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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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