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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.
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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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