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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.
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?
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.
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