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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.
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