This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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?
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.
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".
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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?
More options
Context Copy link
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".
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link