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Notes -
In today's "old man yelling at clouds" news, it appears that leftist memes (e.g. on imgur) have taken to calling Trump a pedophile due to his connection with Epstein.
As someone who does not give a damn about Trump, but who cares about the language we use to describe reality, I want to object.
A pedophile, in my book, is someone who is sexually attracted to pre-pubescent kids. Often, the term might imply exclusive pedophilia, e.g. someone who is only attracted to pre-pubescent kids. This seems like the worst sexual attraction card to be dealt, while being straight, gay, bisexual, into MILFs, or into BDSM, or most other kinks means you have a decent chance of getting laid, the lack of adults who could pass as pre-pubescent means that there are no sex partners who could consent. If used as an insult, the unfortunate implication is that people are morally responsible for their sexual inclinations.
Naturally, there is an overlap with people who end up molesting children, which is rightfully considered a serious crime. It bears saying that a significant fraction of child molesters are not exclusive pedophiles but just men (mostly) with broader sexualities who use the opportunity of the power discrepancy between kids and adults.
In general, I think that power discrepancy is why we have age of consent laws. Using the age is obviously a crude approximation, I can think of situations where a 15yo having sex with an 18yo would not be problematic from a power discrepancy point of view, and also of situations where two 18yo having sex would be problematic from a power discrepancy view without being criminal. But still, one has to draw the line somewhere, and age is at least something which can reasonably be verified, while "would a judge like the power dynamics in that relationship?" is much more diffuse.
If we tie consent to age, then it makes sense to dis-emphasize physical development. After all, a woman consents with her brain, not her boobs. It might certainly make a difference if the defendant claims he was mistaken about her age or that she was the one who initiated sex (not that either defense would help much, likely).
To get back to Trump, I think it is pretty clear that he is not an exclusive pedophile. That guy paid for sex with Stormy Daniels, hosted beauty pageants and boasted about grabbing post-pubescent participants "by the pussy". Based on the women he married, "small and flat-chested" does not really seem to be his type.
He is also a sex pest. I can not imagine him going "Dear Jeffrey, this is very flattering, but I do not think it is appropriate. Look at that poor girl. She is a minor who possibly did not have a clear idea that she would be expected to do sex work here and is effectively trapped alone on an island with some very powerful people. Besides her being below the age of consent, this whole setting is intrinsically coercive. If you want me to fuck someone, please get an experienced sex worker of legal age for my next visit." Instead, he probably went "great, I will take the one with the bigger tits" and committed a particularly vile act of statutory rape.
From a culture war point of view, I can see why the left is pushing the pedo angle. It basically comes from qanon, where "oh, did I mention they also rape kids" was used as a boo light to drive home the fact that these were Bad people. MAGA pattern-matched Epstein to this, which was fair enough. Now that it looks like Trump might have been a visitor to Epstein's Island, the likely factually accurate claim "Trump is a sex pest who has no conception of consent and will happily commit statutory rape" is not going to do much damage. The American people have known that he is a sex pest with no conception of consent since 2016, and in their heart of hearts they also know that someone who is generally loose on consent will also not be a stickler for the rules as far as age of consent is concerned. By contrast, going "that pedophile world-controlling elite you were always talking about? Trump is their chairman!", or more shortly "Trump is pedophile" is obviously superior as an attack in the CW.
Still, a lot of epistemic commons are burned in the process, and I really don't like that.
Your book is not the book most people are using. Most people don't think about sex in those terms (they don't really think 'straight' or 'gay' either)- otherwise, the group(s) that wants to impose those definitions/morality on everyone else wouldn't need words words words to do it.
For most people, "pedophilia" means "man on little girl" exclusively.
Men can't be raped, so we don't really care about man on boy (unless it's a political group we hate for other reasons that was covering it up, which in combination with that hatred is sufficiently scandalous to destroy them- we're not really after boyfuckers qua boyfuckers, that's a side-effect). As for woman on boy, our reactions range from Nice to "if we don't throw you in jail for this, society's standards might shift and allow man on girl, so off you go". And woman on girl is a statistical anomaly.
Feminists/gynosupremacists launder the moral disgust with "man on girl" into the "man on any woman" definition they've always wanted (though note that this is fundamentally a woman vs. woman thing about how best to exploit men rather than primarily being man-hating, which is how men perceive it). This is why they push to have older and older women be considered "children", and why white-knights (traditionalists and progressive men) accept that. It's also why all the "pedo" literature progressives use only features man on boy (or man on boy-dressed-like-a-girl).
As you noted,
is correct, but those laws aren't set up that way to protect children (they aren't the right tool for that). They're primarily for keeping young women out of the sexual marketplace and providing women-as-class a weapon to exploit men more powerful than them (to which they are inherently attracted).
Once you understand the concept of "consent" is a lie (and intended to confuse "raping little girls" with normal human behavior) you can start to understand how people actually think about sex. Then, you can also see that Rs have a better understanding of this than Ds do because they're more likely to reject this framework (to the point that even traditionalist Christian sexual ethics paint a better picture), so Rs are less likely to be concerned with "non-consentual" behavior than Ds are.
Also, a tangent:
Well, if you're only looking for physical penetration as a subset of "abuse with sexual intent", yes, you'll find that's mostly men.
Men and women are different especially when it comes to the way they think about sex; thus we should expect the ways they intend and perpetrate sexual abuse would be different.
clarify, please
Sure, here you go. You'll have to excuse me from re-typing all that, though if I have time I'll re-state a good chunk of this later in this thread anyway.
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