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[cw: very uncomfortable discussion of the history of legal prohibitions on child abuse. Caveat, I like my men older and hairier, so I'm non-representative on several different fronts.]
It's a bit of a mess because the historical norms are based on chastity/purity concerns for girls, physical injury for boys, and corruption of a minor for both in the literal sense of encouraging bad actions, mixed with a handful of shame on the family unit. Since chastity-as-a-property died off, and corruption of a minor was slowly reframed in these contexts as speaking ill of the fundamental character of the victim, physical injury ended up trying to serve as a (poor) bridge through the 1960s and 1970s. That's how you get stuff like the Breendoggle, where very serious and pedophile-not-ephebophile-specific child abuse was happening openly and people waved it off as just an old man being weird, or some of the really creepy minimum-age-with-parental-consent laws. Where norms did show up, they were present in the sense that this was something as shameful to the victim as the perpetrator.
((That last bit was made worse because a lot of 1940s and 1950s studies on actual pedophiles-not-ephebophiles relied on self-reports from interviews with offenders, who unsurprisingly claimed to have been 'seduced', and generalized it to ephebophile contact. You may now throw up in your mouth a little bit. Psych studies have never been very robust.))
The modern social norms are downstream of a handful of social analysis hitting at several different rungs.
The concept of child physical abuse as causing long-term psychological harm started in the 1960s, but over the next decade there was a sudden and broad deluge of early child sexual abuse by people it seemed to have screwed up really bad, starting from incest and then bringing in other trusted adult figures, along with enough confessions by people on the supply side of the sexual abuse that the reports couldn't be handwaved away as confabulation or attention-seeking. This is what you're putting in the "trauma" bin. Psychiatrists put together the theory that serious abuse by trusted figures who applied shame or coercion changed how the victim saw the world, and this seemed to show up everywhere from suicidal ideation to depression to difficulty forming friendships to norm abuses to extremes of over- and under-expression of sexuality. Some of this is probably confounded to hell and back (a repeated discovery was prostitutes very often having a history of being molested as a child, which is plausible for causative reasons... but also coincides with almost half of those from a very-poor upbringing in this time period reporting being molested), but the only real serious discussion is how much is downstream of the physics of the abuse and how much from the coercion and shame.
While the trauma/harm approach was clearest for <14s (the pedophiles-not-ephebophiles), the literature had enough cases for late teenagers that it was illustrative, if not predictive.
Second, you've got the growth of pornography, and how it highlighted types of conduct that weren't really visible before. Before the 1970s, CSAM was largely seen as vice (by consumers) and corruption of minors or obscenity (by the manufacturers); even where severe aggravating conduct was present, the imagery would have just been evidence of that crime, rather than a crime itself. With cameras and early printing materials becoming available as personal tools, though, it became apparent that there was demand for younger persons not just by actual pedophiles-not-ephebophiles, but also by manufacturers that saw them as easy marks.
The caps at the higher end are really recent -- there's a reason that in the UK into the 1980s, you could have a newspaper with photos of a topless 16-year-old delivered to your front door and it'd be only be noteworthy because The Sun was considered a schlocky tabloid, and the US had 16-year-old models or 'high school juniors and seniors' as a common media subject up until the 1960s. Though I'll note that they weren't the standard, either, even when not prohibited.
This eventually culminated in the Traci Lords scandal in the United States. She was 15 when she began 'production', continuing for multiple years. While California was somewhat unusual in having a state CSAM law and that law going to age 18 from its initial enactment, the bit where she was very well-known for multiple years and a sizable amount of material before anyone actually started enforcement was a wake-up call that both state and federal law was toothless.
Worse, her case was pretty much a perfect storm of everything that social conservatives had listed in their parade of horribles. She claimed to be 'consenting' (and was, by the standards of the time, well-paid), but that she also had no understanding of the genuine ramifications of working the field, had zero alternatives, and a massive power disparity that the manufacturers were pretty happy to (by their own legal defense unknowingly) exploit. Her off-screen boyfriend was seven years older than she was, when she was 15. She claims that her drug use didn't coincide with or cause the abuse during actual sex scenes, but that's... something social conservatives were skeptical about, and at minimum she claimed she was plied with alcohol and cocaine when 'modeling' turned into 'nude modeling'. In her personal life, she claimed to have been raped or molested at the age of 10, had some sort of fucked up relationship with her stepfather, and been impregnated and had an abortion by 15; she publicly claimed that the industry had exploited her naivety and teenage lashing out, and that her attempts to leave and get a normal job had been badly undermined until federal law and the scandal forced her out.
When the scandal came out, it resulted in the modern record-keeping requirements and bumped the federal age limit from 16 to 18. While it originally issued under the theory the top end of the age limit was meant to avoid issues where a 15-year-old might have been hard to distinguish from a 16-year-old, enforcement quickly standardized as Lord's full story came out.
Lastly, you've got the Guttmacher Institute and related studies in the 1990s finding that under-18 pregnancies clustered such that a large number of fathers were several years older than the mothers. Qualitative data was a lot less clear, but what was present suggested a massive amount of interaction that was abusive on top of the age gap. This is definitely paternalistic to some degree, but it's a space with a broad disparity of power, serious impact on normal upbringing, and a lot of potential abuse. It was a lot easier to ignore age of consent's exact gap when the central case was a 17-year-old and his 16-year-old girlfriend, than when it was a 30-year-old giving a 16-year-old cash or an ultimatum, and there was enough of the latter to be a serious statistic.
In short, those last two had the ephebophiles-not-pedophiles ended up looking real bad. Not every single one -- afaict, Lord's porn star boyfriend seems to be about as sympathetic as a statutory rapist passing a 15-year-old pot can get, at least compared to the James Deen sorts -- but enough that the norm established pretty quickly and broadly. And because it's so new and shallow, it's deeply uncomfortable to discuss or analyze at depth.
Being forced to submit to something your biology and instinct tells you not to has some seriously negative psychological effects.
But, that's not unique to sex. Obviously.
Even getting held captive during a robbery does this to people; so does any shitty authority figure lording over a captive audience- boarding schools, concentration camps, prisons, etc. can all prompt this shift in behavior. Shitty jobs with no other opportunity can prompt this ("sleeping with the boss" is not a meme for no reason).
So then the question becomes "why do we still honor the isolated demand for rigor for sexual causes of those issues?", and that has 2 main answers- evidentiary trail, and female market power.
The evidentiary trail argument is there because it's easy to prosecute. "Look in $orifice and take sample, determine origin of that sample, compare birth certificate. If under $age, the person who made that sample is guilty." Open and shut. And it's not like sex isn't a means of forcing submission (or a prize thereof); it's just the only thing that comes with the territory that you can actually prosecute without having a crack team sort through every text message ever. (Proving gaslighting/sabotage is very difficult; that's why people do it.)
Female market power is a bit more complicated, but it's an instinctive collective bargaining thing. Let's say woman A has nothing else to offer but her submission (her "self") to man X, and let's assume there's woman B who's more attractive (specifically, younger) or more desperate than woman A.
(Just like human biology, we're ignoring the existence of contraceptives and assuming the "self" may only be sold once at full price- each subsequent selling, if at all permitted, devalues the product.)
Woman A has every incentive to render woman B unable to sell her self to man X.
To do that, she will come up with every excuse- usually (and ironically) "too young to know better"- to convince other men to visit death upon man X no matter how low B's price goes. Now, woman A can sell her self to man X, and she gets to set the price of her submission, for man X now has no alternative if he would like a woman. Her "wage", her "worth", has increased relative to man X due to the absence of woman B.
(More generally, this is just how markets work. Collective bargaining is inherently an oligopoly.)
Now, let's assume that a picture of a woman is worth some fraction of her self. Woman A will want to ban woman B from doing that as well, and it'll be done by complaining about how wicked man X would ever be to buy B's pictures. When woman A is pulling the ladder up behind her, she'll go on and on about how the choices were "work or starve", blame society and her family for giving her that impression, complain about workplace conditions and the assigned tasks, claim she had to use drugs to keep up, go on about about how horrible it was to grow up poor, and blame man X for knowing she should have been paid more.
(This is just how unions justify themselves.)
What limits woman A's ability to control the market is how much enforcement power she can muster. She wasn't able to muster very much in the '60s and '70s, but in the '80s her relative power expanded and that of men contracted. So now it's man against man in the white-knighting competition rather than woman against woman in the casual sex competition; just as woman B must undercut woman A when men get richer relative to women, man Y's only option is similar to woman B's would be in a free market: undercutting man X by promising woman A a higher price- less submission, more resources offered, or by publicly swearing an oath to woman A that he will harm man X should he prefer the superior product/better deal that B offers, or if X ultimately fails to pay A what she believes she is worth.
(This is why ground-level anti-union/anti-oligopoly violence is ultimately counterproductive. The more sellers you take out of the market, the more powerful those who remain become.)
Most of the claimed issues that "social conservatives" have- all of the ones you have listed- is just the same kind of justification for why man X and his desire to maximize his own value is evil and must be suppressed. They strategically pretend (and eventually will believe for real) that [the interests of] woman A morally outranks man X. At the same time, and for the same reasons, woman B is strategically denied any notion of agency whatsoever; it will be argued that that she is a "mere child, helpless and confused, and should run along while the adults are talking". This is all to convince Y to support A's suppression of X, which is who A generally wants to sell her self to. (Talk is cheap, after all.)
They must also pretend that men's wage has never decreased relative to women's relative to its peak. If that happened, Y might stop paying to defend A's interests. But if A can successfully deem B to be "a child", then interest in B can be righteously condemned as child rape. But because that is a lie, it creates an externality resulting in more actual child rape. (If the market were working correctly, A would be liable for that externality, not X. It actually helps A when a [future] B is raped: fewer Bs mean less competition for A, damaged Bs mean less competition for A, and it's a kickback to the Y that did it.)
And yes, the reason it's become continually worse over the last 100 years for men is because, outside of 1950-1970, their wages have dropped compared to women. From 1950-1970, the reverse occurred, which you know as the Sexual Revolution (when A's power to prevent X from buying B failed.)
40 years of decline in man's relative wage, though, and as you can see we're way past minimum (w)age now. The current frontier is "he ended up being poorer than he said he was, so the sex was rape" and "the court is not interested in any of the evidence that proves the rape allegations are fabricated" (labor dispute, A vs. X), "boyfriend given the Scarlet Letter for a nude selfie the girlfriend sent unprompted" (legitimacy dispute, A vs. Y [and sometimes B]), and "young men, provided they are not white, are permitted to rape young women" (pollution, A vs. B [and sometimes Y]).
This is examination of revealed preference, nothing more. There are no value claims to be found here; buyers aren't intrinsically evil, sellers aren't intrinsically good. Both are life, and they simply are.
But these two things- market dynamics, and what the enforcers of the power that makes it so tell themselves- are the precise reason why AoC laws (as one of several demonstrations of the market power of woman A) have remained one-way ratchets for the last 40 years, and will continue to be so long as current market conditions remain the same.
(re: @dailydogma)
I broadly agree with this analysis with a small caveat. I tend to think that human behavior can't be reduced directly to economic thinking. Rather, economics impact behavior through evolution, both biological and cultural. So ultimately this is a level or two above the question of the immediate cause. Maybe @gattsuru gives the phenomenology of the cause, you give the far-origins of the cause, but ultimately the shift has to be situated into the modern drift towards feminism in and late marriage more generally. Given feminism and late marriage, ideas about the age of consent needing to be high will win out, in large part because of selfish reasoning on the part of women like you detail. @gattsuru documents what those ideas actually feel like. So the final part of the explanation concerns this more general drift, which as been happening for over 200 years.
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Thank you, very interesting. Where did you source all of this? As in, how do you know it?
I had heard of the Lords case but not in the context of age of consent. It doesn't seem to relate. Shooting porn is different from a romantic relationship, and she's obviously not a normal case. On top of that, the Wikipedia article states she lied about her age, and demonstrates more than enough premeditation in her actions for her to be held accountable.
Then there's some looney, Marx-adjacent psychiatry. Mental illness is mostly genetic, and trauma is mostly non-sexual, and sexual-trauma is mostly non-romantic (rape), so it makes no sense to fly past heritability to trauma, and then fly past actual sources of trauma like poverty and low status, to sex, and then conflate young romantic relationships with specifically being raped or forced into sex. Kind of like the Lords scandal, it could only make sense to someone with crazy ideas about human genetics who also already wants to go on a sex crusade.
Finally with the Gutmacher institute ... it's some kind of floppy eugenics or dysgenics to care about teen pregnancies specifically. I'm not for it. I think you do eugenics the right way or not at all. Best case scenario most of those pregnancies were dysgenic so it was crypto-eugenics to oppose them. But this isn't very effective when you also have a welfare state and don't regulate their births after age 18 anyway. So compared to the massive negative externality of criminalizing straight men, it doesn't pass. But I don't think this was the motive at any rate, it's just a way to evaluate the policy. The motive I believe was closer to the Marxism of the other two example, except this time relating to education. The idea is that the state is entitled to keep a teenage girl as a wife to the school system. That's obviously horrifically wrong morally and doesn't even make sense empirically unless you think that high school education is useful. Which, obviously it is not. It's all signaling. Anyway, «some young women are getting pregnant» is hardly headline news unless you're predetermined to go on a sex crusade, yet again.
None of these really justify or explain the phenomenon. The closest they get to explanation is if you think ideas are causal, then all of these might be downstream from blank slatism generally which could hold Traci Lords to be equal, mental illness to be environmental, high school to be causal in manufacturing good citizens ... but that's too convenient. Blank slate ideas themselves are not consistent, they are merely a tool for something deeper. For example, it's blank slate enough to talk about the trauma of low status and poverty, but psychiatrists like to victim-blame on that dimension and skip to sex talk. Is it blank slate that gays are born this way? How about trans-racialism being a no-no (remember Rachel Dolezal?). It's pick and choose to an uncanny degree, on top of it being very wrong empirically, meaning anyone reasoning in good enough faith should eventually discard blank slatism.
Uh... combination of Clayton Cramer bringing up the 1970s introduction and iteration of federal CSAM law really surprising me, then trawling wikipedia, Lord's biography/tell-all, and a written history of obscenity law that I'm afraid I can't remember the name.
The porn itself, weirdly, seems to have been the least of it, and mostly bad in the sense it made return to a normal life even harder. It just meant that California's system was not just carefully overlooking excusable relationships, but ignoring pretty central examples of what it claimed to object to, undeniably. The earlier sexual abuse feeding sexual poor choices, the abortion, the fucked up relationship with her stepfather, coercive use of hard drugs, and what Lords herself described as lashing out were what made a cause celebre, and they all pointed much broader than . Only a few were romantic, but they were all sexual or sexual-adjacent.
That's fair, and in fact part of why no one on the production side was ever convicted, and (afaict) the only convictions were of people reselling the films well after the scandal. Didn't really soothe social conservatives, though; that she premeditated toward these directions was part of the criticism, in the same sense that modern social conservatives would object to a 14-year-old smuggling and taking testosterone.
Fair. It was the 80s and 90s; academic psychology definitely wasn't doing good.
That said, a number of the claims were and remain pretty plausible -- people who reporting physical injury or extreme coercion during first intercourse and then became extremely sexually 'frigid', or who were told and became hypersexual, or who were incapable of having platonic relationships because they perceived everyone of a sex (or everyone) as only interacting with them to get into their pants, or dwelling around a romantic relationship with someone that once made them drop everything and since abandoned them once they were too old for their tastes.
There's a serious selection bias, here: the shrinks were tautologically only talking to people who talked to shrinks, and while they largely weren't selected from people who had been molested, they were selected for people who had Problems and that tends to get more of the rape cases than the 15-year-old lovers ones. But that's material to be argued, and it was at best seen as something supporting Romeo-and-Juliet laws with oversight.
To an extent, but I think you're measuring off the norms of the current political alignments rather than those of the 1980s and 1990s. Both the health risks and the long-term family formation risks were a big matter for Moynihan-and-Reagan-era politicians, who did genuinely put a lot of effort into the problem, if admittedly not very effectively in hindsight. The norm outlived them, but it's got more grounding than you'd think.
I mean, I wouldn't call this grounding in the same way that the swing towards anti-tobacco has grounding. People thought cigarettes were health-neutral or healthy, then they found out it causes lung damage and cancer. Simple enough. This grounding is a bunch of motivated reasoning (not from you but from the people) that doesn't really make any contact with reality. For example
There are no causal health risks or family formation risks I can find in the literature that survive close examination. The latter issue sounds like a dog whistle for lower class people being most of the underaged relationships at the time, which makes sense because richer people tend to marry later at the present moment, the former issue is ... I don't know. If you look at the literature closely it seems confounded with class also. Babies from younger mothers tend to be less healthy but then so do young mothers. The causal effect seems approximately 0 after 15. Also the illogic with plentiful tolerance for 30 something birthing and then fretting about health effects of pregancy at 16.
I will say the obnoxious tyranny of the laws do tend to match other laws from the time, like drug laws and computer access laws.
Can you link to this? First I've found out about this guy, looks like he exposed some fake scholarship on American gun politics history. I read a bit about that, and I would say most of the academic literature supporting high ages of consent and similar ideas has the same issues he found in gun politics history literature.
Thanks for the detailed discussion. It has strengthened my view that high age of consent laws (meaning ~18) are intellectually and morally standing on a foundation of air. I think when that happens it's usually hiding deeper ugly motivations as Robin Hanson talks about as opposed to a whole society accidentally falling for nonsense while shutting out all of the people who politely try to help them out of it. In this case again I think it's broadly some kind of Hamiltonian spite, that's all I can get out of the gigantic travesty that the Epstein affair has been anyway, as Michael Tracey has documented.
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