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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18951 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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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:

  • Older women viscerally hate it when older men date younger women, which has led to the Left broadly being hostile towards age gap relationships.
  • The Right has two elements: First, there was a lot of (wildly incorrect) hysteria that Leftists were going to try to make pedophilia legal as the next step on the slippery slope after gays and trans were done. Second, there's long been a bunch of conspiracies about pedophiles controlling the government in QAnon or Pizzagate form, so there's been a ridiculous trend to try and link practically anything towards sinister cabals of pedophiles.

As such, there's almost no political appetite for decreasing 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.

Olde[r] women viscerally hate it when older men date younger women, which has led to the Left broadly being hostile towards age gap relationships.

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:

Being a boy sucks because when you're 13, you're competing for the attention of 13-year-old girls against 19-year-old men. And when you're 19, you're competing for the attention of 19-year-old girls against Saudi princes.

As such, there's almost no political appetite for increasing the age of consent.

I think you mean "decreasing".

Correct, I've changed it, thank you for pointing it out.

The fact that the death threat people never seem very educated, and that smart people on this forum independently arive at the same opinions as myself, makes me think this topic is for some reason stratified mainly by intelligence.

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