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Did you just forget that adult women also get a vote, or what?
No, that seems consistent with my point? Unless you don't think women are people or a part of society.
Your whole point seems to be "men clearly don't generally want this that much, or it would be legal". But even at this facile level of reasoning about how social norms and democracy work, women are in fact half of society and the electorate.
Good point. So your model is what exactly? All or almost all men are ephebophiles, and all or almost all women oppose this? What percent do you think? I just haven't seen strong evidence of sex polarization on this topic, in data, so I wasn't thinking of a massive gender effect size when reasoning.
Most men are ephebophiles, some women oppose this out of naked self-interest, most women oppose it out of a tendency towards groupthink, women have extreme social leverage over men, and there's a baptists-and-bootleggers coalition between feminists in the muck of the groupthink and conservative parents who have no personal interest in finding a partner but do have an interest in marginally protecting their daughters' chastity.
How do you know these things? Interesting hypotheses, although I have seen data to the contrary ... in particular I have seen data indicating most men prefer women over 20. More interesting to me is your model of woman's social leverage and groupthinking. What are you basing that on? You sound very sure of yourself there with all these details. How do you know these things? It sounds like a compelling model to me, basically that the age of consent is high because of spiteful women and bad parents. The groupthink part could be correct but I want to be careful about not assuming too much and making excuses for people's actions. Ultimately each individual is responsible for their own beliefs and actions. While they will be influenced by the input of others, this is only ever partial, and they are still responsible for how they respond to peer influence. And furthermore the average direction of peer influence should precede peer influence, naturally.
Most data I'm familiar with on female attractiveness shows a peak in the mid-teens, despite a strong social desirability bias to the contrary (which I think readily explains the minority of exceptions). Moreover the historic and current reasoning behind the age of consent is well-documented; you can just go out and look at what rhetoric is raised in its defense, who supports it and why. Your model, conversely, is completely alien to me; I'm not sure how one winds up imagining a world where men selected an age of consent based on what they find attractive.
That 4chan chart with the loli cartoon girls touching the bars? That was fake. You never checked the citation? It was fake.
I have tried to have debates on it and I can't. There are no good arguments in favor of high ages of consent as far as I can find. Just a bunch of people who threaten to kill you for looking like an ephebophile (it seems like a strangely g-loaded topic, unlike race differences where a lot of smart people will insist on the blank slate). Your bias towards «every man is secretly an ephebophile» is probably right on smart people forums.
There is no reasoning in books or legal documents. I read through US court opinions and found that the laws are vitiated by modern norms, in that they were original passed for chastity purposes around 1900, and they tended to have lower age limits. They also only applied to girls, and had no close in age exemption, since most of the point was not allowing the girls to be ravished by teenage boys. They also always had marital exceptions. They no longer satisfy chastity purposes, with close-in-age-exceptions and the general decline of chastity's salience in public morality, so their current aim remains mysterious, despite the ramp up in their age limitations and enforcement. At the same time marriage ages go higher, the target being 18 and no exceptions. So it would seem the point is to have girls be run through by schoolboys before marriage age, while arresting any man barely older who might be in the position to marry her, as the age gaps are comically and unnaturally small. Basically they allow her classmates to exploit her while forbidding her to date a 20 year old of good character. It has been demonstrated scientifically the optimal age gap for fertility is 7 years, with most normal human relationships being between 3 and 10 years of age gap. Yet close in age exceptions are often only 3 or 4 years, distorting most normal monogamous human relationships that should occur.
I tried reading intellectual discourse on the topic and the best I could get are European memoirs. Needless to say there was nothing systematic or impressive here -- Vanessa Springora in «Le consentement» is mad her adult male lover cheated on her when she was 15. So that means we must raise the age of consent? Doesn't follow.
Jiro recently mentioned the American idea of «trauma» which is present in the folk-feminism which persecutes Epstein, but Rind et al eviscerated that idea a quarter of a century ago. When I replied with a four point explication of the faults of «trauma» , Jiro immediately dipped. No debate was had. I conclude it cannot be had.
It's easy. We live in a democracy. High age of consent people have no good reasons, so that leaves aesthetics. Data shows low gender effects for age of consent opinions. Attraction data shows adult men prefer 20-somethings.
Meanwhile you are operating off of potentially fake data, projection, and groupthink/social desirability bias as a vague god of the gaps for when it doesn't exactly add up. To paraphrase how I see your reasoning:
«we live in a democracy, but people secretly disagree with the law, but they don't vote it out because ... groupthink. no further mechanics given, just somehow a minority can mind control a majority. idk. anyway, I get to feel like everyone around me is also significantly attracted to this boyish 12 year old girl and are just lying when they say I have an unusual attraction complex.»
I will be honest with you. Even when I was a schoolboy I liked girl over 16 the most. Even when I was only 16. No lower age gap preferred. Now I am older and I genuinely think 19 or 20 year olds are much more physically attractive than 16 year olds on average. You really cannot argue I am mindcucked because I argue for lowering the age of consent, since it disgusts me how awfully they treat people like you for having historically normal romantic relationships. Just like how I am not actually pragmatically racist but I am attracted to the ideas of HBD. I am a taboo-poker and justice seeker. A lie exposer.
Likewise there are men who definitely like them older than me. They like them «busty» and 26, 27, or 28 years old. I used to assume they were coping but I think it's genuine now. It's a simpler model that predicts more. Humans vary a lot.
[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.
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