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Your logic suggests that you'd have no objection if a 13 year old girl published nudes with knowledge and consent.
Is that true?
Is consent the defining factor here?
I just want something on record.
I think 13 year olds should not be sending nudes to anyone. However, as a society, we seem to have decided sex is for everyone and we all should start the younger, the better. Romeo and Juliet laws because aw, statutory rape is such a condemnatory charge! it ruins your life (if you're the guy fucking the younger girl)!
So if we're going to say "okay, yeah, 13 year olds can have boyfriends/girlfriends" (instead of "What? No, you are too damn young! Wait a minimum of another three years before even thinking about dating!") and if we're going to say "hey, sex is a beautiful, natural, instinct that everyone has a right to engage in, and once you hit puberty you're old enough to make up your own mind" (even setting aside the "well ackshully in Classical times 13 year old girls were routinely married to 30 year old men, this is why I am not an ephebophile/why women should be married off as young as possible by their fathers picking a husband for them" set), then at least let it be in the context of a relationship, where she knows and consents to giving her boyfriend nude photos.
I still think it's a very bad idea because it's highly likely the first thing the boy will do, regardless of how he swears he'll only keep them to himself, is share them around with his friends. But at least then it's a decision, even if it's a bad decision, made by the girl. The consequences there are the punishment: yes, you can't trust men when they swear fidelity, yes men are only after one thing, yes you now have a reputation for being a slut, yes more people than you ever wanted to know now know what you look like naked (and maybe even trying to strike sexy poses), yes this is your fault as well. Learn the hard lesson and don't do anything this stupid the next time.
Fake photos of her that the creator pretends are real, that she sent him, that he's fucking her, that she's easy, hey guys have a look, you could get a piece of this whore - yeah, she is perfectly entitled to punch him in the face for that.
And so it sounds like we're worried about something other than a child's consent being present or not.
And of course, you're seemingly expecting that the female side of the equation isn't going to be mature and wise enough to make good decisions here and thus is not blameworthy.
But you get young guys, who are similarly immature and unwise, and you expect them to behave with maximum propriety, and if they do not, then they should expect immediate and swift reprisal. I don't see why leniency due to inexperience and immaturity absolves one but not the other.
If we think kids engaging in uninhibited sexual activity is bad, and, in that vein, that sharing nudes is bad, I simply suggest that we are concerned for reasons orthogonal to 'consent' and should thus apply rules that restrict all the parties' behaviors, possibly for their own good, regardless of who did or did not agree.
I think 13 year olds are not mature enough to make good decisions. If a 13 year old gets convinced to provide nude photos, they've been taken advantage of. It doesn't matter if they're a girl or a boy.
Where it's pardoned, as seems to be the case here, that "haw, haw; of course 13 year old boys are horndogs, of course they want naked photos of girls, what harm did they do?" that's equally bad. I'm not saying "excuse the girl", I'm saying "the girl in this case did not do anything wrong yet she is being punished for it".
Yes, and I'm saying "we accept that most 13 year olds can and will make horrendous decisions, and we try to correct those decisions without making it out as a double standard where only SOME teens are culpable whereas others are not."
And its probably not good to overreact and treat teen guys as evil rapists for an action that objectively speaking involved no physical force or coercion.
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I would mostly agree with this. Its just another example in the long list of examples why the consent standard when applied to sexuality and sexual interactions is more or less useless.
I don't think it is useless, but man, people do not seem to really know what they mean when they say "consent." Worse still, they don't really know what they mean when they say they "consent" to some activity.
Sex in particular, the emotional valence of the moment, and the intensity, can shift by the minute. Then, reassessed after the act, someone may decide that some particular part of it they 'agreed' to in the moment was actually a violation.
That is one of the main problems with consent as a standard. It does not hold up under any of the hard cases.
And with sex IN PARTICULAR, there is no reasonable way to go back and assess whether it was validly given or not or whether the lines were crossed. I noticed this issue in law school. "Wait, how the f@&k do you establish evidence for lack of consent when it all happens behind closed doors?"
Unless you film the whole interaction and that opens up the whole can of worms that we're discussing.
Yes, which is why intelligently-designed laws around sex sidestep the issue.
Let's look at the sex laws described in Deuteronomy and the social dynamics it encourages downstream of those things- remembering that this is at a time when asking people to deny their human instincts of immediate revenge was far lot more novel (and a lot more difficult due to lack of State capacity) than it is today, so we can say that these are laws/accommodations/compromises that are made because human biological instinct ultimately runs more along these lines than any modern view.
The relevant TL;DR here is:
If she actively cried rape, but in a place nobody could reasonably hear, she is assumed to have been raped by default and the judgment (of death) falls solely on the man. This protects the woman- if she actually values the life of the man, she won't run off somewhere this can't be detected (and because the penalty for rape and murder are otherwise the same, there's no other incentive for the man not to just kill her)[1].
If she didn't actively cry rape in a place someone could hear, then judgment falls on both (forced to marry if woman was unmarried, and death for both if married or engaged). This ensures consent [to having participated in the violation, also [0]] cannot be revoked after the fact, which protects men, and also ensures that- if they both did want this- the woman is bound to/invested in total secrecy for the same reason the man is. It also protects men from cuckoldry in an age where sex always results in babies[2], but this is more a "make sure our warriors don't burn down society by refusing to fight and instead throwing open the gates" thing.
Now, because modern society is objectively stacked in favor of women (and this observation is a point towards this interpretation), we observe that we still have the strictures of the first (that protect women) but without the benefits of the second (that protect men). That is why we push further and further into "consent can be revoked at any time"- that's simply what we should expect from female gender politics and the associated ignorance (intentional or otherwise) of the inherent moral hazard that being able to retroactively cry rape enables.
In a society that's objectively stacked in favor of men, by contrast, we should observe that the second case dominates. It looks a little different when this happens; there tend to be a lot of mistresses, wives divorcing left with nothing, fathers disowning their children, old women intentionally locked out from self-sufficiency, casual ass-slapping, and all the other things Boomer women (and their [progressive] daughters) complain about the 50s and 60s for featuring.
[0] Feminists get angry about "has to marry the rapist", but ignores that all sex [outside marriage] can trivially be called rape for the same reasons it's so easy today (and the community at that time would agree; there's no reason a woman would ever have sex for pleasure- something traditionalists and progressives agree on, as it's dishonorable). So the law here is "virginity is part of a woman's inherent value [normal men and women agree on this point completely provided contraceptives don't exist]; you break it, you buy it, and the woman is in charge of saying you broke it retroactively and at any time" (which is what progressives want to be able to do).
[1] If I recall correctly- and you'll have to correct me on this point- the US still has a version of this law (where it's some separate sex crime charge if either participant leaves their state of residence- in fact I'm pretty sure the mere suggestion of such is a crime).
[2] Traditionalists in particular will harp on and on about this because their instincts are incompatible with the technology that makes this so, but what that argument actually means is that the father of the family shouldn't be expected to lay down his life and toil to advance children that aren't his. This is an argument that doesn't directly apply to women, so women naturally assert this dynamic doesn't exist... until the young men refuse to fight an enemy that promises better terms for young men. (And yes, the lack of enemies in the West means women will further not see a need to co-operate until it's too late.)
But see, that's what consent is: it's simply a codification of who is assumed to have automatically cried rape. This is how "children can't consent" can even be a coherent sentence, because on dictionary reading it's nonsense. This case is also the steelman for having this law- traditionalists and progressives are actively harmed by the existence of sex in general so it's understandable- but naturally, most of the fight in this case is over who gets to be "a child" -> "who automatically cried rape".
Naturally, because young women (13+; both trads and progs call this "child" for property rights and anti-sexual-competition reasons respectively, but biology doesn't agree with their assessment) are sexual competition for women but not men, women will push as hard as they can to make sure the definition of "children"/"automatically-considered-raped-for-sympathetic-reasons" is as wide as possible. And I'd say "anyone who claims to be, at any time, ever" is pretty fucking wide already- the fact they semi-seriously want to set the age to 25 is proof they won't ever be satisfied with that.
Of course, setting it to "infinite" is just Deuteronomic law through the back door, and that's not going to happen as long as there are enough liberals (or liberal-sympathetic) who want to fuck more than one young woman. Hence the stalemate.
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