for the same reason I don't have a lyre
Between ages 13 and 50 you lose about 20% of your gray matter, and gain about 10% of white matter.
These are not dramatic differences.
Teenage brains and middle aged brains are very similar.
for those aged between 14 and 16 the close-in-age exception is 5 years.
A world where everyone believes that there is no connection between puberty and adulthood is a world detached from reality, setting itself up to constantly be in opposition to all the things that we naturally do and feel.
It's a recipe for creating easily avoidable troubles.
Snort has the worst name imaginable.
Snort enables me to filter by keyword. So if I have no interest in cats, I just mute all posts containing Cat, Caturday, etc
Snort has a delete button which doesn't work.
Snort's interface is buggy AF.
Snort pretends that I can post an image, but it doesn't work.
It's important to remember that feminism is not a monolith.
There are sex-positive feminists and there are Puritan feminists.
Some of the most vocal feminists are literally lesbians. Many of them hate men and/or think that all sex with men is criminal.
Then with the infantilization/overprotection dogma, anyone under 20 is a helpless child so obviously "vulnerable young girls" need men with guns to defend them against evil horny men with penises.
Many smart progressive sex-positive feminists fell into this trap. They still believed that sex is good, BUT they became convinced that sex NOT for anyone for whom an age-gap might cause a power imbalance which is ABUSE!!!!! PANIC!!!!!!
Serious question:
Some say "Teens cannot consent to someone above a certain age."
In Kentucky the close-in-age exception is 10 years.
In Idaho it's 3 years.
In Illinois it's zero.
Which gap is correct?
and where's the evidence showing what the correct gap is?
People who hate young adults aged 14-24 are everywhere and they are constantly insulting and infantilizing them, claiming they have deficient brains etc All the classic bigotry we used to see aimed at Blacks, Asians, and women now gets heaped on teenagers.
May I ask what country you're from?
Have you ever been to the USA?
The infantilization of teenagers got started in the mid-90s and has been slowly intensifying ever since.
(a few states raised their ages of consent as part of that)
The Sexual Revolution started in the 60s.
The Sexual Counter-Revolution started around 2005.
Try this video (it's only like 5 minutes long)
How sex-phobic ancient god-mongers leveraged the phrase "consenting adults" to power...
The Sexual Counter-Revolution
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re: "America is hypersexual and extremely liberal when it comes to sex"
Compared to who? There are many countries much more sex-postive than the USA. America's long strong Puritan tradition makes real sex education impossible creating enormous problems for us. We had a MASSIVE HYSTERICAL meltdown over a half-second glimpse of Janet Jackson's boob.
Over the last 10 to 20 years lots of people started talking about sex a lot. Gens Y and Z seem obsessed with it. BUT they are having less sex than any previous generation at their age. They convince themselves that they are sex positive but they constantly go "Ew! Ick! Gross! That's sus! Inapropriate! Don't Sexualize!!!" etc.
I really think that in the 80s we had twice as much sex, but talked about it half as much as today's 20 year olds.
Feel free to ask about the rise of Neo-Puritanism :-)
No post-pubescent female should ever be called "girl"
This is a case of a bad law causing harm, by criminalizing harmless behavior.
https://nypost.com/2014/12/26/mom-had-sex-with-teen-she-met-at-daughters-high-school/
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Men are sexually attracted to young women. Maybe you can get a social movement big and angry enough to force them to hide that fact, but the fact itself will not change. Personally I think forcing those thoughts and feelings underground will do more harm than good.
An extremely important opinion piece by Lenore Skenazy
Not All Adults at the Park Are Predators
Old and young have always interacted. Yet the idea that children and adults go naturally together has been replaced by distrust and disgust.
Sunday, March 3, 2024
I’m trying not to obsess about child overprotection, but … obsess I do. Here’s the latest object of my ire: the playground signs at my burg, New York City, that say, “Playground rules prohibit adults except in the company of children.”
Apparently, any adult who simply wants to sit on a bench and watch children at play could be a creep, so we should just ban them all. The idea that children and adults go naturally together has been replaced by distrust and disgust.
There was a case here a while back when seven chess players playing outside were fined for … playing chess. Their chess tables — concrete ones, immovable, and placed there by the city — were deemed too close to the children, so the men were booted.
It didn’t matter that they hadn’t caused any trouble. In fact, the grizzled guys had taken it upon themselves to teach some of the local children how to play the game of kings.
Actual kindness? Who cares? All that mattered were the fantasies conjured up by what-if thinking: What IF they turned out to be monsters?
By separating the generations this way, we are creating a society that actively distrusts anyone who wants to help a child other than his own. Compare this anxiety with what goes on in Japan. Did you watch “Old Enough,” the Netflix show with the 4-year-olds shopping for sushi ingredients?
There, the youngest children wear bright yellow hats when they go to school. “Doesn’t that put them in danger?” asked a friend. To her, a child who calls attention to himself is a child who could be attracting a predator.
Only attracting adult attention is exactly what the yellow hats are supposed to do. In Japan, the assumption is that the easier it is to see children, the easier it is for grown-ups to look out for them.
Japan’s belief is that children are our collective responsibility. America’s is that children are private possessions under constant threat of theft.
Which brings me to the flip side of our obsession with stranger danger: the idea that any time a parent lets her children do anything on their own, she is actually requiring the rest of us grownups to “babysit” them, for free.
The “Why should I have to watch your kid at the park?” question comes up when I talk about how good it would be for children to get more exercise and independence by doing that thing we used to call “going outside to play.”
It’s not that someone else HAS to watch any child at the park on their own. It’s that usually humans DO watch out for each other. It’s not unpaid labor. It’s being a human.
Most children making their way to school or frolicking outside are not going to need major assistance from anyone, adult or otherwise. Yet if they do, I’d like to think most of us would give it ungrudgingly. Their parents have not foisted a huge burden on society by letting their children be part of it.
Old and young have always interacted. Adults who enjoy being around children are, for the most part, just adults who enjoy being around children. Not predators.
And children who are out and about in the world are just that: children out and about. Not a big, unpaid obligation for the rest of us.
I’m not sure about the yellow hats, but Japan has the right idea. Looking out for everyone beats trusting no one.
LENORE SKENAZY
Ms. Skenazy is president of Let Grow, a contributing writer at Reason.com, and author of "Has the World Gone Skenazy?"