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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   21580 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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I am generally not for marriage age gaps of -10 years, nor am I for it when these teachers are cheating on their husbands, but the cruel way in which Americans punish these women is absurd. Realistically they should just lose their careers and only go to jail for a few years if their husband presses charges for adultery. At least adultery actually has a victim. Why do Americans refuse to have adultery laws but yet they have all these absurdly cruel victimless crime sex laws? There is nothing actually being done to the teenage boy when he consensually has sex with his cougar teacher. Don't Americans see that when they assign these heavy handed sentences to such women, that they are the criminals?

This is due to the American mania for consistency in stupid beliefs- in this case, that men and women are the same.

I, once adjusted for differing sexual morality standards, don’t particularly disagree with your point that statutory rape of a young man by an adult woman isn’t a thing thé same way it is of a young woman- although it remains disqualifying for a youth-oriented position. But in America treating transgeessions differently depending on the sex of the victim is not a stable equilibrium, and most people would rather overpunish unprofessional teachers than under punish rapists.

I, once adjusted for differing sexual morality standards, don’t particularly disagree...

Isn't that adjustment extremely relevant here, though? If I were to define statutory rape of a teenager, I'd just call it seduction of a minor. Sexual morality is fundamentally tied up in defining the crime. The fact that much of secular society can't admit this muddles the conversation a lot.

Yeah, the practical consequences of seduction will vary for boys and girls, but in practice that seems to be (more than) adequately covered by consideration of mitigating factors in sentencing.

Yes but also no- I don’t consider the boy being a teenager a relevant factor even if they both did a bad thing.

But in America treating transgeessions differently depending on the sex of the victim is not a stable equilibrium

So Americans want to sacrifice innocent women in the name of feminism? Why are they so feminist?

and most people would rather overpunish unprofessional teachers than under punish rapists.

Women 99% of the time cannot rape men. If they pull it off, they also threatened them with a deadly weapon which is enough of a charge I think. Also Americans overpunish „rape” since they have expanded the concept far beyond what it actually means. So wanting to not overpunish „rape” is another aspect of their excessive cruelty.

This woman isn’t ’innocent’ although she’s also not a rapist.

By that standard, nobody is innocent.

I don't have much sympathy for fornicators running into consequences, even if those consequences happen to be ridiculous.

I am sympathetic to that, but it is ultimately a self own, because you live in a society where you are almost forced to fornicate, so it's not the big evil you think it is. Let's say you marry early. You can't marry that early because the type of people who prosecute the woman won't let you marry until 18. Can you marry at 18? Is your wife older than you? Exact same age? What are the odds of that? Is it natural? They won't let you marry a 16 year old when you're 18, they'll throw you in prison like the 28 year old woman with the hopes that Travonius tears you up a little if you catch my drift. So if your wife is a normal amount younger than you, you're probably 21 or 22 by the time you're allowed to touch her ... when did you start feeling horny, 12? So just wait 9 or 10 years, no big deal? No sympathy for„gooners” either, so if a boy looks up lascivious girls his age, or his future wife's age, during this time, your FBI will arrest him and sentence him as an adult to some United States justice. It's okay, I mean you can have sympathy for horny people? They're just young men anyway, and everybody hates them.

Yes, wait ten years. Don't be a male dog mom, sublimating the natural urges into improper and destructive behavior. Foofoo the chinese food dog doesn't like being pushed in a stroller, and doing it is bad for his owner, just the same as sex for pleasure without commitment is bad for both parties- unloving and self destructive by inculcating vicious habits.

Waiting 10 years is an imposition on young men for the sake of the blob, so no. I support waiting 5 years max and still marrying with a potential age gap of 2 or 3 years. All the arguments against this I've heard are bad. Just credentialism and feminism basically.

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I thought there was broad social consensus in the US that such women are usually punished rather lightly.

IMO it's a straightforward projection of female vulnerability, the fear of being overpowered and exploited by a stronger man, onto male children, whom they imagine as equally helpless. Americans would jump out of their seats if they saw this German film where, an adult woman, stark naked, shared a scene with her then 12yo male co-star, even though the on-screen relationship between their respective characters was presented as an inherently unhealthy one.

FWIW I wouldn't be thrilled if a grown woman made sexual advances on my 15yo brother or son if I had one. Now I don't think the physical consequences of that relationship would have any pronounced difference if the boy in question was 14 as opposed to 16 (age of consent in my country), if he personally enjoyed it. But age of consent laws exist for a reason, there is still the moral quandary of blurring healthy boundaries at a critical stage of development.

Jumping off topic, I think @FtttG is hitting on something big here:

I don’t think the antinatalists, for the most part, are people who could have children if they wanted to, but are electing not to for moral reasons. I believe they are mostly profoundly mentally disturbed people with whom no one would want to have children, and who have erected a towering edifice of convoluted reasoning wherein this deficiency in fact makes them morally superior to the “breeders” in their vicinity. Their worldview is ultimately the product of sour grapes.

A very astute and widely applicable observation that can extend to any ideology that calls for radical upending of current societal arrangements. Its adherents don't actually want that, not really. They really just want to play the game the way the winners do. So naturally, they gravitate towards an arrangement where they're the winners. No incel would favour overhauling current dating market dynamics if he magically transformed to chad.

FWIW I wouldn't be thrilled if a grown woman made sexual advances on my 15yo brother or son if I had one. Now I don't think the physical consequences of that relationship would have any pronounced difference if the boy in question was 14 as opposed to 16 (age of consent in my country), if he personally enjoyed it. But age of consent laws exist for a reason, there is still the moral quandary of blurring healthy boundaries at a critical stage of development.

I think the problem is that Americans are cruel. Your logic is „I wouldn't be thrilled” and the laws exist „for a reason.” Yes, I wouldn't be thrilled if someone goes past me at 150 kmh on the highway. The speed limit exists „for a reason.” Mm hm. Maybe he has a reason to be in a hurry but if he is stopped by police, too bad.

None of this logic works if I find out the man is incarcerated for 10 years. You must actually do something wrong to justify that, not something which is „not thrilling.” You are basically destroying the lives of these women for no reason. If you fired them as teachers and left it at that, fine, the rules exist for a reason. But you need a very good reason, not a vague, I'm not thrilled reason, to incarcerate someone. At least if you aren't cruel.

I think there ought to be laws against cruel people, because such people don't thrill me. They ought to feel their own cruelty.

You are basically destroying the lives of these women for no reason.

This is inherent in punishment. If punishment didn't cause harm to the target, it wouldn't be punishment--you're basically arguing to never punish anyone.

And it's not "no reason"; the reason is that sex with underage people, especially when the age difference is drastic and the teacher is in a position of authority, is harmful to the lives of the victims, even if they don't immediately step up and say "yeah, I was harmed by this".

This is inherent in punishment. If punishment didn't cause harm to the target, it wouldn't be punishment--you're basically arguing to never punish anyone.

False dilemma. Obviously there are degrees of punishment. It's cruelty when you go overboard. I agree teachers who hit on their students should be fired, but it's cruel to put them in prison, especially for more than 1 year.

And it's not "no reason"; the reason is that sex with underage people, especially when the age difference is drastic and the teacher is in a position of authority, is harmful to the lives of the victims, even if they don't immediately step up and say "yeah, I was harmed by this".

I believe in no victim, no harm. If you can't find a victim, there is no harm and should be little to no prison time.

I believe in no victim, no harm. If you can't find a victim, there is no harm and should be little to no prison time.

There are victims. You just have bad standards for what counts as a victim. It should not require physical harm to be considered a victim.

I'm a victim then. When do I get to put the people who offend me and make my life bad in prison? I would much rather have sex with a 28 year old woman when I was 15 than deal with a lot of what people do to me.

Then convince me and the lawmakers that the harm done to you is harm that we should respect as being harm. You are looking at it as "it's either all harm or none of it is". It shouldn't and doesn't work that way.

You know it's harm and refuse to protect people like me. For instance, adultery. Nobody pretends like that isn't harm. The Bible is clear that it should be a crime. History is clear that was a crime. Men and women are clear that it's wrong. There are other examples.

Yes, antinatalism is just one example of the general trend wherein politically radical people are almost invariably those who are least satisfied with their lives. An antifa meetup will not exactly be swimming with charming, good-looking people, but neither will a gathering of white supremacists.

If you're interested in this topic I highly recommend Eric Hoffer's The True Believer. I was a bit disappointed to find that I'd been scooped seven decades in advance.

Thanks for the rec. Yeah, I suspect a big part of why incels are so viscerally hated by other similarly maladjusted groups (transgenders, ANTIFA, /r/okbuddyliterallyme) is that they serve as an ugly, unfiltered mirror to their own insecurities and resentment over social/sexual rejection, but without dressing it up with pseudo-intellectual scaffolding or progressive moral language. Ironically, even when they larp as world-saving radicals online, they still submit to reddit leftist taboos for updoots (social acceptance). On the other hand, incels just say the quiet part out loud. That raw honesty makes them intolerable.

“They hated him because he told the truth” is rarely a good explanation.

Like, if you go online and see someone railing about how you are his class enemy, how you’re part of a conspiracy to keep him from getting pussy…how are you going to feel about that? Is it going to have anything to do with his perceived “raw honesty”?

I don't think that's really what he says? I think he's saying that this is narcissism of small differences in action, more than unflattering truth, and that incels lose out by departing from consensus as to their problems(it's not my fault because I'm ugly is a very different explanation than it's not my fault because of capitalist cisheteropatriarchy, even if they both revolve around justifying a lack of agency).

how you’re part of a conspiracy

Maybe I wasn't making my point clear. Yes, many incels do spend too much time inside their heads and spiral into neurosis and paranoia. But the visceral hatred I was describing from other similarly maladjusted groups (like the antinatalists and Ryan Gosling bros) usually kicks in long before that point, precisely when the mirror gets held up without the ideological coping mechanisms. Their "raw honesty" is that they're unhappy and insecure because of their low social/sexual status, not because the sky is falling and fascism is on the rise™, it's an unflattering mirror to the Ryan Goslings' and ANTIFAs' own lived experiences (the Gosling larpers are just reddit approved incels with a glorified martyr complex), that if their own lives looked like a John Hughes' movie, they wouldn't be in those spaces to begin with. They've probably silently felt at lease some of the things the incels speak of online, but don't feel comfortable to confront those feelings and question their socially approved priors.

Side note: I'd recommend checking out /r/DebateIncelz to really understand the incel perspective in a somewhat neutral and sane environment without the usual caricatures coming out of .is. The problem is these guys don't articulate their experiences without chimping out on unmoderated spaces, that doesn't make those experiences not true (from their pov at least).

Edited some sentences.

Why do Americans refuse to have adultery laws but yet they have all these absurdly cruel victimless crime sex laws?

The laws against young men having sex are mainly there as a logical/equal-opportunity side-effect of society's desire to punish sex with young women.

It's not that complicated.

society's desire to punish sex with young women.

Why are they like this though? Is it their cruelty or something else?

Because women lack agency and protecting them from predation in time periods when they often have no choice in which authority figures they are exposed to is a worthy goal.

The only good solution to this is a traditional marriage regime, not this monstrosity Americans made.

If we are talking about adultery laws and "absurdly cruel victimless crime sex," what does that have to do with laws against young men having sex?

Like, based on the original example of an older female teacher, it seems completely off-topic. What do you mean?

Uncompensated sex with young women, that is.

I was an attractive youth and got some attention from pretty, relatively-young female teachers, but nothing over the line even given the much wider latitude afforded by society at the time. This was gratifying and is especially so in retrospect as I understand it better, whereas in the moment I didn't really know how to interpret anything and wasn't sure.

But when I was 16 I did babysit for a while for a military wife whose husband was often away, and she came on to me pretty strong. She'd touch me a lot and suggest that maybe sometime she could get another babysitter and the two of us could hang out. That kind of thing. Again, I wasn't fully sure about what was happening, and had the sense I should probably tell my parents about it, but chose not to. I didn't feel threatened, even though it was weird, and maybe a little exciting. She was very cute and probably about 28.

In retrospect it bothers me more. I am very glad she didn't push harder. I'm pretty sure I'd have refused, and probably gotten out okay, but it would have been severely traumatizing. And if I'd gone along with it, that would have been worse. Talk about life regrets! I care a lot about my sexual integrity and have never slept with anyone but my prior and current wife. I'm physically sick at the thought of that being taken from me when I was, mentally and spiritually, very much still a child who didn't exactly understand what was going on. And that's beside the damage to her family, and the community more generally if it were discovered, which I can only suppose it would have been eventually.

Perhaps in other cultures, where the rules of human engagement are spelled out clearly and boys are prepared for such things by 16, there could be room for older women pushing them into it. But having been close to something like that myself, I have no sympathy for the ones who do it in our culture.

I can respect that you have strong personal values around sex and relationships. But you're still describing a values violation and deep regret, not a clear physical assault. Feeling profoundly disgusted or used after a regretted encounter is real and common, but I highly doubt that you would've felt the degree of bodily violation, physical illness, and scathing hot showers to wash off her touch following that encounter, if you went through with it.

As a man, the closest analogue I can imagine to that level of visceral violation by a woman would be something like being pinned down by a morbidly obese landwhale with horrible breath, and having my dick forced to get hard inside her. This is precisely why most cultures throughout history — even highly patriarchal ones — have had no real concept of a female rapist. The evolutionary dynamics and physical consequences are simply not symmetrical.

This seems like a fully-general argument against, uh, laws? I can't think of any that don't come down to what amounts to values. Murder has been legal and even encouraged in plenty of societies, for example, though with certain (values-based) restrictions.

Your personal values and what the law permits don’t necessarily align, and laws naturally shift as social structures change. Feudal societies heavily discouraged sex before (or outside) marriage largely to guarantee paternity and stable households. Post-sexual revolution and a working female population, most of these risks are now ameliorated. That said, the thrust of my point is the specifc kind of rape trauma a female victim would go through doesn't match the facts you described, nor do most cases of female-teacher-fucks-male-student. And at 16, you could've probably easily overpowered her if she tried to force herself on you.

But you're still describing a values violation and deep regret, not a clear physical assault.

The harm does not become the fault of the person who has been harmed just because he could have had values under which it would not be harm. This is the autistic argument that only tangible, physical, consequences count--who cares about emotions? Physical consequences are not the only kinds of harm that count.

By your reasoning even forcible rape largely causes harm by values violation. Which is true; if you had values which said that being raped is good, there's actually little permanent physical harm from a lot of rapes (outside of pregnancy). It doesn't matter. It's still harm. You can't just dismiss harm for depending on someone's values.

The emotional harm of active, forceful penetration is not analogous to values based emotional injury from regretted but consensual sex, even if both can be painful. And that sounds like a strawman of my reasoning. Forcible rape causes harm through both physical violation and emotional trauma. But the physical component (the overpowering and loss of bodily autonomy through force) is not optional or purely values-dependent. Values matter. Emotions matter. But they don't make every negative feeling equivalent to violent assault.

The harm does not become the fault of the person who has been harmed just because he could have had values under which it would not be harm.

So you're in favor of criminal penalties for misgendering, then? Because that (and safetyism more generally) is the logical conclusion to giving this argument any legal weight.

This is why we tend to set hard boundaries on "what a member of society is allowed to consider harm". 1A is like that- it absolutely oppresses the easily offended and the incorrect, who are forced to suffer the existence of [thing they don't like].

Of course, we only cover specific things there, so a Karen not consenting to your child walking down the street alone can effectively order him arrested for that crime, even in nominally liberal countries.

Those people have to be oppressed in this way- forced to suffer the existence of things that disgust and terrify them- for a pluralistic society to function. As a (classic) liberal, I assert this is justice.

So you're in favor of criminal penalties for misgendering, then?

No, I think these need to be looked at at the object level. Rape and underage sex cause psychological harm that we should respect, misgendering causes psychological harm that we should not respect.

Rape is in a separate class for reasons that aren't merely psychological, of course.

While I don't deny that "forcible confinement" and "assaulted so hard you suffer lifelong injury" do have psychological effects (in a way entirely dissimilar to underage sex, doubly so when the underaged is male), we punish rape because those things have physical consequences- things we have an objective measure for, and an objective remedy.

That's not something you can do for psychological harm, which is why it's a useful vehicle for concern trolling to justify whatever you'd like without actual evidence. Because I guarantee you that I can absolutely find "evidence" to substantiate misgendering being just as psychologically harmful to someone as actual (to say nothing of pretend) rape is (and not infrequently claimed to be identically harmful, for that matter).

I could hear an argument that psychological harm is something we should respect, but it would need to be done in a way that doesn't max out the scale in favor of the interests of people with a biological predisposition to catastrophism the instant it's switched on.

I do not believe that we punish rape mainly because of the physical consequences as opposed to the psychological ones, at least not in modern society when women aren't property.

So you're in favor of criminal penalties for misgendering, then? Because that (and safetyism more generally) is the logical conclusion to giving this argument any legal weight.

The view you're in favor of isn't logical. Logic would imply protections for men like anti-adultery laws, but they aren't interested in making the law logical and fair. It's trad-hat on for girls, and, thanks to Ginsburg, boys, and hippie hat on for men. We can get scammed by women, cheated on, whatever, we just have to grow up and deal with it, but as soon as it's one of their protected categories it's 10 years of prison per irrational tear cried.

But you're still describing a values violation and deep regret, not a clear physical assault.

Our statutory rape laws are (generally, in the US) written as strict liability and don't require physical violence (which would probably trigger additional charges), seemingly because we do see it as a values issue. And I'm not sure that's wrong, personally.

Is this a joke? How would you not know what sexual intercourse is when your IQ was fully developed and you had been alive for over a decade and a half? It's not difficult.

How did you manage to conclude that I didn't know what intercourse was? There are dimensions to sex vastly more complicated than tab A into slot B. There are personal, social, spiritual considerations and learning to navigate those isn't simple. Especially when it's your mom's friend who's pushing you.

Thanks for the clarification. That made it easy to flag you as "Too retarded to be worth interacting with in the future" though I'm not one for blocks, myself.

Ok, sorry, heat too high and light too low I guess. Sorry for comparing 28 year old women hitting on 16 year old boys being bad to believing in witchcraft. But do you get my point, how your logic can come off as magical? I accept what you're saying but the context here is these women face 10 years in jail or so. I understand they might have causes you some slight discomfort as a teenager, but that can't justify a decade of incarceration. People cause me emotional discomfort and self image issues almost every day, and it would be a very different world if even some of them could be locked up for 10 years for causing me discomfort. I just don't believe a woman hitting on you at 16 can be much more harmful than how I feel when someone says I'm retarded.

How did you manage to conclude that I didn't know what intercourse was?

You said:

In the moment, I didn't really know how to interpret anything and wasn't sure.

I wasn't fully sure about what was happening.

I was, mentally and spiritually, very much still a child who didn't exactly understand what was going on.

(posted before edit adding three additional sentences, but probably still partially a valid response)

I think it's probably indicative of some kind of deep pathology that the details of the physical, mechanical angle was immediately imagined to be the only thing I could possibly be having trouble understanding, with zero consideration of everything else involved in sex.

It's simple, right? Benis and Bagina. What's not to understand, kid?

How about "How is this going to affect your self-image, relationships to family and community, and ultimately your (notional) future marriage?" I was very aware of all that in play, plus much more, and no, I didn't understand it. Nor frankly was I quite willing to believe that this married woman and friend of my family was trying to have sex with me, and had to overcome a very high threshold of giving her the benefit of the doubt, which was also kind of awful.

I'm just not sure how far the word "consent" should be stretched.

(1) When I grant my consent to sex, I mean that I understand that this woman wants me to repeatedly insert my penis into her vagina until I achieve orgasm.

(2) …and subject me to a small but nonzero risk of disease, fatherhood, and child-support payments (as outlined by this stack of legal rulings).

(3) …and subject me to a small but nonzero risk of lasting psychological harm (as outlined by this stack of scientific studies).

(4) …and subject me to a small but nonzero risk of stigma as a statutory-rape victim.

I think that [the modern notion of] consent is a troublesome concept for any number of reasons. Actually more than troublesome; unworkable, even.

The way things actually work in my experience is that sex is something that happens within marriage and marriage must, by its nature, be approved by the community or at least the priest, which is a pretty excellent filtering mechanism.

All the handwringing about consent occurs to me as people having shattered a priceless vase and hurriedly trying to work out hacks for handling the shards without nicking any arteries. But one has only to take a glance at the sheer amount of blood on the floor to realize it's not going well.

What pathology exactly? I've heard this in the wild, not aimed at my myself but from your crowd in this discussion, and it didn't make sense. I have a very loving marriage, what deep pathology are you talking about exactly? How would you know if you didn't know what sex was at 16? How does that make you a sex expert? If anything it makes you delayed at sex and romance matters. Are we just making the laws for the delayed at this point, normal people be damned?

Because generally that relationship is inversely proportional if you’re a smart kid.

Then empirically, they aren't that smart.

I think it was pretty smart of me to not have sex in high school.

Dude. If you go into AP high school classes and ask the boys there, the last breast they ever touched would be in a KFC bucket.

But they know what sex is.

Not complicated, as long as they're not doing the male feminist thing like the GP is. They know if they want to do it or not, and assertions that they're traumatized by the offer are destructive when listened to from either gender.

Yes. They’ve read it in a book one time. They don’t know what it is by experience.

They’ve read it in a book

Of course, the people complaining about opportunities to gain that experience also conveniently tend to be traumatized by books and other media that describe it too.

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There is nothing actually being done to the teenage boy when he consensually has sex with his cougar teacher.

FWIW I am male and as a youth I had two incidents along these lines in which adult women attempted to groom me. One was a camp counselor and the other was a teacher. Fortunately nothing happened and both of these women were nice enough to back off once they realized I wasn't interested sexually.

I'm not going to say that I was traumatized by these incidents, but they were mildly disturbing and I do think that female on male child molestation is more destructive than is thought by the "where were these women when I was a child" crowd.

When I was in eighth grade, my history teacher- young, female, quite pretty in retrospect- had a crush on me and it was blatantly obvious, she never did anything but it was incredibly awkward and I was not a fan of the experience.

Idk, it doesn't make sense intuitively that much, causing you discomfort by unwanted advances doesn't mean they deserve to go to prison for years. I've never seen any compelling evidence that these women should go to prison, unless they cheated on their husband, but that's not why they go.

Idk, it doesn't make sense intuitively that much, causing you discomfort by unwanted advances doesn't mean they deserve to go to prison for years.

I would definitely agree with that and I am certainly not claiming otherwise. My point is that there is an element out there which seems to think it's basically a nothingburger if an adult woman in a position of authority seduces an underage male student. In my opinion, it's not.

Idk, it doesn't make sense intuitively that much, causing you discomfort by unwanted advances doesn't mean they deserve to go to prison for years.

Talk about moving goalposts. We're not talking about causing discomfort by making unwanted advances, we're talking about sex, and some of us are still backward enough to think that's a big deal.

Talk about moving goalposts. We're not talking about causing discomfort by making unwanted advances, we're talking about sex, and some of us are still backward enough to think that's a big deal.

There is no way to consistently think sex is a big enough deal that are willing lock up single women for having sex with a 16 year old boy consensually, but you refuse to log up adulterers in general. Adultery actually has a victim, the Hanania meme does not.

An adult woman can't have consensual sex with an underage boy by definition. Adults cheating on one another don't need society to step in. Adults fucking kids do.

16 year olds aren't underage boys, if you define underage boys to be people who can't consent to sex with women. The cutoff here would be 12 or 13 on average. Really it depends on puberty timing and IQ but if you have to project that onto age it would be 12 or 13 I think.

Adults cheating on one another don't need society to step in.

Okay, then adults stealing from one another don't need society to step in. Legalize stealing? It's not like the one spouse consents when the other cheats. If they do, maybe that's another matter. It's polygamy more than it is adultery and it's a separate discussion as to whether to tolerate it. If they don't consent, they're being victimized and I think they need society to step in. What are they going to do in 2026, beat the cheating spouse? Kill them with stones? Then society steps in on the side of the cheater. Something has to give.

Okay, then adults stealing from one another don't need society to step in. Legalize stealing? It's not like the one spouse consents when the other cheats.

Adults cheating is at most a contract violation, which unlike stealing would be a civil offense rather than a criminal one. Your partner doesn't require your consent to have sex with someone other than you.

Adults cheating is at most a contract violation

No, it's historically a crime that could result in execution.

Your comment is just stating the normie/liberal position instead of an argument. Rhetorically, it's flawed.

I think your definition is wrong. Whatever age you decide on as the cutoff, it means that the society assumes consent when both partners are above this age, modulo literal mental disability.

Below this age? The lack of consent is not automatic (and if it is, it's the fault of a badly written law), the assumption of the lack of consent is. The couple has to prove their relationship is healthy when challenged, but they should be able to prove it.

I would be fine with two cutoff dates, with the lower one separating "definitely a crime" from "could be problematic".

I would be fine with two cutoff dates, with the lower one separating "definitely a crime" from "could be problematic".

They used to have this in Europe more often but radical feminists have insisted otherwise. Although Germany still has a law like this. They got rid of it in Belgium and France. It was 13 for the age of consent and 15 or 16 for the age of could be problematic.

No, children are unable to consent to sex with adults. There is often a lower cutoff for sex with peers, but not adults.

There is often a lower cutoff for sex with peers, but not adults.

Why? Teenagers are often attracted to adults, mostly in their 20s, and adults in their 20s are often attracted to teenagers. Is this just about romantic affirmative action for teenage boys?

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Yes, but being a child is not a binary toggle.

The couple has to prove their relationship is healthy when challenged, but they should be able to prove it.

It has nothing to do with the outcome for the couple (insert "I consent/I consent/I don't" meme here).

Whatever age you decide on as the cutoff, it means that the society assumes consent when both partners are above this age

It doesn't even do this now. It's actually impossible to consent to sex; participants cannot bind themselves in this way (and may cry rape/coercion ex post facto at any time no matter how ridiculous it is).

But that was the problem with defining "consent" to stop needing to have the "sex isn't harmful to anyone, so that's why kids can have it" argument in the first place. Consent is simply waiving the veto power society entitles you to over sex, which is why doing so is not possible.

Wow. If we were in a bar I would demand some more details. Unless your expression was telling me don't.

Shared my similar story here and you're welcome to ask questions though I don't think I have much more to say about it.

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