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That baffles me. A 12 year old is mature enough to be sure of their gender identity and sexual orientation and so can ask for puberty blockers.
A 22 year old woman who sleeps with a 40 year old married man who, surprise surprise, does not dump his wife and kids to marry her is a poor little blossom who was groomed and taken advantage of by an older man.
Make up your damn minds. If 14 year olds are mature enough to fuck, get pregnant, and get abortions without their parents' knowledge or consent, then 22 year women are mature enough to realise that 30-50 year old men are not interested in them for their brains.
You're looking for consistency on the wrong axis. It's not "children are mature, adults are vulnerable". It's "this claim suits my agenda, and this separate claim suits my agenda too".
It appears to me that their mind is made up and it says that old trad white male capitalist able-bodied neurotypical cis hetero normative patriarchal [progressive stack intensifies] is the enemy; the source of all that is evil. It's a totalising blend of identity politics plus politics as identity. It's "are you with us or are you one of them?"
That's true. Incoherence is no barrier, it's a weapon.
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Isn't this more a problem with the overloaded term "groomed"?
I feel comfortable saying that the 22yo was taken advantage of, that it was a bad thing, and also that there should be no criminal and limited social consequences. That's because, as you note, she had the maturity to know better, or at least to carry on without lasting damage.
Calling that "grooming" is fine, but it doesn't make it equivalent to the other use of the term: soliciting underage kids for sex. The same 40yo hanging out by a playground and convincing children to get in the van is categorically different and should be condemned in the strongest terms.
These two positions are consistent. It's conflating the two terms, or defending against such a conflation, that leads to mental gymnastics.
I don't think that a 40 year old guy having sex with a 22 year old woman is grooming in any sense. It might be taking advantage of her, it might be even murkier depending if she's a vulnerable person (is emotionally fragile, has been misused in the past, etc.) or if the older man is in a position of power/authority (I don't think Bill Clinton was right in what he did with Monica Lewinsky, even though Monica was old enough to know that fooling around with a married man was wrong).
Grooming children is a much more serious matter.
Agreed on all counts.
I'm saying that misuse of the term "grooming" is a side effect of the definitional fight, rather than people refusing to make up their damn minds.
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