From Human Stupidity, an MRA blog rather obsessed with underage girls and the alleged evil of age of consent laws:
[I]f a 15 year old … can decide to have sex with a 16 year old … [h]ow come she cannot have sex with a 35 year old? Age discrimination by law?
Are you worried about manipulation of the tender 15 year old? I have a solution:
what about legalizing sex with underage adolescents, if they first undergo an hour of mandatory counselling and a 2 day cool off period? That should take care of this issue. This would guarantee safety for the 15 year old against being conned or manipulated. More safety that is offered to 21 year old tipsy Friday night party girls who may feel sorry for what they did yesterday
I think he might actually be serious here. Though it’s pretty clear he’d be happy with any excuse to make it legal for 35 year-old men to have sex with 15 year-old girls.
I said it before, it bears repeating: are 16 and 17 year old girls just too old? Really? How low does the age of consent need to be?
Because there’s no difference between sleeping with a 16 year old or sleeping with a 35 year old, apparently.
Oh god, the 15-year-old girls again. I can’t wait for the barrage of “what if it’s true love?” and “but they’re always so seductive” and “25 is a burned-out husk of a woman” and “it’s MISANDRY to impose any limits whatsoever on men’s behavior.”
In fact, while I’m predicting the entire thread up here, let’s also expect lots of:
-Refusal to agree to any age of consent, because you’d hate to rule out those foxy four-year-olds
-Stories about how in Ye Olden Tymes and in Europe Or Someplace, everyone married twelve-year-olds and it worked out just great
-Accusations that feminists just love it and never object when women commit statutory rape of boys
-Super creepy stories about how I went to the beach once and there was this thirteen-year-old girl there just totally showing it off, I mean you could tell she was just putting it out there, how can you say that a girl so lushly sexual that she wears a bathing suit to the beach doesn’t know exactly what she’s doing to the 50-year-old men looking at her
-Extra creepy justifications about how those 15-year-old boys don’t know what they’re doing, and girls would enjoy the sex so much more with an experienced man
-Objections to the word “creepy” as if it were a slur against all mankind, because part of the MRA thing where they’re a weird parody of a social justice movement is picking some words to consider slurs against them (never mind that “creepy” actually has a very specific meaning, and “ew, male” is not it)
-Random threadjacks about random conspiracy theories, because it’s not a Manboobz thread without those
I don’t think I need to read the rest of the thread now; pretty sure I got it covered.
I don’t think any of us need to read the thread now, Holly, you’ve predicted the thing pretty perfectly. Which is both impressive and depressing.
I think you’ve pretty much covered everything, Holly.
There’s sure to be a dismissal of the entire concept of power dynamics within a relationship. And that dismissal is sure to come from the same paste eating dimwit that constantly claims that women use the power of sexuality to keep men and boys in a near constant state of sexual arousal and frustration. So we can look forward to that big bowl of stupid. And, of course, Meller may still show up to tell us that there’s no mental or emotional difference between an adult woman and an 11 year old girl again.
Other than that, though, I think you’re good.
And yet we’re slandering some of these guys by calling them pedophiles. Riiight.
Also, Holly, don’t forget someone drawing a creepy-thin-and-not-justifiable-line between pedophilia and ephebephilia.
Also, I like(read: am disgusted by) how the teenagers are always “she”. They really don’t care about the teenage boys at all, until we start to mention how problematic this is. I mean, I suppose that could be because we women never want sex unless we can get $MONEY$ out of it, and 15 year old boys don’t have any of that.
Ignoring the fact that it’s an incredibly stupid idea, just who is going to fund these counselling sessions? Will it require special training, or will the middle-aged people themselves be the counselor? Does there have to be a third-party witness to sign off on the whole thing?
Just seems like it’d be an awful moodkiller to go through all that.
Yeah, ignoring the absolute creepiness of this idea, it’s also entirely impractical. A horny teenager isn’t going to want to spend the time talking to a counselor, and an adult willing to sleep with a fifteen year old probably doesn’t want other people to want to know, either. Who’s going to set up these counseling offices? How will these sessions be mandated? Is parental consent needed?
Logic. Not the strong point of this idea.
http://images.cheezburger.com/completestore/2009/8/27/128958755988809769.jpg
Amnesia – And what will be the content of the counseling?
It seems like it might end up as a meaningless gesture where they’d ask “do you really want this?”, the girl would say “yes” like he told her to do, and they’d give her the stamp of approval (along with, perhaps, even less credibility if she’s then raped, because she said in the counseling session she wanted it, and no takey backsies!).
Because anything else they could talk about–recognizing power dynamics in the relationship, the need for enthusiastic consent to sex, setting boundaries–might get distressingly feminist, and we couldn’t have that. (Not that you can teach a 15-year-old communication and limit-setting in one hour anyway, but I’m sure these guys wouldn’t want to take the risk.)
Oh fuck ass shit. In another part of the same entry (http://human-stupidity.com/stupid-dogma/teenage-sexuality/when-rape-is-not-rape) he justifies the rape of a FOUR YEAR OLD.
Obviously it wasn’t really rape, you see, because maybe it was just fondling and fondling’s not so bad and did you notice the judge was female and then he goes on to complain about not being allowed to watch a video of the assault.
I’m gonna go spend the next four hours barfing thanks.
do victims of statutory rape even have discretion over whether charges are pressed? like that seems to go against the whole idea of protecting people who are too young to intelligently consent to intercourse.
Sharculese – I can tell you from personal experience that the victim does not get a say there. In practice, they can do a pretty good job of concealing evidence and denying everything if oh no don’t hurt him I still love him, though.
cynickal seems to have the right idea.
No, Sharculese. If Consent isn’t an element of the crime, the victim doesn’t actually get a choice in pressing charges.
Granted an uncooperative victim can sink a case entirely, in practice, especially for statutory.
@Holly: That is truly sickening.
From the link: “So the word rape is redefined to serve an agenda: to make smaller transgressions look like heinous crimes.”
Yes, because the sexual assault of a four year old isn’t a heinous crime, I suppose. Last I check, the only agenda that defining something as a rape serves is that of prosecuting sexual assailants.
Holly, you forgot the “used-up vagina” trope. Because vaginas are only good for a limited number of uses, you know.
I’ve always wondered: do women have a digital read-out of the number of uses left on there vaginas before they get used up? Is it like my son’s asthma inhaler? ‘Cause you can totally get a few extra puffs out of those things even if the meter says zero.
Actually, vaginas have those little pull-out numbers that you take while waiting in line at the deli and the like. It gets pretty messy.
But, Laura, can’t you just replace the tape? It seems like it would be pretty easy to foil that system.
Oh well, I’ll just take a number and wait over there. 🙂
Holly and Nobinayamu have already covered most of the bases of the MRA arguments. Along with the “a 25 year old is a burned out husk of a woman” goes the argument, “Feminists want to keep the age of consent laws they way they are because they’re so jealous of 14 year old girls”. I know I’m not jealous of teenage girls, and I doubt one could find many feminists who are either. Even if 100% of feminist women were actually jealous of the way 14 year olds look, though, it would still be wrong for adults to have relationships with middle schoolers.
What if you never got the chance to have sex with a 15 year old when you were 15?
Also, this post is too short. Without Schwyzer updating either, what am I supposed to do with my internet time? This sucks.
This isn’t discrimination. It is matching up age of consent with the age of majority. If you are considered an adult, then you can consent. If you aren’t a legal adult, then you can’t.
If this guy wants to “fight” against this, he should challenge age of consent and majority laws instead of claiming discrimination.
Also, what is so old about 16 year olds? Why must they have access to 14 and 15 year olds? Are the 16 year olds no longer naive enough for them?
Thinking about it, if you start with the presuppositions that all female humans are A) interchangeable, and B) unable to mature past puberty, then you probably could reason yourself into believing that a hypothetical 12 year-old is no less fuckable than a hypothetical 42 year-old.
This, of course, also assumes that said arguments aren’t simply the rationalizations of chronophiles. Although, it is a pretty sad commentary when a massive logic failure is the optimistic option.