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Is there any reason the age of consent should be higher than 15 in the United States? I've concluded from Twitter that it's extremely difficult to find and good arguments against this. Meanwhile there's a lot of evidence for the position. Academics seem to agree with an age of consent around 15 while 18 seems to be more of a grassroots idea.
The arguments for an age of consent of 15 are multitude. First there's evospych; studies show most men in their twenties are attracted to 15 year old girls. Then there's ancient demography; the median age of marriage ranged from 16 to 18 for girls until 1600 AD and the minimum legal age of marriage ranged from 12-14 in most societies. Next there's the psychometric evidence: 15 year old girls demonstrate adult intelligence, while little children would be considered handicapped by adult intelligence standards, meaning the former should be able to understand sex and its consequences while the latter likely cannot. There's contemporary cross cultural evidence, specifically from Europe, which shows that wealthy modern countries can do just fine with age of consent set at 14 or 15. Example countries right now include France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Estonia, and more.
All of this evidence points to 9 being too young, but 18 being too high. It seems like 14 or 15 is the optimal sweet spot. This is important right now as we can't properly judge Epstein without thinking scientifically about the age of consent. All of his victims were over 14, and that's not underaged everywhere. It's probable he would he charged with prostitution in Europe, but seeing this as a pedophile situation is not necessarily the right way to look at it.
The counter evidence I have been shown is essentially nil. It usually is just a death threat, actually. The best evidence is that the brain develops until 25, but then why not have an age of consent of 25? Why not let 24 year olds date 15 year olds? It doesn't really matter logically when the brain is mature, just when it is mature enough, given that 18 year olds brains are still maturing but they are seen as mature enough by these people.
The other main piece of objective evidence is that fecundity peaks around 20. The issue with this is that sex and dating do not mean pregnancy. Furthermore ancient demography shows that teen pregnancy is good enough anyway. Finally, the data don't seem to indicate that teenage girls are too young for pregnancy; the negative causal effects on their pregnancy are extremely mild and don't justify banning a 20 year old from dating a 15 year old.
Finally there's subjective evidence, lived experience. Interlocuters swear up and down that they weren't mature enough to date at 15. Well, that's not my experience and the experience of a ton of other people, including entire countries with nuclear weapons. I'm not sure who is wrong here, or if it's just something that genuinely differs between people. Still, lived experience is really not how I hand out felonies to loving couples. I find that idea odious. Especially when the girl and her family testify that their lived experience is different from the American norm.
It's important to disentangle physical readiness from mental/financial/social readiness. 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. 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). They're probably never going to college. It's not automatically guaranteed to ruin their life, but it's likely.
Unless, of course, the father takes on a proper father role and earns money and helps raise his child because he's a proper and responsible adult.
This almost never happens (and probably still wouldn't even if it were legal to admit to being the father). What's more likely is she just aborts and and then we have more dead babies and more psychological trauma. I wouldn't object in principle to a teenager marrying an adult ahead of time and then having marital sex, because this handles the pregnancy issue, and also prevents a lot of the potential for predatory relationships where a high status man convinces a gullible teen girl that he loves her and her bullshit detectors haven't finished developing. I would also have a lot less objections if birth control were free, widely accessible, and perfectly reliable, though I still think the emotional and sexual dynamics are unlikely to turn out well.
is just flatly false. 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 don't think it's impossible for an adult and a teenager to fall in love, but there's such a huge variety of predatory and charismatic people who tell all sorts of lies to get into someone's pants. I don't think this is good.
If we lived in a more monogamous, more honorable, more high-trust society where a girl's father and brother could beat the crap out of and/or ostracize creeps who make false promises and break her heart, I think a lower age of consent would be fine. If we had a magical mind reading or future forecasting machine that could pick out people acting in good faith I think a lower age of consent would be fine if restricted to people who passed this screening. But in the world we live in, where we have to make a law and apply it fairly to everyone, something like "15-17 years old if the other person is within a certain age range, 18 otherwise" is fine, which is what a lot of U.S. states have. Statistically, this reduces bad outcomes while still enabling normal behavior in most cases. What Epstein did is horrible and wrong. It's much easier to convinct if we have clear lines that were broken instead of having to pick and choose "well, this girl was maybe kind of taken advantage of but I guess he didn't break any laws... oh well, guess you can go free."
And keep in mind that an adult who genuinely falls in love with a teenager with good intentions can just date them without having sex until they're old enough, 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.
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Studies also show that men are more aggressive than women. That doesn't mean we should legalise assault.
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I do wonder whether scientists in these countries have done any rigorous studies regarding whether early sex has harmful psychological effects.
I don’t know, but I would guess this is very much ‘if you have sex at 16 and your culture regards this as abuse then you’ll probably be traumatised, but if society regards this as the natural outcome then you’ll be fine’.
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Its a simple balancing act. 15 is probably too young, because there remains a significant number of girls who are still beginning puberty at that age and pregnancy, while possible, is more dangerous than it would be in just a year or two. By the time a girl is 17, the chance that a pregnancy is better off delayed for a year based on physical development is minuscule.
Plus in the modern age girls are idiots at 15. And the window of years around that. Particularly when an older man can flash cash at them and not be immediately hung by his heels by her brothers or dad. Some of the Epstein accusers aren't, in my view, the heroines they are made out to be, but I don't doubt they feel traumatized. Even the girl who served as his wrangler and got all her friends to turn up for all the great times. Of course she regrets it now. We all regret a lot of things.
Centuries ago yeah, maybe females and males could get the sexual congress going earlier. They could also feed themselves and survive in the wild, and had to answer to the tribe. In the current year I'm not at all convinced. I partially agree with @Corvos in his comment, but like almost everything, case-by-case.
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A top level post about an extremely... divisive topic by an account with only 3 prior posts all made 3 years ago?
On the off chance you're not here to stir up shit, I recommend that you please try to be a more active and positively-contributing member of this community before posting top level comments about topics like this.
You are right, of course. But people here seem to have bad troll detectors. As long as a post is long and grammatical (and nowaways, doesn't have too many signs of ChatGPT), someone falls for it every time.
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The big issue is the Fascist-Feminist synthesis means both the Left and the Right actually agree on this issue, but for wildly different reasons:
As such, there's almost no political appetite for increasing the age of consent.
As for what it ought to be, 15 does indeed seem like a more reasonable age than 18. It wasn't even that uncommon all that long ago, heck a lot of countries in Europe have their ages at 14. In terms of mentality, a lot of it depends on the individual's IQ. A 130 IQ kid could be emancipated at 13 and would probably make better decisions than the average adult, and there's an argument to be made that an 85 IQ person should always be treated as a child to some extent. But polite society has an allergy to explicit references to IQ so we just randomly draw a line at 16-18 and call it good enough I guess.
I'm also quite cynical about this phenomenon, but for what it's worth, I felt a pretty visceral hatred for those relationships myself when I was a younger man.
I keep thinking about a tweet which went something like this:
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I think you mean "decreasing".
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It makes sense once you figure out it's never been about protecting children. (Death threat = topic is governed by conflict theory.)
It's about protecting old women from the competition [for men and their resources] young women inherently provide, in co-operation with a subset of old men [fathers] being able to credibly threaten to lock up whoever their daughters are dating. Whether this is a good or bad thing is out of scope.
All of the other stuff it's claimed the blanket approach protects against is already covered by existing laws (rape/kidnapping, extortion, and anti-incest for the rest of it), so by POSIWID that's not what the AoC is for.
IMO you do need an AoC, although the argument that sways me is contingent on the AIDS pandemic. Specifically, consent without knowing about HIV isn't fully informed, which means you need sex ed, which means you can't have 5-year-olds consenting to sex because lol good luck getting them to comprehend sex ed.
16-18 is way too high, though. If teens are lying about their ages to get sex, your AoC is too high. Sex ed for preteens and AoC at 13-14 is what I support. And if you get rid of AIDS I'd be willing to abolish it - it's the only one left that is a big deal (the rest are either curable, vaccinable, or so minor nobody really cares).
You can't just "get rid of AIDS" while tolerating the #1 enabler of it: homosexuality.
Making a vaccine or a cure would work. That's what removed syphilis, gonorrhea, and hepatitis as problem STDs.
(Technically, there already is a cure for HIV - bone marrow transplant from someone with CCR5-Δ32 - but that cure is useless because either you take such doses of immunosuppressants that you effectively have AIDS anyway, or you get graft vs. host disease and die even quicker. I mean a useful cure.)
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