The newest kind of Puritan thought crime is when you "sexualize" someone.
#SPR860
"Objectify" used to be overused,
but at least that's a real thing
(tho' perceived differently by different individuals).
Now it's been replaced by the ridiculous nonsensical "sexualize" :-D
.#SPR860
I just skimmed through a video where the author's conclusion is based entirely on the idea that kids are too stupid to understand that there's a difference between cartoons and real life. The level of idiocy on YouTube is astounding.
Two steps:
a. don't choke him
b. don't overthink this
Why did Iris.to stop working?
The fact that people believe in teenhood or "adolescence" is pretty amazing. Some "experts" talk about adolescence ending at age 14, others say 25 or 30. Since the concept has zero scientific basis it's impossible to prove any of them wrong (or right). Social media is full of people screaming that 19-year-olds are children, especially if they suspect one of having sex with the "wrong" person. If that were true we'd have a massive child labor problem. Right now we have about 8 million 14 to 18-year-old young adults who have been forced into a kind of unnatural artificially extended childhood. They work, drive cars, join the military, some even start families, but society insists on infantilizing them, and criminalizing their sex lives. Not to mention the segregation. Barred from bars and night clubs, they're not allowed to socialize with anyone over 21. No society has ever done this before. It's a big experiment and so far the results are horrible. Youth suicide is at record highs. Doubling down on this tragic mistake is the dumbest thing we could do right now.
We've been taking aspirin for over 100 years. Does that mean it's safe? Maybe. Maybe not. but the burden of proof is on those who claim aspirin is dangerous.
We've been eating apples for 1000s of years. Does that mean we should stop?
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Paranoia and sex-phobic hysteria combined to make people irrational.
The trend toward infantilizing young adults has not helped at all.
and the bad science that came from fishy fMRI scans made everything a lot worse.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/brain-development-25-year-old-mature-myth.html
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The point of an age of consent is to send a message to a (in Poland for example) 15-year-old that "Now the state no longer decides for you. You are old enough to choose. You have the right and the responsibility to control your own body."
When you add age-gap exceptions to the law, the message becomes "You may be old enough to choose. It depends. You sometimes have the right to control your own body, but obviously you're too stupid to consent to people of a certain age who can brainwash you."
The later is a demeaning, disempowering, counterproductive message.
It's amazing that we had to invent the word "preteen"
because the whole country started misusing the word "child"
All questions of public policy should be reduced to individual contribution. Like "If you're not actively traveling toward the combat zone, gun in hand, you have no right to an opinion on the war"
or "If you don't have 3 homeless people in your living room you have no right to opine on zoning regulations"
"If you drive a car to work every day, you have to shut up about deforestation."
Our species spent 99% of our time as hunter-gatherers, usually in groups of around 150 people. Ostracism was an effective punishment in those days. We may have internalized that, and so instinctively see "Kick them out of society!!!" as a solution. 1)
I have no idea how this works in the information age. There's a weird clash of our instinctual behavior with the extremely powerful new tools in this very new environment. 2)
Lenore Skenazy, in her excellent book "Free-Range Kids" explains how we got the Stranger Danger Panic. Here's a link to a podcast about the same thing, which goes into fascinating detail about it as well. https://www.buzzsprout.com/1112270/3884039-stranger-danger . 1)
We never recovered from that hysteria, despite the fact that crime fell precipitously from the early 90s to today. As the mania continued protecting our "kids" became more and more important. https://youtu.be/12J1f0Zqaqw 2)
as a result the age at which we thought "kids" were old enough to do all sorts of things rose dramatically. https://youtu.be/3BPjj5nNc9Q 3)
In a sex-phobic Puritan society like mine, of course, sex is feared the most. Adult-child sex has always been taboo, but over the last fifteen years teenagers got stripped of their adult status and reclassifed as children. https://youtu.be/5YaOKkdOCjQ 4)
Well-meaning people believe that hordes of dangerous sex predators seek out teenagers to sexually abuse, and they've also convinced themselves that teens have such terrible useless brains that they are easily manipulated. So they're defenseless. https://youtu.be/GIrTW5OE2ck 5)
Nobody worries very much about real pedophilia for one simple reason. 6-year-old girls don't have sexual fantasies about men who are 20 years older than them. 16-year-old women, however, often do. So taboo meets reality, and the result is a lot of acrimony on social media. 6)
By redefining the word child to include lots of post-pubescent people aged 13-21 they by default redefined pedophilia to include attraction to fully developed people who have secondary sexual characteristics, adult sex hormones, and adult sex drives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yNjdt7h3UA 7)
To dismantle this chain of unscientific nonsense is very easy. BUT... taboos are special. A taboo is unspeakable. NO ONE is allowed to question a taboo. So there can be no rational discussion of the biological facts, that need to be accepted in order to dispel the panic. 8)
Becoming an adult has nothing to do with anything legal, mathematical, linguistic, or economic.
Children become adults when nature puts them through puberty. It is biology. It's that simple.
Nobody is worried that Miss Shelbia is a child soldier? but we're all furious that she's a successful model?
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Here's a fictional portrayal of a mother speaking to her son from a hit TV show from 1976.
Do mothers and sons have conversations like this now?
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This is a case of a bad law causing harm,
by criminalizing harmless behavior.
https://twitter.com/nypost/status/548967508519436289
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Most people know the story of Polanski's crime. So they can just skip the first 15 minutes.
The last 20 minutes however are really important unfiltered views of the victim. It's a perspective rarely heard and extremely important.
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This post is long so I put it up on Lemmy.
I think it's easy to read