"Consensual sex" is just sex.

[Gravitycollapse]

51. The creepy assholes who talk about how "she acted older than her age..."

Are making a circus of reality. They latch onto a possible truth and use it to their own ends. What the creepy asshole is saying is in many ways very truthful about a lot of young people. But that truth has nothing to do with why they're saying it and it doesn't have anything to do with the victim. They take a truth and project it onto their own transgression in order to justify it.

What is the truth buried under the bullshit? That there is an immense level of variability among the intellectual and emotional faculties of teenagers and young adults. And as we sit upon a threshold for what constitutes informed consent, many of these persons have the ability to cross over or fall short.

Age of consent laws assume intent rather than try to define it based on evidence. Which is the exact opposite of trying to determine intent. They assume that an 18 year old having sex with a 15 year old is such an egregious ethical violation that it should be criminal. It does not say anything about the minds of the two persons. It aligns intent with age and in the process intent is subsumed under age.

The reason why age of consent laws are generally correct is that the alignment of maturity with age is also generally correct. But that can be said of all sorts of generalizations that, in the end, are wrong a disturbing amount of the time.

I am also suspicious that the very system which produces predatory men is also responsible for the enacting of laws regarding age of consent as a way of allowing hegemonic masculinity to continue to regulate the sexuality of teenagers under the guise of law. Rather than defining consent around intellectual or emotional capacity, they align consent with age. And does that not reflect the very kind of ideology which preoccupies the mind of sexual predators? That what defines sexual availability is age.

What I'm speaking to is a contradiction which grows stronger as the person approaches the age of consent that then inverts itself entirely once one surpasses the age of consent to the point where there is a general social obsession with deeply sexualizing 18 year olds. What we see is a need to regulate sexual purity. That is why the history behind statutory rape revolves around a fear of sexual corruption and carnality and sin and NOT around whether the young person in question is capable of understanding action and consequence or even whether he or she was injured in the process.

We see this in the culmination of a legal "tipping point" that is like a clock counting down to an age which, when time runs out, allows society to throw young adults to the wolves. That is the inversion. And what I think it demonstrates is that we as a society probably didn't care about the safety of the 15 year old. We cared about maintaining an image of safety.

When I say that statutory rape can be both consensual sex and rape, I am not saying that sex and rape are the same. They are not. The two are mutually exclusive concepts. But that proves my point that a law which has the potential to make these mutually exclusive concepts appear the same is an institution we need to question.