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Yes, the conditions in the state of nature are indeed horrifying. I wonder if the past 200,000+ years of human evolution had anything to do with the incentives, motives, and options typically leveraged by its participants? Surely modern peoples are trained to understand those core motivations, and are honest about them, at all times, and not forming their basis of what is and is not good and proper based solely around purely instinctual self-interest. (Now if you'll excuse me, a pig just flew past my window.)
So I think we can get a better picture- both of what's fair, and by how men and women should act and be biologically wired to be attracted to- by imagining our initial conditions and going forward solely from there.
And in the state of nature case, for women, power is "you get to eat, have a roof over your head, and strike the best deal for resource sharing", and consent is "you enter into a relationship that provides the above provided you cook the meals, maintain the household, and open your legs as desired".
Informed consent is "if you don't, you'll die, or take a serious haircut on your lifetime earnings and potential standard of living". From a modern lens, that seems unbalanced, until you notice that men die if they don't work too. Sexual dimorphism means that men have to contend with the environment to eat, and women have to contend with men to eat- in both cases, of course, you're still working.
Now that we've described the contract- one that inherently includes sex work, it's worth noting- now we'll look at the incentives. For men, they want someone as young and attractive as possible (they heal faster from childbirth and it's easier for them to have kids, sex is better without having to turn the lights off) at as low a standard as possible (so they can get away with paying them next to nothing compared to themselves, to the point they could afford more than one). For women, they want someone as old and powerful as possible (more secure, more resources, more even-keeled) with as little competition as possible (so they're not outflanked by younger, prettier competitors with lower standards[1]).
The thing that sets the lower limit on the age of the women participating in this, especially when there's an oversupply of them[2], is sexual maturity. It may shock you to know that most men aren't sexually attracted to little girls[3]. They can't do the domestic stuff as easily, they aren't developed enough/don't have the v1.1 firmware update you get at puberty that makes them particularly interesting in bed, and they don't quite get how to provide the whole SaaS (that's sex-as-a-service) experience that is attractive to men (that thing they do where they act as a desirable sex object: women do this, girls only cosplay it)- in short, they're still growing.
Now, let's apply that:
So those are the words that come out of her mouth, but what is she actually saying? A steady union-backed job is absolutely an attractive, freeing prospect for a man, why wouldn't [something a woman instinctively sees as the same thing] be highly desirable for a woman? I can see an interview process going badly, or the job not turning out to be what was agreed to, to be damaging just as much as it would be for a man to suffer that- but in terms of "my prospective employer firing me or discontinuing my contract", which is what [at a fundamental level] this is, I see no need to protect women from this more than we protect men from the same. Residuals (i.e. pregnancy) are a different matter, of course.
Yes, that's the female interest motte (but, again, see [3]). The bailey is "men could easily manipulate women into all kinds of behaviors, and as a result the only women who will get men's resources are those more willing to do things that men want, and that's a problem for us women who don't want to do those things but still want those resources". (The fact that this slots women into the "kid" position is relevant- in an environment of equality, women have equal agency, so they're just as resistant to being manipulated as men are.)
As far as "well, we want a blanket law because we don't want to pay attention to circumstances"... I think the criticism writes itself, but other laws, properly enforced, should cover most to all of these cases. The thing that makes this abuse in the first place is specifically "submissive has no ability to disengage" [the motte of the term "consent"- where the bailey is any degree of "I'm not getting paid enough for those acts of submission"], which is the same thing women are trying to control with blunt instruments like this (and it is important they be blunt so that judgments default in their favor- an age of consent is intended as a bracket under which All Women Are Believed [to have been seduced], which is why places where either women or fathers have outsized levels of social power have higher ages of consent in modern times.)
[1] The female talking point around "protecting women" is equal to the male talking point around "protecting the borders/protecting jobs". In both cases, their direct competition are other men/women willing and ready to take their job- we use words like "exploitation", "minimum wage", "human trafficking/illegal immigration" (when those people are foreigners)- it's just that for women, the job is sex work and being attractive.
[2] Which is the reason polygamy exists, why limits on it benefit young men at the expense of everyone else, and why young men are alone in enforcing any prohibitions thereon- if sharing a husband will be a better contract for a wife than going with someone poorer, and if young men are drastically poorer than old men, then the rational choice for a women is to share.
[3] As I've described, it's in the interest of women to conflate "grown women just beyond the male evolved optimal sexual attraction age" and "sexually immature girls", so this needs to be restated even though it should be obvious. Actual pedophilia is a maladaptive anomaly, men wanting just-mature women is not.
And I get this idea from the
pornographyromance media that women watch where it involves a complete lack of "sufficiently informed consent" (but lots and lots of the instinctual dynamics I described above), so I suspect women are lying about this being a negative in and of itself. I'm also not surprised they'd never admit that, because screaming "I don't want a consentual relationship" is obviously not in women's sociofinancial/sociobiological best interest.I am not convinced: groupies are a thing for this specific reason and the 60s-80s were rife with them for that reason. (What, you thought women throwing their underwear at Elvis was somehow not sexual?)
I do not think the motivation of (implied: traditionalist) fathers and feminists are the same. I've discussed why feminists do it, but for fathers it's much simpler: that daughter is his property, and he will manage and discharge it as he sees fit. Non-virgin daughters are worth less to men than virgin ones are, and it is in the father's interest that the daughter fetch a man of maximum price (i.e. a man that is maximally fit to protect her, and a rich man is obviously better-positioned to do this).
Note that the moral hazard here doesn't actually exist in the way feminists think it does (property can be managed incompetently, yes, but it's still ultimately in the interests of the property holder to manage that property appropriately), and most of that is an artifact of conditions changing faster than male instinct was equipped to deal with. Which is a great argument for "daughters shouldn't be property", just like it is for humans more generally.
If I understand your sarcasm right, this seems like a fully generalizeable counterargument to most human progress. If you want to argue "back in the ancestral environment we (likely) did not have a conception of sexual consent, so I do not see why we need one now", the same argument could be made against other civilizational projects like trying to limit the murder rate, curing diseases or preventing starvation.
I think that both in the ancestral environment and agrarian societies, age (above 20) was directly negative in a husband, but sometimes positively correlated with beneficial qualities.
Evolutionarily speaking, if you are a 14 and looking to marry, you perhaps have 15, 20 years of fertility ahead of you. Sure, there is some heavy discounting because chances are that you will die in childbirth or some unrelated cause before you reach age 30. Any children you have will be a net drain on resources until they are perhaps 14 (when they will either be in the position to sell themselves into sexual/domestic/reproductive bondage or work to produce their own calories). If your expected age at the birth of your last child is 25, that means you would want your husband to provide for your family until you are about 40 (or possibly 50 if you are really lucky wrt fertility).
That is a tall order in the best of circumstances! If the husband you marry is 20, he would have to be able-bodied at age 46. If he is 35, he would have to be able-bodied at age 61.
Now, I will grant you that in the ancestral environment, humans might not have had a conception of fatherhood, or long-term monogamous mating patterns, so let us consider agrarian societies instead, where both of these were generally a thing. (Absent paternal involvement, the trade-offs for age in mating are that on the one hand, paternal age is indicative of a higher genetic fitness, but also will increase the mutational load.)
In an agrarian society, almost everyone is a peasant. Most girls will not marry some noble land-owner. Working marginal fields is back-breaking labor, my guess is that most men give out before 40. What happens then is very dependent on the customs of the society. In the best case, your husband dies quickly and you inherit his land and can marry some landless 20yo who will be happy to breed you for the rest of your fertility window. In most cases, this is not how societies organize. The realistic best outcome is that your husband had a younger, landless, unmarried brother who will just take both the land and you over for him, but more realistically, he will inherit the land and marry a fresh 14yo. He might keep you around and feed you and your kids while times are good, but if he has to chose between his wife and his kids and you and his nephews, things will look grim for you. Realistically, the land might never have belonged to your husband in the first place, but just been leased out from a local noble, who will simply proceed to lease the land to some other guy once your husband fails.
Obviously, if you can become the nth wife of some guy rich enough that he does not have to work the field, that would be preferable from an evo PoV, but realistically that is not an option most girls have.
In conclusion, from evo, you would want to go for a rich man if you can, but settle for a young, strong man if you can't.
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