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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.
Who do you want fifteen-year-olds to have sex with? Their classmates? High school seniors? College students? Their dads' friends?
My best answer to this is college students because 7 year age gaps are the most fertile according to the data. But also, whoever they want, since I can't find justification for ever making sex with a 15 year old a crime.
My problem with this idea is that legality, while originally designed to reflect morality, inevitably influences it. Both in the "illegal, thus immoral" direction, and, what's more important in this case, "legal, thus moral".
This might be literally a first-world problem, since countries with less pervasive state influence do not conflate legality and morality equally easily, but in a place like the US I'd rather have more fine-grained AoC laws, so that fathers don't have to resort to moral, but illegal acts to keep scumbags away.
18 seems like a young age to lose paternal authority over an unmarried daughter, if that's what you value. Somehow I don't think AOC laws actually are for this though. What about an age of consent of 15, but parents can veto their daughters' relationships until they are 18, or even 21? Veto means they can press charges against the man for violating their authority over their daughter.
The way the law works now, it doesn't protect paternal authority. Daughters will just do what they will with other teenagers, who are immune from AOC prosecution. Then when they turn 18, they will do whatever they please. The law mainly functions to prevent loving, family-condoned relationships between 20-something men and teenage girls.
Mate, please stop explaining. You just sound more and more creepy the more you go on about older men and younger girls. Seven year age gaps can be a huge gulf, or not so much, depending on the age of both parties. 15 and 21 are two different phases of life. 22 and 29 are getting nearer in experiences. 30 and 37 are fine.
10 and 17 is not fine. 12 and 19 is not fine. And I've found that arguments around "why not 15?" tend to drift downwards rather than upwards in the "if 15, why not..." later development of the argument. If 15, why not 14? If 14, why not 13? If 13, why not 12 - after all in the Classical world 12 year olds were married! (as you have used as an example yourself).
As to "family condoned", that depends on the family. Were I the parent of a young daughter, I'd be highly suspicious of any 20-25 year old guy sniffing around my 13-15 year old daughter.
As age falls, the number of men who are disrupted decreases, while the reasons for disrupting increase. Eventually, you get children who don't desire sex, can't get pregnant, and don't understand it. It's pretty clear that the age of consent should be higher than that number, and that number is probably greater than 10 or 11. Probably it's between 13 and 15, if you look at the recent modern world. I personally think 13 is too young for sex because I think it's probably the minimum age a girl can really fall in love with a man, she's very inexperienced at that age, and any man (or boy) ought to wait and meet her family before taking her virginity, which she should definitely have. And 13 year olds still have mild intelligence deficit compared to adults that goes away by 15. If I had to pick an exact age, I'm split between 14 and 15. Maybe I would pick 14.5 because it would be funny and it would highlight the arbitrary nature of the law. "How old are you?" "14." "Which type of 14??" LOL
Why are all the guys so eager to fuck teenage girls also so insistent that these girls be virgins?
Serious question, bub: You keep talking about your "lived experience." So I assume you are not a virgin. I'm not going to ask if you've ever banged an underage girl, but I am going to ask: assuming you have had sex with a virgin, why didn't you marry her?
The lived experience is me at 15. I only know what went on in my head at 15 for sure, not anybody else's.
This is a loaded question, because I did marry her.
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