DeepNeuralNetwork
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User ID: 799
DeepNeuralNetwork
5hr ago
But... how do you tell the difference? In a legal sense, how does the law get set up in a way that you can prove one or the other beyond a reasonable doubt?
I've noticed a problem that a lot of the dumbest laws that makes no sense today were set up in the 20th century. Much older customs are Lindy; they persist between ages. Very recent laws might make sense for right now. But stuff invented by people between 1910 and 1970 were temporary patches for a bygone era. High age of consent laws are an example of this. 15 year olds just aren't as sheltered as they were in 1940, and trials aren't just based on witnesses and testimony like they were in 1940. When someone has a relationship, there is a huge electronic paper trail of the promises and dynamics of that relationship. Therefore, the government can prove much more subtle things than just "she is 15 and they had sex." Through online messages and social media, the government can show where a man lied and did not follow through. The law does not recognize this because it was created 100 years ago for a specific people that are now gone, when all of that would have been spoken in private, mouth to mouth, in a world where that couldn't even be secretly recorded, leaving no objective evidence behind. There is no reason to assume that law is the best for us, with all of our technology, medicine, hygiene, and education.
I believe adultery should be a felony and deceptive seduction should be a crime, maybe a felony. So in the case of a 40 year old and a teenager, one or both of those applies in most cases. If neither applies, then we are condemning age gaps or fornication, which could be okay, but I'm not sure how the mainstream society can consistently justify that (they never justify anything though, it's always just feelings).
If these chain relationships had been with 40 year old, wealthy, sexually mature/greedy/desperate men this would have likely been a lot worse.
Why, other than STDs, cutting out teenage boys, adultery, and deception? I think all of those except cutting out should be illegal on their own. Cutting out is good actually because I don't think most teenage boys are mature enough for dating. Personally I was not mature enough to date for marriage until I was 20. I think they ruin the girls far worse than a 20 something could. 40 somethings are in between, they're more mature but you get into the massive age gap issue and the question as to why a 40 something is dating a 15 year old. Is it frequently adultery? Did his wife die in childbirth? Otherwise, why is he even available for that? And so on.
Again, anyone acting in good faith can just date them without having sex for a couple years and everything is fine.
Say this to the gays and see what happens. I don't find this reasoning consistent with current sexual ethics; it's special pleading, and the exception to the rule can't be justified.
DeepNeuralNetwork
5hr ago
I'm really struggling to envision how this would work in practice.
Prosecutor charges defendant with rape or sexual assault and argues with evidence that the charge applies because the victim lacked the cognitive ability to consent to sex, due to being too young of a child.
A 20-year-old man has consensual sex with a 15-year-old girl, but it's okay because "she seemed really mature for her age"?
It would be okay because she was not mentally handicapped. Normal 15 year olds understand sex.
How would this synergise (or not) with other rights only afforded to people who have reached the age of majority? 15-year-olds can vote, drink alcohol, smoke, buy guns etc. provided they can demonstrate that they're unusually mature for their age? Can you imagine the administrative overhead involved in having a public body vet the emotional maturity of every 15-, 16- and 17-year-old in the land on a case-by-case basis?
I think all of those are fine for 15 year olds as long as their parents can veto it. In fact that's how it was for a long time until the late 20th century. They used to have smoking rooms in high schools (for students) and they would bring their rifles to school and so on. What is more important is whether they can not have their parents be their guardians. I think there should be the ability for smart 15 year olds to become emancipated in cases where their parents lack ability, are abusive, or are just too different from their own tastes. This is very rare, however, but courts already hear emancipation cases. Most 15 year olds probably don't want to be emancipated since they get along with their parents and depend on them. In fact the opposite is more frequently the case, many parents keep parenting until their child is in their early 20s, which is probably why the age of adulthood in the US used to be 21. This happens because their 18 and 19 year olds are still dependent on them and don't trust their own judgement. For example, I bought a gun when I was 18. Looking back I definitely did not need it and I was glad my parents took it away from me. I went to college and they found I had a fake ID when I came back for the summer and that got taken too when I was 19. A lot of girls had tracking apps on their phones for their parents during freshman year of university and when I was 21, a friend wanted his freshman girlfriend to come live with him in a different city while he did an internship, but her father wouldn't allow her.
As for the franchise, I don't care at all because I don't vote. The reason for that is that I don't accept mass democracy as a political system, but that's a totally different can of worms.
DeepNeuralNetwork
6hr ago
People who find a reason to say five or six when I say 15 are simply FUDing. I'm increasingly convinced that nobody is actually attracted to pre-adolescent children, dogs, or decayed corpses. The roots of sexual behavior towards these are rather extreme horniness and other mental illnesses. If true, this would imply it's straight FUD to talk about "Paedophiles out there claiming six year olds experience sexual desire" -- this is not a real thing outside of a couple of shock artists. Equating it to a 20 year old dating a 15 year old is just incorrect.
DeepNeuralNetwork
6hr ago
No one is attracted to 10 year olds. They get together at 15 and 20, then time goes forwards, not backwards.
DeepNeuralNetwork
6hr ago
By high age of consent I mean 18. If you are a 21 year old man, it's normal to only seek women younger than yourself. That means 18-20. But statistics show you are going to be attracted to girls as young as 15. Which means the 15-17 year old age range is artificially cut out of your dating pool.
DeepNeuralNetwork
20hr ago
So rape that leaves no injury isn't rape?
It's rape, but I have to have evidence it happened other than victim testimony. If the accused denies the victim's testimony, and there's no other evidence of rape, then they cancel out and I wouldn't convict.
I see this is not just about the age of consent.
You thought I liked little kids but really I'm just anti-feminist.
DeepNeuralNetwork
20hr ago
I present to the jury the transcript of the defendant's sexual encounter with the victim: https://litreactor.com/columns/themes-of-pedophilia-in-the-works-of-piers-anthony
"Your father wants to have sex with you, but doesn't dare, and your brother wants to, but doesn't know how." "What's sex?" "That's when a man and a woman—a grown man and grown woman—get together and do it. Children aren't supposed to." She didn't know what he meant. A look of great perplexity showed on her face. "What do they do?" "They take off their clothes and lie on a bed and, well, they do it." "What do they do? I don't understand!" "Well, he puts his—I guess you don't know the words—his thing in her thing." "Why?" "Because it's a hell of a lot of fun, kid!" "You mean like when Daddy plays with me?" "Yes, only more so. A lot more so." "I want to do it!" she told him.
Jury, I claim that this transcript proves the victim had no idea what sex was when she "agreed" to it. Consent is defined as informed agreement. What say ye on the victim's informedness.
"Guilty".
...
You can never make this argument for a mentally normal 15 year old.
DeepNeuralNetwork
21hr ago
There's fiction, and there's real life. In a fictional book, a character can be any age, any size, and still behave in any way. In real life, those features correlate strongly. It's easy to write an adult, mention she's 5 years old, and about 4 feet tall, and then have her wax eloquently about her passion for her lover on a stand. In real life, 5 year olds can barely string a coherent adult sentence together, and not about abstract ideas.
testimony of victims of child sexual abuse who later claim they were too young to consent and that even if they enjoyed it at the time, it fucked them up later in life, I suggest you watch some parole hearings, of which there are many on YouTube.
Link? How old were the victims? How does one enjoy something and then have it insidiously fuck them up later if there's no physical damage? Is it heartbreak? Addiction? Those are the only two experiences like that I can imagine. I'm not sure what they would be addicted to. Sex? I don't think it works like that, people just have a sex drive. As for heartbreak, what if it's just a lover's quarrel gone wrong? How come it's not illegal to break my heart?
Except that once we accept your arguments for why young men should not be denied the pleasures of a 15-year-old, you really don't have much except vaguely-defined "physical and mental development" to argue against going much younger.
What you call vaguely defined is in fact scientifically measured. What you prefer to my indices are the stated feelings of older women. As a rule, I can't condone the idea of labeling someone a felon because a woman says she's offended by him. She's got to show some physical damage or demonstrate some kind of financial or physical grievance using hard evidence. Maybe the difference between me and age of consent should be 18 folks is that I won't convict a man or legislate based solely on woman's scorn.
(There are children who go through very precocious puberty. Should they be on the menu?)
I already answered that with the "common law age of consent" idea. If it wasn't clear, puberty timing doesn't appear to correlate much with intelligence, so no, I would not buy precocious puberty as a defense if the girl clearly can't mentally understand consent because, for instance, she is 9.
DeepNeuralNetwork
21hr ago
Enough to matter. Mostly outside of large American coastal cites, though.
DeepNeuralNetwork
21hr ago
Serious question, bub: You keep talking about your "lived experience." So I assume you are not a virgin. I'm not going to ask if you've ever banged an underage girl
The lived experience is me at 15. I only know what went on in my head at 15 for sure, not anybody else's.
but I am going to ask: assuming you have had sex with a virgin, why didn't you marry her?
This is a loaded question, because I did marry her.
DeepNeuralNetwork
23hr ago
What age do girls stop playing with dolls? Do they play with them at 14? They're playing with dolls during their freshman year of high school?
DeepNeuralNetwork
23hr ago
If 15, why not 14? If 14, why not 13? If 13, why not 12 - after all in the Classical world 12 year olds were married! (as you have used as an example yourself).
As age falls, the number of men who are disrupted decreases, while the reasons for disrupting increase. Eventually, you get children who don't desire sex, can't get pregnant, and don't understand it. It's pretty clear that the age of consent should be higher than that number, and that number is probably greater than 10 or 11. Probably it's between 13 and 15, if you look at the recent modern world. I personally think 13 is too young for sex because I think it's probably the minimum age a girl can really fall in love with a man, she's very inexperienced at that age, and any man (or boy) ought to wait and meet her family before taking her virginity, which she should definitely have. And 13 year olds still have mild intelligence deficit compared to adults that goes away by 15. If I had to pick an exact age, I'm split between 14 and 15. Maybe I would pick 14.5 because it would be funny and it would highlight the arbitrary nature of the law. "How old are you?" "14." "Which type of 14??" LOL
DeepNeuralNetwork
23hr ago
Ah. Are we getting to the real nub of the argument now? And how many 20 year old men want to have babies with their 15 year old girlfriends, as opposed to getting to stick their dick into a hot, wet hole?
Plenty I'm sure. But how many 15 year old girls want to have babies with their boyfriend, as opposed to getting their hot, wet, well I'll not finish this, but you know what I mean? Are you saying 15 year old girls date for marriage at a higher rate than older women?
But why don't you?
They want to convict people of felonies based on their experience. But it's canceled out by mine and others, plus lived experience isn't enough for what they want anyway.
It's bad for society when minors are exploited, even if minors consent to the exploitation and feel they are not being exploited and that they really do love the guy.
What do you mean by exploitation exactly? How is this bad for society, even if it makes minors happy?
DeepNeuralNetwork
1d ago
15 and 20, not 13 and 40. Male feelings matter too.
DeepNeuralNetwork
1d ago
Married off at 12 does not necessarily mean "and the older husband immediately deflowered his pre-teen bride"; often the extremely young ages were more to do with locking down alliances and getting prime inheritances into your hands e.g. Charles Brandon, aged 29, became betrothed to his 8 year old ward Elizabeth Grey which enabled him to be raised to the peerage as she was heiress to a title and a fortune. This contract was annulled when he married Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth was married off aged 10 to the 17 year old Henry Courtenay. She died aged 14 so it is unlikely the marriage was ever consummated.
Later Charles Brandon married a 14 year old who he was also the ward of, and they definitely consummated because she gave birth to a son at the age of 15.
DeepNeuralNetwork
1d ago
I support returning to traditional sexual mores. But if we don't, the harms should be fairly distributed between the sexes, not excessively laid upon young men, who are already the biggest losers in the sexual revolution. Old guys can cheat on their wives with 19 year olds with impunity, girls can do whatever they want, and even when they make money and status off of it they get to avoid shame by proclaiming victim status decades later, and this is taken seriously, and young men get a felony if they resist losing half of their dating pool to high age of consent. That doesn't make sense.
DeepNeuralNetwork
1d ago
Elsewhere in the thread I said I supported a "common law age of consent," where the aptitude for consent is judged by a jury in a trial that charges rape or sexual assault, where the prosecutor brings evidence that the victim lacks mental capacity. My priors are that in 99% of cases involving 15 year olds that are successful now, the state will be unable to meet this standard. But in 99% of cases involving 10 year olds, they will be able to meet this standard. It's fine with me to have 1% outliers, after all, people differ a lot in intrinsic qualities other than age.
While I wouldn't lose sleep over lowering the AOC to 15, nor am I losing sleep over it being 18.
The problem here is that most cases over 15 result in serious harm to a man, and little to no harm to the girl. If the age is lowered, you will introduce slightly more mild harm to girls and decrease serious harm (prison, felony status, sex offender registration) to young men while also causing positive externalities like the expansion of young male dating pools, increases in young marriage and increases in the TFR. The issue is therefore asymmetrical; an age of consent of 18 is plausibly far less optimal than an age of consent of 15, when it comes to the amount of harm and negative externalities either causes.
DeepNeuralNetwork
1d ago
10 year olds have a serious intelligence deficit compared to adults. 10 year old pregnancy is extremely harmful. The cohort of men attracted to 10 year olds is a small percent of the population, and they tend to have other mental illnesses. Even as a smart person, I personally don't think I could have consented to sex at only 10 years old. I didn't understand it enough. I don't believe any of these are true at 15.
DeepNeuralNetwork
1d ago
How is that weird if the main harm is pregnancy?
DeepNeuralNetwork
1d ago
We're not criminalising loving relationships, we're criminalising the sexual exploitation of minors, and as with literally every law in the history of the human race there are bound to be weird edge cases where it could plausibly be argued no real harm has been done.
You're not criminalising sexual exploitation of minors. Exploitation means to use someone unfairly for benefit. There is no clause in the law that the girl must be used unfairly, even though this would be easy to demonstrate. For example, if a man makes promises to her over text, has sex with her, cheats on her, and then dumps her, that would qualify as sexual exploitation. Indeed, at the very least, if criminalising exploitation were the goal, there would be no close-in-age exemptions for teenage boys, and testimony from the girl that she loves the man would ruin the case. And it's not a weird edge case. In every case I've studied, either no harm is done, harm does not rise to the level of a felony considering the values of society (heartbreak doesn't cut it for me, I demand my heart to be protected too and otherwise I'm not willing to put the mere feelings of teenage girls over the mating interests of young men), or the case is an easy way out after a rape or abuse allegation, which is a de facto violation of the 5th amendment of the bill of rights, which states:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
If the case is known to really be about a rape, and the sentence and punishment is proportional to that effect, but a lesser crime is prosecuted, yet the worse crime is in fact the motivation for it, then the right to not be "eld to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury" as well as the right to "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" has been violated. In other words, the state must prove the real crime, not pass unjustifiable laws and then use excessive punishment for the crime as written described, because "everybody knows it's really about rape or exploitation."
As written, statutory rape punished as a felony with prison time also violates 8th amendment rights.
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
If a man is convicted of statutory rape, then he had consensual sex with a teenage girl. If "everybody knows" he's a rapist, too bad, he committed an unserious crime per the letter of the law. That crime being a felony or requiring "sex offender" status seems excessive and cruel and unusual to me. Considering that as written, the crime has no victims, jail time also seems cruel and unusual. The state has the hard job of proving the real crime, not bypassing the Bill of Rights with a funny trick.
DeepNeuralNetwork
1d ago
More care should have been given to only allowing questions that are predictable. In other words, research is rewarded. There should also be a mechanism for making all of the research public. That way, the markets are informative to everyone, and only marginally productive research is rewarded. Instead, there is an incentive to dupe people, and reckless gambling is allowed on myriad questions that are obviously unpredictable. Gambling and duping markets are clearly in tension with the stated goals of prediction markets.
DeepNeuralNetwork
1d ago
I have no goal here other than intellectual exploration. Nothing discussed here will have any impact on the law; if my goal were physical and ephebephilc I'd be well served just living in one of the many countries where the age of consent is 14 or 15. I may in fact be a citizen of such a country; not everyone is from the Anglosphere. I'm on this topic because American outrage around under-18 age of consent laws and the connection to the Epstein case is fascinating. I don't understand the outrage at all, it's totally alien to me.
DeepNeuralNetwork
1d ago
I've thought for a while on your comment, and I think your main point is that most men who would date teenage girls are bad, and therefore such relationships should be banned. I'm not convinced that's actually the case though. We can't look at the kind of men who do it despite it being a felony as representative of the kind of men who would do it if it were legal. When I examine the historical record, I see a lot of normal men having relationships that would be considered a felony today, due to high age of consent laws. You say
so it's not like these laws are causing tons of harm to people. The laws only get people too impulsive, impatient, or predatory to wait, which is exactly who we want off the streets.
But by preventing loving relationships from forming in the first place, the laws cause significant harm. The 21 year old dating pool is essentially cut in half by high age of consent laws and the irrational taboos they enable. This causes large harm to normal 21 year old men, akin to a regulation that seriously disrupts the market for some good which most people need to be happy.
The justification for that huge disruption just seems too thin to me. The justification for the punitive treatment of those who defy it also doesn't sit right for me. While many of those people might be otherwise criminal types, since normal people aren't rebellious, I can't get behind using overly broad, disruptive, and unjust laws as a way to minority report "bad seeds" into prison before they commit a real crime. Accepting that logic permits essentially any bad law. I could make it a felony to wear yellow punishable by decades of imprisonment. I'm sure most of the people who don't obey might otherwise not be obedient, or intelligent enough to understand the consequences of their actions, but my law is still a bad idea because it is unjust. In fact, one could even call this logic eugenics: "The law is bad, sure, but the average person prosecuted is dysgenic, so it stands on eugenic grounds." The problem with this is that society does not permit eugenics as a justification for any laws, so it doesn't sit right with me. Even if it did, there would be better ways to go about it that harm normal men much less.
You can score high on an IQ test, but it takes a lot longer for people to develop some emotional maturity and shed off their childhood naivety.
I'm not convinced childhood naivety is a serious issue. It doesn't pass evolutionary psychology reasoning that 15 year old girls should be too naive to enter into a romantic relationship. In fact, society doesn't buy this either, since many are in romantic relationships. It's just age gaps that are not tolerated, but 15 to 17 year old boys are probably worse when it comes to lying, breaking hearts, and using girls.
Teenagers are not ready to raise children. They're still in high school, if they drop out of school they'll have to get a low paying job and will have worse financial prospects for the rest of their life.
Getting someone to drop out of school shouldn't be a felony. Pregnant girls usually don't drop out of high school due to their pregnancy. I've heard from older people that during the "teen pregnancy" era, it wasn't too rare for girls to come to high school with a baby bump or wearing a wedding ring. Now you never see that, but it's because teen pregnancy and marriage stopped, not because teenagers that are married can't finish school. And marriage and pregnancy is a lot more than just dating. How long do most people wait for marriage and kids? If a 15 year old and a 20 year old fall in love, she will probably be about 18 by the time they are married and done with high school by the time they consider kids. People don't normally meet and reproduce in the span of a few months.
If they try to stay in school the baby is likely to get a poor upbringing (or the burden falls on their parents, IF they have good parents).
Not only are pregnant teens likely near the end of high school, there's online high school now too. In general, school can be done entirely online, since it's distinct from paid work. More generally, there is no reason for high school to be so disruptive to family life, other than to disrupt family life, which is probably a big reason why it's so disruptive. Outside of the United States, high school schedules are often more like universities: there are many half days, classes are not full time, students are free to come and go from campus.
They're probably never going to college.
There's online college, if it's so important. The pronatalists are also currently discussing college marriage, since they noticed that college schedules are more lax than a 9 to 5. Nonetheless, is it really felonious that a woman become a stay at home mother instead of getting a Bachelor's degree in a subject that is often useless? I don't think so. But sure, people who really buy in to modern feminism and the standard educational pipeline are probably more likely to support high age of consent, because it penalizes men who might disrupt it. I think it can be argued that that disruption shouldn't be a felony, and that it might even be a good thing.
DeepNeuralNetwork
1d ago
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1996-06416-014 https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/208803.pdf
First link shows 20 and 21 year olds report being attracted to 15 and 15.5 year olds. Older men in their twenties report close minimums to that, it rises 1/2 a year per male year of age, so men don't report not liking teenagers until they are 30. Second link shows the vast majority of statutory rape prosecutions are of 14 and 15 year old girls, involving males aged just 18 to 24. Which is, of course, the age range that reports minimum preferred female ages ranging from 14 to 17. My takeaway is that age of consent laws over 14 or 15 primarily act to felonize normal young men under 25, with very thin justification, since these are natural and consensual relationships between young people.
The problem is that libertarianism is a fundamentally lazy attempt to systematize and plan social structure. The problem with this plan for children is that parents are adapted to maximize their childrens' fertility. Understanding how exactly this works gets into a ton of math and science very quickly, and that's where the NAP writer checks out.
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