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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   21576 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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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.

Indeed.

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