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 -
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link