Try to guess what the blogger at The Truth Shall Set You Free, a blog that describes itself as “an examination of all issues related to comparative religion and the attempt to find truth in the world today” is talking about here. (Hint: It’s not drugs.)
“We are going to let drug dealers set up stands on every street corner, with glitzy advertising, and they will be allowed to offer their illegal drugs, for free, to anyone who walks by. But if anyone takes them up on their offer of free drugs, we will arrest the receiver and send them to prison. Even if the seller advertised a legal drug, but the receiver took an illegal one unknowingly.”
Well, I probably gave it away with the title and the illustration, but yes, he’s talking about age of consent laws. We’re back on that subject again, thanks to the inability of manosphere douchebags to stop talking about it in extremely icky ways. The “dealer” here is, of course, the underage girl. The drug in question … is also the underage girl. The unwary buyer? The poor, helpless, and outrageously oppressed male of the species. I’ll let our high-minded Christian blogger explain:
Criminalizing consensual sex with willing 16 year olds is absurd. Consent is consent.
The bias of the law is revealed by considering this: If both parties consented to breaking the law, why aren’t both parties punished? …
Uh, because the law is designed to protect underage girls and boys from older predators? Because we as a society recognize that consent is really not consent when one of the “consenting” partners is underage and the other is much older?
But no, our thoughtful student of comparative religion seems convinced that the purpose of the law is, well, I’m not sure what he thinks the purpose is other than to harsh the buzz of older men in thrall to evil, devious, conniving teenage girls.
In his mind, teen girls are the equivalent of drug dealers and older men are hapless, helpless addicts:
-The dealers (young women) are allowed to advertise (through clothes, makeup, body-language) an extremely valuable and addictive commodity (sex), and in fact, they can give it away totally free, without fear of any penalty…
–but if a customer (man) takes that heavily-advertised and freely-given valuable commodity, he is committing a felony.
And that’s the case, he complains, even if the girl lies about her age!
–even if he had no knowledge that her drug was illegal (underage), even [if] she misrepresented the commodity as legal, he is solely at fault.
–The consumer (man) is sent to prison, and forced to register as a sex offender FOR LIFE
–The dealer (young woman) is allowed to walk free to continue to entrap other potential customers of her illegal commodity.
A clearer example of the infamous “pussy pass” couldn’t not be conceived. What these laws are really doing is punishing men for girls being sluts and/or liars.
And so the oppression of men by evil women and girls continues apace. But there is, our blogger insists, a simple solution to this terrible injustice:
Punish the girls who are providing!
Clearly it is unfair to expect men to be able to resist the lures of these conniving Lolitas. We must do something to protect innocent men from underage sluts slutting it up in public!
I bet Marc will find a way to misinterpret all of that, Pecunium.
(Though, that is a very good and well-detailed response.)
vaguelyhumanoid: That’s not what we are doing. We’ve gone through all of this before, so I’ll sum up.
Statutory rape laws are meant to address the fact that not all people are able to give informed consent.
Are they perfect, Of course not i.e. people who are mentally able to give informed consent will be prevented from legally doing so? That’s the breaks. The harm to them is minor.
Since, in almost all jurisdictions two minors cannot commit statutory rape against each other they aren’t even prevented from having sex. They are merely prohibited from having sex with people who are statutorally excluded.
It is unarguable that there is a point at which a child is both unable to consent, and manipulable.
Since the ability to determine who is, or isn’t able to give informed consent isn’t something which can be done on a case by case basis, a “bright line” is needed. Where each jurisdiction draws it varies. In the US the majority of states allow 16 year olds to consent with anyone.
To remove the, “bright line” in the interest of making it legal for that small percentage who are being inconvenienced is to open the larger majority, who aren’t able to give informed consent, to abuse.
Which is why I favor, and the law provides, a statutory lower limit on the age at which someone can consent to sex.
@ Marc:
“What’s the benefit in keeping men around?”
Men are people. They matter just as much as any other gender, and it would be inexcusably evil to wipe out an entire gender because of some false assumptions (see Pecunium’s posts) that you are making about a small portion of that gender. Seriously, why on earth do you need this explained to you?
Nobody wants to play the let’s-try-to-justify-gendercide game with you, Marc. Give it up.
Now, let’s talk about pickles.
Let’s do a risk-benefit calculation:
Some pickle jars hurt people.
Some people like pickles.
A tiny potential for harm is much more important in the grand scheme than a few pickle-eaters losing out on a taste, right? Don’t you think we should get rid of pickles? I mean, there’s no real benefit to them, right? They’re just slightly tastier than horseradish, and if we get rid of pickles we can all have more money to buy horseradish! Don’t you care about horseradish, Marc?
Oh for fuck’s sake. That’s like insisting that birds-of-paradise look so beautiful because they want to make humans to want to kill them and take their feathers — and not for any reasons actually relevant to the birds’ interests, such as attracting other birds-of-paradise.
Men are people. They matter just as much as any other gender, and it would be inexcusably evil to wipe out an entire gender because
But it would be in principle, from a risk/benefit-calculation, a good idea? The world would be better, right? It may be ethically problematic, but it would in principle be reasonable, right?
of some false assumptions (see Pecunium’s posts)
We won’t wipe them out, that would need killing billions of people. We will phase them out. As a first step we well make the laws to abort males more permissive (late term abortion allowed without giving reasons).
that you are making about a small portion of that gender. Seriously, why on earth do you need this explained to you?
Pecunium, I would say, at least implies in his post, that men exist that feel overwhelming urges to rape (mind you, I don’t advocate castration, I advocate a phase-out). If you accept we can finally agree that the urge to rape is sometimes biological.
How do you know in advance as a parent that you don’t get one of these rapist as son? You can’t know. So getting a male is like getting a disabled child (after all, a whole chromosome is missing) who is a potential rapist, has an increased chance for criminal behavior and a reduced life expectancy. But you can’t abort it like a disabled child. Explain me that!
And because of the demographic effects I would advocate a reduction for child benefit payments for males.
That would be Phase 1.
We are not talking about full-blown genocide, nobody thinks it would be realistic to do such a thing. We can just talk about Phase 1 now… later, we will see.
This is getting tiresome, Marc, but okay, I’ll play too.
“But it would be in principle, from a risk/benefit-calculation, a good idea? The world would be better, right? It may be ethically problematic, but it would in principle be reasonable, right?”
Okay, fine. If you put aside the ethical and moral considerations, and the genetic superiority of sexual reproduction for complex organisms versus asexual reproduction, and the personal problems that people would experience with having their loved ones killed, and the decrease in the quality of life due to shrinking sexual options, and the misery of living under a totalitarian, genocidal government, and the fact that artificially shrinking the gene pool leads to diseased populations — yeah, other than all that, “phasing” men out would be a great idea. You win.
(Watch subsequent trolls claim that I said “phasing men out would be a great idea”.)
“We won’t wipe them out, that would need killing billions of people. We will phase them out. As a first step we well make the laws to abort males more permissive (late term abortion allowed without giving reasons).”
Practices like that are already in place for female fetuses in places like China and India. It achieves short-term goals, but screws up long-term ones.
“Pecunium, I would say, at least implies in his post, that men exist that feel overwhelming urges to rape (mind you, I don’t advocate castration, I advocate a phase-out). If you accept we can finally agree that the urge to rape is sometimes biological.”
Lots of urges are biological. The urge to urinate is biological. Yet most people learn to control their urges enough not to pee in the middle of a hotel lobby. The urge to eat is biological. But most of us don’t drop everything to stuff our faces the moment we feel hunger pains. Sure, there exist a handful of people who cannot control their urges — but exterminating half the human race is hardly the solution to that. Instead, it should be addressed on an individual basis. The best solution to the existence of individuals who cannot control their urge to rape, or their urge to pee is indefinite (but humane) confinement and diapers, respectively.
“How do you know in advance as a parent that you don’t get one of these rapist as son? You can’t know. So getting a male is like getting a disabled child (after all, a whole chromosome is missing) who is a potential rapist, has an increased chance for criminal behavior and a reduced life expectancy. But you can’t abort it like a disabled child. Explain me that!”
Male children are far more likely than female ones to be born disabled. Autism and hemophilia are just two disorders that readily come to mind that afflict boys more than girls. (On the other hand, as far as I know, there are no afflictions that affect girls more than boys, other than, obviously, diseases of female reproductive organs.) So yes, genetically, males are more fragile than females. I just don’t see how this is a justification for exterminating all males.
@ Marc:
No, nobody agrees that getting rid of men makes sense from a risk/benefit perspective.
No, nobody agrees that getting rid of men would make the world a better place.
No, nobody agrees that gendercide is a reasonable option in principle.
No, nobody agrees that gendercide is reasonable if you just do a little of it instead of entirely eradicating a gender.
No, nobody agrees that “whoops, I just realized it’s a boy” should be a valid reason for a late-term abortion. Late-term abortions are for when pregnancies threaten the life of the mother, one fetus is parasitically attached to the other and only the removal of one fetus will result in any live children being born at all, the fetus is already dead and needs to be extracted, or it has just been detected that the fetus has a horrible birth defect that will result its horribly painful death soon after birth. Not for when you just don’t like a trait in your fetus. Seriously, don’t start this conversation.
No, nobody agrees that the urge to rape is biological.
No, nobody agrees that you are correct about the high rates of recidivisim in rapists.
No, nobody agrees that a significant amount of rapists claim to be compulsively drawn to rape.
No, nobody agrees that the characteristics of an incredibly small amount of male rapists who claim to be compulsively drawn to rape can be extrapolated to mean anything about the male gender as a whole.
No, nobody thinks that because a very small portion of male rapists claim to be compulsively drawn to rape, the entire male gender is just too risky to exist.
No, nobody agrees that someone’s gender determines if they’re going to be a rapist.
No, nobody agrees that being male is a disability, or like a disability.
No, nobody will probably agree with you about whatever sexist point you’re trying to make about child benefit payments.
No, nobody agrees that your plan of limiting the number of men in the world via eugenics is a good idea, or worth talking about.
No, nobody thinks that the only thing wrong with gendercide is that it just isn’t realistic to enact.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?
Marc: A simple question:
But it would be in principle, from a risk/benefit-calculation, a good idea? The world would be better, right? It may be ethically problematic, but it would in principle be reasonable, right?
Do you really believe that?
[ ]Yes
[ ]No
I’ll bet you don’t.
Which means you are playing some sort of game. It may be you hope to show some thing we believe to be, in fact, wrong, with his bit of reductio. The problem is… none of the people accept the premise.
Why would it be wrong? Because it would only make the world better if men never, ever, being able to rape women again was the only thing that matters.
Why would it be wrong? Because men are people too, and (shock) they are equal to women in value. Ergo wiping them out is wrong. It’s wrong from the POV of, “pure ethics” and it’s wrong from the POV of “Feminist Ethics”.
I say (in my own words) men do not have an overwhelming urge to rape I also say that I don’t imply it. I say, plainly, that some men do. Some men also have an overwhelming urge to wear women’s clothing. Some men have an overwhelming urge to live alone in the woods. Some men have an overwhelming urge to be actors, or lawyers or doctors, or farmers.
Saying *IB>* implied any such thing when very I explicitly stated the study you cited is flawed because the selective sample of non-castrated people was a group which self-identified as being complusive, and therefore couldn’t be representative of “all men”, while arguing that sex-offenders are low recidivists…
Is presenting an argument I very much didn’t make, and saying I made it.
That’s dishonest.
Okay, fine. If you put aside the ethical and moral considerations, and the genetic superiority of sexual reproduction for complex organisms versus asexual reproduction,
Ah, that’s a good argument. But technically it could be solved. We would produce sperms with the genetic material of an egg.
and the personal problems that people would experience with having their loved ones killed,
We wouldn’t kill them, we would just stop producing them. After 100 years there are no males left.
and the decrease in the quality of life due to shrinking sexual options,
ok, that’s an argument. But consider the benefits! If women are so selfish that a cheap fuck is worth more to them to all these benefits, ok.
and the misery of living under a totalitarian, genocidal government,
totalitarian… well totalitarian, ok. But not genocidal.
and the fact that artificially shrinking the gene pool leads to diseased populations — yeah, other than all that, “phasing” men out would be a great idea. You win.
The gene pool shrinking is no argument, we’ll artificially produce sperm. Reproduction will not be uncontrolled as it’s now, we will rot out all genetic diseases.
Do you really believe that?
[ ]Yes
[ ]No
[X]Exactly as much as anything else I argue here for.
Why would it be wrong? Because men are people too, and (shock) they are equal to women in value
Why should they be equal in value, objectively? If we say, sometimes, just sometimes, testosterone is a component in sex offenses (which would be the easiest explanation, Ockham’s razor, you know, if throughout the cultures it were nearly only the men who raped). If they further have increased aggression and criminality and are genetically more fragile they need to have something important where they are better than women to compensate this flaws. I fail to see what this could be.
Ergo wiping them out is wrong. It’s wrong from the POV of, “pure ethics” and it’s wrong from the POV of “Feminist Ethics”.
We would just phase them out, that’s very different from wiping them out. There are other arguments, too. Aggression that is correlated with testosteron, the elimination 90% of all criminal behavior and the need of less pregnancies.
Marc: Do you read what you write? You agree that the reconviction rate… for all crimes, is less among sex offenders, then you argue this the rate of convictions for rape somehow invalidates this.
No, I don’t. The reconviction rate for all crimes is uninteresting, it’s only the reconviction rate for sex crimes that I was arguing about, the 3.5% in three years number you know. That’s pretty low, yes, but if we assume that only 1 in 10 rapes ends in a conviction this number is no surprise at all.
But it’s interesting to note that the reconviction rate, though low is constant over decades. That means that sex offenders, though they don’t often get reconvicted because rapes usually don’t end in a conviction, often happen to be reconvicted for a sex crime they committed 20 years later. That really makes it seem like “they don’t change”.
The two are not related. A person who has been convicted of a sex offense is already one of the 9 percent which you allege is the convinction rate.
Yes, but how’s that a problem?
Which moves them out of the “under-reported” column. A parolee doesn’t need to be charged again, usually, to be sent back. It’s trivially easy to violate one’s parole, and just get sent back to prison (and in fact things like failing a drug-test are the more common ways in which they do get sent back).
Yes, but I was not talking about the overall rearrest rate (including because of parole violation), I’m was talking about the reconviction rate for sex crimes.
Really, Marc, you’re the only one making this “grand gendercide plan”, and trying to somehow, someway, state that we (even the men of Manboobz) believe it. People have been saying “No” since forever.
Really, how far can you carry this bullshit? What is the end goal for you?
“Ah, that’s a good argument. But technically it could be solved. We would produce sperms with the genetic material of an egg.”
And now we know who cut biology class in school. The reason that sexual reproduction is better than the asexual kind, genetically speaking, is because it allows for a greater variation in all sorts of traits within a population. If you artificially produce sperm with the same genetic material as the egg, you end up with a clone of the mother. And that’s an evolutionary dead end.
“If women are so selfish that a cheap fuck is worth more to them to all these benefits, ok.”
You poor thing. A “cheap fuck”? That’s a value judgment that I just don’t agree with. No one who’s ever had a decedent fuck thinks of it that way.
Make that “decent fuck”. Oops 🙂
Marc… where to begin:
[X]Exactly as much as anything else I argue here for.
Objection, non-responsive. There is no actual content in that answer. It’s possible you believe everything you argue for. Because you will never tell us, we have no way of knowing.
But, to be charitable and take you at face value: Again, a question; what is your aim with this Gedankenexperiment ?
What is the point? You’ve posed the question, and gotten detailed answers, We reject the hypothesis (that men are “predisposed to rape”), and even more we have rejected the conclusion (that as a result of the posited “predisposition men ought to be wiped out*)
Having refuted your data, and rejected your conclusion have you come back with new data? No. The closest you have come is to engage in a weasel-worded assertion that I support you (and I’m flattered that you think my reputation so persuasive). The problem is, of course, I don’t support you, not even with implication.
Even that doesn’t sway you. You keep repeating, with minor elaborations, the exact same argument. We keep rejecting it.
Why do you think that will work?
What, assuming arguendo, that you don’t believe it, is your purpose in trying to get us to agree with it?
Why, if you do believe it, do you think we ought to agree with you?
Why should they be equal in value, objectively? If we say, sometimes, just sometimes, testosterone is a component in sex offenses (which would be the easiest explanation, Ockham’s razor, you know, if throughout the cultures it were nearly only the men who raped). If they further have increased aggression and criminality and are genetically more fragile they need to have something important where they are better than women to compensate this flaws. I fail to see what this could be.
Why should they be equal in value? Because they are people. That’s the entire point of feminism. Men and women are equal. Not women are better. Women are equal. Men are equal.
You have misapplied Occam’s razor. Why? Because any hormone can be blamed for anything anyone does. Trivia Question… what happens if someone has an excess of testosterone? They lose libido. To apply Occam’s Razor it has to be the simplest of the legitimate factors. Take away estrogen and libido goes down too. Any number of things, all simple (and all too simple) can be used to “prove” why “x” group commits crimes. That some of them are simplistic doesn’t mean they are right.
Occam is that the simplest of valid hypotheses is the one to be preferred. Until you can show validity, you can’t apply Occam.
Second, rape is a crime of consent. It doesn’t take testosterone to do it. There are men in this community who have been raped. Since women can, as easily as men, refuse to accept consent (and I can guarantee you that non-violent, non-consent rape of men by women is underreported), it’s not a “male” problem.
Third: Men do not need to be, “better” at anything to justify their existence. They exist, that alone is enough.
*Yes, wiped out. You may not be advocating massacre, but an argument that Gypsies, or The Ainu, or the Hmong, or Germans, or anyone is a blight on the face of the earth and ought to be sterilised so they are, “phased out”… that’s wiping them out. It may not be murder, but it’s most certainly extinction.
Amused: I’ve never had a decadent fuck that was merely decent.
😀
Marc: A reconviction rate of 46 percent is higher, or lower, than one of 3.5 percent?
Lower.
If it’s that much lower, how can you say they are incorrigable offenders.
Your, “20 years later” is still part of that 3.5 percent. Claiming the overall conviction rate for rape is low isn’t relevant. What’s the rate for conviction of someone previously convicted of rape? A lot higher. That’s because prior convictions for a subsequent offense of a related nature is allowable evidence.
Again: what is it you are trying to accomplish with this?
Why are you arguing so strenuously for it?
“We are not talking about full-blown genocide, nobody thinks it would be realistic to do such a thing. We can just talk about Phase 1 now… later, we will see.”
I think Marc has surpassed himself this time. He actually has a detailed plan to “phase out” his entire gender and sees nothing wrong with this.
Ironically, now that I’m done laughing and Marc is now making the argument in at least two threads I’ve got a well-nigh overwhelming urge to cuddle my boyfriend. It’s what I do when I feel the need to hide from the crazy. 😛
I’d honestly rather exterminate the whole human race and replace them with robots.
Hewmanz are boring.
Pecunium, why can’t we have a non-age-based standard of consent that still covers the same things that having an age of consent is meant to?
We should take Marc’s plan and propose it to the MRAs xD that way we don’t even have to spend time doing the whole gish gallop debunking thing, they’d do the work for us xD
Yeah, let’s not do that …
…. because the MRAs don’t really have a sense of humor and b/c I am really really tired of Marc’s trollery.
vaguelyhumanoid: Ok:
1: explain why we need it.
2: explain what benefits it provides to society.
3: explain how it works
4: explain why it’s better than what we have now.
Ironically, now that I’m done laughing and Marc is now making the argument in at least two threads I’ve got a well-nigh overwhelming urge to cuddle my boyfriend. It’s what I do when I feel the need to hide from the crazy. 😛
Yes do that, cuddle him, cuddle him as long as you still can!
Marc: A reconviction rate of 46 percent is higher, or lower, than one of 3.5 percent?
Lower.
If it’s that much lower, how can you say they are incorrigable offenders.
Your, “20 years later” is still part of that 3.5 percent.
No it isn’t, it’s the 3-year reconviction rate:
3.5% (339 of the 9,691) were reconvicted for a sex crime (a forcible rape or a sexual assault) within 3 years.
3.5% is much lower but 46% but still that makes sense.
The problem is that for sex offendeses (unlike non-sex offenses) there’s a huge gap between the low risk per year recidivism and the high cumulative recidivism rate.
The risk for reconviction is low, but this risk is constant, it persists for many, many years. As you can find in the UK study:
The study found that 24.6 percent of the sample was reconvicted for a sex offense over the entire 21 year
This rate is surprisingly consistent with a constant 3.5% recidivism rate for 3 years.
Add to that, that only a fraction of sex crimes are reported and just a fraction of that end in reconviction… that makes it even more disturbing. It’s seems a plausible hypothesis that they reoffend relatively quickly again after their release but it just takes a while until they get caught. It could be that if a sex offender is reconvicted 15 years after his release he never did something during this time, but it just (though of course direct evidence is lacking) seems very inplausible.