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On the off chance that I become an oyster farmer and run for senate 10 years from now, let the digital record unequivocally reflect that I am 100% in favor of attractive single female teachers """""raping""""" their male students to get pregnant.
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?
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.
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.
You said:
(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.
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