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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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