My personal experience says yes. When I was 12 I fooled around a bit with a 13 year old friend of mine. When I changed my mind about doing it again I didn’t have much trouble telling him so. I can’t imagine being able to turn down a 20 or 30 year old as easily.
When I was 15 I had a 25 year old make out buddy over the summer. I very carefully kept him at arms length, the whole thing felt pretty dangerous. Interacting with him was not like interacting with boys my age. If I’d decided I was in love with him or something crazy he would have been in a position to harm my life much more than a boy my age. I couldn’t call his parents, I couldn’t complain to his school, he had a much greater access to all kinds of resources, if things got out of hand. He did not treat me like an equal. I’ve never personally seen a guy in his 20’s treat a teenage girl like an equal, and I’ve seen alot of guys in their 20’s hook up with teen girls.
I’ve watched people in college hook up with professors. Their relationships with them are different from relationships with other students even if they they are not actually taking any classes from those profs. This is not true when the ages are closer, older undergrads dating young profs.
The power imbalance is real. The fact that a person your age can also be manipulative or abusive doesn’t negate the base level imbalance that comes with a big age gap.
Edit: I feel like I should also mention that when I dumped the 25 year old guy he insisted that I was just doing it because my parents were making me. He refused to believe I was acting on my own volition. If you think about this, he was admitting that he didn’t believe I was capable of making my own relationship decisions.
You’re assuming that all 40-year-olds want to have sex with 18-year-olds. The problem isn’t 40-year-olds in general, just the ones who come after teens.
Predators look for certain types of prey. They’re not going to approach a confident, mature teen; they’re looking for someone they can easily manipulate.
That headline is fucked up. How would we feel about “Atheist teacher arrested for sex in cemetery with 16 year old student”? “Before her job at the high school, Aldinger is reported to have served as recently as Fall 2015 as council president of the local branch of American Atheists…”
(This is where someone asserts that literally every Christian ever is a homophobic, hate-mongering, hellfire-preaching hypocrite, and I point out several million reasons why that’s not true, and they try some No True Scotsman bullshit, and can we just skip it this time please?)
When has that ever happened on this forum? With known posters, not drive-by trollies?
This is the same equalizing technique used with regard to racism. Articles (and personal conversations) in this country have a tendency to mention race if and only if the person isn’t white. Right now, Muslims are another group that is particularly pointed out in this same way. Do you not recognize that if the teacher had been Muslim, that fact would have been part of the headline in any mainstream article? So, if we use an adjective to describe black people and Muslims, why shouldn’t we disclose when a person is white and/or Christian too?
Screwing in graveyards is a venerable rite. Pre-christian. Makes more corn!
The age of consent varies wildly over time and place. At one point it was 12 in much of western Europe… unless the male was ordained Christian clergy, in which case it was lower, because they had a separate court system.
No one has the wisdom, self-confidence and experience to avoid exploitation by others. Yet people still sometimes have positive experiences.
Let me analyse the assumptions we’re working from here:
If two fourteen-year-olds decide to explore their sexuality together, that is inherently bad for them and should be prevented for their own good.
If a 25-year-old manipulates a 17-year-old into thinking they want to have sex with each other, that is so bad for the 17-year old that other crimes pale by comparison.
If a 17-year-old manipulates another 17-year-old into thinking they want to have sex with each other, that’s part of the game.
A 30-year-old is more capable of manipulating a teenager than a 22-year-old is.
Actually, I don’t agree with any of those.
There are, however, some arguments for having those kinds of laws that I think might be true:
Positions of authority (teachers, etc) can be abused in subtle ways that might be hard to prove in court.
Manipulation in general is hard to prove in court.
Differences in maturity can be abused for manipulation.
Some people have a talent for manipulation that can develop surprisingly early.
“Genuine love” with a large age difference is comparatively rare. (It is even rarer when it is illegal and frowned upon by society).
Regretting a decision in sexual matters can happen at all ages, but it is more likely to happen with younger people.
Regretting a decision to engage in a “taboo” relationship causes a lot more psychological damage than an equally unpleasant relationship that society considers “normal”.
There’s a case for age-of-consent laws to be made based on those. Only my randomly chosen numbers and my punishments will probably be lower than yours.
It somehow hurts to read that. I think it is related to my complaint that American society seems to lump in 17-year-olds with the small children. There is no fundamental difference between a 17-year-old and an adult. It is a difference in degree only. Isn’t it offensive to tell a 17-year-old, “you are a child, you have no rights”?
It’s a good thing to protect 17-year-olds, but if something is “harmless” when done by/to an 18-year-old, it does not warrant long prison terms when done by/to a 17-year-old.
Most European countries are a bit more relaxed on those things. There are occasional stories in European media about how crazy and puritanical Americans are with respect to sex, especially with respect to teenagers and sex.
We seem to be less fond of black-or-white laws with stiff minimum penalties. We like to keep the option that a judge sees mitigating circumstances in a specific case.
Also, I don’t usually use the German word “Kind” to refer to people above about 14, so the proclamation “OMG (s)he had sex with a child of 17” sounds utterly strange to me.
When I was 15 in the 90s, the common prejudice about American teenagers visiting Austria on student exchanges was that they were hopelessly naive and innocent in sexual matters and required a special crash course in sexual matters to survive a three-week stay in Europe. (My own school didn’t have an exchange program with America, so I never fact-checked that). I was a virgin at that age. I think most of us were.
Here in Austria, age of consent is at 14, with an exception for really small age differences. Criminal responsibility also starts at 14, so what younger kids with each other is not a matter of criminal law. There are additional laws that impose penalties for “abusing a position of authority over anyone under 18” and for “abusing the immaturity of someone aged 14 or 15”.
Not necessarily. Pretty much the opposite actually. Or rather I don’t think it’s anything the law can prevent, so whether or not it should is moot.
Since I would set our age of consent at 17, no. But as I said, I would want scientific studies before my own country set a national age of consent. Austria’s may be three years lower than what seems, on first impression, wise to me, but at least it’s presumably nationwide (?), which is better than the US’s patchwork of state laws. And as I said, other cultures might benefit from setting the age of consent at different ages. Going simply by my outsider perspective, in my travels and associations in Europe, I do think children are probably on average a lot more mature about sexuality than Americans. But I doubt that’s entirely or even mainly down to age of consent, and far more to do with what is in many ways a much less puritanical prevailing culture. Regardless, I’m an outsider to Austria and my opinion as an outsider counts for far less than any Austrians, IMO.
Game? I personally think that treating relationships as games is a serious red flag of emotional immaturity. I can see why someone judging American society by its youth pop culture would think the “game” is how we relate to one another sexually. That would be an erroneously simplistic view of the 300 million people who live here. Our shallow cartoonish pop culture is an embarrassment, but it’s not the entirety of who we are.
There’s a far less disparate power imbalance in the ability of one 17 year-old to manipulate another. But the main (though not only) reason I would set the age of consent for the US at 17 is because that’s when youth here seem to start gaining more self-control over their hormonal urges, and would therefore have a greater ability to decide for themselves whether to have sex with their elders, whom we already expect to have more self-control than someone under 16. While it’s true that this is a difference in degrees, a difference in degree can in aggregate result in a difference in kind - animal neural complexity, for example, being a difference in degree that yields fundamentally new abilities (semantic languages, cultural memory, future modelling, deductive reasoning, ect…) once thresholds are reached. In no way am I arguing that every human being passes the tipping point beyond which they can have the worldly confidence and self-control to resist exploitation. Some people will reach it younger and some older; some people are better at exploiting certain other people. My guess is that most of these psychological traits follow a normal distribution within any given culture.
There is, presumably, a reason Austria doesn’t allow adults to accept consent from arbitrarily young children. Why has Austria decided 14 is the age at which someone is ready to give that consent? I submit that the difference is when your culture has determined most of it’s youth are, on average, ready to have a chance for equitable sexual relations with their elders, not that there is such an age. I honestly can’t see what would be so controversial about my assertion that we, the US, should do scientific studies to try to determine where the age typically is for our youth, and legislate a national age-of-consent. In what way is this worse than our current mess?
In general, yes. An average 30 year-old has spent over a decade unsheltered in the real-world where the social and material stakes are higher and the support for them less immediate or comprehensive. An average 22 year-old has still spent most of their life under the protection of their family and fewer opportunities to cause themselves or others harm. In short, a 22 year-old is less experienced in the use of the power afforded adults. Again, there are exceptions. Some 22 year-olds will be far more cunning than some 30 year-olds, but on average they will be less given less opportunity to learn. Some people learn faster from experience, and some never learn from it. The primary purpose of the law, however, is to work for as many people as often as possible.
I don’t entirely agree with most of them, and I can see by the fact that you took those to be my positions that I did a royally poor job in expressing my views. That’s not false humility. You’re clearly articulate enough to be capable of comprehending what I wrote, so it follows that I was unclear.
I agree, but I would say that’s more an argument for laws aimed at preventing abuse of authority, even if there is some overlap with age-of-consent laws.
True. And that’s why I think everyone should be equal under the law. We are limited by what we can know goes on inside people’s minds. The goal should be laws that balance freedom and risk according to the typical traits prevalent within the culture they govern and what the members of that culture want to achieve through its laws. Laws will be different between nations. But it’s unwise to have different laws depending on where one finds oneself within a nation, at least regarding something as serious as sexual freedoms.
Yes, that is in fact a large part of the argument I tried, apparently poorly, to make.
Yes, there are edge cases. And while laws should attempt to serve the interests of as many as possible, no legal regime can hope to cover every edge case within a large society. That’s a major part of the role of courts, to attempt to apply the intent of the law when the letter of the law fails to apply the intent to specific cases.
I’m not sure what you mean by genuine love. Love can be many things - a neurochemical bond, an act of devotion, a habit of devotion, a sacrifice, a romantic aesthetic, and more - but the notion of “true love” as it’s presented in Western culture is basically a gross oversimplification and appeal to mysticism.
True. Prudence is part of the process of gaining maturity. I agree with this.
True, and while I acknowledge that this will be a factor any society will take into account in setting laws (for what are taboos but a prevailing social mores), I do not believe this is an ethical argument for any sort of laws. On the other hand, the ability to prudently decide whether to engage in relationships one’s society deems taboo, and risk the reproval, however unjust it may be, of others, is a function of maturity, and someone with less maturity is more likely to suffer regrets for how they make that decision.
I don’t think either of us rolled dice. But yes, you’re guesstimates on what ages are best will likely differ from mine. As I said, I think laws this important deserve to be backed up with scientific studies, and should never been be based exclusively on opinions or anecdotal experience.
I do not. I group 16 year olds in with younger children for the purposes of this particular freedom. If the word children is offensive, I’m fine with using a different specific term for this particular matter. Indeed, the usual legal term of art in the US is minor.
Laws granting adult freedoms must, nonetheless, determine where the differences in degrees are likely, on average, to yield differences in results for things like exploitation, regret, imprudence and lack of caution. At some stage the process of learning and maturing gradually becomes a difference in kind. It differs, probably along a normal distribution, for different people. At some stage a child begins to use language. At another they begin to form narrative memories. At another they begin to feel comfortable away from their guardians. At various stages they begin to feel confident among peers that have crossed those other stages earlier than they. No one’s arguing that humans are uniform machines. But the process of growing up and the transition from childhood to adulthood aren’t purely cultural inventions, though the laws and customs surrounding them are less complex than the actual variances in the process itself.
Thank you for such a thoughtful and considered reply. I’d also like to apologize for a mistake I made earlier. I misread Austria and Australia. Aside from being a very stereotypical American mistake, I didn’t mean to insult your nationality by misstating it.
Sorry I can’t write a longer reply clarifying some of the points was trying to make earlier. My partner and I are off to a late movie. Apologies also for any typos. I don’t have time for proofing this, but I will try to find time to do so later. [proof read]
Christian hypocrisy. Most atheists I know don’t lord it over other with their high falutin’ values and sanctimonious “better than thee” attitude. Compare this to many Christians, especially politicians and preachers (as if there was a difference), who seem to be more likely to be caught in a bathroom or the like doing a specific bad thing or two the more they denounce it in public.
So, basically, you’re going from “a Christian committed a crime unrelated to religion” to “all Christians are hypocritical assholes.” Exactly like I asked you not to. Thanks!
Neither do most Christians I know. In fact, I think I’ve associated with more atheists who act that way than Christians.
The point is, some Christians are assholes, and some atheists are assholes. The worst Christians probably do more damage than the worst atheists, and it’s fair and right to call them out for that. I’d rather hang out with the most smug and sanctimonious of atheists than a right-wing fundamentalist. But it’s stupid to stereotype millions of people based on the actions of a subset, however loud and irritating that subset.
You’re welcome. I didn’t say “all” Christians. It just seems to be the ones active in the political and cultural sphere. I’m sure there are perfectly quiet Christians out there that don’t spend their lives bothering other people or trying to pass laws to create a theocracy. I just rarely meet any.
Give me a break. I’m a regular contributor here. “Sorry” that I went out of bounds of your self-appointed role as moderator and gave an opinion with which you disagree. That must be rough, open discourse and all…
