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Age Gap Relationships
So its no secret that people, particularly zoomers, like to bitch and moan about age gaps in relationships. Should someone who's 30 date someone who's 18? Does it make you a pedophile if you do?
A lot of this discussion hinges on whether or not these people are actually "adults" that can make logical decisions. I've been pondering this myself so I'm going to run by two hypotheticals (Both for and against 18 year olds or "teenagers" being adults) and see what you guys think:
Case 1
Is it fair to say that you killed a child? Probably not. You killed teenagers? Technically. Did you kill some grown ass man thinking he could jack you? Many would say yes! On top of this, many people would judge these boys as adults, and have them take a prison/jail sentence as adults. It seems that in the eyes of many, if you do adult things, and are expected to take accountability as an adult, we should rightfully call you an adult. Make sense? Maybe lets consider case 2.
Case 2
Now, both Steve & Maddy choose to do an adult action (have sex) with an adult consequence (reproduction), and took responsibility as "adults" (getting married and getting a job). Would we say these 2 are adults? It seems the answer here, for many is no. You shouldn't want teenagers to be having kids: that's what adults are expected to do. That fact that Steve & Maddy have done adult things, and are now taking on adult responsibilities, doesn't make them true adults in the eyes of many.
So far, Im what I'm thinking with both of these cases is that the cognition needed to make adult decisions perhaps simply lie at different ages, based on said decision. Maybe its easier at 14 to know that car jacking & killing is wrong, than it would be to have the knowledge and maturity neccessary to handle a sexual relationship. And that the whole "lets have one universal age of adulthood" is looking at it wrong: Different actions simply have different complexities to them, and thus a universal set age of adulthood ignores those complexities. But assuming this is true, where does sexual relationships lie on the age scale? Is a 16 year old really too immature to date some one who is 19? 20?
If we should have universal age of adulthood, that tracts onto everything (alcohol, crime, sex) where would it be? Currently, all of these have different ages (21 is for alcohol if you are in the US). What do you guys think?
I live in a world where large age gaps are socially acceptable if a bit unusual. In the rad trad world they are recognized as a choice that people sometimes make(and typically there are more 18 year old women interested in men significantly older than them than the reverse; teenagers are normally annoying and the former category is not actually selected for maturity. This is not to say that most or even very many high school seniors want to be going out with men in their thirties). It doesn’t cause any social problems(social problems in rad trad dating exist; they are not this one), but we also live in a world with functionally no premarital sex or divorce, and it’s noted as sometimes making things awkward at family gatherings. The prevailing opinion is that the secular world would not be able to handle it. Wives significantly younger than their husbands will have a second diaper changing phase, but women don’t really mind changing diapers and tradcath men are all smokers so it’s not the longest phase anyway.
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I don’t think other than legal issues age is a good qualifier of adulthood. The reason is pretty simple: what actually matures a human brain is that it’s forced to be responsible. You can find all sorts of examples in history of people the modern world would consider too young to be allowed to hold a job at McDonald’s. Alexander Hamilton was born in 1755, and by 1771, the age of 16 which is when our kids get baby’s first fast food job, our boy Alexander was mature enough to run a port for 5 months.
I can point to lots of my own family history where women were routinely getting married at 14 and having children by 15 or 16. It wasn’t all that rare for kids in the 19th century. It would not have been unusual for kids on farms to be doing things that we’d cringe at and probably charge people with neglect for allowing. Kids of 9 could tame calves, sheer sheep, help with livestock, and so on. Those kids were much more mature than their modern peers because much was expected of them at much younger ages. Our kids not only don’t do mature work, but increasingly aren’t really expected to help out around the house or do homework (at least in some districts).
I do think a universally accepted age of adulthood makes sense from a legal perspective. Having to individually decide on every milestone whether a person X years old can do it means a good deal of legal chaos. If you had a universal standard (say 18) then it’s no longer necessary to say “is he able to be treated as an adult?” If you’re 18, you can do everything any other adult can do.
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Are they black? It may depend on the race. Steve and Maddy don't sound black, but 4 „teenagers“ with guns going carjacking sounds black. I think it's hard to talk about this without race. r/K selection theory says some races reproduce under an earlier, lower investment pattern than others. Different races also have different levels of adult neoteny, different developmental timing, and so on. It's not impossible to consider that the average black person becomes adult-in-their-race earlier than the average Asian or white person.
Why would that be a good idea?
We don't know. I've never seen any persuasive scientific evidence on the matter. History goes one way, the current culture goes the other. My guess is that cultural fads come and go and that this one isn't beneficial for fertility, so it will go eventually. As a libertarian I hate to see governments treat the violation of the current fad as a serious crime, but it's mostly isolated to the Anglosphere and especially the United States, where most of the awful culture and toxic fads come from and circulate. So at least there's that.
Im honeslty curious for your answer here, because this reply is unique in taking race realism into consideration. For our car-jacking situation, we'll say they are poor white kids. Steve (Black) & Maddy (Hispanic) are in an interracial relationship.
On a side note, It probably be rather difficult to set maturity levels into law based on race as well, but im guessing this is a moral judgement, rather than a legal implementation.
Yes. I would rather adulthood be granted by IQ test. An optimized by-race system would just use racial IQ means instead of the test itself.
Hard to say since it comes down to intelligence for me instead of race. Poor whites are close the median blacks.
Thats interesting, so this girl could be 25, but not be an adult, ever?
That kinda works sort of, but has another problem, your essentially saying that a 14 year old with a higher IQ should be an adult, with all that entails. I dont think many people would accept that.
Adulthood ideally requires a level of emotional control that gifted 14-year olds are less likely to have than normie 21-year olds (but plenty of 14 year-olds have it and plenty of 21-year olds don't) and an ethic of taking adult responsibility which 14-year olds have not generally had the opportunity to develop in our society, and particularly not in the PMC milieu where most gifted kids are going to come from (but would do in a better-run society).
Right now, my guess is that less than half the gifted 14-year olds with the cognitive ability to pass an "early adulthood exam" are emotionally ready for adulthood, but 80% of them could be if we raised gifted children with that expectation (and most of the 20% are sufficiently autistic that they will never be emotionally ready for adulthood - part of the purpose of academia in a world where it isn't ruined by woke activism is as an artificial environment which makes geniuses who can't adult maximally useful)
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Yes. Preferably. I don't think most people should vote. The main issue is deciding who their guardian should be. It may be infeasible to give them a guardian but many of the non-guardian related restrictions can apply to them. It would solve a lot of problems. These same people can't handle alcohol or gambling. We could scuttle a lot of credentialism by just having their status disqualify them for jobs like doctor, lawyer, and pilot. That girl in particular is a character which is supposed to be retarded, so I think she would have a guardian even under our present system.
Yes, well, that's because they're self-serving stupid people who want to continue despoiling society. It's sad.
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Large age gaps are rare and have always been rare. The reason they draw disproportionate attention is because they serve as a way to psychologize one’s opponents in the battle of the sexes. We might say similar things about concepts like “the wall”, the debate on catcalling, so-called “chadfishing”, the “body count” debate and so on. All of these relate to similar neuroses. So let us psychologize, then.
The “age gaps are nothing bad wink” imagines his opponents as middle aged harpies. Sad about their declining looks, he imagines they are very upset at seeing men their age date much younger women, and so they lash out. Forget the fact that most of these women are married to men (broadly) their age, and that most middle aged men are married to middle aged women, and that he himself is likely either with a woman close to his age or, if he is single, is unlikely to be dating a far younger woman statistically. It is the idea that matters. It is more of a taunt than anything.
Similarly, the “age gaps are bad” /r/fauxmoi regular embarrassingly invested in the romantic lives of various celebrities is also posturing. Not to the opposite sex, though, but to the same one. Consider the line “I was catcalled every day from the age of 12 to 20. Men are pigs, they want the youngest possible girl who doesn’t yet know how to recognize their bullshit - don’t make my mistake”, which one sees variants of in every one of these discussions in women’s communities. What is this line saying? It’s saying “I was once an extremely beautiful young woman. I had great currency, and you should listen to me”. It is no less an invocation of one’s own attractiveness as status as hitting on your uglier friend’s boyfriend in front of her. Men do this too - the ex-playboy telling young men that casual sex isn’t all it’s set up to be while still emphasizing just how much of it he had, for example. There are the rich people who will tell you money isn’t everything. The beautiful people who tell you looks aren’t everything. Many of the people saying these things aren’t even rich or beautiful.
And none of them, really, are wrong. There are elements of truth to every one of these narratives. But they’re all motivated. In the end, these people go back to their average wives and average husbands and find, I hope, some average happiness. The gender debate rolls on.
I suspect that the current age-gap discourse actually serves to benefit powerful/wealthy older men, as they become the only ones with enough clout to ignore the social shaming... and the only ones with enough appeal to convince a woman to ignore the social shaming. Acquiring a hot young girlfriend thus becomes even more of a flex and proof of their own status.
And of course it encourages them to keep it on the downlow, and this also suits the guy because she won't be pushing him as hard to make them 'official' or 'public' and gives her less leverage to push for a marriage.
And finally, by making it taboo, it actually becomes more appealing for a certain kind of woman to seek it out.
Bill Belichick is simply not bound by by same standards as your average guy. And because he isn't bound by them and can't be influenced by shaming, the shamesters won't target him, they'll go after the class of males they think they CAN influence, who were less likely to be able to attract a young lady anyway.
So as with many other things, the main effect of such social rules is to restrict behaviors of the middle group of men who are cowed by status games and shame.
And of course the bottom class of dude who is so outside the normal status hierarchy that it doesn't effect him will go after younger ladies regardless.
Well this is gonna be a fun little narrative violation then. That is just about marriage rather than girlfriend but wealthy people are also significantly less likely to divorce as well. They tend to marry when they're young and then stay with their wives.
Haha but you see the issue there.
Bill Belichick isn't married.
Leo DiCaprio doesn't marry his girlfriends.
Nor does Toby Maguire.
Likewise, consider the rise of Sugar Dating as an informal institution.
This is my point. It actually relieves the pressure to marry these women since they lose any real leverage they might have had.
They're getting to have the cake that is off-limits to normal guys, and eat it too by having no legal or social commitment obligations imposed.
I mean most of the age-gap relationships I see are more of the 'lifer hospitality worker in his mid thirties and random 19 year old cashier' type than the rich or wealthy involved in them. They're also generally more towards lower socioeconomic ends of society for a variety of reasons.
I agree that some subset of the rich and/or famous date down, but the majority of the rich don't have that much social clout and your average UMC middle-high manager with a mortgage and a 5M networth is generally not in any position to find a wife who's 20 years younger than him.
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The whole point @magicalkittycat was making (which I agree with) is that these guys are exceptional among rich/powerful/successful men. Most R/P/S men are still married to the mothers of their children, so they are facing weaker taboos against taking up a younger girlfriend than they used to - both the taboo against adult age gaps and the taboo against adultery in 2026 are weaker than the taboo against adultery was in 1980.
The informal institution of "rich men having mistresses but being discrete about it" was not created by seekingarrangement.com.
The purpose of the age gap taboo from the point of view of the feminists and allies imposing it is to force middle-aged divorced men with options to date middle-aged divorced women rather than dating prime-age never-married women. Middle-aged divorced women, and women who want to improve their options should they choose the life of middle-aged divorced woman, are the core constituency of feminism.
Solid point.
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My position is that we have the technology to directly test for capacity to engage in the behaviors in question. So the legal proscription on, e.g. alcohol consumption, sexual relations, gambling, taking out loans, etc. the 'incapacity' we impose on minors can be lifted on a case-by-case basis rather than an arbitrary birthday fiat.
There's additional mechanisms I'd attach to this, but it makes good sense to me. Some sixteen year olds are probably mature enough to handle parenthood. Many twenty-four year olds are probably not quite mature enough to grasp why buying lotto tickets it not a sound financial decision. And capacity for one of those doesn't inherently imply capacity at the other. Rain Man probably understands odds/statistics enough to let him gamble, but maybe doesn't get how sex works.
The age at which they are competent to do these things is unlikely to be the exact same, based on their brain development, life experiences, and emotional maturity.
And I like the idea that if there is an 'objective' testing process in place to gain 'adulthood' privileges... then this gives kids incentive to study and prepare for these tests... meaning they actually work at grasping the topics and mentally engaging with them, rather than just expecting to gain them with passage of time.
This is not dissimilar from requiring teens to pass a driver's test before being permitted on the roads (inadequate as that may ultimately be).
We'd have to test for emotional maturity, not factual knowledge, which is itself a problem, and it would be subject to Goodhart's law; a test would just end up measuring ability to take the test since no test can test everything.
Also, given the history of tests for voting, it's likely that general maturity tests would be abused. Age is easy to measure, so it can't really be gamed the same way.
Yes, which is why I somewhat tongue-in-cheek suggest the ant-glove test as an option for figuring out if somebody has control of their emotional state.
A decent test of emotional maturity is putting someone in an objectively painful/uncomfortable situation, and require them to 'suck it up' and not break down in tears or flee. Sound familiar? Its all just testing emotional regulation, the ability to react proportionally/not overreact, and to endure discomfort to achieve later rewards.
We also have the marshmallow test, which could be adapted to something that would tempt adults too.
"I'm giving you a $100 bill to put in your wallet. If you can bring me back that exact same $100 bill in one week, you will get a second one." I expect low-impulse-control individuals will spend that sucker inside a day or two.
Blatantly plagarizing gom jabbar.
The reverse, no? I think this is a savage tribe that's been doing it for a millenia.
Dune Isn't Fiction It's a Historical Novel
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I don't think this would be a decent test for emotional maturity, even if modified for the real world. There are situations where we should accept people breaking down in tears or fleeing. And I absolutely don't trust any bureaucrat or scientist to figure out what sort of reaction is proportionate and what is overreacting, when people's liberty depends on the answer and when overreacting is strategically used for political purposes.
And I don't trust the masses to figure out that it's all good at a certain age. It would be better to just ignore emotional maturity as a concept and hope it correlates with IQ a lot (it probably does). I don't really care if some high IQ, but emotionally immature people get to be adults at the age of 14. It's not a big deal.
Meh for you maybe, but I feel like a lot of people would reject a 130 IQ 14 year old dating someone who is in their 30s. It just seems intuitively wrong on many levels, even if someone has a really high IQ.
But that's because they're stupid, and they foolishly think they get to control more intelligent people with their stupid gut feelings and half-assed, self-serving heuristics. That notion is everything wrong with society, more or less. It's the most toxic idea in the universe so far.
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So who should be held liable when an emotionally immature 18-19 year old signs a contract and then has a breakdown when they're unable to complete their end of it.
If they're considered mature enough to sign contracts, they should be considered mature to have to follow through on them. If there are measures taken against this, they should be age agnostic. (For instance, allowing the discharge of student loans in bankruptcy, which also discourages banks from giving out loans for useless majors in the first place.)
And therein lies the problem. If they're not mature enough to follow through on them (as the facts in evidence show), why are we assuming they were mature enough to understand them at the time they signed them?
Females in particular might have a hard time grasping compound interest.
And yes, bankruptcy is an answer in many cases... but the practical point there is that banks won't lend to people who are likely to declare bankruptcy.
So that becomes the de-facto maturity test, whether a bank considers you credit-worthy.
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Socialization is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If someone has been socialized to be an adult by twelve, they'll mostly live up to that. If they've been socialized not to be an adult until 40, they'll do that too. It's mostly a function of what we all demand of adolescents. "Teenagers" are a modern invention. Legally and socially we need a clear line, which has for the past fifty years or so been eighteen. For the most part, that's not a bad compromise. But the socialization about what is expected of those age groups changes much faster than law.
Indeed. Invented at the end of WW2 as a concept. Really quite modern.
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Especially in the age of social media.
One factor that I'm seeing with the rise of streamer culture, a lot of the streamers (i.e. the role models many of these kids are glued to) are getting into their 30's and are still 'stuck' in a loop of playing video games all day, going out and partying and drinking, using light drugs (or hard ones), and obsessing about social drama amongst their cliques.
And they make good money doing this so there's no clear reason they should stop.
A handful of them make good eventually, but those who get families and responsibilities... tend to drop out of streaming.
So kids are getting socialized by role models that don't even know them, in social groups that only exist online, and whose norms are basically that of a particularly low-class high school, and that are incentivized towards anti-social activities, more often than not.
I don't blame the streaming sites for this per se, but I don't think our core social structures were prepared for the rise of this alternative culture that scales internationally.
Makes you wonder how. Presumably people with "real" jobs and things happening outside of streaming are sending them money?
Yeah.
I think there's an oversupply of lonely youngish people with decent-paying jobs who enjoy living vicariously through a streamer they identify with/find sexually attractive. Parasocial behavior is a bit under-studied I think.
I've been in the streamer loop and a decent amount of them are children of privilege to begin with, which is why how they got through the initial clout-building stage for years on end before graduating to actually have enough partnerships to self-finance somewhat.
Also a lot of streamer lifestyle goods aren't really that expensive to produce especially if you're a big enough influencer to have the providers of Coachella Tickets and expensive alcohol giving you them at cost.
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Try to think of the situation in reverse. If my niece or one of my younger cousins when they come of age at 18, told me they were currently dating a 30 year old man, it would certainly give me pause and reflection to wonder where his particular interest comes from, that's distinct and different from someone in the same age group as they are. Would you feel differently if the tables were reversed in your case? It's a matter of differences in the stage of life. An "adult" at 30 isn't even on the same level as an "adult" at 50. It's less questionable because there's likely mature development from both parties from 18 to their present age that's taken place. A person at 18 though is too green to have that life experience that feels right. Would you take advice from yourself at 14? How about 18? I know more about everything, including myself; today in 2026 than I ever did back then, but looking back, although I was lacking in knowledge about certain things, I was every bit on the right track.
I was rejected once by a woman who was 1 year older than me and said it she felt it she would be like dating her younger brother. Seemed petty to me and it would've landed better without the insult. My ex-girlfriend of almost 8 years was a year and a half older than me. We'd known each other prior to dating, so there was already an established history there. Maybe that was something that softened any kind of weirdness. Looking at most of my age cohort today, I've done amazingly well by comparison when I see so many women who still act like 16 year old girls. If I ever got a word with mom and dad and I'd tell them they clearly failed as a parent.
I agree that it's kind of a red flag. (And I say this as a man in his 50s who is engaged to a woman who is 18.) The issue is that there are men out there who are "in love with a number," i.e. they are kind of obsessed with dating young women. Such a man can be expected to quickly lose interest in the woman he is seeing, because everyone ages. Which isn't necessarily a problem if you are looking for a fling, but if the woman is interested in a long-term serious committed relationship, that's a problem.
Fundamentally, the situation is no different from when a woman dates a man who is known to be a "player" type. To me, that's an even bigger red flag. I find it annoying that society is far more tolerant of "f*ck boys" than of older men in relationships with younger women.
Were you married before? Are you a widower? My main problem with age gaps like this is they're often the product of cheating or divorce. They also take away from young men.
I don't want to delve to deeply into my personal life, mainly because I don't want to dox myself.
But in general I agree that (1) polygamy (and polygyny) are bad for society; and (2) age gap relationships can act as a kind of polygamy -- since (1) they can result in one man monopolizing the reproductive years of multiple women; and (2) they can result in a man not giving one set of children his full paternal attention.
That being said, the trope of the man who becomes successful and ditches his first wife for some young hottie is a bit like stranger kidnappings and police shootings of unarmed black men. All of these things are rare but splashy and get far more attention than they realistically deserve because they serve some kind of narrative. In reality, most divorces are initiated by women who are bored and/or monkey-branching and high class polygamists like Donald Trump, Leonardo DiCaprio, or Elon Musk are pretty far down on the list of things undermining society and making life more difficult for young men.
Surely you can give a broad coverage of how you came to be in such a wide age gap relationship.
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I certainly have no moral problem with that, provided you both have honorable intentions. But, on a prudential level, how are you thinking about your future marriage in the context of aging? A six-year gap may get smaller as a couple ages, but surely a thirty-five-ish–year gap will get larger; in thirty years you will be in your eighties and she in her forties.
I don’t mean this as a gotcha. I assume you have thought about this, and I am curious about those thoughts.
I'm not thrilled about the age gap situation. The trouble is that it's just so hard to find a woman in the West who is (1) not obese; (2) not a single mom; and (3) not into woke progressive nonsense. Sadly I am not 6'2" with a chiseled jawline, so I have to compromise.
What can I say? I try to eat carefully and go to the gym a lot.
This really is the issue.
In many cases there's not a huge, noticeable 'maturity' difference between a 21 year old woman and a 28 year old woman. One will just have a lot more 'baggage' than the other.
There's definitely an experience difference... but rarely does a woman take those experiences and learn good lessons and improve from them, i.e. mature. Oftentimes it just spirals as she justifies further bad decisions as a mere incremental step from what she previously did. So if the choice is between a 21-22 year old or a 28-29 year old, you're signing up to deal with an emotionally unstable partner with a naive idea about how the world works either way.
But the latter is also going to be bitter and have higher expectations and be more judgmental, and the former is more likely to be pleasant, inquisitive, and eager to experience new things. The light hasn't been snuffed out yet.
I had the very dark thought recently, that it would be very helpful if we could develop amnestic drugs of some kind that a late 20's woman could take that would 'reset' her memories and mental processes back to its youthful state. Literally have her forget all the previous mates, all the hookups, all the horrible breakups and emotional trauma and debauched decisions she's made over the past decade.
If she's otherwise physically attractive and now has the attitude of a 20-year-old, she's suddenly much more appealing as a mate. Unless she has a kid, can't easily remedy that issue.
As a sage on twitter put it:
It gives me no happiness to report it, but my generalized experience with women is that by age 26, their personalities aren't ever improving from what they've displayed up until then.
This is not to say a single woman automatically becomes unmarriageable after that point! If their personality is good, its probably going to stay that way too.
But that age appears to be when the traumas and bad decisions will pile high enough that they can't be suppressed so long.
The Hail Mary of having her pop out a kid and see if that unlocks the nurturing part of her brain has many risks.
Its such a cruel/weird trick of nature that the age of 18-25 is when men should be doing their best to gain life experience and toughen themselves up... whereas women should be doing their best to avoid getting debauched and should be protecting their general positive life outlook as long as possible.
And under current social paradigms, we basically encourage the opposite arrangement.
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I agree that this can be an issue, but for me it's not necessarily a deal-breaker -- depending on the degree of bitterness, of course. The bigger problem, in my opinion, is that secular women are fed a constant stream of anti-male propaganda through their smartphones.
Same difference, ultimately.
The singular best green flag I can see in any woman, if she passes the other basic filters, is NOT being utterly addicted to screentime. And specifically, not having instagram, tiktok, dating apps, or certain other apps that do little but feed mental distress. If they have a loop of checking their phone every 30 seconds, or being stuck on it for long periods, or are addicted to posting every detail of their lives/choreographing things for maximum appeal, I tend to write off any further interest in them as a partner.
I've had the displeasure of watching behavior shifts in real time of young, 18-24 year old women who were generally pleasant to be around, and through a combination of the corrupting influence of algorithmic feeds AND the massive influx of digital attention any attractive woman gets if she posts herself online, basically becomes entitled, narcissistic, and usually fairly dismissive of her IRL relationships in favor of cultivating the online following.
I, personally, have spoken to a depressed, anxious young woman who knows she is mentally unwell, and knows to some degree that the apps are driving her down a bad path, and I had literally said "hand me your phone and I'll delete every one of those apps off of it for you" and she balked and did that Gen Z stare thing, said 'no thanks' and then walked away to do something else.
I think it's a good heuristic for young men too. The manias are different but the causes are the same.
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Whatever your degree of "compromise" is, it's not nearly as significant as the compromise the woman marrying a man 30+ years her senior is making.
I have a corner of the extended family that includes a man who, after his kids were grown, divorced his wife and remarried someone slightly older than his kids and had a full second family. They are nice folks that clearly love each other and I like them, but I can tell it's been rough on them in various ways due to the age gap: the dad hit (practical) retirement age while the youngest kids (one with special needs) were still in middle school, and I know the wife has had to start working, presumably to close the budget. I know she's been having to take care of him (now in his 80s) physically too since before the last kid left the house, and I can't help but occasionally think about how she's actuarially likely to be widowed in maybe her early 60s, and how she'll handle that long-term.
Nothing against them personally, but I think they'd have been happier overall if they were closer to the same age and met earlier. I wish them well, though. Life throws things like that at you sometimes. I hope it goes well for the GP here, too.
This situation is also rough on the kids from the first marriage, who suddenly acquire a stepmother who isn't old enough to be their mother, but will need to play the social role of mother unless the kids spend ~100% of the time with their biomum. I'm going to date myself by pointing out that acquiring a stepmother young enough that she could just about have dated him instead of his father was what pushed Bill of Bill and Ted over the edge into loserdom. (Ted was just as thick as two short planks).
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From the purely pragmatic/actuarial standpoint, if the gap is 10 years or larger, you as the male had better make some kind of preparations that will ensure financial security for the family if you die, and definitely to cover those last few years of care.
I mean you should in any case, but doubly so if you're asking them to sign up for a very high chance of spending their twilight years alone and unable to earn much.
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That's an interesting question, because she has a thing for older guys and is therefore getting what she wants out of the age gap, or at least what she thinks she wants. Presumably she is compromising on other things though. Sadly, everyone does. (Well, almost everyone.)
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The same place all male interest in females comes from. Historically, 30 year old men (or even older) routinely sought out 16-18 year old women to form families with. The question is entirely in the quality of the man. I happen to have this exact situation in my family, with a cousin dating and then marrying at 19 to a man 12 years her senior. He is a very good dude who happened to really, really want a large family. To my knowledge, he adores her, never speaks down to her or has treated her as less than an equal partner, and 8 (or maybe 9? I've lost count) kids later they are one of the happiest families I know.
It goes without saying men are biologically attracted to women. Not all desire is a form of healthy expression or interest. There are a lot of very attractive women in my family and a good handful of them I view like younger sisters. That men would find them attractive is no surprise and I don't hold it against them for thinking that. I'm against a man who would manipulate them into sex without requiring love, mutual commitment, support or investment. Yeah, sexual congress is universal. I get it. The goal has never been to prevent that. The goal is to keep that within context.
I wouldn't inherently reject a man who comes along and tells me he's interested in one of my relatives. I've had it happen before. Like you, it depends entirely on how I vet him to be. When I was a teenager, a group of my friends were out in the city once late at night doing things they shouldn't have been doing. As the night continued to get late, I drop word in with my best friend that my younger cousin (which they all knew) is out at a party past her curfew so I asked him to swing by to pick her up and join them while they walked her home. At one point one of the guys in the group made a pass at my cousin and my best friend who was there walked up and popped him in the face pretty hard, and told him to "shut the fuck up." After she was dropped off, they rolled through my place as it was nearing the morning and they told me what happened. Me and said friend in that group are still friends to this day and he apologized the night that it happened, but our relationship has been strained for decades after that. He's definitely been out on the periphery of things ever since then. But that was all par for the course with how we grew up. We policed each other's behavior and kept one another in line. It was a strongly enforced norm. Homeboy chose to make an degrading attempt instead of keeping his mouth shut.
It's about the kind of man you are and how responsible you are. If you can prove you're a mature suitor and a respectable man, that's more than enough social proof for me to have my blessing, but "proof" is the key word in that sentence. If he was much older than her but came from my friend group and we'd had a multiple decade long pedigree with each other, I'd know the man well enough to know whether he's a good fit for someone in my family or not. One of my best friend's cousins is married to one of my cousins and they have two kids with each other and it's a very happy marriage. We've long passed the point of being best friends, we've been in-laws now for quite awhile.
Absolutely, and this is one of the advantages of a strong family, as it has been historically. If a man knocks up a woman and doesnt do the honorable thing, the womans family has certain duties involving pitchforks and/or shotguns. But an age gap is not a good indicator of lack of commitment, I would argue both historically and currently its the inverse. Even the sour-grapes danger-haired feminists who shriek about such things couch their argument in terms of power imbalances rather than a lack of commitment.
The short leash and overprotective brothers thing doesn't seem to work though. It didn't work in your example your cousin still ended up a single mom and it didn't work in among the kids at my high school. The girls end up sneaking around anyway and half end up pregnant out of wedlock. The girls from middle and upper class liberal families whose brothers don't care who they date seem to have much better results. And you might say it's a class thing and sure maybe it is but still that's the half of it I can't imagine a family of respectable doctors and engineers getting together to force some disreputable boy to marry one of their relatives.
Does it work in every case? No. But it worked an overwhelming amount of the time. They're still married to this day and he walks around in fear of retribution. I don't see any logic that gives way to the notion that the situation improves further by a complete withdrawal of that attitude.
Does still married matter if they are separated and your family will beat him if he ever shows his face at Thanksgiving? That doesn't seem like a successful outcome to me. And I don't think that attitude has much effect. Middle class American young women and girls tend not to have family with that attitude and they don't get pregnant out of wedlock or indeed get pregnant much at all anymore.
A lot of lowerclass and working class young women with protective family attitudes like that do end up pregnant out of wedlock because single motherhood is accepted in their social milieu.
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Well, the argument being couched that way merely conceals the complaint about a lack of commitment; gynosupremacists feel entitled to male commitment.
"Power imbalance" is the way they legitimize that entitlement, as the power imbalance has favored the woman in any relationship for the past 50 years or so. Compare "eat the rich" (and the people who say it); in both cases, it's just a fight over whose version of entitlement is enforced at gunpoint.
I've always adopted the approach that whether we're talking about employment, gender relations, family, interpersonal interactions, whatever it is, if you want to live and be independent of the group that's your right to do so, but you in turn receive no benefit by your lack of membership in it.
If I and other men are implicitly held to be responsible for how the men around us behave, such that it's our job to keep them in line so women feel comfortable and happy going about their business, then they're in turn obliged to follow men's rules at the end of the day. I can fully understand why a woman wouldn't like to constantly live her life in deference to men, but there's no good alternative around this. The only other way to live is by accepting the risk that your independence makes you fair game for anybody and everybody. If we have to compete and you wind up getting in a fucked up situation, you signed onto this, so don't ask me to have pity for you. Despite what others told you, you knew what you were getting yourself into. Every man understands this in his dealings with other men.
If you're complimentary to me, then I obviously owe you certain rights and privileges in virtue of our obligations to serve out the roles we carry for one another. If you're my equal then you're a competitor to me in all aspects of life and your misfortune and pain is a natural consequence of "losing" in the game of survival we're playing. The fact that you lost isn’t proof of your innocence, all it proves is that you’re weaker than me. Sorry, but that's how it is. Life is full of trade offs.
A lot of what men deal with in life they figure out through difficult experience, trial and error. Life is a catch-22 for us because if I don't go to work, I starve. For women (yes, not all of them), plenty of these choices are optional, such that you don't 'have' to work if you don't want to. Or at least as hard as a man does. Women have options where men often have no choice. So a lot of the bad choices women end up making for themselves are expressions of their desire to engage in that activity; and so they’re there by choice. So when you end up getting "burned," you aren't a "victim," you're simply an idiot.
Sorry, what exactly is the "this" here? Every man understands that they're signing up to compete and potentially get fucked up?
Yes, the common understanding is that choosing to play means a risk being the loser, and that there will be at best magnanimity, but certainly not sympathy.
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I think it's important to first identify who the principal opposition to age gap relationships is and at least in my experience, it's almost always women. "Dirty Old Man" and the like. In particular, it's older women. (Not absolutely old but older than the younger age gap partner). Which makes sense. Men famously have a rather constant age of women they find attractive. IIRC in practice age gap relationships are actually rather rare but if an average guy got to choose an idealized partner she'd probably be about 20-25 in age. Which is usually just biology. Just like an idealised female would pick a 6'3 billionaire.
Women are on average better at things like using emotive language and at enforcing and creating social norms ("the longhouse"). Indeed, I can think of no real social norms that have recently been created by men. Women excel in doing things like creating social legitimisation for personal bugbears (see the proliferation of female-centered therapy language). Since we live in a post-violent, heavily language and discourse centered world and since the discourse creators are now all female, you should expect "the discourse" to reflect the issues and wishes of the women forging the discourse.
So that's something to keep in mind with age gap discourse, a lot of it's probably the collective grievance of older women in terms of not wanting to compete with younger women for higher-value mates.
IIRC actual research finds that large age-gap relationships aren't that common but also that they tend to produce slightly better and more durable relationships. I think that 18 is a reasonable Shelling point for these things. People are allowed far more destructive things from that age than dating someone older than them.
I propose a different explanation. If we take a broad look at the age-gap relations where the woman is above the age of majority and the man is older than her, we can see that they are not universally bad (unlike, say, forty-year-old men raping ten-year-old girls). However, there's a specific subtype of this relationship that, while definitely not illegal and not universally immoral, still isn't something that improves the overall quality of truth and love and beauty in the universe.
I'm talking, of course, about a relationship with an expiry date. An older man uses his greater access to material resources or his greater relationship experience to have sex with a young attractive woman and then breaks up with her. Just a few decades ago this wasn't a problem: the young woman's parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents would all immediately see through this man's nefarious plan and forbid the problematic relationship. If the suitor had noble intentions, he would have to prove himself to them.
However, it's $current_year, and this kind of direct personal interference in a woman's private life is now taboo. She's an adult, and no one can tell her who to date and who not to date. On the other hand, she's no longer protected from this form of exploitative relationship. How do you square the circle? You transform personal interference into impersonal. Instead of specific women being told, "no, you cannot date this man", all men are now told, "any of you that dares to date a 18yo is definitely a disgusting predator".
There's an unspoken carve-out for men with noble intentions, just like there's one for attractive men in "don't hit on women in bars/gyms/etc", but it doesn't work well, given the amount of heat this topic generates.
I agree that there may be an element of this in play, but consider a situation where a young woman who is dating a man who is roughly her age but also is a "player" or "f*ck-boy" type (or gives those vibes off). Applying your historical view of things, in the past the young woman's family would have arguably identified such a man as a "cad" or a "rake," and forbade the relationship.
Nowadays, there is some degree of impersonal social disapproval of "player" types, but it's nowhere near the ferocious hostility displayed towards older men who are in age-gap relationships. So I have to think that there's more in play.
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I don't know that this is true. I used to do a fair amount of genealogy for work and large age gaps were pretty common in the old days. Even in my own family, my great aunt married a guy in 1931 (when she was 20) who was about 20 years older than her, and only a couple years younger than her parents. This aunt was like a grandmother to me but I never knew her husband, as he died in 1963, and I didn't really know much about him. Years later, my dad a comment about him along the line of the following when we were talking about the family history: "I don't know what she saw in him. He was like an old man, he never had a steady job, he was mean. I don't understand why my grandparents let her marry that guy." My uncle told a story about his first driving experience, when Uncle Lee asked him to take him to Oakland so he could buy a piss urinal for his basement. He used to tinker around down there and didn't want to walk upstairs and was tired of peeing in a bottle. So he asked my uncle, despite the fact that my uncle was only 13 at the time. My uncle said "Don't you need a permit or something?" and he just waved his hand and said no. So my uncle drove him to Oakland. He had a winter coat on and turned the heat up all the way in the car even though it was June. When they got there the place didn't have one and Uncle Lee got pissed off at the manager. Then when they were leaving my uncle backed into the alley and ran over a bicycle that was lying in the street. Uncle Lee got out and threw it while yelling "Goddamn kids with their toys!" Apparently my grandfather hit the ceiling when he found out about it.
Some of those age gaps I've noticed in my own genealogy research was a much older man marrying a 2nd wife after the first wife died (new wife then helps care for existing kids plus having some of her own with him). Not always, as your example shows, but trying to tease apart the particulars complicates it.
Yes - pre sexual revolution the vast majority of marriageable, single older men were widowers. If a man was a bachelor at thirty there was a reason. "Confirmed bachelor" was a euphemism for gay.
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It depends. There are definitely people who are sketch and seem like they'd go a lot lower if only it was allowed and those people are pedos, but actually spotting them vs just finding someone who is on the younger side hot isn't an easy task so people fuck it up often.
A lot of places (including most US states) do have 16 as the age of consent so they could sleep with whoever! And even many of those that don't have "Romeo and Juliet laws" allowing small age differences.
Now legal vs moral are different questions though. I think 16 year olds are generally mature enough to handle body responsibility and should be treated that way both morally and legally for most things. There are some who are still stupid, but a lot of that is just from coddling our kids too much. For example, many parents will get a babysitter for their sixth grader nowadays whereas sixth grade just a few decades ago were the babysitters
Age of adulthood has always been arbitrary, the point of a single age is mostly for simplicity and being consistent. It's way easier to know and enforce the rules when it's simply "18" instead of having to roll the lottery each time if police and a judge disagree with your assessment of maturity. As for that exact age, it's generally between 16-20 in modern culture. Some do go higher and some go lower but it is mostly in that range. Doesn't matter where exactly, just has to be reliable.
I mean, it matters that it's set as low as possible unless you see people as mere cattle of the State. Setting it higher than it needs to be, by definition, only has costs to individuals, although maybe not the State.
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Look I don't disagree it's sleazy as fuck but "pedophiles" are attracted to prepubescent kids. Maybe you're right at least some of them might go younger if they could, but a 50yo man dating a 19yo girl is not an act of pedophilia.
I've seen tiktoks arguing we should raise the legal age from 18 to 21 or even 25 and see who gets mad. I'll put up my hand right away, I just turned 25 and I'd hate to just become legal when I'm like 5 years into my career.
Now yes, as you point out moral and lawful categories don't always align, and indeed the idea is that at some point you gotta take accountability for all your decisions, including bad ones.
I also suspect it's gendered, reactions to female teachers having sex with male students tend to be more intense among commentators (especially feminists) than the "victims" involved because the reverse is categorically harmful. But men who engaged in sexual activity with adult women as adolescents describe it more positively and report less trauma. Doesn't mean that it is healthy long term, but there are pronounced gendered differences in psychology and hormonal behaviours reflected in these surveys beyond just "he doesn't know he's a victim".
Is that really what pedophile means though? It seems like 99% of the time it's used, it means an adult who likes teenagers. Child molester is more reserved for adults who do stuff to prepubescent kids.
A lot of zoomers think otherwise.
Logically, voluntary sexual intercourse can't be traumatic no matter the age gap. Claiming otherwise is a bizarre social fiction. Which is why we are left always asking what the real motives are for age gap laws and norms.
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So this relates to the sibling thread I have, but what is the categorical harm being done when it's a male teacher having (consensual, non-manipulative, insert qualifiers, etc.) sex with female students, and what makes for the gendered difference?
That study you linked only describes public perception of such acts, not the actual trauma from the act.
What you describe is purely abstract and doesn't reflect real life dynamics though. The asymmetry is layered with differences in non-trivial physical risks (pregnancy and greater exposure to physical harm), developmental vulnerability, and reputational consequences borne by female students from both peers and family. The bodily stakes aren't nearly as equivalent for male students in analogous situations. If the adult female gets pregnant, she bears the physical, social and legal risks, not the adolescent. And peer perceptions are the inverse for young boys. Through porn and other media, teenage boys spend their developmental years admiring and fantasising sex with adult women above their own age bracket. So for better or for worse, sex with an adult woman is a status symbol for male students.
Except for "developmental vulnerability", by which I assume you mean damage to underdeveloped internal organs, doesn't everything else (pregnancy, reputation, etc.) also apply to really old geezers dating really young adult women?
Also, I wouldn't be so sure about legal risks, given that even a 15 year old boy was ordered to pay child support to a 34 year old adult woman. But that seems almost tautological: it is immoral to fuck a child because society might hurt the child if you do.
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Those qualifiers reduce this to essentially an empty set. And even if you can come up with some hypothetical where it is possible, there's no way to tell between that and the vastly more common situation where the relationship is manipulative.
The answer to the sibling comment is the same: Given the nature of children, consensual, non-manipulative, pedophilia is essentially impossible, and the weird hypothetical where it's possible is not something you can actually distinguish from the rest.
I already provided an obvious one that myself (and I'm sure millions of other teenage boys) went through: horny 14 year old me jerking it off to a whole lot of different adult women.
Suppose it were somehow made known to me that I could have sex with one of those women, I just have to say the word and she would allow me to have my way with her. The consensual qualifier is already satisfied, so that leaves the manipulation one. Would she be manipulating me by simply allowing the act to happen?
I don't see how this is a weird hypothetical at all. I may not have been exposed to any such situations myself, but given the amount of news articles where an adult woman was caught doing something like this, there are likely to have been far more unrecorded instances of this happening where an adult woman was not being manipulative, unless your definition of "manipulation" is far more expansive than mine.
Unless you're talking some scifi situation or some weird borderline case, this is very unlikely to happen without something being seriously messed up with the woman. Maybe "non-manipulative" is a bad word for that, but it will have bad motives and dynamics. And it would still be impossible for an outsider to distinguish a "good" case from the mountains of bad ones.
Ok, but why do you assume that? Or what do you mean by "bad motives"?
By observing humans?
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I have several questions of my own:
Assuming consent and good intentions, what actually makes pedophilia immoral? I remember my days as a horny 14 year old; there were definitely some hot women in their thirties I would have consented to banging. Would even a consensual, non-manipulative act of sex with a much older woman showing me the ropes have caused me irreparable psychological harm?
And the thing that makes pedophilia immoral -- why wouldn't it make a larger age gap relationship immoral? Imagine a rich 70 year old white man being with a hot 22 year old -- not unheard of here in the third world. I would think he's got at least as much power to manipulate her as a 30 year old with a 14 year old.
And of course I understand there is a gendered difference between the scenarios, as much as the left may not want to admit it. A 30 year old man fucking a 14 year old girl produces a much stronger ick than the reverse. Why is that?
It's easier for a 30 year old to manipulate a 14 year old than a 70 year old can a 22 year old. In particular, young minds aren't fully developed and are susceptible to saying yes to things they don't actually want to do. This is why "but the kid consented!" is not a good defense, even if true. Further, pedophilia in general causes psychological harm to the vast majority of minors, so even if we grant for the sake of argument the many claimed cases of people saying they would've totally been fine if they had sex when they were 14 (or actually had done so), it would be enabling pedophiles who would then go on to harm the many people who are not fine with having sex at 14 years of age. This is similar to why you can't consent to being murdered, and murderers who only murder "consensual" victims are still murderers who are still imprisoned for murdering people. We also want to discourage rules lawyering, and if we allowed exceptions in the case of consent, that would open the door to endless litigation over whether the 14 year old really consented, which would result in adverse outcomes for many cases because most 14 year olds don't consent.
This is probably true for some 14 year olds, but not others.
Do you value virginity at marriage? Most people don't. Let's say the hymen doesn't matter, and sex is fun and it feels good. Most people believe this. Obviously, the sex with the 14 year old is voluntary, not forced, or else it would constitute rape. Why do you need staturtory rape laws? On the basis of what harm? The problem is that when it comes to everything but the age of consent, men lose out because „the hymen is a social construct,“ „it can be broken by a bicycle,“ „Onlyfans at 19 is a human right,“ but when it comes to the age of consent it's suddenly Great Harm if a girl consents to sex and then regrets it. What great harm? The law does everything it can do to make sure her virginity is blown out by another man at marriage, but suddenly if she loses it to a loser man who is not her age, it's Big Bad. Why? What harm?
I'd be hard pressed to find a 14 year old for which this isn't true. For it to be false, they would have to be already financially and emotionally independent, mature enough to know the full consequences of sex, have the self-worth and courage to say no, etc. which are all traits that vanishingly few 14 year olds have, if any.
The harm when a minor agrees to sexual acts without fully internalizing what they entail and then being too scared to say no once it starts.
I don't agree with the existence of Onlyfans.
I'm not aware of any laws in Western countries that prohibit premarital sex between consenting adults.
It was true for me.
I don't know what emotionally independent means, financial independence doesn't matter, 99% of people don't have this.
I hope all 14 year olds understand pregnancy and STDs. Is there any other harm? If a man wears a condom, what's the big harm exactly?
Great.
I think you misread me, I was complaining that they don't prohibit it.
Having a strong sense of identity, of self-worth, being able to handle big problems like running out of money, not having to rely on your parents for typical socialization or emotional support. Things like that.
Are we speaking past each other? By financial independence, I mean not being dependent on anyone else for money, and the typical signs of this are things like having your own job and owning your own place. I bring up financial independence because a classic groomer tactic is to shower a child with gifts they wouldn't be able to attain themself. An adult is financially independent and can just buy whatever they want so such a tactic would not work on them.
I find it hard to believe that you at 14 years of age could just buy whatever you wanted and wouldn't be susceptible to a grooming tactic like that.
Sex is a hugely emotional and intimate act and there's more to it than just wearing a condom. A child is highly likely to feel complex emotions they hadn't felt before if they end up in a sexual encounter, and highly likely to want to back out and stop, but also highly likely to be too scared to say no. The harm is in having sex with the child when they don't want it, and the subsequent emotional damage, feelings of powerlessness, lowered self-worth, etc. not uncommon when someone gets raped.
Arbitrary line.
How is this different than the usual courting of women by well-off men?
Okay, then prosecute for forced rape then. If it's not forced rape, what is the issue? Even causing emotional damage, feelings of powerlessness, lowered self-worth is not a felony level harm. Intelligent motte commenters and society make me feel like that all the time. Am I raped?
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Ok, I agree with most things you say, but just to clearly separate out the practical rules that must be put in place to protect the median case, versus the purely ethical side of things:
Is it or is it not fine for a 14 year old who wants to fuck a 30 year old to be allowed to fuck the 30 year old? If not, where is the psychological harm coming from?
But why? Why should it be illegal if there's ample documentation that the person being killed actively consented to and wanted to be killed?
No. The harm comes from the 14 year old not knowing what they're agreeing to and being too scared to say no once it starts.
Because we as a society have agreed to grant as much protection as possible to everyone, even to people who are either stupid or mentally disturbed enough to want to be killed, because we generally value human life. There is also the fact that if consent was an exception, so many murderers would claim the "but they actually consented" defense which would drag out the (already unbelievably long) criminal justice process of putting murderers in prison.
Okay, the latter is something I hadn't considered. But the former: what do you mean by "what they're agreeing to"? They're agreeing to stick their dick into someone they wanted to stick their dick into anyways.
I don't see why this is a useful protection to grant.
But we're not talking about the general case. We're talking about the specific case of someone who no longer values their own life and actively wishes for it to be taken away.
This would be trivially solved by requiring a high bar of evidence for this defense. Can they produce the amount of documentation that Meiwes and Brandes had on hand, signed and notarized and what have you? 99.9% of murders are not going to have that on file.
They may have agreed to that. But they don't know about the complex emotions that comes with the act and their minds are not mature enough to handle it. It's more than just the raw physical act that takes place.
The theory goes that suicidal people are not in their right mind and if they were cured of their afflictions would no longer wish to die. By giving up this protection we would be causing thousands or even millions of unnecessary deaths.
We still do everything in our power to prevent suicidal people from taking their own lives. We don't just ignore them and leave them to their own devices or even actively encourage them to kill themselves.
It's not just being able to eventually adjudicate the claim, it's also the amount of judicial resources spent on frivolous claims (especially since, as you admit, the defense would only be successful in vanishingly rare scenarios). Do you know the saying, "the process is the punishment"? How the process for resolving disputes or incidents, and it being dragged out for a long period of time, is itself a punishment? Defendants can cause that sort of punishment too. The defendant and/or their lawyers will do absolutely everything they can to keep the defendant out of jail, and that includes claiming defenses that have no hope of success, but still result in delays and time, effort, and resources spent having to rebut the claim by prosecutors and witnesses.
As I said, allowing this sort of defense at all would result in the second-order consequences of spawning endless litigation over whether someone consented to being murdered, especially if there was a high bar of evidence.
"They totes consented to it, the document was notarized by this guy!" "Hang on, is that notary even licensed? Looks like his license expired." "Yes, but, he got it reinstated, so it's valid!" "Yeah but, look at this recent state law, says he has to renew in a month, and he didn't." "Hang on, what about..." and so on, arguments like that, ad infinitum. It's already hard enough to put away murderers, we don't need to make it harder.
That's only one way to look at it, no? By demanding such "protection" we cause a lot of unnecessary suffering.
If ad infinitum problems crop up, that's a bug of the legal system, not of the moral code behind the legal system. Not every legal system has this issue.
Was the notary licensed at the time of notarization? If so then it's legit. If not no. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes of the court's time with a sufficiently competent legal system.
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Is there evidence of 14 year olds being uniquely damaged in countries where the AoC is (or was) 14?
Until about 30 years ago the average age of virginity loss was around here, so this is obviously false. Unless you can't tell a 14 year old and a 4 year old apart, which is perhaps useful rhetorically but not realistically.
Sure you can- break into a Texan's house. Though this is just splitting the difference over "breaking into a house defended by armed homeowner will definitely get you killed" and "all cases of self-defense are murder".
Yes. The origin of age of consent laws came about because Britain in the 1880s had literal child prostitutes who were constantly being raped, but no legal recourse could be taken since the defense was always "the 14 year old consented."
Just because someone loses their virginity doesn't mean they consented to it.
If you break into a Texan's house because you want to die, that's arguably just suicide that involves a third party, not murder. Suicide by cop, for example, is (sadly) a popular suicide method.
Sounds like wage theft to me, which is a problem distinct from what you've described. You don't need AoC laws to fix that, you simply need to enforce the existing ones.
Perhaps, but the desire is there for the vast majority of cases where a 14 year old loses it; typically to their similarly-aged companion of the opposite sex, sometimes even in the context of a marriage [as at least one sibling comment describes]. (Alternately: since a young age, I've suffered self-abuse. I always told myself no, but deep down, I knew I wanted it.)
The problem wasn't that they weren't being paid for their services. The problem was that they were being raped. No amount of payment makes it ok to have sex with someone who doesn't want it.
I wasn't talking about sex between people close in age, I was talking about the hypothetical scenario of a 30 year old having sex with a 14 year old.
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Not in cisHajnal countries, which not coincidentally are also the countries where consent in something approximating the modern sense formed part of traditional sexual morality. The average age at first marriage in England never dropped below 25 for men/23 for women (see here for example) until the 1950's baby boom. Pre-marital sex obviously happened, but since it tended to result in a shotgun wedding I don't find the idea that losing your virginity a decade before marriage was common.
Marrying your daughter off at 14 is for royals and goatfuckers, and in neither case is her consent relevant.
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If you have the wherewithal to ask that question the answer is no, trivially, but there are a bunch of people (and you'll see them come out in this thread when they wake up tomorrow) who will claim otherwise. The steelman of their opinion is that it's difficult to know which kind of person you are at that age, but they also don't know what it's like to be someone who isn't affected like that and can tend to be jealous of that trait.
For women, biology (it's to a less desirable woman's advantage that more desirable men [to them] are forced to accept an inferior product for the same price). For old men, it's internalized misandry; for young men, it's jealousy.
As for why it's not that way in reverse (outside of people faking their
orgasmsoffense as an extension of the pretense that men and women are the same- 14 year old men aren't allowed to fuck because that would lead to 14 year old women doing the same, and see above for why they don't like that), it's because men and women are different, so the way they bring value to relationships is also different. Women [and I'm talking about the statistic mean here] bring beauty and are attracted to dollars, men bring dollars and are attracted to beauty.It's very confusing and incoherent to the average human being for older women to prefer to fuck men who can't offer dollars; usually it just marks the man as a dumpster-diver [because older women are less beautiful -> less valuable], and marks the woman as someone so undesirable she couldn't even give herself away. (The predator angle is usually invented; human instinct says men can't be raped, you need to be educated to believe otherwise.)
Well, I most certainly was not thinking about potential psychological harm when I was rubbing one off to adult women. But regardless of what kind of person you are at that age, how exactly does a horny teenage boy get harmed by having his fantasies met in a non-manipulative and consensual manner?
Again, I'm not saying there's no harm. But if there is, can somebody please show it to me, because I'm having trouble seeing it myself.
It's certainly possible (English version here).
But what is interesting is the idea of statutory rape. It comes across as this thing that is simply axiomatically wrong, even under ideal circumstances where the adult is not intending to manipulate, groom, or otherwise inflict harm on the child. You can account for everything unwholesome, and yet somehow the act itself is still seen by society at large as so obviously morally wrong as to not need any further justification.
What you said about this being merely the self-interested motivations of different demographics makes sense to me. But this would seem to morally justify sexual relationships with willing girls of any age; the only limiting factor is societal opprobrium, not ethics, which somehow feels like the entirely wrong conclusion to draw (unless this is just my internalized misandry expressing itself).
It's the entirely correct conclusion to draw, but you're also forgetting that (and I can't believe I actually have to say this) most men don't want to fuck little girls. Men want huge tits and a nice ass; tweens have neither.
Though of course there are exceptions on the margins, or when the woman initiates; human nature can't grok the concept of women initiating sex because it's massively counterintuitive, biologically-speaking (re: pregnancy risks), and in large part doesn't even attempt to do this (which is also why the concept that women can sexually abuse men is completely foreign- this is why female-dominated professions like teaching is obsessed with teaching 7 year old boys they're secretly girls, among other things). It's actually harmful for women to acknowledge it because their self-interest dictates they pretend sex is a chore, for the same reason your self-interest dictates you seek a high wage even for a job compatible with your interests; men take this at face value sometimes.
And by "little girls" I mean "not women", which per the thread's topic I consider to be <=12; ancient societies, including European societies until the Industrial Revolution, had this anchor point for reasons that have a lot to do with both biology and the fact that economic productivity wasn't yet gated behind a decade of credentialism and manual labor was still economically productive; both things that aren't true in modern times, so you get the 13-23 set acting super weird because their biology demands adult treatment that society pretends is illegitimate (because they simply don't have room for them in the economy, and segregation breeds contempt).
We pay for it in events where one of them runs amok and kills a bunch of their peers and consider this acceptable for some reason.
While the word "teenager" as a marketing term only dates to the 20th century, I don't think the evidence supports this idea that adolescence simply didn't exist before the industrial revolution. The teenage years have always been considered a transitionary between childhood and full adulthood.
Yes, children would start assisting with household and agricultural labor from an early age, but it's not like you turned 12 and your father immediately threw you out to start your own farm. It was a gradual escalation of responsibility. A typical 13th century teenager might be an apprentice, a novice, or a squire, but they wouldn't become a journeyman, priest, or knight until their early twenties, and would spend most or all their teenage years assisting a "real" adult with their work until they were experienced and economically secure enough to start their own household.
Outside of the nobility and rare exceptions, medieval people didn't marry until their late teens or early twenties, and would often stay under their fathers' roofs (and their fathers' authority) for even longer.
Certain coming of age rituals like bar mitzvahs would occur shortly after puberty, usually around 14-15, which might symbolically represent passing from childhood to adulthood. But, again, very few 14-15 year olds were actually treated like full adult members of the community. The age of majority almost everywhere has almost always been betwen 16 and 25. Rome started unusually early at 12 and 14 for girls and boys, respectively, but Roman law was weird in that essentially everyone of any age was considered an adolescent dependent of their pater familias. And the Romans had all sorts of other age-gated requirements for full participation in adult society. For example, you weren't eligible to stand for public office until you were 30 and had spent 10 years in the legions, and you could sue to overturn contracts on the basis that your youth and inexperience were being taken advantage of until the age of 25.
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I'm not forgetting that. But there's a huge amount of societal attention placed on the few men that do want to fuck little girls, which is the whole reason that this is even a topic of discussion in the first place, right? Otherwise it'd be a fringe nothingburger concern.
Good observation.
Well, we've only started truly paying for it in recent decades, whereas the phenomenon of segregated teenagehood has been going on for quite a while, right? But what solution is there? There is even less room for them in the economy now, and even if there were, the general public would be aghast at the idea of reintroducing child labor.
It's more that they're just the motte of the "all sex is rape, all men are predators" argument that women draw a socio-financial salary from repeating. It makes sense for them to do this, just like it makes sense to spam "all young people are subhuman/mentally invalid until 25" for all people whose station in society would be threatened by the presence of younger competition (doubly so for women who #fightfor25).
There's also the fact that, for people who are not you or me, sex is very special (in a way described as spiritual, which makes sense as it's fundamental to human existence); it's core to the way they experience the world and as such has to fall into specific buckets. This is why early '70s academics were all like "well, if you fuck in childhood, maybe you won't grow up to be such a square?", and why that didn't actually end up working.
(Note that said academics generally treat opposition to this as 'closed mindedness' and treat pushing it on those people as 'liberating' them; ignoring the fact that for a lot of people, their instincts are smarter than they are, or they're already at maximum capacity for resisting the instincts that are maladapative to the situation and forcing them to bear even more is not tenable. Compare "hatching eggs" for transgenderism.)
It actually hasn't, though; the word only dates back to the 1930s, and between 1945-1980 the post-WW2 economic boom created space for [older] teenagers to enter the workforce. Before that was peak "children in the mines", of course (and if they were as useless as the average adult thinks they are, they couldn't have been so employed), but the Depression forced most of them out and into the
asylumschool system because there was wasn't enough work for adults at the time. Creating more schools and legally mandating a captive audience attend them was a great way to employ more people, too.Things started getting worse for the under-18 set after that time ended; that was the beginning of the "CPS will come abduct you if you're playing in your own front yard" era.
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To be clear here, I said a lot lower. The types of dudes who are getting off to loli content and actually she's a 2000 year old dragon sort of things, where they obsess over "barely legal" and "jailbait" because they are pedos and just don't do anything because of the law. And the existence of such people should be expected if we assume the deterrent argument of law is true.
Aren't "barely legal" and "jailbait" referring exactly to the teenagers I'm talking about?
But suppose we lowered the age further. Again, assuming consent -- as in, the child wants to do something with an adult and the adult allows them the opportunity to do so, which I think already implies a minimum threshold for age -- what exactly is immoral about that, and how wouldn't that transfer across different age gaps? Doesn't the hypothetical still hold?
(I say assuming consent because non-consensual acts of sex are obviously unethical regardless of age.)
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