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Notes -
Thuletide on Fertility
According to Thuletide, the age gap «pedophilia» moral panic, spawned by feminism and kicked into overdrive during the #MeToo era that began circa 2017, is a potentially civilization-ruining phenomenon. He is, of course, not referring to very real problems, like grooming gangs in Britain, but the fact that 18-year-old boys are frequently accused of being an "Epstein diddy blud" merely for talking to 17-year-old girls. If you wanted to vaporize our already plummeting birth rates, stigmatizing any age gap larger than that between identical twins is a great way to do it.
From Thuletide's Telegram:
From his Twitter, he cites the following. Older-male age-gap relationships produce more children, with total lifetime fertility peaking at +7 years (although the variation from +3 to +13 years is very small). The negative fertility effect of older wives begins immediately at +1 year and declines linearly; at +3.5 years, couples produce 0.5 fewer children, on average. Obviously, this is due to women's limited fertility window, which is much smaller than commonly believed: by age 31, around 10% of women are sterile and around 50% are subfertile (they have difficulty conceiving, decreased egg quality, etc).
He concludes on Telegram:
Sounds like a better plan than complaining about phones to me.
His argument would go down much better if he did not say this. It may be objectively the case, but holy shit does it make him sound like a pedophile. It generally reflects quite poorly on people when they sexualize those who are legally and popularly regarded as children.
"An 18 and 16 year old having a sexual relationship should not be discouraged" is one thing. "It is ephebophilia not pedophilia"is quite another and makes it sound like what he really wants is for himself to have sex with 15 year olds without risking punishment.
So how is it feasible in your view to not sound like a pedo but at the same time describe the simple anthropological reality that girls sexually mature earlier than boys?
I did write that "teenage sexual relationships should be decriminalized" does not make you sound like a pedo. The issue is that the rest of the rhetoric seems to serve as an argument for why men who are old enough to have degrees and careers should be allowed to have sex with high school students. That last part is where the problem is. When the poster then doubles down and it turns out I was right and this is what they wanted to argue, the rest falls apart.
Generally, if you want to make an academic argument about sexual maturity you probably shouldn't sully it by then immediately using said argument to justify breaking societal taboos.
If you say teenage sexual relationships should be decriminalized, people will probably ask you why. What will you reply then?
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If setting the facts straight "reflects poorly on people", that's a major issue with the conversation that's important to push back against. Pointing out something is incorrect is always a valid addition to the debate, and tabooing the truth is never justifiable.
Or maybe he just doesn't want to be shamed for his perfectly normal sexuality? "It's not pedophilia" is just correct, and implies nothing about what kind of relationship should be appropriate. You can perfectly well be aware that a normal heterosexual man will find 15 year old girls attractive, and this is not inherently a problem, but still think he should wait until she's older, and if he doesn't, then it becomes a problem.
What I quoted is the kind of thing people say when they are trying to push an agenda. Specifically the agenda that older men should be allowed to sexualise and have sexual relations with people under the age of 18. There is a clear taboo against this in modern society, and for good reason. So when someone starts to undermine this taboo through their arguments it is going to result in alarm bells.
This is a very online thing, where people conflate the indeed very sharp and absolute threshold of 18 for porn, with the age of consent for sex that isn't recorded and distributed. In many European countries the age of consent is 14, in some it's 15 or 16. Of course there are other constraints like being in a teacher or similar role, in which case it will not be allowed.
Very online people are simply unable to tell the two apart because they rightfully know that in porn it would be the absolute toxic sludge and nuclear waste to come into contact with such material, and they generalize this to IRL relationships.
So, again, people are allowed to sexualize and have sexual relations with people above 14 in much of Europe. It may be disapproved socially by people in their lives, but it isn't disallowed per se.
Sure, but the reason for the low age of consent in Europe is generally not so that grown men with careers can have sex with high schoolers. It is to decriminalize sex between teenagers. The social convention for adults not to abuse this is quite strong, so it is pretty rare that it happens.
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What's your evidence for this? Because I don't think you need an agenda to want to set the facts straight, especially if the wrong claim unfairly demonises you.
Declaring something sacred and therefore any opposition to related claims automatically invalid and evidence of bad faith is not valid epistemics. You can be wrong while thinking it's for a good cause, and people can correct you without being motivated by a bad cause. I don't believe in taboos. If the reasons for the taboo are good enough, the position will be able to withstand counterarguments and the taboo isn't needed.
It's not like the age of consent is a law of nature either. In Germany, for example, it's 16 (with the exception of power-imbalanced relationships like teacher/student), and it's a priori not clear that's a worse solution. Or the 17 in some US states. If you want to argue 18 is the right number, that needs to be based on facts, not bulverism.
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Is there a large cadre of people believing an 18 year old having sex with his 16 year old girlfriend is pedophilia? Sure the girls father hopefully discourages it but doubt many think of it as pedo behavior.
I would say it is not seen as paedophilic, but widely seen as unwise for other reasons. "Society should discourage an 18year-old bf and a 16-year old gf from having penetrative sex" is just normie.
"The age of consent should be 18" is comfortably inside the Overton window.
I'd argue it's widely seen as unwise for the simple reason that teenagers aren't assumed to reliably practice birth control.
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Where is that normie? Do teenagers not have sex in that normie world? Or are you claiming that they must be in the same year of school? Say, the guy is in the last year of high school, the other is one year lower but the guy is on the older end of his cohort and the girl is the younger end of her year. I think nobody bats an eye about this in real life.
I'm no sociologist but I'm guessing that social norms regarding this are more or less shared throughout the West, in towns both big and small. That is, when two teenagers are in a sexual relationship but both are discrete about it and are otherwise not seen as anti-social delinquents, their social circle quietly tolerates it.
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Those small town cops that conservatives favor love busting teen boys for such things; this effectively ends their chance at a good life with a sex offender conviction. "Romeo and Juliet" statutes were made to make that a little harder, though there's still edge cases.
On an unrelated note, naming a statute after a tragedy involving suicide, murder and treachery is probably not a good PR move.
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I see. Small-town conservative America is quite foreign to me, as I'm in Europe. Here it's normal that people around 15-16 start to drink alcohol, have parties, and at 16-18 it's very normal to have relationships that include sex, with the more adventurous "cool" partyface types starting earlier.
Exactly the same in the US.
Was. Teens aren't drinking, partying, or having relationships much any more.
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Most states have a Romeo and Juliet exception to the age of consent being 18 whereby if the difference in the age of the lovers is a small number the age of consent doesn’t matter. This suggests the Overton window is a bit nuanced.
That is, we don’t want to send high school boyfriends to jail for having sex with their slightly younger high school girlfriends even if ideally we don’t want them having sex.
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Let's be kinder (and more precise), it makes him sound like an ephebophile. Generally 17 year old boys are not crying about age discrimination with regards to their 15 and three-quarters year old girlfriend, and guys who like to quote stats and ages are a lot older than the "persecuted 18 year olds" used as the example here.
The general public, bless their hearts, think an ephebophile is a paedophile with a dictionary. I think an ephebophile is just a man with normal (straight or gay) male sexuality. In both cases, the word is not helpful.
It is due to a hyperstitious cascade, in Scott's terms. Normal people have gotten the memo that this is not something to talk about in polite society.
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That description also applies to the author of the OP, fond as he is of peculiar terms like "scientifically consent". Profile picture of a prepubescent anime girl is a dead giveaway.
Misuzu Kamio is not prepubescent. Being scientifically able to consent means you can understand what is going on and make an informed decision. The age at which this happens vs when it's legally recognized correlates positively but probably < 0.60 which is not that strong. Can you understand that?
No idea who this is (other than a Google search telling me she's some kind of reincarnated moe light novel character) but that's some real "She's actually a thousand-year-old dragon" energy.
Look, I don't love @FtttG's call-out (@FtttG: Argue with the OP directly if you take issue with his statements, do not play the "Reminder: OP is a bad person!" game). But you aren't exactly beating the rap here. "Scientific consent" seems to be something you made up, in the way that people who want to make up terms to justify something that would otherwise be hard to justify will do. It has no legal (or scientific) basis. "Can understand what is going on and make an informed decision" rests entirely on how we define "understand" and "informed," and having unfortunately seen some interviews with actual pedophiles, they will absolutely argue that 5-year-olds can understand and consent to sexual relations. 12-year-olds certainly think they can understand and consent to sexual relations. So if your definition of consent rests on the expressed internal mental state of a child, you are going to be defending the premise that essentially anyone who's verbal can consent.
It's a very basic concept that isn't being used pedophilia. If you don't have this concept, you have to accept the Orwellian newspeak idea that in California, 17 year olds can't consent. The notion of scientific consent ability divorces ability to consent from the local law. It says that the law might be wrong in many cases, which is true. It is trivially true that if you allow real thought on the topic instead of no thought, pedophiles might make some arguments. However, if I were you, I'd have more faith that you can figure out using reason why 5 year olds can't scientifically consent, and why people who claim otherwise are factually wrong.
The character is in high school. She is designed to look 17 or 18. It doesn't say how old she is exactly or what year she is in but in Japan people attend high school at 18 years old.
I think everyone understands that age of consent laws are arbitrary and when the law says someone can legally consent does not necessarily correlate to when someone actually has enough agency to consent. Age of consent various from state to state and from country to country, and everyone knows this does not mean that teenagers in Alabama are ready for sex earlier than teenagers in California. This is no less true of age restrictions on everything else, from driving to enlisting to signing a loan.
Inventing a concept like "scientific consent" just sounds suspiciously like an attempt to punt. Even if you and I agree that five-year-olds cannot meaningfully consent and most 17-year-olds can, if you reject age-constricted consent and you just want go on vibes, the door is open, yes, for someone to argue that a five-year-old has enough awareness and agency to consent. (If you think this is absurd, enjoy some Piers Anthony).
The problem is we have this concept 'consent', which means something. And we have 'legal consent' which means something else. In theory, 'legal consent' could capture something like 'consent by someone who cannot understand what they are consenting to', but in fact it does not, but we still want a word for that concept.
Sure. But I think you are pointing at a different problem than what dogma is focused on.
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Do you know what the word "prepubescent" means? It is not a synonym for "child". It specifically refers to someone who has not yet started puberty. Misuzu Kamio is canonically 16-17, ~5'2", with a prominent hour-glass figure indicating fully-developed secondary sexual characteristics. Is she a child? Yes, she is a teenager, which is considered a child by most modern people. She is clearly not prepubescent.
I think Misuzu is closer to 15 based on a shot we see of her half-eaten birthday cake in the anime (which for plot reasons, we know has the right number of candles), but the bigger point is that she's not a particularly sexualized character and I wouldn't expect someone having her as a profile picture to be thirsting for her.
This is interesting because Key were obscure about the ages of the characters in Air, while in Kanon they were aged very obviously, at least to the extent that you find out their specific years in school and then can deduce from that. The reason for that could be twofold. First, the main character is older in Air. We don't find out how old he is exactly but it's implied he's between 20 and 25. He pretends to be Misuszu's classmate to her aunt but it's implied that he's slightly too old to pass well for this if you look at him too long. But still young enough to attempt it. Later he confirms he's over the age of 20 but it vague about how old he really is. In Kanon the player character in his second to last year of high school which makes him about 17 per the Japanese school system the girls are either in his year or the year above, making them 17 to 18.
In Japan, high school is three years and starts at the age of 16, with most people graduating after turning 18. Additionally, Air occurs at the end of a school year, but all of the girls are not graduated, so they must be starting their middle or last year, making them closest to 17 or 18 years old.
The only way they are plausibly younger is if they are actually attending a combined junior-senior high school and are in the lower grades. The evidence that this could be the case is mostly circumstantial; it seems that Japan does have some schools like that. The setting is a small village, and I think they are more common in small villages due to economic factors. Also the characters all act extremely immature, which could just be moe writing, but they do act like they could be on the younger side.
The most direct piece of evidence would be Misuszu's homework. She was catching up on math from the previous school year and specifically is working on quadratic equations, IIRC. That seemed a bit held back for Asia ... I studied that when I was 14, so that's what first gave me the idea. The internet says this is usually studied in Japan first in the last year of junior high or the first year of high school. So it's possible she enters her first or second year of high school after the events of air, which could mean her summer birthday is her 15th birthday if she will turn 18 during the summer after her graduation, and was actually in her last year of Japanese junior high prior to the summer.
In my translation of the VN she says «will I ever need to use things like quadratic functions in my daily life» and «this is the right formula, I solved it.» This is very vague still. It sounds like she's applying the quadratic formula in her homework and has been introduced to quadratic polynomials. Claude says the first year of high school in japan is usually graphing and basic functional analysis of quadratics. So, she would likely be graphing a function instead of applying a formula. Claude is very interested in the distinction between the word function and equation, but I don't know how important that actually is and what the Japanese says. To me they are the same thing.
But it is just as possible that she is turning 16 or 17 because she could be 18 before her last year, and she could be entering her second year of high school. Ultimately, the VN is too vague on her exact age. The cake only has 11 candles as well, but you could suppose there is one for every gap between the nuggets. Then there's 12 on the cake with one obscured, and three missing since they eat two pieces with two nuggets, so that makes 15.
I appreciate the detailed analysis. A few minor points:
The Japanese school year starts in the spring, so summer vacation happens during a school year, not in between two school years. This doesn't change too much about the quadratic evidence though, since she's also specifically being made to take summer classes because she's behind, so even if she's actually in high school, her schoolwork could be remedial middle school stuff.
The Japanese cutoff date for when you start school based off your birthday is April 1, which is also around when the school year starts. So most students start high school at 15. If Misuzu turns 15 in the summer, that means she was 14 when the school year started, which would make it her third year of middle school.
It's been a long time for me, but is it ever explicitly stated that the school is a high school and not a middle school? I remember this being vague. I know that some girls from Kanon make a cameo appearance, but there's no reason to think that the Air versions of Ayu and co. are the same age as the Kanon versions, or that they're the same year as Misuzu (unless there's some "different years have differently colored ribbons" thing going on?).
If I had to give a number for Misuzu's age I'd definitely say 15 as more likely than any other.
I'd be interested to see if you had any thoughts on how old Kanna was during the events of 1000 years ago. Narrative niceness would dictate she be the same age as Misuzu during the events of Air, but 15 seems too old for Kanna.
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I'm not super invested in this particular debate, but I want to state that I, for one, am rejoiced to see themotte.org finally evolve into discussing things that truly matter - anime girls.
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Yes, I know what prepubescent means.
My point is not that being thirsty for a barely-legal anime character makes someone a pedophile, my point is that splitting hairs over the exact age (or technical age, hence the thousand-year-old dragon meme) and secondary sex characteristics of a character clearly drawn to be childlike fits a certain archetype.
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