Have you checked the quarry, Guy?
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Right â other people were scoffing at the idea that a dance instructor could have any kind of power over a student; I was simply pointing out the possibility.
Thatâs trivially true. An 18 year old is âsomeone older than they areâ. Is âa significant subset of 17 year-olds perfectly capable of dealing with a relationship with someoneâ who is 40 or 50 years old? Or does the magnitude of the age difference not matter?
And what do we mean by âsignificant subsetâ â does that mean like 5% or more like 40%? Or even 51%?
Again, depends on what you mean by âa significant subsetâ. Surely there are exceptions, but I think it is somewhat implausible to assert that 33 year olds are no more able on average to assess compatible or incompatible mates or sexual partners than 17 year olds.
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Whenever I see âmust register as a sex offenderâ I am forced to ask myself - was their action so grievous that we need to make sure this person will never get a good job, will have difficulty getting housing, and in general have a very difficult time for the rest of their life?
This doesnât seem to warrant such a response.
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Heck, I have one. And no, I donât want to see @Donald_Petersenâs teen sex tape either.
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I regret that I have but one like to give to that comment.
You have just made reading that entire book WORTH IT!
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Actually, I think the rub was locatedâŚ
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Is that teh herp on her lip? Top right? Or bottom right? Or bottom left?
i hesitate to respond at this point because i donât like to encourage quibbling but for the purpose of my reply i would be willing to replace the words âsignificant subsetâ with the range of 17-33%.
having witnessed the behavior of my sonsâ (28 and 35) and their friendsâ relationship behaviors over the past 5 years or so makes me regard my statement as materially more plausible than you do. frankly, having witnessed the relationship behaviors of the friends of my mother and father when they were in their 40s and 50s makes me think that dealing with physical relationships and romantic attachments is not something humans are consistently good at regardless of age.
further, it is my belief that infantilizing 17 year-olds does not really protect them. perhaps that is not your intent but you do seem keen on the idea of protecting them from someone a decade or so older than they are. and again, i point out that in some states 17 is the full age of consent and the 33 year-old would not have been chargeable with statutory rape and would not be tarred as a sex offender in those jurisdictions.
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I assure you my intent was to actually understand what you were trying to say rather than quibble.
That almost makes it sound like you generally think adults are less capable of dealing with physical relationships and romantic attachments than are 17 year olds. At this point, I guess Iâm not sure I understand what you mean by âdealing withâ here. Surely we could decide that some adults with severe mental illness or developmental disabilities couldnât âdeal withâ physical relationships; perhaps we could include (non-SSC) sexual sadists, serial abusers, etc. But it doesnât sound like thatâs what youâre talking about. So Iâm really not sure what youâre claiming.
On the contrary; I think 17 year-olds should not be infantilized, but actually are infantilized, and what I am so keen on is to protect the actually infantilized 17 year-olds from potential abusers.
I think itâs a wee bit unfair of you to imply that Iâm in the wrong for suggesting a large proportion of 17 year-olds are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse by older romantic partners when you happily argue very similar things about 33 year-olds â who we cannot reasonably claim are more infantilized in our society than 17 year olds.
Weâre clearly both basing our judgments on our interactions of people of various ages; however, you are basing your view of 17 year-olds on your own experiences and those of your wife and sister decades ago (perhaps you were not as infantilized as the current crop?) whereas I am basing my views on 17 year-olds on my experiences teaching in a high school. And your views on 33 year olds seems based on your experience with your own adult children and their friends, and one might conjecture that this biases you towards viewing their behavior as immature, etc; whereas my judgments on 33 year-olds is based on friends and colleagues.
TL;DR, it seems very strange to me that youâd be so down on me judging 17 year-olds to lack the emotional maturity for romantic relationships with much older partners while simultaneously claiming that 33 year-olds lack the emotional maturity for romantic relationships with anyone. Perhaps I simply misunderstand what youâre trying to argue, but now youâre accusing me of quibbling for asking you to clarify these apparently contradictory claims. Is there any chance you could clarify what youâre actually claiming without implying anything about my intent or character (I take the âwhite knightâ and âquibblingâ as implications about either my intent or character).
i apologize for the offense generated by my infelicitous phrasing. at the time i read i read your earlier response it seemed to me that you were trying to catch me out on an unstated percentage rather than about my larger argument that the range of readiness for relationships is highly individualized and variable. i see now that you were genuinely interested in what proportion of individuals i meant by my adjective âsignificantâ and i regret the implication.
as for what i am claiming: it is that many 17 year-olds are perfectly capable of dealing with the emotional and social elements of a physical relationship with someone who is older than them, even to the point of being 2 or more decades older than them. my mentions of 33 year-olds is meant to implicitly introduce the notion that age does not, of itself, guarantee that someone is mentally or emotionally better prepared for a physical relationship. i realize that laws tend to be âone size fits allâ affairs and they wanted to set a cutoff somewhere. i insist that the cutoff is arbitrary and possibly capricious. after all, there is evidence in brain research that the frontal cortex does not finish developing until sometime in the mid-20s which has led some to argue that in criminal cases defendants in their early 20s should be treated more in accordance with status of juveniles than adults. should that suggest that the age of consent be raised to 21 or 23 or 25?
i also mention again that if this relationship had occurred in another state there might have been no crime because the age of consent is either 16 or 17, an age of consent that is true for 18 states.
would you be willing to agree that we are arguing over a standard that is inevitably somewhat arbitrary in its establishment?
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Hey, Benito Mussolini was a dance instructor, and see how his life went!
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Absolutely. I would consider the standard to be what the folks at lesswrong might call a âSchelling Fenceâ â just an arbitrary point you pick to avoid slippery slope or a race to the bottom. (Term is derived from âSchelling pointâ: Focal point (game theory) - Wikipedia) The idea is to avoid the situation where people push the point back and back: if 17 is ok,why not 15? If 15 is OK, why not 13? Obviously we end up in some nasty territory somewhere along this line.
While this may be capricious, I donât think itâs necessarily a bad way to deal with situations like this. What is definitely a bad idea is the sex offender registry. Maybe it wouldnât be as bad if there was a possibility of appeal, or if names dropped off the registry after a certain period of time, but I tend to think it would be better to scrap it entirely.
What I was really arguing over is the likelihood that a person who turned 17 years old within the last 12 months who is dating someone, say, twice their age is being abused or exploited in some way. I personally think it is an exceptionally rare 17 year-old who would be able to be in a healthy romantic relationship with someone that much older. Even just considering the fact that disagreements and fights between romantic partners are pretty much inevitable, the older party is probably going to be more confident in their beliefs and have more âtricks up their sleeveâ for getting the other person to comply, and I think that sort of lack of parity in a relationship is a little unhealthy.
I could very well be wrong about that, maybe the human ideal really is 14 year old girl/35 year old man and all these egalitarian modern relationships are undermining the foundations of our civilization.
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and i consider it a good deal less rare than that.
the youngest age of consent without any age gap provision in the law in any jurisdiction in the united states is 16 which is true in nine states. a further nine have an age of consent of 17 without any age gap provision. if this incident had happened one state over, in nevada, where the age of consent is 16 with no age gap provision there would have been no crime and the woman and her lover would have been within their rights to do what they did.
youâre welcome to conclude on that sarcastic riposte but please donât think it characterizes my argument in this thread.
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note to @Falcor
i hope my conversation over the past several replies with @wysinwyg does not represent the kind of discussion you might consider unwelcome to a thread.
Youâre kosher, but I am always watching.
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Tried googling and failed. What book?
The Quarry.
It was the first book we read in our book club. It wasnât a resounding hit.
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Ah, thanks.
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