Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
- 203
- 2
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link