doesn’t qualify as clinically pedophilic (or hebephilic or ephebephilic depending on the preference), nor as being criminal sexual assault… sex toys aren’t illegal. Although I suspect the anti-“pedophilia” people would likely get humanoid sex robots reclassified under child pornography laws if they ever came into being, before more sane sex laws were created. There is also a kerfuffle between anti-child porn advocates and many therapists of pedophiles and hebephiles regarding the use of CGI youth images and other similar tools as a way of allowing pathological pedophiles and hebephiles from acting out their urges in real life. All in all your post is a breath of fresh air, I just wanted to make sure you were aware of all the different nuances being missed by most people discussing the issue.
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A 5’10” 14 year old female? Sheesh! Amazon city! You and your husband must be giants or something. lol.
As for the pedo hysteria…..Me? I stay FAR away from kids. I have literally ZERO to do with them. When you’re born male you already have a multiple targets posted on your body. I don’t need another one. Especially one THAT big.
It shocks me how utterly stupid and paranoid people have gotten.
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Yeah…”Robot rape”. How the hell can someone rape a robot? LOL!
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As far as any porn that doesn’t involve actual children, I don’t care about it as long as no children are ever exposed to it. The idea of computer-generated pictures of adults having sex with children is disgusting to me, and it would certainly be a form of pedophilia for an adult to show pictures like this to a child, but as long as it’s just a private adult thing, no one is harmed and that’s all that matters.
However, it seems kind of risky for any adult to have stuff like this in his or her home or on his or her computer. If anyone found out it could cause rumors to spread and could put this person at greater risk of ending up on a surveillance list somewhere. But it’s like any risk an adult decides to take: you decide whether the benefit is worth the risk, and then you don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for you if the worst possible consequence that could happen actually happens.
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She’s almost exactly the same height as me — maybe a hair shorter. I think I’d pretty much reached my full height by the time I was her age, and I think she’s on about the same growth schedule, so she’s probably the same size she’ll be as an adult. And she’ll be 15 next month.
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I’ll throw this in. As a 50 year old man, I’ve noticed it’s also not about the absolute age of consent. At my age, I’m expected to be dating only women 40 or older. Express any sexual interest in any woman younger than that, and I’m a creep.
That makes any interest I have in the majority of porn performers, strippers and even musical performers (I’ve picked up a taste for Kpop in recent years) something feminists would dearly love to find illegal in some way.
They forget sexual attraction has its roots in reproduction, and let’s face it, after 40 women’s chances of producing a child with birth defects skyrockets, and producing any child at all drops. Our sex drive knows this and programs us in a very specific way to seek women with the widest possible reproductive year range while keeping us away from women so young they’d die in childbirth.
I’m fine with 18 being the legal age of consent but I also acknowledge it is perfectly arbitrary. I also acknowledge all of us have a 13 year old mother somewhere in our ancestry and that may have worked out fine for that time and place. Now the world is stunningly more complex and so some type of barrier is justified to allow maturation before committing to motherhood.
But that is a psychological barrier, not an instinctive one. The instinctive one uses fuzzy logic based on appearance. The psychological one is the result of training and culture.
What I am not fine with is the double standard of older women exploiting teenage boys being considered liberating while older men get criticized if their significant other is above 18 but lower than the “acceptable” age difference. I remember my mother being horribly critical of a friend of my dad who was in his 40’s dating a woman in her early 30’s. Only about 10 years difference and yet THAT was too much. She was a whore and he was a pervert in her eyes.
There is a new series of consent rules men have to obey that go beyond just 18. Age difference, wealth difference, country of origin… the list is increasing. And it is all going to boil down to the idea that if we find a woman we’re with attractive, we should be imprisoned. We should only date women we find repulsive.
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I see. But 5’10” is still amazon size for a woman. I don’t see to many of these around. I think 5’4″ is average for a female in the US. 5’10” is average for a man.
And here is an early “Happy Birthday” to your daughter. They grow up FAST Susan.
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Yeah. I can’t wrap my brain around the idea of being sexually attracted to a kid. That’s just so fucking nasty!
BTW, I still remember the “don’t talk to strangers” campaign when I was a kid in 1980s. It was the first time I became truly frightened of adults. There’s a thin line between being cautious and being insanely paranoid. What sucks the most is that the worst problem humans have (besides themselves) is other humans.
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“I’m fine with 18 being the legal age of consent but I also acknowledge it is perfectly arbitrary.”
Same here, that’s fine. You have to draw the line somewhere.
“I also acknowledge all of us have a 13 year old mother somewhere in our ancestry and that may have worked out fine for that time and place. Now the world is stunningly more complex and so some type of barrier is justified to allow maturation before committing to motherhood.”
Well, I’d say it’s because people 200 years ago matured MUCH faster as people because they HAD to. If they didn’t they’d STARVE to death. It’s amazing how fast humans will grow up when faced with starvation and death. lol. The survival instinct kicks in. Not only that but we’ve banned child labor and tried to extend childhood almost indefinitely. They don’t learn responsibility or real hardship. These days a 13 year old girl probably has the maturity of a 7 or year old 200 years ago.
“Only about 10 years difference and yet THAT was too much. She was a whore and he was a pervert in her eyes.”
Guess that makes my great grandfather a pervert or something to these morons. He was married to my great grandmother until his death. It certainly lasted MUCH longer than today with all of these 40 year old little girly brats running around.
I remember this chick I used to work with rho was in her early 20s. Her boyfriend was in his late 30s and so of course her gets called a pedophile all the time. A pedophile dating an ADULT chick? Really? Do these fucktards even know what one is? When you think about it they’re also massively insulting the chick too. As if she’s some dumb little girl who doesn’t realize she’s “being taken advantage of”.
The thing is most people live in the Matrix. If someone, sorry, some MAN does anything….ANYTHING….outside the cultural “rules” then he’s done something wrong. And to the fucking morons with 40 IQ, no, I’m talking about justifying pedophilia. I’m saying anything PERIOD. It can be about punishing bitches who commit crimes or me just wanting the same rights these privileged little princess cunts get.
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2 comments:
1. Could you lay out a scenario where the hysterics about trumped up pedophilia facilitates the crimes of actual pedophiles? That’s quite a charge to lay at the feet of SJW’s (who I’m no fan of), without a commensurately compelling argument.
2. On the subject of gays getting a pass on cradle robbing, yeah, we’re pretty much sacred cows to the left right now. However, within the community, we tend to roll our eyes at guys who get into relationships with guys at least a decade younger. We applaud when they can bed one, as youth and beauty are the coin of the realm, but for actually shacking up with one, it’s seen as sad.
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“What I am not fine with is the double standard of older women exploiting teenage boys being considered liberating while older men get criticized if their significant other is above 18 but lower than the ‘acceptable’ age difference.”
I agree that there should be absolutely no double standards in this or any other area. A young adult is capable of deciding what’s important to him or her in a relationship.
But some years back, I did wonder about the logic of a man in his 40’s whom I heard griping because the 23-year-old woman he was dating had the gall to actually want children of her own. She wasn’t willing to content herself with the fact that the two kids he already had were all he wanted. And his friends were commiserating with him and saying she was “after the money.”
Being attracted to fertility is perfectly understandable — but just as there’s nothing wrong with a middle-aged man being “after” what turns him on the most, so there’s nothing wrong with a young hottie being “after” what turns her on the most. It seems to me that when a young person marries a much older person, it’s only reasonable for there to be something in it for the young person, too.
Of course, the risk is that the young-un’ll stick around as long as it’s fun, and bail when the going gets rough, such as when health issues start cropping up for the older person. And with fertile young women, there’s also a risk that her elderly ex will be sending her checks for years and years to come.
And there’s the rub: it must be extremely rough to be so unswervingly attracted to women who are at their most fertile, and yet have no desire to make any babies with them. It’s like the other thread about women making babies with “stolen genetic material.” On the one hand, you (general male heterosexual you — not you in particular) want to be able to keep your genetic material under lock and key, and prosecute any female whose body makes use of it without your express permission. On the other hand, your most primal urges make you want to keep repeatedly releasing that genetic material into the environments most conducive to giving you another little human to take care of.
This is how the human race has managed to survive and thrive for so long, so it’s definitely not a bad thing. I suppose the solution to the problem would be for a man who knows he’s done having children to get a vasectomy and only get involved with young women who don’t want kids, or who already have all the kids they want, too. The thing is, young women who don’t want kids, or who already have kids from a prior relationship, don’t usually have quite the same glowingly-innocent quality as a young woman who loves children but is still waiting for the right man to have her own children with.
And I imagine that THAT’S why the middle-aged man was griping about his 23-year-old girlfriend. He didn’t just want young and hot — he wanted glowing, radiant innocence. Common sense would say that you have the “kids — yes or no?” discussion pretty early on in the dating relationship, especially when there’s a big age-gap, and if both want completely different things, you part ways. An older man who doesn’t want any more kids should have the maturity to accept that he can still have a hot young thing — just not the innocent beautiful young thing who still wants her own family.
And as far as the single women in my age-group who are so pissed about the majority of single men our age going after younger women, you can stay focused on that and stay pissed, or you can find things that you enjoy and care about to get involved in. There are always people out there who need a friend. And if you never got to have children, there are all kinds of ways you can invest yourself in the life of a child; just as some women miss out on childbearing, some children miss out on having the loving parents and support they need.
While adoption of an older child who’s been through hell is a huge commitment and should never be undertaken by anyone who hasn’t counted the cost (not just in money but in love and energy) and resolved to stick with this child through everything, even having a committed adult who devotes an afternoon or two a week to helping with homework, or takes them clothes shopping a few times a year, or takes them out for a nice meal and listens to them a couple times a month, and who is willing to be consistent and stay involved to this degree for as long as the child needs them — this can have a HUGE impact on the life of a child.
Also, along with having compassion on yourself for having made some wrong choices and missed out on getting married during your youth — if you’re willing to have that same compassion on a man who may have made some wrong turns, too, and is therefore a lot less economically stable than the average male your age, romance isn’t completely out of the question at any age. I’m not talking about settling for a jerk — but about being open to a guy who’s a good person NOW, but who maybe was a little slower to mature just as you were, and is reaping the consequences in the form of much lower earning power, and little to no property, just as you are in terms of not having any biological babies or grandbabies.
HE may actually have some children and grandchildren, and may benefit from your help in restoring any relationships that got broken during his less mature years, so you could actually get the blessing of some little ones calling your Grandma after all. So you may even get to spend your latter years surrounded by family after all. Of course, there are no guarantees, and even those of us who get to raise our own biological children have to do so with an open hand and not with any assumptions about the future.
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About three years ago on BigThink http://www.bigthink.com/dollars-and-sex/would-you-pay-to-have-sex-with-an-android Marina Adshade discussed an article that’s behind a paywall, in which researchers studied issues relating to the possibility of life like humanoid robot sex toys. Apparently one of the issues had to do with moral prudes objecting to sex for nonprocreation. Another objection had to do with the potential for sex robots to be used as a tool for chronophilic sexual disorders (pedophilia and hebephilia).
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Thank you, Jim! Yes, they do. 🙂
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So if a robot “looks” like a child they have a problem with it? Really? It’s a R-O-B-O-T bot a human child. lol. I’d much rather sick pedos fuck a robot than rape some poor kid.
So really what they have problem with is not the act itself but someone even thinking it. Granted even that’s sick but thinking something is not the same as doing it. I’ve thought about beating the living shit out of feminists but I’ve never done such a thing. Sounds like an Orwellian thought crime to me.
Damn, if people were locked in cages like animals or just executed for mere thoughts everyone would be dead. Lol.
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“Why is this even hard to understand?”
It’s not. Remember that these are the same people who have been peddling the pay gap, false rape stats, false DV narratives, patriarchy, etc. for decades now. Logic will not work with them. They simply hate men and they’ll do or say whatever is needed to demonize them.
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I dont get why you would defend Germaine Greer.She has published a book featuring twelve year old boys in erotic poses and would scream blue murder if a man her age did the same thing with twelve year old girls.And keep in mind,Greer said if a grown woman rapes a young boy and the boy has an erection,he should be the one charged.
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The reason “the law” does so is because those images didn’t come out of thin air. They involved real kids at some point. The police here arrested a man just last week for sharing images involving an INFANT with someone in South America. He had taken them. The infant presumable lived here. The police (properly) declined to identify the connection between perp/perv and the child.
PS, Caps please!
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In which case, I think both would be idiots.
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Janet, could you clarify which two people would be idiots? Are you talking about both the adult woman and the adult man who go after 12-year-olds? It comes across to me like you’re saying that a boy who gets raped by an adult woman is an idiot, too, but this doesn’t sound like something you would say.
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I was talking about Greer creating a book of photos – not explicit but certainly creepy – of 12 year old boys. A man would be attacked for making the same book of images featuring 12 year old girls and while I think both are creepy, I don’t think either is “child pron”. I meant that both Greer and the hypothetical male photographer would be idiots. Probably not the best word. Cringe-inducing but not criminal. What is a good word for that feeling?
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The problem seems to be that, pedophiles and hebephiles are sick in a clinical/psychological sense, but most people seem to want to say they are “sick” in a moral or Manichean sense. Mental illness isn’t well understood by even the most cutting edge researchers, and the general masses view of it is often “medieval”. It seems that because so many people in this particular instance conflate pedophile with sexual assault of a minor, they are more interested in punishment than treatment.
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Skeezy.
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Partly true. The law also penalizes fiction and drawings.
As for photos, I’ve seen it this way. While the act was in the past and the viewer did not pay for that, he/she is financing the next rape.
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This is standard law, the guy didn’t know or have reason to suspect that she was under age. Rape is a crime of intent, if he knew or suspected she was under age, they’d have thrown the book at him.
It was obviously consensual, even though technically he can’t accept that consent, but he didn’t know that he couldn’t, because e thought she was older, or at least the athoities have accepted that his was the case.
Statutory rape is about power imbalances between adults or older non peers and those under the age of consent. They’re there to stop predatory behaviour of the inexperienced.
Most age of consent laws allow for children to fuck their age peers.
Where I live it’s 12 years old before that happens, but I’m not sure what they do to two 11 year olds having at it, probably nothing, and the 12 year old demarcation just means that the 12 year old gets in trouble if the other one is 11.
At age 16 you can have at whomever you want, even if that’s an arthritic 80 year old so long as both consent.
I really wish SJWs would learn why the laws are as they are, and stop calling unintended infractions crimes. SJWs seem to like apron strings and authoritarian rule.
Yeah it’s creepy when old people fuck young ones, but really if you think about it, adults fucking children is legal where all ages of consent is under the age of majority. Which is most of the civilised and the rest of the world.
I don’t personally sanction it, but that’s me and I won’t condemn those that do.
I didn’t know Germaine was that much of a cradle snatch..er..a cougar, good luck to her.
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FYI, the standard term/euphemism in the erotica business for models who look underage is “skinny models”. (A typical Slate magazine writer once ran across the term and spoke his guess as fact that it must refer to whether model is athletic.)
Here in Florida woman pedophiles do not get a pass. A high school teacher who was convicted of having sex with some very big boys near the age of 18 recently got out of prison on parole. Actually, I don’t believe the charges. I think it was a rumor going around, amplified by bragging, and witnesses who were afraid to back down.
Gay men do not get a pass on that around here, either.
Speaking from personal experience, I saw a policewoman in the hallway checking on an address in the apartments. I asked if I could help and she turned out to be the policewoman who is to track the locations of pedophiles. Unlike a TV show she did not display the tooth-gritting, growling or sour anger expected (on TV shows, that is) but said the guy (who had given a wrong apartment number) was like a lot of those she watched , that is, he had had a 16 year old girlfriend when he was 21. He had been stigmatized. After that one affair he lives the life he has to. He is a drifter and occasionally traffic tickets from other states arrive here because he uses this building as his address.
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I for one am perfectly fine with the age of consent being abolished. It is an “after the fact” misandry fueled law, that does nothing to protect people. If we operated for thousands of years without these kinds of laws, why do we think we need them now? To answer this question, someone highlighted the point that because of child labor laws, kids are not maturing mentally at the rate their bodies are.
Instead of fighting against what is biologically normal, how about we treat the problem like a graph? Aka, increase the rate of mental maturity, so that a 14 year old is perfectly capable of consenting to any man no matter what the age.
This leads me to an obvious point. If these so called “naive children” (feminists love to throw that word “child” around, when talking about sexually mature 14 year olds) have the capability of being more mature mentally, then it would stand to reason that although the system is spitting out teenagers that aren’t mentally mature, there are still some who break free of the system and are on their own path in life. (aka, the kind of people I enjoy talking to)
As a final point, I have been throwing out a specific number in the example, but the reality is every girl matures differently. As these draconian laws become worse and worse, and our prisons become over-burdened with “sex offenders”, I hope I can find some escape to it all….
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I didn`t mean to hit the like button for me,I just wanted to link to artwatch.Please don`t think I`m a narcissistic toad.
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I get annoyed any time I see a case of “statutory” rape in the news. Sex with a 14-year-old or older is not rape, in my opinion. It’s maybe morally questionable, but to throw someone in prison for every morally questionable action he/she takes would be fascist. There’s a difference between being a bad person and being a dangerous criminal.
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Do you see it as rape when an adult is entrusted to play an important part in a teen’s life — for example, as a teacher, pastor, or counselor — and has sex with the child? I see this as very different from just some random adult.
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“so the example in the article of the teacher in his 40’s who had sex with his 16-year-old student was rape, in my opinion”
Not here in the UK. 16 is nice and legal.
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Assuming you believe the answer to your question to be yes, would it be assault or rape if the younger person was the more sexually aggressive individual? I believe coercive sex is rape, it is one of those traditionally nonviolent expansions of the definition of rape, which feminists make that I fully support. However I can imagine circumstance in which protected classes of people who are usually assumed to be the victims in these kinds of scenarios are really the aggressors/perpetrators such as it were, if the sex were coercive or appears that way to an outsider. More importantly I can see young people with sufficient agency to know what they are choosing when they pursue relations with “authority figures”. Further, is noncoercive relationships between “adults” with power disparity rape or sexual assault? If you were “available” and had an opportunity to have a relationship with your boss, or his boss or your pastor, and it was mutually consensual would it be rape? If not why is it rape for a sexually active/aware minor? I am sure it is possible to define and criminalize coercive sex in such a way that it doesn’t deny agency to those who clearly have it, even if we’d prefer those people not have agency.
My position is far more radical than JB’s, not only am I o.k. with sexually adventurous minors exploring their sexuality, I am O.K. with those people exploring with whom ever they like, including authority figures.
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I lost virginity at 15 with a 25 year old hooker. And I enjoyed every single minute of it.
Here, the age of conset is 13. So shagging with a 13 year old in not crime.
BUT… I never would. I have a deviant taste for girls in her 40s. Cannot help it.
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So you see it as perfectly nice and aboveboard for schoolteachers to have sex with their teenaged students? How do British parents feel about this?
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“Assuming you believe the answer to your question to be yes, would it be assault or rape if the younger person was the more sexually aggressive individual?”
There are, of course, some young people who are physically strongly than their teachers and are capable of coercing them into sex. If this happens, the teenager and not the teacher is guilty of rape.
However, when it comes to sexual aggressiveness that the teacher is able to escape from before it culminates in a rape, the obvious next step is to report the child’s aggressive behavior to your superior and let the superior figure out the best way to deal with the situation. And of course, a teacher who survived a rape by a student should also take the logical next step and report the crime, in this case to both the school administration and the police.
I realize that reporting crimes of this nature can be a very risky prospect for some teachers, though. Especially if a very powerful female teenager managed to coerce a male teacher into sex, society is so predisposed towards assuming that only males can rape, that the teacher’s report could really backfire on him and result in him getting charged with the crime. If I were a male teacher in such a situation, maybe I’d just leave that job and find something different, which would be really awful if I loved my job and had built up tenure.
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Would you by chance happen to be in your 30’s?
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I personally prefer having safeguards in place to protect vulnerable people — such as young people, or adults seeking counseling — from becoming sexually involved with people whom they’re looking to for help and guidance.
I also see it as possible for a teenager to be both sexually adventurous and vulnerable.
As I already shared the other day, I know of one happy marriage that resulted from a relationship that started when a girl in her senior year of high school and one of her teachers realized they had a mutual attraction and discretely started spending time together. I have no way of knowing the details, but it doesn’t sound like she threw herself at him and they started shagging in the broom closet.
So…there may be some cases where a professional may decide that a particular relationship is worth the risk. Such a situation seems more feasible when it’s a 17-year-old senior and a 20-something unmarried teacher than when it’s a 14-year-old student and a 40-some-year-old married teacher with a pregnant wife.
I may just be too old, and too protective of my kids, to relish the idea of sending them into situations where there are no legal constraints for adult teachers and caregivers who might feel sexually attracted to them. I realize it’s normal to feel attracted to a sexually-mature young person, and given the fact that SOME adults are willing to pursue these feelings EVEN at the risk of a criminal conviction and loss of their career, this makes me wonder what would happen if all the legal constraints were totally lifted.
If you want to live out your fantasies of banging your history teacher, isn’t that what role playing games are for?
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I do get where you are coming from. I am not opposed to having rules in place to prevent behavior that isn’t appropriate or for which an organization disapproves. A therapist wants to be accredited with a certain group, they can’t have sex with their clients while they are their clients. You want to be employed by a certain company then you have to follow their rules about not dating or sleeping with your coworkers, underlings or supervisors. You want to work for a school district as a teacher, then you can’t sleep with your students. My only issue is that if it does happen and it is consensual, that they may have broken some rule of an organization and can be punished according to the prescribed methods, but they ought not be tried for rape.
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Interestingly enough, re: Your “Experiment one” there does seem to be a medical condition that produces something similar. It’s called Turner Syndrome.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_syndrome
L&O, SVU did an episode with a 17 year old girl with Turner Syndrome, called “Clock” for the 8th season. First aired September 26, 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_%26_Order:_Special_Victims_Unit_(season_8)
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I wouldn’t say it’s perfectly fine. Such a teacher might well be fired (especially if the girl says she was misled or pressured), but not a criminal. If she was eagerly enthusiastic, then I feel clear that no, he shouldn’t go to prison.
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this is what I have said for a long time. I am perfectly fine with a business (or school in this case) having rules against teachers having sex with anyone else in the school (that includes peers). Being suspended from that school is the harshest punishment he should ever receive.
What I am completely against however is:
1. Media using him as a story to create hysteria/fear in the public. The media should NEVER be getting involved in something like this.
2. Police getting involved
3. The girl being told that she was being manipulated against her will by this “evil” man.
4. People using the age of consent as some kind of “holier than thou” tool, wherein they can call anyone who disagrees a pervert, while they themselves are upstanding citizens.
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For a little experiment on what it’s like to be attracted to a kid… Assuming you’re straight, you find women sexy. You obviously know women (and gay men) find men sexually attractive, but do you really GET it? Feel in your guy what that feels like? I don’t think most people do. Being attracted to kids is the same — it just is. And it’s not dependent on a specific desire to have sex — it’s just you find the kids wonderful and breath-stopping and intriguing. Most pedophiles never do anything with a kid because they know it would be awful for the kid and they love kids — just like very few men rape women.
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BTW on a caring note… I hope neither of your daughters believe that being taller is an unfortunate thing! “Amazon” should be a compliment! It is in my mind at least. I am 5′ 10″… I used to date a girl that was 6′ 2″… oh my gosh she was so beautiful, and her legs were stunningly long.
While carrying her piggy-back style.. she could cross her legs around me… “Indian-style” with me in the middle.. it was funny and we used to laugh about it. She was fun, tall, and beautiful. Her tallness was just another of her attributes. It didn’t prevent any of her other qualities. It certainly didn’t stop her from being pretty or even cute.
She (and, I assume, other exceptionally tall girls/women) had a bit of a complex and fear that her height meant that she could never be “cute”. Insecurities abound, but cuteness, like beauty, is ever in the eye of the beholder. It didn’t matter that, when she wore heels, she could be over half a foot taller than me… that didn’t stop her characteristics from being cute… and from me feeling like a million bucks to be with her.
Anyways… time went on, and she married someone even taller than she is… conveniently enough. And I am married to a woman who is 5′ 9″ … breaking 6′ when she’s in her “big girl heels” and I think she’s the cutest, most wonderful woman to walk the planet! I’d feel that way whether I was 5′ 2″ or 6′ 7″.
Your daughters’ mileage may vary regarding the boys they meet and the attitudes they face… it can be a tall order… so, in short, I hope your girls learn that life is too short to worry about how tall they are.
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IS not crime.
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40s. And I like women my age. This is amazing!!!
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“Sweden, believe it or not, is relatively sane about this sort of this thing, and refused to prosecute the man for “child rape”.”
Weeeell. They also had that case of the manga translator (I think he was) who was charged with owning child porn, due to having manga (comic books, drawings) of children looking characters in sexual scenarios.
Thing is, is it being a pedophile that is wrong? Or acting on it?
Saying pedophilia is wrong, and no one should have those thoughts, is thought policing.
Saying no one should ACT on those thoughts on the other hand is about protecting children from harm.
So the though experiments you propose and the case of the drawn comic are all scenarios where people who have thoughts that they can’t act on actually being able to act out their fantasies. They are still pedophiles, but they aren’t harming actual children, what more can we actually ask?
The moment they molest a child, or move from drawings to pictures/videos of real children they are crossing the line into crime and should be punished.
It’s the same line between rape fantasy and actual rape imo.
As for the current “ew you pedo” hysteria about people liking the looks of teenagers. First of all it’s not pedophilia, attraction to young adults has it’s own term (that eludes me at the moment).
Not to mention that the age of consent differs in many countries. Here in Norway it’s 16.
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Interesting article at Free Range Kids.
http://www.freerangekids.com/is-a-21-y-o-with-a-15-y-o-girlfriend-a-sex-offender-the-next-25-years/
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Thanks timinycricket! I felt a lot more negative about my height than my daughters do — and it’s funny, my own negativity increased every time some well-meaning person felt compelled to go on and on about how lucky I was to be tall and how I could reach all the high shelves and so on. It always seemed fake to me — like, why would people feel a need to keep telling you how wonderful your height is if they really think it’s so obviously wonderful? It was also annoying to realize that it was a characteristic that mattered so much to people that so many felt compelled to inform me, “Wow, you are tall!”
I think the times, they are a changin’ — although my oldest did start expressing the desire a couple of years ago not to get “too” tall. And she’s more recently commented about how much more “compact” many girls were, and how many who were tall were still more “compact” and not as wide as she (and I) are. And of course the famous actresses always seem to fit into a specific height range. There are the exceptions like Nicole Kidman but directors generally still like having heroines shorter than heroes.
They made an exception when casting Kidman with her (then) husband Tom Cruise in “Eyes Wide Shut” — probably because of Cruise’s role as the (sort of) cuckolded husband in that one. But they generally searched for really tiny actresses to play alongside Cruise in his other movies, especially the Mission Impossible one, in order to give the illusion that he was really a big guy.
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Interesting article, fairly thought provoking comment section. My major response to the primary concern expressed in those comments is, that if people with a natural biological urge that all animals have, aren’t “ready” to act upon it once it arises; that can be caused by some combination of two things, either parents aren’t properly raising their young to be prepared for that biological function (which is largely true), or otherwise the belief that the young people aren’t “ready” is false, and the belief is just a result of a cultural bias (which I suspect is also true).
Susan up until 150 years ago half of everyone born live died by age 5, and half of everyone who made it past age 5 died by age 17 (surprisingly both of those numbers aren’t seriously affected by socio-economic class differences). An examination of first century BC Roman catacombs will show us that 47% of wealthy Roman patricians (the upper upper class) who made it to legal adulthood in Rome died before age 30; while those excitingly rare finds of burial sites for the poor indicate that 91% of people who made it to legal adulthood died before age 30. For reference sake in Classical Rome legal adulthood was usually between 16 and 17 years of age.
In the middle ages and renaissance period, the numbers were actually worse by quite a bit and legal adulthood in that era was closer to puberty. In Tang China the numbers were comparable to Classical Rome and in Ming China the numbers were only slightly better (42% of elites and 90% of poor people).
Contrary to what modern liberals believe and what Rousseau and Locke taught us, primitive aboriginal foragers tend to have short brutish lives rarely making it past 25; while archeological sites from the upper paleolithic (the 40,000 years prior to the development of agriculture) paints an even bleaker picture of human life expectancy. I bring this information to your attention, because there is a reason why we have a sex drive at puberty, millions of years of evolution aren’t going to be rendered moot by a century and a half of healthcare which has dramatically extended our life times.
I admit that as I approach 37 years old, and looking at the exhaustion I am facing with the forth coming baby in my house (I am the primary caregiver for children and elderly in my multigenerational house), I’ve begun to wonder if we wouldn’t be wiser to return to having our children closer to puberty. That said we may be able to accommodate our new cultural norms of waiting until our mid 20’s or later to procreate, without necessarily trying to void our evolutionary instincts to have sex at puberty.
I am aware of the “studies” which show that our brains aren’t fully developed until our mid 20’s, to which I respond what did the researchers expect to find when they were studying axon connection formation (knowledge acquisition) in a group that was almost exclusively college students; in other words another example of social science research failing to meet quality standards.
The problem is essentially being misidentified, it’s not that kids aren’t ready to have sex or that they lack the maturity or wisdom to consent to a more mature or otherwise older partner, it’s that our culture is too sex negative and largely speaking too misinformed about human biology and I am loathe to use the term psychology, but it will be better understood than anything else I can say….
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Right, and there will always be a plenitude of insecure guys who will feel that a girl taller than they are somehow emasculates them. Is their identity as a “man” that they are taller, heavier, or even stronger than their girl? Depending on the match up, it just might not be the case.
Compactness? Hmm… I don’t know what to say about that… but what about models being praised for being tall and long? Elegance and grace are other qualities that are often more commonly associated with a “long line”… though that’s a dance term, I think.
Why does compactness feel superior to expanded-ness? It isn’t superior even if it feels that way just because of learned social beliefs.
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That last paragraph is what I try to explain to people all the time, but in my case it isn’t because they are misinformed, it is because they are hysterically sex negative…
It is obvious why older females would be like this: After all the lies (cosmetics and fashion) are thrown aside, older women realize that they don’t have youth anymore. When they see a guy wanting to be with this “youth”, their human reaction of jealousy (not gender specific) kicks in. Therein lies the seeds of where the corrupt side of feminism started. 1800’s England anyone?
What is not so obvious however, is why males are so sex negative when it comes to these things. The only conclusion I can make is that they are afraid of what few women in their lives will think (and by extension, all their friends). This points to why it is absolutely hypocritical that MRAs throw other men under the bus as “pedophiles” when this topic is brought up. This issue attacks the heart of feminism which is plain old jealousy and control. What better way to show its corrupt nature?
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“And I’d see it as rape even if she’d been a couple years older and still in high school.”
So, if she were 18 and in high school….
I was with you until here.
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Jason, I agree that our sex-negative culture has a huge bearing on the whole issue. There are some cultures that don’t even have a word for virginity — where it’s seen as perfectly normal for young boys and girls to experiment sexually well before the girls reach the age where there’s any risk of pregnancy. In a place where sexual knowledge and experience is not equated with loss of one’s innocence, or lessening of one’s value, I think it’s very likely that girls could begin having sex at very young ages, with men of all ages, without ever feeling used or dirty.
And here in the manosphere, I realize there’s a huge range of attitudes when it comes to female sexuality. For men who don’t see a woman “who’s ridden a lot of cocks” as any less marriageable than a woman with little or no sexual experience, it doesn’t seem quite so horrid for them to want to do away with the age of consent and have access to any young girls who are eager and ready for sex.
But for men who DO feel that a woman’s value depreciates with each additional man she’s had sex with — if these men ALSO want to lower the age of consent and have access to girls who may be sexually mature but also may be less attuned to all the subtleties of the PUA philosophy, and may actually confuse such a man’s sexual interest with love, it seems to me like they’re looking for a way to get revenge on womankind, and possibly to create even more radical feminists, by doing all the damage they can to girls’ lives before the girls clue in and become very, very angry.
It would be very interesting if I could find some statistics regarding the views of those who’d like to do away with the age of consent — as in, what percentage of them has words like “slut” and “sexual gatekeeper” in their vocabulary.
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What difference does it make if a person values virginity or not? You are making the most bizarre connections in all these paragraphs, and to me it reminds me exactly of how a feminist would talk.
I don’t know what kind of point you were trying to make in your last paragraph, but I for one don’t use those kinds of words. In my opinion, those words and many others are carelessly thrown about with no thought behind them.
To your credit, you have made a few nice points here in the comments, but I have to say, you are definitely at odds with me and a few others here.
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My initial bias as a result of my atheism is to blame religion, and certainly there is a lot of bad stuff in religion which creates a sex negative atmosphere; however there is nothing that says mixed age relationships should be prohibited or frowned upon, nor is there anything which says sex/relationships should be saved for 10 years after the completion of puberty as opposed to its onset. I think both sexes are sex negative because we live in a sex negative society which teaches them to be so, what isn’t so clear is why society has become so sex negative, and before anyone suggests it, no I don’t think it’s feminism’s fault either, in so far as they are sex negative it is a reflection of broader societal sex negativity. After pausing on this for just a few extra minutes it may be the case that sex negativity in this issue is a result of strict religious regulations regarding sex coupled with the 19th century invention/prolonging of childhood stemming from increased life expectancy.
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I haven’t a lot of time to comment here so let me just say that this is a more plausible and understandable argument, and not something I’ve previously given thought to. While I think it is a great point and something worth thinking about more I am not convinced that it changes my mind regarding consent, but apparently I fall into your first category or I would like to think I do.
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What I think she is saying matters isn’t valuing virginity, it’s the response a proponent of abolishing consent has towards promiscuity. She is concerned that some people may make the case that we are out of a lack of respect or love for women.
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I don’t see it as a bizarre connection at all. We still have a culture where some people — both male and female — see a woman who’s had a number of sexual partners as somehow lower in value than a woman with little or no sexual experience. In this context, it makes sense to want safeguards in place to protect girls from giving away their virginity at an age where they may be physically ready for sex but not fully understanding that that fatherly male who seems so loving and interested in them, is also going to view them in a negative light if they give it all up too easily.
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Susan, I just wanted to let you know that while this has been the first time I’ve disagreed with you enough to argue with you, I don’t dislike you or anything like that. I don’t always read people well particularly in the moment, and if I wrote anything to you that suggested, I thought less of you, or that you were bad or what-have-you, that I apologize. I still like you as much as someone can like a stranger they exchange occasional ideas with online. Basically I want to make sure I’ve disagreed with you respectfully.
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I honestly don’t care if a female OR male are interested in someone for their virginity. It isn’t up to me or anyone else to call them “evil” from the outset. What if their minds change over time? Are we to become the thought police?
I don’t know if I can stomach coming back here if you keep up with all this passive hysteria. This is why I many times give up hope whenever articles like this come along. There is always that *one* person who has to say “but… but… safeguards!”
Again, I will point out that we operated for thousands of years without these laws… Why can’t we work towards returning to these ways, instead of artificially creating the problems we are now facing?
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But as long as no people are harmed where is the harm?
At that point you are saying you should punish the thought, the desire. You are in effect making it a thought crime.
And I think the argument that viewing drawn/cgi will make you escalate is a bit far fetched. The argument for the reverse could be made, and is probably stronger.
By letting people who have these tendencies get one channel to fulfill them they will be less likely to seek out worse material.
Of course there is a risk that a person grows tired of just drawn material… but that risk exists today while everything is illegal.
Making something illegal doesn’t make the problem go away, and in some cases it can even increase the risk of the worse outcome happening.
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“I’m more concerned about the adults whom we’ve entrusted to have more than casual access to our kids, so the example in the article of the teacher in his 40’s who had sex with his 16-year-old student was rape, in my opinion. And I’d see it as rape even if she’d been a couple years older and still in high school.”
I think Rape is the wrong word to use, sexual abuse maybe? Or are those two words watered so much down that it’s now synonymous? (I know Norwegian law have a distinction between the two.)
But I agree I think anyone in a position of trust, like teachers, healthcare professionals, jailers etc shouldn’t be allowed to have any intimate relations with their charges, regardless of age.
But it would be in my mind considered sexual abuse, and not rape.
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“I remember this chick I used to work with rho was in her early 20s. Her boyfriend was in his late 30s and so of course her gets called a pedophile all the time.”
Not to mention a lot of girls are attracted to older men.
And honestly the difference in maturity between a 20 year old and 30 year old is probably much smaller than between a 20 year old and a 16 year old.
There is this “rule” saying guys shouldn’t date girls below half their own age + 7. And honestly though when you look at it it it makes a sense for most people, as it keeps your date within the “maturity gap”.
I personally might find an 18 year old attractive, but I would probably not want to have a long term relationship with one, as our worlds wouldn’t match.
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Hi Jason, I’ve always seen your posts as respectful, and I also hope I’ve never come across as disrespectful towards you.
You really made me think when you shined the light on one really weird aspect of modern culture — that of deeming any sexually/reproductively-mature individual who wants to have sex, as being “not ready” for any kind of sex they want to engage in, to the point where they have to be protected and prevented from fulfilling those desires.
I’ll have to think more about that one. My main issue is that I feel like young people often look up to their elders with a high degree of trust. In some cases, they may feel honored that the older person is even taking an interest in them.
For example, one of my friends in college shared about a situation that developed in her very conservative Christian junior and senior high school youth group. I think she said it was a group for 7th graders through 12th graders, and the older girls were feeling rather put out that they didn’t have any dates with boys in the group, because most of them were gravitating towards the junior high girls. It was later discovered that many or all of these mixed-age couples had become sexually active.
While some of the senior high girls might have had sex with these boys if given the opportunity, keep in mind that this was a religious group with strict teachings against premarital sex. So while some of the girls may have given in to their same-age boyfriends’ desire for sex, some would have been more likely to be assertive and stand their ground and speak up about what direction they felt the relationship should or shouldn’t be going in…
Whereas a 12 or 13 year old girl who’s getting the attention of a 17 or 18-year-old boy is more likely to be kind of in-awe of this older boy and wonder what he even sees in them. You can see the same idea played out in non-sexual relationships between younger kids — i.e. the baby brother or sister who gets included in their older sibling’s activities with their same-age peers is often very happy to “serve” and wait on the group and do stuff for them that they’d refuse to do for their own same-age peers, just for the privilege of being included in whatever the “cool” older kids are doing.
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Well, maybe it would be better classified as sexual abuse and not rape. Sexual abuse is also a crime here. My main interest is not so much in criminalization, but in protecting our kids. Whatever repercussions are leveled against an employee that took advantage of being in a position of trust, need to be repercussions that will stick enough to prevent them from just leaving that job and going on to another job that gives them access to other potential victims.
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Susan, I don’t find you disrespectful either, I just am often told I am not aware of when I am being rude. Also I had a particularly rough week and probably wasn’t paying as close attention to what I said as I would normally.
Unsurprisingly, since I am an atheist I don’t agree with the rule set that the religious group was trying to follow, but I also don’t agree with them failing to do so as blatantly as they did. I don’t care for hypocrisy any more than I care for irrationality. That said, part of my reason for being interested in the issue at all stems from the fact that I have always even as a minor been attracted to people roughly five to twelve years older than me. I didn’t get to pursue any of my crushes as a teen because I was afraid they’d go to jail if they said yes, not withstanding the fact that most (probably even all) of them wouldn’t have said yes, or the fact that I was misinformed about the age of consent at that time in my state it was 13 not 18 so I was legal. So I get being attracted to older people, and perhaps because I didn’t have a negative experience to disabuse me of the interest, I sympathize with young people who also have that interest. From there, everything else flows from a point of logical consistency and an understanding of history and biology.
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>Could you lay out a scenario where the hysterics about trumped up pedophilia facilitates the crimes of actual {sexually abusive persons}?
Depends – are you comfortable with the edit I made? If so, it’s endless….
1. Runaway retrieval still exists.
2. Attention is focused well outside the home.
3. Raping your own children was decriminalized in most states in the US as part and parcel of the “anti-pedo” campaign.
4. Schools will lecture children “not to talk to strangers” about what their daddy does to them.
5. If you restrict a child’s communication ability so they CAN’T disclose to anyone, you’re just “saving” them from virtually-mythical “internet predators” – it’s REALLY funny to compare the abuse advocates’ and domestic violence orgs’ suggestions about internet access.
…etc. Frankly, the whole make-believe insistance that a magical world called “outdoors” is filled with armies of “pedophiles” lurking behind every bush more or less amounts to nothing more than a panicked denial that “heterosexuality” and “daddy issues” share an intersection. Sadly, this has included pro-rape advocacy – such as the incest exemption laws and “reuniting families.”
>That’s quite a charge to lay at the feet of SJW’s
With just a little thought, examination, or research, it is actually very, very small.
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I think what you’re talking about here involves an important distinction: there may be some 13-year-olds who are emotionally and physically ready to have sex and genuinely want to have sex with an older person. But then again, there are also some emotionally-needy 13-year-olds who feel so desperate to hang on to the older person’s interest and affection that they’re totally willing to let that older person call all the shots and do whatever they say without any thought to what they (the young person) really want.
Sexual abuse victims, and abuse victims in general, often crave adult affection, and especially if they meet an adult who treats them better than their childhood abuser did, giving this person sex may seem like a small price to pay. Especially if the abuse was sexual, they may have grown to accept that “this is just how (people of that particular sex) are” — that they all want sex and that’s just how it is. They may even initiate the sex if they feel like this is a way to solidify the relationship and keep the person interested — and you imagine how this will backfire if they get involved with PUAs who are only interested in the conquest and will quickly lose interest and respect (any respect they might have tentatively had) after that.
Some abusers will even try to rationalize that what they did wasn’t so bad because the young person had already lost his or her virginity to someone else. This was certainly the case with former pastor Jack Schaap, who as a 50-some-year-old pastor got sexually involved with a 16-year-old girl with a troubled past who’d come to him for counseling (in addition to being one of his parishioners, along with her parents, she was also a student in the church’s high school).
And you know, maybe it doesn’t matter whether this kind of behavior is classified as rape or abuse — and again, the only reason it seems so necessary to treat it as a crime is that if it’s just treated as a professional infraction, it would be too easy for someone like Schaap to get hired on by another church or religious organization where he’d be trusted to counsel more young people. It would be easy because so many organizations prefer to be very hush-hush when they have to fire someone over something like this, because the publicity isn’t exactly good for them.
http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/lake/hammond/ex-megachurch-pastor-blames-underage-victim-wants-out-of-prison/article_2ae9324b-eacf-546e-9f73-c12147f5726f.html
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Free Range Kids is a great website that encourages parents to allow their kids more freedom to learn to explore and navigate the outside world without fear — and lots of Free Range Parents are getting harassed by SJWs.
http://www.freerangekids.com/
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He was about 15 years older than her. I just think it;s’ insane to call someone a pedophile even if they’re dating a 20+ year old adult. That’s just fucking idiotic! Maybe it’s just envy from them, eh? 😉
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Indeed envy is a big reason for this. Even the “ugliest” teenager, can many times be more attractive than someone in their 30’s.
Also, I say screw that “7 year” rule. I don’t need to let my life be ruled by some paranoid hypocritical rule that only shames normal male sexuality.
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Yes, that was a sudden wrong turn.
I also found myself taking a train not long ago and an attractive young women sat next to me. As we talked I got the sense she was younger than she looked. I asked directly and she said she was 15. Good to know, and no big deal. It was a three hour train ride and we probably talked for 2 and a half of those hours. Great kid, very lively, unafraid, and interested in pretty much everything.
I find it disgusting that anyone would think there’s something wrong with that.
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Indeed, it is beyond me how difficult it is for people to throw away all these terms like “ephebophile” and “hebephile”. How about we just accept what is biologically normal and leave things alone?
From what I have seen both on the internet and off, there are 3 major categories that we face today:
1. Jealous older women
2. Hysterically paranoid parents
3. Hypocritical men
At this point in the world, I have no clue which category is the majority, but I can definitely say all 3 of them have hit me at the same time when I pursued a girl at my church. (for those of you who saw that word “church” and started forming opinions, please try to set that aside and see this account for what it is). I am not sure about all churches, but I am betting that all 3 of those categories are exasperated in the church context.
The age? I will not mention this because if you were asking this in your mind, it could imply a couple things like you distrust me and/or think I am not biologically normal. Both of which point to a very serious problem in critical thinking.
for distrusting me: How long have you known me? What possible reason have I given you to distrust me? Have I done something to show I am untrustworthy?
for assuming I am not biologically normal: What is more statistically probable? That I am a true pedophile? Or that I am a normal male just like every other man out there?
These things are very simple, but we live in a day and age where even the most simplest things are obfuscated beyond all measure.
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Anything wrong with having a lively conversation with an interesting teenager? Certainly not!
I realize some panicked parents would scream “stranger danger” — but they’re most likely not the ones who’d allow their teen to ride the train alone.
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Well, as I’ve already mentioned in a previous post, I see a huge difference between some random adult man striking up a relationship with a girl (as far as your use of the term “girl,” I’m not sure if this means that you didn’t feel she was a woman yet, or if it was the more general usage in which couples of any age might refer to themselves as “girlfriend and boyfriend”) and a man in a professional role — such as teacher, pastor, or counselor — striking up a relationship with a girl who’s looking to him for some kind of help or guidance in her life.
And maybe we don’t need to use any scientific terms to describe an adult, male or female, who’s sexually interested in people who are much younger — maybe this is just normal for both men and women — but when a married pastor in his 50’s behaves like Jack Schaap did (I mentioned him in a previous post), I feel like something needs to happen to prevent him just taking his abusive behavior somewhere else. His attraction to that young girl was certainly biologically “natural,” but his behavior was still inexcusable. Maybe it doesn’t have to result in a felony conviction, but it seems like that’s the only way to effectively stop someone like that.
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You keep going on about a specific case of someone in “authority”, and you never make it clear what your position is (such as in my case).
To that end, I am in agreement with Jason Wexler on this. That is, I don’t care if it is someone in “authority” or not (btw, in my example I was just a peer. There, happy now?). If anything, if you set aside your over-protectiveness for just one second, you might see that such a relationship can be a positive thing. Sadly in your world, you can only see it as evil.
Also, what do you mean by rape in this snippet?
“so the example in the article of the teacher in his 40’s who had sex with his 16-year-old student was rape, in my opinion.”
This sounds an awful lot like automatic assumption of guilt on the teacher’s part. Why are you so hellbent on making the authority figure out to be a bad person?
Also, you decided to go for the “I am not sure if you are a pedophile category”? That is, instead of assuming that when I said “girl” I meant it like any other man in existence. You instead wondered if I meant “women” or not… SMH…
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All I know about your particular case is that you, as an adult man, pursued a girl in your church, and your pursuit of her brought you grief in the form of people whom you classified as 1.Jealous older women, 2. Hysterically paranoid parents, and 3. Hypocritical men.
I don’t know you personally, so when I wrote my previous post, I had no idea whether you were the pastor of this church or in some other role of authority, such as a teacher or counselor to this girl. You have now specified that you were just a layperson.
As far as me going for the “I am not sure if you are a pedophile” category, it seemed likely that the girl in question had at least been through puberty, and as far as the way that “any other man” uses the word “girl,” some use it very casually to refer to all females, while some men refer to a female peer, especially one that they’d like to date, as a woman.
If this girl liked you and was mature enough to be dating — and if the parents were indeed just “hysterically paranoid” — then I’m sorry about all the flack you got. It’s not fair when two people like each other and everyone around them is trying to make THEIR problem with the couple’s age gap into a problem for the couple.
I imagine that it wouldn’t be much better if a romance sprang up between a woman in her 30’s and a teenaged young man in the church. Yes, I realize that our society is all into the “cougar” thing and shouting “You go girl!” But in a church setting, I imagine the older woman would face some really deprecating attitudes from any teenaged girls who might like to date the young man, from the man’s “hysterically paranoid parents” who might be worried about not getting any grandkids, and even from her “hypocritical” 30-something peers who might be good friends with the boy’s mother and/or have teenaged boys of their own.
I think it would be a good idea to rethink any rigid attitudes we may have about mixed-age relationships. Maybe age really IS just a number. But again, I still have concerns about abuses of power by authority figures.
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Jon, I forgot to respond to this part of your post:
“Also, what do you mean by rape in this snippet?
‘so the example in the article of the teacher in his 40’s who had sex with his 16-year-old student was rape, in my opinion.’
This sounds an awful lot like automatic assumption of guilt on the teacher’s part. Why are you so hellbent on making the authority figure out to be a bad person?”
In a previous post, I conceded that maybe it could be better classified as sexual abuse and not rape. And my main interest is in preventing teachers like this from being able to easily move to another job that gives them access to more young people. If there’s a way to protect other young people without incarceration, that would be great.
Here’s another story about what I see as an abuse of power. It’s not documented so it’s just like any story that any of us might share about ourselves on this blog. It would be interested to see what everyone’s perspective is about it.
http://www.faithstreet.com/onfaith/2014/06/30/my-affair-with-a-youth-pastor/32773
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In Japan you can buy “lolicon” videos, that is, porn movies that use legal but very young-looking, adult, consenting actresses (like 135cm-140cm tall 20-year-olds-who-look-13) to simulate sex on screen with a (sexually developed) minor. So in a sense they’ve already tried the experiment you described, and with non-genetic engineered heechy-keechys. (BTW Yeah, it’s a great book!)
Anyhoo, this market is HUGE in Japan, and considering how much Westerners share them on torrent tracker sites (the only way to get them if you can’t read Japanese and buy the digital version from them directly), I would expect the market to be huge everywhere…the only real obstacle being ambiguous laws that would STILL treat you as a pedophile even if everyone in the videos is demonstrably 100% legal, and just acting a part for entertainment purposes. They’ll just make up laws if necessary. Anything to protect the narrative, anything to prevent competition from younger, more fertile, arguably more pleasant females.
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I am done here, you are just hellbent on making sure that consensual relationships are bad when there is an authority figure involved. I for one will always give the benefit of the doubt, and stories like the one you just posted only continue the “now that I look back, I think it was abuse” stories that feminists push women to come out with.
Based off of your continued “but” arguments, I for one think that if you saw a 25 year old man with a 14 year old girl, you would immediately cringe and wish to “fix” the situation, no matter if it was just peers or not.
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I’m not in the business of trying to fix any random couple I might meet. But what do you mean by giving the adult married pastor the benefit of the doubt when he decides to have sex with a 15 year old in his youth group? If you’re done here, then that’s fine, but maybe others will have opinions on this. If the story is true — which, like any story shared without any proof, we have no way of knowing — but supposing it is, what do you think about a married pastor who goes from church to church looking for vulnerable young people to meet his sexual needs with?
This doesn’t sound like a guy who was fully intending to be a great husband and youth pastor and just “happened” to fall in love unexpectedly; it sounds more like someone with a definite intent to use that role to get laid, given that he’d tried previously tried to get something going with another girl in the group before she went off to college.
The thing about authority figures is that they have the ability to play an important role in a young person’s life, simply because of their position. Some random older man that a girl meets on the bus is just like any other guy. She may talk to him and if he seems nice, give him her contact info and have more conversations and maybe decide to meet up for a date. The amount of contact will usually progress gradually, depending on the impression she has of him, based on their one-one-one conversations. And it will usually be limited because teens usually have lot of other stuff going on in their lives, and hopefully parents who are attentive to them.
In contrast, authority figures have regular access to kids, often for long periods, and youth pastors usually have a lot of charisma and are chosen for that and for their ability to relate well with kids. They are also generally well-respected by parents and other teens. It’s really quite common for young girls to idolize a young, good looking youth minister — and to have this person start showing a special interest in them can make them feel like they’re one of the “chosen ones” and go right to their heads.
I don’t see myself as particularly “hellbent” regarding age differences in couples, although I’ll admit that when it comes to people entrusted with certain positions working with our kids, maybe I do have a blind spot. If a young person has an affair with an important authority figure and then everything goes sour, this bad experience can sour all their memories of an entire phase of their life.
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@Christian, you have a very good point. “Child Porn” can be of 17 year old “children” who are dancing in tight Leotards (google Knox vs. USA child porn). Drawings of elves, Japanese underage Hentai, and yes, a porn version of the Simpsons already yielded child porn convictions.
Most Child Porn is victimless, like sexting, selfies, photos of children in bath tub, legal teens having legal sex, selfies of teens masturbating (yes, got a man convicted for possessing his own selfie masturbation recording when he was 12).
As Professor Milton Diamond proved, availability legal “child porn” REDUCES sex crimes against children. The reason is likely that the pedophile can jerk off to reduce the urge of attacking children.
Finally, to my own surprise, it has been shown that consensual sex even with young children is usually non-traumatic (sorry for quoting research, albeit very politically incorrect and shocking): google for the “Rind Study” or check Clancy, Susan A. (2009-12-08). The Trauma Myth: The Truth About the Sexual Abuse of Children–and Its Aftermath. Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
In the 70ies, parts of the German Green party promoted scrapping age of consent laws altogether. These used to be 12 in the US, Spain, Britain everywhere, before feminists got the vote and made it their main issue to criminalize male sexuality, to raise age of consent and make prostitution illegal.
You find 60 posts about child porn witch hunt when clicking on the link in the header.
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@Christian, you have a very good point. “Child Porn” can be of 17 year old “children” who are dancing in tight Leotards (google Knox vs. USA child porn). Drawings of elves, Japanese underage Hentai, and yes, a porn version of the Simpsons already yielded child porn convictions.
Most Child Porn is victimless, like sexting, selfies, photos of children in bath tub, legal teens having legal sex, selfies of teens masturbating (yes, got a man convicted for possessing his own selfie masturbation recording when he was 12).
As Professor Milton Diamond proved, availability legal “child porn” REDUCES sex crimes against children. The reason is likely that the pedophile can jerk off to reduce the urge of attacking children.
Finally, to my own surprise, it has been shown that consensual sex even with young children is usually non-traumatic (sorry for quoting research, albeit very politically incorrect and shocking): google for the “Rind Study” or check Clancy, Susan A. (2009-12-08). The Trauma Myth: The Truth About the Sexual Abuse of Children–and Its Aftermath. Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
In the 70ies, parts of the German Green party promoted scrapping age of consent laws altogether. These used to be 12 in the US, Spain, Britain everywhere, before feminists got the vote and made it their main issue to criminalize male sexuality, to raise age of consent and make prostitution illegal.
You find 60 posts about child porn witch hunt when clicking on the link Child Porn Witch Hunt (60)
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@Christian, to add to my prior comment: you can find nanny cam videos of toddlers being shaken and beaten into brain damage and death, of adolescent football and prize fights that permanently maim “children”, of adolescents clubbed to death in gang fights, of jackass movies were adolescents hurt themselves. All this is more dangerous and harmful than 99% of so called child porn.
So it is questionable why Child Porn is singled out with insane punishment for mere possession of photos.
Google: Cruel child porn laws kill, “destroying lives unnecessarily” (Judge Jack B. Weinstein)
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“I honestly don’t care if a female OR male are interested in someone for their virginity. It isn’t up to me or anyone else to call them “evil” from the outset. What if their minds change over time? Are we to become the thought police?”
The issue isn’t whether it’s good or evil to care about virginity. The issue is that our society DOES make this distinction, especially for women, and also makes a distinction between a woman who’s only had a few sexual partners and a woman who’s had a lot. This fact alone makes me feel like EVERYONE has a right to have their sexuality protected until they reach the level of maturity where they can understand the kind of society they’re living in and the way some people will define them based on their sexual experiences.
To hear a girl say something like, “By the time I knew what a virgin was, and how my virginity was supposedly the most precious gift I could bring to my wedding night, I wasn’t a virgin anymore” is pretty heartbreaking to me. And again, I’m not saying whether this obsession with “how many cocks a woman has ridden” is good or evil — I just think everyone has a right to be mature enough to understand that the obsession exists and make their own choice as to whether they care what that particular group of men (and judgmental girls and women) thinks.
“Again, I will point out that we operated for thousands of years without these laws… Why can’t we work towards returning to these ways, instead of artificially creating the problems we are now facing?”
Okay, go back a few thousand years to Old Testament times, and it’s true that there were no age of consent laws. If an unmarried couple was caught having sex in the city, it was assumed to be consensual or someone would have heard the woman scream, so they were both stoned to death. If it happened in the country they’d give her the benefit of the doubt that she’d screamed and no one heard her, and let her live.
If the woman was already married or betrothed to someone (I think the customary age for girls to get married was about 13), then I think the man got stoned (again, if it happened in the city, the woman or girl got stoned, too). However, if the girl hadn’t been sold to a husband yet (meaning she was probably under 13), the rapist had to pay the father the bride price for a virgin, and then could decide whether he wanted to give his daughter to this man in marriage or just keep her with him.
I guess the idea was that if a man contaminated another man’s wife or fiancé, this was a worse crime than if he contaminated an unpledged woman — so long as the girl’s father still got the bride price, nothing was lost. It’s unlikely that another man would want to marry the girl at that point, but society at that time wasn’t focused on what this must have been like from the female’s perspective — it was all about men messing with other men’s property.
As far as our more recent history, it looks like age of consent laws have been around since the 13th century, though the age started out being much lower than it is now. But I wouldn’t say that Western society prior to that time was “sex positive” — would you?
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Hi Jon, I spent some time responding to your post, but it seems to have disappeared. I’ll check back later to see if Janet found it in her spam folder, before trying to write it again.
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When it comes to age of consent laws, I’d really love more input, possibly from JB and others who are parents, as well as any others who’d like to chime in. The example JB opened with, of the physically mature girl who was two years under the age of consent in her country and deceived a twenty-something male tourist she’d just met into thinking she was old enough for sex, and then tried to get him prosecuted for rape after the fact, seems to me very different from the cases I’ve heard of in which adults who’ve been entrusted to play important roles in a child’s or teenager’s life end up crossing professional (and, in my opinion, ethical) boundaries in order to use those young people to meet their own sexual needs.
And here I’m not demonizing anyone for whatever they happen to feel an attraction for. This reminds me of the JB example that another poster on another thread here just shared with me, in which she nipped a toddler temper tantrum in the bud by explaining that you can’t control your feelings but you can control what you DO. I think we’ve all experienced strong sexual attractions for some people whom we knew it would be a bad idea for us to actually hook up with, and most of us learned to process all that without actually having to act upon those desires, possibly by going off by ourselves and climaxing while thinking about that person, or whatever.
Jason Wexler introduced a valid point about a young person’s right to autonomy. What if a young person has grown up in a home where they always felt comfortable conversing about sex, had unlimited access to information (when they wanted it — not information that was forced on them before they were even interested), and got to learn a lot about different approaches to sex, including some of the prevalent mindsets in their own society that could affect them if they decided to start having sex at a young age, especially with someone who already played another important role in their life, such as a much-loved teacher.
While I think it would be bizarre for any pre-pubescent child who’d never been molested to just right out of the blue start trying to initiate sex with people, I also appreciate what Jason was saying about the messed-up viewpoint that anyone who’d reached sexual maturity was still not ready to decide whether they wanted to have sex, and to choose their own sexual partner.
When I hear about adult men wanting to remove the age of consent, I’m trying hard not to overreact, but I can’t help thinking that there’s something bizarre about a twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty-something guy who feels like he can’t enjoy satisfying sex with a girl of eighteen (or seventeen or sixteen, whatever the age of consent is in that state). I understand if all they’re concerned about is getting deceived into thinking that they’re having sex with a woman, only to be arrested afterwards. That’s a valid concern.
But, back to my example about people in positions of authority like teachers. They already know the young person’s age — and yet there’s at least one man here saying that we need to give those adult professionals the benefit of the doubt and not assume that they’re evil. This goes beyond just worrying (justifiably) about “jail bait” and being deceived. It makes me wonder whether, if there were no age of consent, there’d be a lot of men going after twelve and thirteen year old girls? And yes, maybe even a lot of women going after young boys. I’m not someone who thinks laws can solve everything, but what do you (general you) think we’ll happen if we do away with this particular law or safeguard?
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Susan, the more I think about it, the more I am inclined to think that the most sane solution is to keep age of consent laws with the two major caveats that a lot of states already have in effect: age gap and mistaken age.
In the case of a teacher, as you point out, there can be no mistaken age and the gap is probably going to be way too large., making all those relationships essentially illegal until the age of consent has been reached.
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I like reading That1Susan’s postings. On the one hand, women are strong and capable. On the other hand, they are so helpless and stupid that they cannot be held accountable for their decisions, even at age 15. She has her feminist catechism well memorized and pushes it as far as she thinks JB will let her.
Do y’all know that until the 1970’s, under age US females who were sexually active were often put into reform school for being sexually active? Then, the feminists decided that a girl of any age should be able to do anything a woman of any age could do, without going to jail. So, young men go to jail for sex with a willing young woman, while the young woman can send as many men to jail as she wishes with no penalty whatsoever. That is insane.
A couple years ago a stupid female reporter for the NY Times wrote that the age of consent in Mexico is 12 years old. What an idiot.
In fact the age of consent for girls in Mexico is 18.
The difference in Mexico is who presses charges. In the USA, anyone who has sex with an underage female is charged by the police system, no matter what the girl or her family want.
In Mexico, after age 12 (menarche in some states) only she or her family can press charges. And, under 14, if charges are pressed by the family, and he had sex with her, he is presumed guilty. Even if she says she was willing.
After age 14, the court must prove he engaged in some sort of dirty tricks, called estupro, I think. If the court finds she was willing, not guilty. And, if she was willing, she can testify in his defense.
As a real life example, nearly 40 years ago, a 12 year old girl in my neighborhood got pregnant by a 25 year old man. The family investigated and quickly determined it was consensual. The man agreed to support her and the child, and when she found out she got sex whenever she wanted, she also agreed to be his wife and cook and clean for him.
They raised three children to be productive adults. There was a fly in the ointment. Leopards do not change their spots. She banged most of the men in the neighborhood…
In the USA, the man would have gone to jail, and would have spent the rest of his life sleeping under a bridge somewhere and the family and the taxpayers would have been stuck with the bill. And, the other kids she had, who would also have been outside of marriage, would have cost a fortune in law enforcement and prison costs. Just as they do in the USA. Yet, in the USA, folks imagine they are a superior culture even as our inner cities melt down.
One does not understand his own culture until he lives for some time in another totally different culture. One of the things I learned recently, though I had all the information for nearly 30 years, is that in the USA WE HATE OLD MEN. Even old men hate old men. That1Susan hates old men.
I told my wife’s best friend that in the USA old men are called “old farts.” She looked like she wanted to throw up. Old men are respected here, unless they are way outside the curve. The rich old man lost his wife, and when he was 78 had a child with a 20 year old ranch girl. No one mocked either one of them. He wanted good sex with a young woman and she wanted a better life for herself and her children, than extreme poverty in the ranch. They both got what they wanted.
And, everyone, including women, tell me that if I become a widow, my next woman can be in her 20’s. In my case, because of personal preference, probably an unwed mother of good character, or a young widow with several kids. In other words, a woman who otherwise can’t find a decent husband. If a young woman can get a husband in her age bracket, I think she should.
Oh, almost forgot. That1Susan seems bent out of shape by men of authority seducing young women. While you slept, Susan, and it must have been a very long sleep, most women of all ages decided they preferred men of power and authority. So, how many students would spread ’em for the school or church janitor?
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Do you think the age of consent should be 14?
If so, I am assuming you want an age restriction. How much older can the person be?
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nice read, and great points. You used the word “hate” for old men, but another phrase that can be used here is “unfounded distrust”. See, for some people, it doesn’t matter if the old man is the most upstanding/kindhearted individual in the world. There must be something evil lurking behind him, and she won’t see it any other way.
I have seen this distrust/hatred of old men many times in my life, and I can’t wrap my mind around it. Although feminism has played a large part in this, I am sure there are other factors that have lead to this. Perhaps one of them being what you just pointed out: The fact that we as Americans think our culture is superior to everyone else’s. This even includes our age of consent laws.
I am surprised that more politicians have not run on the platform of “age of consent”. Making it his/her top priority to make sure no countries have an age of consent law under the age of 16. *saving the children* would be his/her motto, and it would easily get him/her votes. (all these dual pronouns give the benefit of the doubt, but we all know which gender is pushing for this kind of stuff the hardest)
You hit the nail on the head in your last paragraph. Has anyone noticed that when a man of any age decides to court a girl, he does his best to give off an aura of power/confidence? Wait a second…. So a person is upset when an ACTUAL figure with power/money uses this to court someone? Yet when an average man trumps up his cards (*read LIES) you are okay with it?
Yes, I have been using this quaint term “court”. Yes, I am expecting the response of “it isn’t courting, it is abuse!”. Again, the assumption of “evil” is strong with you. What do you say that to the man in the aforementioned story who decided to take care of the girl? We live in such a paranoid society, that we can’t even accept goodness when it slaps us in the face.
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“I like reading That1Susan’s postings. On the one hand, women are strong and capable. On the other hand, they are so helpless and stupid that they cannot be held accountable for their decisions, even at age 15.”
You’re ignoring the fact that in modern societies, there’s a wide variation in terms of the ages when individual boys and girls become mature men and women. Also, because of family instability and divorce, some young people are very emotionally needy and this interferes with their ability to function as rational adults.
“She has her feminist catechism well memorized and pushes it as far as she thinks JB will let her.”
JB “lets” anyone post, whether she agrees with them or not, so long as they abide by basic standards of decency.
“That1Susan hates old men.”
At fifty, I think I’m probably pretty close to being an old woman, and my husband, who is fifty-six, has been getting AARP stuff in the mail for years. I love, love, love my old guy. I though it was cute when we were engaged and he came to pick me up from work one day, and one of my colleagues thought he was my dad — and my honey was so shocked. I told him it was because of his greying hair, and then he was really shocked because he hadn’t noticed how grey he was. 🙂
I also love my younger brother, who being only sixteen months younger than me, is probably pretty close to being an old guy, too. And I adored my father and paternal grandpa, who are both gone now; my maternal grandpa died before I was born, but I loved all my uncles on my moms side, most of whom have died of OLD AGE, which means they were OLD MEN.
I think you’re extrapolating my concern about one particular category of adult men into a literal hatred for ALL MEN above a certain age. And you’re extrapolating my concern about adults who seek to gratify their own sexual needs with the young people they’ve been trusted to care for, into a hatred of any adult who has a sexual relationship with a MUCH YOUNGER ADULT.
If a young single mom and an elderly man are happy together, why should I care? And even if she doesn’t have kids but just happens to be a young adult who’s fallen in love with someone old enough to be her grandpa, they’re the ones living their lives — I have my own life to live. It’s kind of like, I prefer cream and sugar with my coffee but someone else’s enjoyment of black coffee with no sugar doesn’t wreck my morning coffee for me. Why should it?
“
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“You hit the nail on the head in your last paragraph. Has anyone noticed that when a man of any age decides to court a girl, he does his best to give off an aura of power/confidence? Wait a second…. So a person is upset when an ACTUAL figure with power/money uses this to court someone? Yet when an average man trumps up his cards (*read LIES) you are okay with it?”
Where did I say that it was okay for people to lie to each other? Of course we all try to put our best foot forward when seeking a mate, but there’s a difference between that and intentionally deceiving the other person — which is a sin that can be committed by both men and women, by the way. But in my experience with falling in love a couple of times, I really FELT like I was a transformed person. It wasn’t that I set out to deceive anyone, but seeing myself the way that they temporarily saw me in the early stages of infatuation — well, it was kind of like all my most positive qualities were greatly exaggerated and the negative qualities were temporarily dispersed because I was so happy, happy, happy all the time.
But anyhow, regarding your question about a man utilizing his ACTUAL position of authority as a means of gratifying his sexual urges with one or more of the young girls transitioning into womanhood who’ve been placed in his care — you really see no difference between this and a man simply trying to make the best possible impression on a woman that he likes? What if we reverse the situation to that of a female teacher wearing sexy clothes to class that would be suitable to wear for a night out on the town with an adult male; since she has an ACTUAL sexy body, is it okay for her to “trump up her cards” with the teenaged boys that she’s teaching in the same way she might with an adult male?
Yes, I’m sure there are a few female teachers who dress provocatively, just as there are a few male teachers who cross some lines, too. But I’ve never seen any of my teen daughter’s teachers dressed provocatively, so that’s why I’m guessing that the number of teachers who’d like to complicate their jobs by being “titillating” is not all that high. Teaching is a tough job, and most teachers find it hard enough to keep kids focused on theirs schoolwork as is.
But, of course, my point was whether you think it’s okay for any adult, male or female, to try to “trump up” his or her cards as a means of seducing one or more of the young people under his or her care and authority?
“What do you say that to the man in the aforementioned story who decided to take care of the girl?”
Well, I’d be very upset with any 25-year-old who had sex with a 12-year-old child of mine, especially if he knew my child was only 12. With the example, I have no way of knowing whether the young man thought the girl was older, and it doesn’t sound like this person was in a position of authority in the girl’s life. Again, if it were my child’s teacher, this person would obviously know the age of the child — plus this person would have been a professional who’d been entrusted with the care and teaching of my children as well as those of others.
It’s weird because you think I have a blind spot due to the horror I feel about ANY teacher, male or female, who has sex with underage students. And I think you have a blind spot in that you see absolutely no difference between the responsibility that a teacher or other authority figure has taken to look out for children’s best interests, and the responsibility of some random tourist or other person around town who could be deceived into thinking a child was much older.
But anyhow, if my 12-year-old daughter were impregnated by a 25-year-old man, I’d learn everything I could about the context in which it happened — as in, could he reasonably thought that she was quite close to being an adult? Does he seem like a good person? And of course, my husband would be reacting to the situation, too. I’m just glad that I don’t think that’s ever likely to happen to us, because it seems like the shits.
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I have one question to any adult who’d like to see the age of consent in their country or state removed or lowered: Would you say that your primary motivation is to uphold the rights of children to freely explore their sexuality with persons of any age to whom they happen to be attracted?
Or would you say that your primary motivation is to live out your own sexual fantasies of having sex with much younger people than you can safely have sex with now?
For people with the first concern — the rights of young people to bang old people — I hear young girls talkin’ about what’s hot and while it doesn’t seem at all weird to me that Jason liked people 5 to 12 years older, I seriously don’t hear any young girls salivating over men in their 40s and 50s (yes some may fall for a guy that age but their “older guy” fantasy could probably be lived out just as satisfactorily with a guy only a couple years older. 🙂 Plus, among the women I know who started having sex at young ages, I’ve met many who wished they hadn’t started so soon — and absolutely NONE who wished they’d started earlier.
For people with the second concern — the rights of old fogies like myself to bang hawt young people — in my state, the age of consent is 17 — and frankly, being 50 myself, 17 is quite freakin’ young. So is 25 for that matter. I don’t personally want to have sex with young people — but if that was my fantasy, I can’t imagine not being satisfied with the youth of someone in their late teens or 20’s.
So I’m sorry if it seems like I’m demonizing middle-aged or older men who just feel like something’s seriously missing from their life because the youngest thing they can shag is a 17-year-old. I guess this is just one of my blind spots.
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24 is up http://thefitnesstest.net/2015/03/chapter-twenty-four/
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you are right… she really is just a feminist. Good luck arguing with her if you want. I would absolutely love to see her reaction if one of her daughters brought home a 40 year old man. Heck, who knows, maybe her husband will “grab the shotgun” as so many people like to joke about these days.
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Yippee! I’m off to read it now.
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So, according to you, an egalitarian neo-traditionalist is really a feminist? I used to think egalitarian meant feminist, but then I started reading this blog and realized that the most vocal feminists were really not in favor of equality for men — and most importantly, for fathers, so I stopped identifying as feminist. Maybe you need to quit focusing on the dictionary definition of feminism and read more JB. That should clear things up for you. 🙂
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Well, yesterday, I was rather puzzled by a couple of posters here who felt like I hated men and was demonizing male sexuality. This was puzzling for me because I thought I’d made it pretty clear that I have no problem with big age gaps in relationships so long as the younger person has reached a high enough level of maturity and knowledge of the world to be able to make a reasoned choice. I also think I made it clear that I felt the same safeguards should be applied to situations in which the older person is the woman, and the stricter rules that I’d apply to adults who’ve been entrusted with children’s care should be enforced equally, whether the adult happens to be male or female.
So, I wondered, why was this seen as demonizing male sexuality? And I think I’ve figured it out: It’s because even though there is a small portion of women who are attracted to beautiful young boys, there is a much higher portion of men who are attracted to beautiful young girls. So the safeguards protecting young people affect men more than women. And yes, it makes perfect evolutionary sense for a man to seek out the youngest and most beautiful mate he can land, just as it makes evolutionary sense for a woman to seek out the most mature and financially stable mate she can land.
Since this thread has been focused on pedophilia and age-of-consent laws, maybe some of you don’t realize that I am also very much in favor of doing away with gender distinctions in divorce and child custody cases. Maybe you think I’m just all about protecting young girls and couldn’t care less about protecting old men and men in general.
I do realize that an older man who falls head over heels in love and gives his heart and “all his worldly goods” to a beautiful young girl is running a very grave risk that she doesn’t care about him at all and is just in the relationship for what she can get. And of course, it’s one thing for a beautiful young girl to select a mate based on who can provide the best life for her financially, and to do so with a willingness to lovingly fulfill her part of the bargain by being affectionate, sexually available, and willing to stand by him in every hardship, and another thing entirely for her to deceptively enter that relationship in order to enjoy the good times and then bale when things get tough, or she gets bored.
An egalitarian court system can at least provide some protection financially — but of course that isn’t going to heal the ache in his heart, over both the betrayal and the very public humiliation. And whereas a jilted and humiliated woman gets tons of support and empathy from every quarter, a jilted older man is often subjected to cruel ridicule by his female peers, who may even tell him that he doesn’t deserve any sympathy because he was “old enough to know better, hahaha.”
And yes, these cruel old women are just being bitter and jealous — and sadly, fixing the court system is going to be a piece of cake compared to trying to fix one of them, though it may be somewhat easier if they’re not so steeped in today’s brand of feminism that they’ve lost the ability to see their feelings for what they really are.
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Your whole comment is agreeable, except for this part:
“so long as the younger person has reached a high enough level of maturity and knowledge of the world to be able to make a reasoned choice.”
Who is to be the judge of this? When you get down to it, people think age of consent laws “judge the heart”. When in reality, nobody can know a person’s heart truly except for the person himself.
This is part of why I wish these laws to be abolished (given lots of caveats, such as reducing child labor laws so that younger people can learn some personal responsibility. If we can instead of pushing for higher age of consent laws, push for teenagers to match their counterparts from centuries past, then there would be no need for these laws.)
This ties into a good point that guy made about Mexico. Since when is it the business of the school or court system to be the FIRST on deciding whether a man is guilty or not? How about close family and/or friends? Granted, considering today’s societal climate, these “close family and friends” are as paranoid as everyone else, but at the very least it would be a step in the right direction.
Also, this whole time people debate the “age of consent”, has it occurred to anyone that some guys are interested in a relationship not for sex primarily? That maybe, part of why they turn to younger women is because they are A. Not yet fully corrupted by feminism and B. Have a higher chance of becoming their own person (with no ties to feminism or other ridiculous ideas)? and C. Accept kindness more readily?
Yes, the naysayers will say that C. is “grooming”. Yet has anyone sat down and truly looked at what the difference is between “courting” and “manipulation”? Here is a hint. It hast to do with the heart, which NO one else can see. So instead of assuming the worst, why not stop being so paranoid? Also, has anyone considered that their “gut reaction” to C, is another reason why men would prefer talking to younger people? (some of them don’t because they are so afraid of the current legal system, as well as what “legal” women will think of them.)
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I didn’t know that anyone was pushing for higher age-of-consent laws. It looks like all U.S. states set it somewhere between 16 and 18. Some allow for an age-gap provision and some don’t, and some allow for mistake-of-age defense and some don’t. I think all states should have age-gap and mistake-of-age provisions. Allowing underage young people who feel ready for a sexual relationship to have sex with someone close to their own age seems fair. Also, for any who have a fantasy about being with someone “older” — I can recall that when I was 14 or 15, an “older man” could be a guy just one or two years older. So it can be a way for them to live out that fantasy.
As far as the 12-year-old girl in Mexico being impregnated by the 25-year-old man — yes, I realize that he took care of her, but from the way the poster here described her, it seems like her childhood introduction to sex — possibly even prior to him — had a really negative effect on her character development. I’m not going to imply that every woman or man who goes out and sleeps with everyone else on the block is a “victim” — however, even Hillary has stated that Bill’s abusive childhood caused him to develop a sexual addiction. I certainly don’t see him as a total victim — I’m just saying that things we experience during our formative years can color our relationship skills for the rest of our lives, and the behavior of the woman in Mexico seems likely to have stemmed from some sort of a sexual addiction.
So I think that when it comes to young people at that in-between age where it’s impossible to know exactly how mature they are, it’s better to err on the side of caution and prevent adults from having sexual access to them. With someone close to their own age, if they decide to have sex, it’s more likely to be a consensual decision rather than something they fall into because of being totally bowled over by expensive gifts and jewelry, expensive experiences such as dinners in high-end restaurants, and most importantly, the older person’s overall aura of power.
This isn’t even about the intentions of the older person — this person may be trying their darndest to win over the young person because they want so badly to spoil them and give them a wonderful life and protect them from all the dangers out there. I just see a lot of potential for harm if the younger person’s not ready to deal with all this, whereas I see absolutely no potential for harm if a young person’s protected from the romantic attentions of much older suitors until the age of 16 or 18, whatever the age of consent is in their state.
I also don’t see how this really harms a middle-aged or older person who’s attracted to much younger people. A 16 or 18-year-old is still pretty darned young and beautiful, don’t you think? And for an older person who’s not just in it for the sex, but is really looking for a life partner, they’re a lot less likely to end up being unfairly prosecuted for mistakenly sleeping with an underage person, as they’d be taking a lot more time to get to know anyone they were in a relationship with before progressing to that phase.
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I’ve often thought that once CGI becomes realistic enough, real child porn could almost disappear. Imagine if you could make a realistic animation showing, well, whatever a pedophile wants. While it might not be the same as having two six-year-old kids, or a six-year-old and an adult, performing real sexual acts, it could be realistic enough that a pedophile no longer feels the need to have a “real” kid. High-quality CGI child porn could be the equivalent of an E-cig for a smoker: not the real thing, but good enough.
And I would also argue that since Martin has created a world for Game of Thrones in which menarche marks the age of adulthood, sex after the age of menstruation is not child porn within the “rules” of that fictional world, and therefore is not child porn for those of us reading or watching the series.
I also agree that “mistaken age” should be a legitimate defense. A person in a bar, club, or other adult establishment is automatically assumed to be at least 18. And with the proliferation of fake ID’s, even asking a potential partner for his/her ID might not be good enough. What’s next – requiring a notarized letter before sex?
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Here’s another beautiful reminder that age is just a number, and age-gap relationships can bring many wonderful things to the lives of both people involved (though off course I still feel that the younger person needs to at least be an adult).
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/27/i-was-32-when-i-met-the-love-of-my-life-she-was-92?CMP=ema_565
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My most popular blog post of all time (completely unintentionally):
http://agalltyr.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/apparently-some-people-think-the-kids-show-lazytown-is-sexual/
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Susan, I stopped following this thread long before you posted this, and so I missed most of your other heated arguments with the people who otherwise agree with me. I have to say that while I would like to believe that if I fell into category 2 with regards to your question (that I just really wanted to bang pubescent youths without negative consequences), that I would have the courage and honesty to say so. However I also have a political Machiavellian mind and so I know that if you seemed convinced by the first argument as you appear to be, that I would view it as politically more advantageous to tell you I was interested in the rights and freedom of young people to express and cultivate their autonomy. In other words I would lie, or hopefully exaggerate and say both applied to me. That said I think you are missing another possible reason people may be supporting abolition or significant modification of age of consent laws. One of the people you were arguing with gave me the impression (and I have no prior knowledge to back this up) that he was prosecuted under such a law. I think it is very plausible that people who have had their lives destroyed or seen the lives of their loved ones destroyed by these kinds of laws, and they want to stop the damage that they do. I can’t speak as to whether the person you were arguing with whom I suspect was prosecuted, was a victim of overzealous or inappropriate prosecution, or fell into the category of “this is who these laws were really meant to protect us from”; however I do know people who were prosecuted absurdly and somewhat ironically it was young girls. I have seen first hand therefore, just how broken and inappropriate the application of these laws are, the punishment and persecution that those convicted under these laws face, even if they are the kind of terrible teacher with student abuser that you want to hold onto as still bad, is far beyond the severity and scope of the crimes they committed or are being prosecuted for. So one could also oppose these laws at least in America under “cruel and unusual punishment” grounds. Oh and as bad as the persecution was for the young women I know/knew they were after all women (girls really), they were victims of childhood sexual assault themselves, who were transferring their abuse to their younger siblings, with no lasting or serious damage (what they endured was much, much worse) and so I know that the persecution they faced was blunted by these mitigating circumstances, I strongly suspect that the middle aged male teacher with a consenting student, or the 22 year old man with the not quite but almost legal girlfriend actually gets much worse, so I think that’s another reason people might support abolition.
Oh and unrelated to the above, but in response to something else you mentioned about 17 being plenty young enough for an old man, for an actual hebephile (someone who is interested or attracted to pubescent youths), no 17 is too old.
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Hi Jason, I hadn’t thought about third reason. That’s a great point.
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