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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 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.
You are not convincing me of the rightness of your views here: "yeah, given my druthers, I'd much rather a hot little 15 year old than that 30 year old hag, I'm only 46, I'm in my prime!"
Which is a situation that "30 year old hag" (in your words) would naturally like to avoid. By cutting the top competitors out of the market, the rest of the competitors stabilize their positions.
Yes, the best men (from the most mercenary "sex for resources" perspective) are still going to select right at the limit. But since that market is artificially limited, the total supply of women is constrained, thus the definition of any given quality of man "settling for" becomes a correspondingly older woman (as that's what they can afford; age is usually a proxy for this, which you acknowledge). If no AoC, "settling" would be 20 (or a 8/10), but with the limit in place "settling" may be 25-30 (or a 5/10).
In this way, the AoC protects the sociofinancial interests of all women over it, at the expense of men (in the "not allowed to fully utilize resources for sex" sense, typically rationalized in some form of "men are objectively better than women and so have a duty to them") and women under it (typically rationalized as "too immature", but importantly the AoC doesn't actually prohibit these women from having sex, it just makes it so that the only men they can sell sex to can't afford to buy it).
Is this an overly simplistic model of how men and women form relationships? Sure- most people aren't quite that mercenary- but there's always some element of this present in every relationship (and is the fear keeping the relevant actors up at night).
On the contrary, I think you are already convinced. It's not a crime to be on the high side of political power.
Let me assure you, 30 year old women are not thinking of 15 year old girls as sexual rivals and competitors, they are thinking guys who want to fuck girls that age when the men are the same age as the 30 year old woman are disgusting creepy predators.
Are you, at whatever age you are now, really scared that a 15 year old boy is going to out-compete you in the employment marketplace? The men on here who argue about "all women have of value are their tits and cunt, and that's all they have to sell, and as soon as they're over 20 they're undesirable, so they want to ban nice ordinary normal men who have perfectly natural preferences for 15 year olds from getting access to 15 year olds" are not coming across as rational giant brains, they're coming across as "welcome to the inaugural meeting of the Mensa branch of PIE".
And if it wasn't obviously in their interest to publicly believe this, I might believe this as well. Half the problem with the "debate" is that this claim isn't being made in good faith; you acknowledge this yourself through your last sentence despite you already having established in previous comments that you know drawing that equivalence is wrong.
So, when everything anyone will tell you is going to be biased in their favor in some way, what else can you do but return to
monkeinitial conditions and reason about what people will say about this topic now assuming those initial conditions remain valid (ignoring stuff like technologies [contraceptives, all known STDs of consequence cured except for one] with which human instinct is not natively compatible)?And the women on here argue that "all men have of value is their ability to physically produce, and that's all they have with which to buy" (or "what price they can fetch on the employment marketplace"). Given gender equality, both should be valid.
The reason for the emphasis on this is that it's the only part of the dynamic we can actually control and measure, much like 6/6/6 is for women (but somehow that's acceptable, which again is why I believe women who do this while believing it's evil when men do it are mistaken at best and actively lying at worst). And every relationship is affected by these dynamics to some degree; there's no getting away from it, we're all human, we like good things, and may God have mercy on our souls.
Is it the full picture? Of course not; people marry their friends all the time to the point it's a meme, women actually seek out casual sex (contrary to an asymmetric biological imperative that they shouldn't), men actually seek out commitment, etc.- but to say that an age beginning with 1 or 2, or a total income that has 5 zeroes in it, isn't a measurable starting point at least some of the time (or at least an attractor, if not the primary one), and isn't the dominating portion of it from people who are working in a way compatible with their instincts? I think that's likely to be destructive.
They'll outcompete me in the dating marketplace for cougars and tomboys (if male sexuality in a woman, then they're probably looking for someone young in that unrealized-potential-is-attractive way); why even live?
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