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Studies also show that men are more aggressive than women. That doesn't mean we should legalise assault.
Assault is legal in some cases, such as self defense, plus it's not a felony to get in a fight, and on top of that if I punch someone, they're more of a victim than a 15 year old girl who loves her 20 year old boyfriend. Yet, the crime is less severe. That's illogical.
The law makes a very clear distinction between the two such that self-defense is not assault.
In many jurisdictions, it absolutely is.
A "15-year-old girl who loves her 20-year-old boyfriend" is not the same as "a 15-year-old victim of statutory rape".
It would be even better if the law made a distinction where a loving relationship involving a 15 year old between could never be statutory rape. Only people who actually victimize should be prosecutable.
I guess in mine it's not, because human nature is violent and we don't want to make every man who gets in a fight a felon.
It is if they have sex, even if she wanted it and is not victimized by it.
Does the law ever pass judgement on which relationships are "loving" and which aren't? How would it even go about doing this? I know that in custody disputes between divorcing parents the judge may well take the respective parents' apparent affection for their children (and concern for their welfare) into account, but my understanding is that this is only one factor of many taken into consideration: if forced to choose between granting custody to one parent who really loves his children but is a heroin addict, and another parent who doesn't seem that invested in them but isn't addicted to heroin and always feeds and clothes them, I imagine most judges would choose the latter parent. Offhand I can't think of any instance in which the legal system adjudicates on which relationships are "loving" and which are not. Still less can I think of any crime which is not considered a crime provided the perpetrator and victim love each other. We used to recognise such categories (domestic abuse, marital rape), and it was considered a major feminist victory when we no longer did so. I, for one, would not like to go back to the world in which it is legally impossible for a man to rape his wife.
Which jurisdiction would that be?
No, it's not. If a fifteen-year-old girl loves her twenty-year-old boyfriend, but they have a celibate relationship, no crime has been committed. If a fifteen-year-old girl has sex with her twenty-year-old boyfriend, in some jurisdictions he will be considered a statutory rapist. The extent to which she loves him simply doesn't enter into it. We're not criminalising loving relationships, we're criminalising the sexual exploitation of minors, and as with literally every law in the history of the human race there are bound to be weird edge cases where it could plausibly be argued no real harm has been done.
You're not criminalising sexual exploitation of minors. Exploitation means to use someone unfairly for benefit. There is no clause in the law that the girl must be used unfairly, even though this would be easy to demonstrate. For example, if a man makes promises to her over text, has sex with her, cheats on her, and then dumps her, that would qualify as sexual exploitation. Indeed, at the very least, if criminalising exploitation were the goal, there would be no close-in-age exemptions for teenage boys, and testimony from the girl that she loves the man would ruin the case. And it's not a weird edge case. In every case I've studied, either no harm is done, harm does not rise to the level of a felony considering the values of society (heartbreak doesn't cut it for me, I demand my heart to be protected too and otherwise I'm not willing to put the mere feelings of teenage girls over the mating interests of young men), or the case is an easy way out after a rape or abuse allegation, which is a de facto violation of the 5th amendment of the bill of rights, which states:
If the case is known to really be about a rape, and the sentence and punishment is proportional to that effect, but a lesser crime is prosecuted, yet the worse crime is in fact the motivation for it, then the right to not be "eld to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury" as well as the right to "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" has been violated. In other words, the state must prove the real crime, not pass unjustifiable laws and then use excessive punishment for the crime as written described, because "everybody knows it's really about rape or exploitation."
As written, statutory rape punished as a felony with prison time also violates 8th amendment rights.
If a man is convicted of statutory rape, then he had consensual sex with a teenage girl. If "everybody knows" he's a rapist, too bad, he committed an unserious crime per the letter of the law. That crime being a felony or requiring "sex offender" status seems excessive and cruel and unusual to me. Considering that as written, the crime has no victims, jail time also seems cruel and unusual. The state has the hard job of proving the real crime, not bypassing the Bill of Rights with a funny trick.
Ah. Are we getting to the real nub of the argument now? And how many 20 year old men want to have babies with their 15 year old girlfriends, as opposed to getting to stick their dick into a hot, wet hole?
If we're going to argue old-timey laws and customs, seduction was also a crime, my friend, and that includes making a girl think she's in love with you and you're in love with her.
You've discounted feelings there, and that's the rationale of the laws around statutory rape: it used to be argued "it wasn't rape, she consented!" even in cases where it was clear the girl wasn't able to consent or was not mature enough to consent, and secondly the law is dealing in reason not feelings. It's bad for society when minors are exploited, even if minors consent to the exploitation and feel they are not being exploited and that they really do love the guy.
You don't believe the testimony of those who said they were not, in fact, old enough at the time:
But why don't you? These are people who are now older and mature and more experienced, saying "yeah gosh back then I thought I knew it all but I had no idea" and I think most of us find that out as we get older. The things we thought we understood and were equipped to deal with with, we had no real idea of what was involved.
Plenty I'm sure. But how many 15 year old girls want to have babies with their boyfriend, as opposed to getting their hot, wet, well I'll not finish this, but you know what I mean? Are you saying 15 year old girls date for marriage at a higher rate than older women?
They want to convict people of felonies based on their experience. But it's canceled out by mine and others, plus lived experience isn't enough for what they want anyway.
What do you mean by exploitation exactly? How is this bad for society, even if it makes minors happy?
There's a very prolific and once-ubiquitous science fiction author named Piers Anthony, most famous for his Xanth series. (Bear with me here.) He's not quite as popular as he once was, so you don't hear about him much anymore, but he was all over the place in the 80s and 90s.
Besides being prolific and writing a ton of series, the thing almost anyone who's ever read Piers Anthony will tell you is that every one his books oozes horny, and there are very few that don't involve some underage sex, at least hinted at if not explicit. Piers Anthony is a classic Dirty Old Man. And hey, everyone has their thing.
Anyway, one of his most infamous novels is Firefly, which is a horror novel about some kind of ooze-monster that makes people super horny. I read it so long ago I don't really remember the plot much, but I do remember a rather infamous courtroom scene:
The child here is, IIRC, five. Five years old. Piers Anthony writes a sympathetic courtroom scene in which jurors are moved to tears by the unfairness of prosecuting a man who fucked a five-year-old because they truly loved each other.
Lest I be accused of committing the classic fallacy of assuming fiction represents the author's actual views, Piers Anthony is also notable for stuffing every one of his books with chapter-long Author's Notes in which he is not shy about his views. Let's just say while he never comes out directly and says "Yes, fucking consenting five-year-olds should be legal," it's, uh, not exactly hiding between the lines.
My point: I don't buy it from a rather accomplished and very charming author who did his best to make it plausible in the pages of a novel. I certainly don't buy it from you. The reason "statutory rape" exists is that the law recognizes that children can be persuaded to do things, and even enjoy things, that are not good for them. A child will enjoy eating ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. A child will enjoy playing all day and not going to school. A child will enjoy dressing up in skimpy clothes and makeup and prancing around in front of adoring grown men who tell her how pretty she is. And a child, no doubt, can be persuaded that she enjoys sex with a grown man.
This is why we have age of consent laws. To protect children from, well, people who think "She likes it" means it's okay.
To address your other point, that you seem to deny the testimony of victims of child sexual abuse who later claim they were too young to consent and that even if they enjoyed it at the time, it fucked them up later in life, I suggest you watch some parole hearings, of which there are many on YouTube. Chomos often use the "She seduced me/it was consensual" argument. I think they usually really believe this. I know some guys believe every rape accusation is just a woman having regrets afterwards, but I find it hard to believe that the adult victims of these men (and note that sometimes the victims are boys, too, if that weighs more heavily with you) are just making it up when they say that what they "consented" to when they were children is not something they should have been allowed to consent to.
Now you may protest "I'm only talking about 15-year-olds, not 5-year-olds!" And, fair enough. Except that once we accept your arguments for why young men should not be denied the pleasures of a 15-year-old, you really don't have much except vaguely-defined "physical and mental development" to argue against going much younger. (There are children who go through very precocious puberty. Should they be on the menu?)
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