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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.
I've thought for a while on your comment, and I think your main point is that most men who would date teenage girls are bad, and therefore such relationships should be banned. I'm not convinced that's actually the case though. We can't look at the kind of men who do it despite it being a felony as representative of the kind of men who would do it if it were legal. When I examine the historical record, I see a lot of normal men having relationships that would be considered a felony today, due to high age of consent laws. You say
But by preventing loving relationships from forming in the first place, the laws cause significant harm. The 21 year old dating pool is essentially cut in half by high age of consent laws and the irrational taboos they enable. This causes large harm to normal 21 year old men, akin to a regulation that seriously disrupts the market for some good which most people need to be happy.
The justification for that huge disruption just seems too thin to me. The justification for the punitive treatment of those who defy it also doesn't sit right for me. While many of those people might be otherwise criminal types, since normal people aren't rebellious, I can't get behind using overly broad, disruptive, and unjust laws as a way to minority report "bad seeds" into prison before they commit a real crime. Accepting that logic permits essentially any bad law. I could make it a felony to wear yellow punishable by decades of imprisonment. I'm sure most of the people who don't obey might otherwise not be obedient, or intelligent enough to understand the consequences of their actions, but my law is still a bad idea because it is unjust. In fact, one could even call this logic eugenics: "The law is bad, sure, but the average person prosecuted is dysgenic, so it stands on eugenic grounds." The problem with this is that society does not permit eugenics as a justification for any laws, so it doesn't sit right with me. Even if it did, there would be better ways to go about it that harm normal men much less.
I'm not convinced childhood naivety is a serious issue. It doesn't pass evolutionary psychology reasoning that 15 year old girls should be too naive to enter into a romantic relationship. In fact, society doesn't buy this either, since many are in romantic relationships. It's just age gaps that are not tolerated, but 15 to 17 year old boys are probably worse when it comes to lying, breaking hearts, and using girls.
Getting someone to drop out of school shouldn't be a felony. Pregnant girls usually don't drop out of high school due to their pregnancy. I've heard from older people that during the "teen pregnancy" era, it wasn't too rare for girls to come to high school with a baby bump or wearing a wedding ring. Now you never see that, but it's because teen pregnancy and marriage stopped, not because teenagers that are married can't finish school. And marriage and pregnancy is a lot more than just dating. How long do most people wait for marriage and kids? If a 15 year old and a 20 year old fall in love, she will probably be about 18 by the time they are married and done with high school by the time they consider kids. People don't normally meet and reproduce in the span of a few months.
Not only are pregnant teens likely near the end of high school, there's online high school now too. In general, school can be done entirely online, since it's distinct from paid work. More generally, there is no reason for high school to be so disruptive to family life, other than to disrupt family life, which is probably a big reason why it's so disruptive. Outside of the United States, high school schedules are often more like universities: there are many half days, classes are not full time, students are free to come and go from campus.
There's online college, if it's so important. The pronatalists are also currently discussing college marriage, since they noticed that college schedules are more lax than a 9 to 5. Nonetheless, is it really felonious that a woman become a stay at home mother instead of getting a Bachelor's degree in a subject that is often useless? I don't think so. But sure, people who really buy in to modern feminism and the standard educational pipeline are probably more likely to support high age of consent, because it penalizes men who might disrupt it. I think it can be argued that that disruption shouldn't be a felony, and that it might even be a good thing.
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