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26 year old man arrested, facing 20 years in prison, for consensual romantic relationship with 19 year old
Cody Pester is facing the charge of "sexual abuse by a school worker" for a fully consensual relationship with a 19 year old who was not enrolled at his school or in his class. He is a 6th grade teacher and began texting the woman when she graduated from the high school attached to the junior high where he taught. He was never the teacher of this woman, since he had only taught 6th grade for a few years, based on his age. There is no evidence that he is a danger to any of his 6th graders, but nonetheless he's been fired for his job, seemingly for wanting to start a family with this 19 year old, who is only 7 years his junior. 7 year age gaps are very common in marriage and are even maximally fertile, according to a recent article. So, based on evopsych, this is likely what he was trying to accomplish. This seems like a prime example of severely criminalizing normal male heterosexuality and reproductive instinct.
To summarize, this law is excessively punitive, to the point of violating the 8th amendment cruel and unusual punishments clause. 20 years in prison for a consensual relationship between two legal adults is out of control. It is also dishonestly named, because the charge is called "sexual abuse by a school worker," but he did not commit this crime as stated because he did not have sex with her at any point when he was a school worker relevant to her. She was simply not enrolled in school when it occurred. The charge should be renamed "consensual sex by a teacher with a consenting and legally adult graduate of that high school who did not have the teacher as an authority figure at any point."
I think this shows that a strong motive in age of consent laws is preventing disruption to the education of young women. It's not really about age gaps or abuse, since the laws don't criminalize those things. 18 and 50 is the same as 17 and 50; it's no difference to an old man. There are entirely separate laws which criminalize actual sexual abuse. And if the laws were about mental capacity to consent, they would be set at 14 or 15. Setting it up at 18 and having extra extensions for teachers makes it obviously about defending girls from marriage to young men until they complete high school. In fact, I read online that the 90 day clause was specifically because romantic relationships like this might derail a girl's college plans. In 90 days, she will be gone to a university, where her professor can date her. This is fine, since it keeps her on campus. Her marrying a mid 20s bachelor at her local high school might make her a 20 year old stay at home mother, which is apparently a felony now. In fact, a lot of "teen pedo" panic seems to be memetically descended from late 20th century "teen pregnancy" panic, which was really about educational disruption, and not about teen pregnancy being dangerous (it's not, the girls were not dying, instead they were kept from school by babies). As someone who doesn't believe in the traditional school system, it seems absurd, cruel, and evil to have laws cruelly penalizing traditional alternatives to lengthy education.
This kind of BS is why I have so much trouble caring about the Epstein files at all (as in the below CW post). I don't feel like doing any kind of deep-dive research into them, which means I'm left with coverage from the mainstream media. And the mainstream media will unashamedly lump together "a prepubescent girl was thrown into a sex dungeon for months and repeatedly raped by X" and "a willing 17-year-old prostitute was hired by X" under the category of "X is a pedophile rapist!!!". But I just do not give two shits about the latter; biologically speaking it's a pretty normal thing for humans to do, and not even especially immoral.
When a 26yo dating a 19yo is enough to trigger serious legal action, it's just one more reason not to trust the system. Maybe there are dangerous pedophiles out there that are being caught, but without constant fact-checking effort that I'm not willing to expend, how could I even tell? I kind of suspect that abolishing all sexual-deviancy laws except for undeniable cases of rape/child abuse would be a net positive for America.
They don't do this because the former doesn't happen. A pedophile describes someone attracted to teenagers almost-surely. The baby-rapist is a canard invented to shame young men out of dating 17 year olds. You can see this in action on this form; I said the age of consent should be 14 or 15, and the only objections couldn't stop talking about 4 and 5 year olds.
Actual paedophiles (in the sense of men primarily attracted to prepubescent children) exist, we even had one on the Motte. But they are vanishingly rare - the number of actual prepubescent kids molested by actual paedophiles each year in the UK appears to be in single figures.
Men fucking sexually mature teenage girls is illegal for good reasons, but it isn't really deviant - ephebophilia is just normal straight male sexuality, and 13 year old girls with periods used to be marriageable essentially everywhere (though rarely married in practice in cisHajnal cultures).
The other thing that is an unfortunate aspect of normalish sexuality is pederasty. The age at which a boy becomes attractive as a twink to a man who wants to fuck twinks is even younger than the age at which girls become attractive to ephebophiles - Greek boylove started when the boy was 12 or occasionally even younger. I think social scripts around modern gayness-based male homosexuality (versatile means bottom!) have developed in a way which mean that Greek-style boylove is no longer considered a normal part of male homosexuality and this has done more than horror at paedophilia to get NAMBLA kicked out of Pride.
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