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Kittamaru said:
I've always been confused how the age of consent works in some situations, but not in others... based on the age of the other party...
Ergo, a 16 year old and a 17 year old having sex is fine... but a 16 year old and a 19 year old is not...
I'm not certain how to phrase it gently, so I'll just go with the straightforward:
Do you not see the high potential for exploitation?
There's an old saying that I can't remember the whole of, could never recite it entirely, but it includes the idea that "three gets you five".
Think of it this way: Short of open force or open cash, if you could convince a ten year-old girl to fuck you, sometime around 1875 in Boston, it was perfectly legal. And as much as people rush to defend that former standard by pointing out lifespan and childbearing, no, actually, median age of menarche has been decreasing—the little girls weren't viable. It was just about a bunch of dirty old Puritan men who wanted to fuck little girls.
There is one state in the Union, and I forget which one it is and really don't want to look it up, but the age of consent is sixteen if she's a virgin, and twelve if she's not. In other words, once you rape 'em,
then they can say yes.
It's
always about dirty old men wanting a chance at little girls.
And, you know, they're going to give high school students something of a break, but even then, come on. Anyone who's gone to a four-year high school knows the senior boys have no business dating freshman girls.
If the age of consent is anything short of adulthood, then yes, we need to guard against exploitation. It's one thing to know that my daughter will someday be sexually active. But, really, there's a reason the law will put a barrier between her and, say, the dumbfuck across the street who isn't a known sex offender or anything, but actually enjoys the reputation of paranoid neighbors thinking he's some sort of Russian mafia.
And I don't know how often it occurs that you're walking around the neighborhood and hear a couple of neighbors having at each other in passion. Nor do I know if you have any neighbors whose congress sounds, when drifting out a window, such that you might otherwise wonder if an actual rape was taking place in your neighborhood except, well, you know it's them.
No teenager needs to take that from a thirty-something. The sixteen year-old doesn't even need it from her nineteen year-old boyfriend.
But think of it this way—
Why do guys want virgins? Well, as the saying goes, "I'd
wreck that if I had a chance!" And that's the point. I never understood why people like that glitzy, overdone pornography that reduces sexual congress to a comedic mechanical spectacle (
badum-dum-dum-dum-dum-baaaa-dum-dum-dum-dum-wokkachikka-wokkachikka!) And, really, just take your torrent client out for a spin, set it to all file types, and start searching terms like "abused", "destroyed", or even something seemingly benign as "anal"; one of the most popular fake-amateur pornography is to hire a hooker, get her to consent to being filmed, and then absolutely devastate her as hard as the guy can.
In a society where couples are told to explore and identify their boundaries, and that just gives a guy a list of things to try to get away with°, we really don't need to be turning frat boys loose on high school girls.
And we sure as hell don't need drama teachers looking at our underage daughters as potential notches in the bedpost. Quite frankly, if we're going to wreck things, let's wreck the guys who do this shit. If enough guys are rotting in prison for decades because her mouth said know but they knew her eyes said yes ... well, that's the thing, isn't it? We don't know how well it would work, despite all our crime and punishment talk, because we won't try.
Actually, no, that's wrong. We know how it would work. That is to say, it wouldn't. We would have the moral satisfaction of sending known violators to prison for a long, long time, but sending rapists to prison even in larger numbers will have, at best, exactly the same effect on the rape phenomenon that the death penalty has on the murder rate. Then again, at least those particular dangerous individuals would be quarantined from society.
Here's a quote that I'm really, really having a hard time with:
In fact, Geneva says, she’s been grabbed, chased, followed, and molested so much in her short life that she’s now made it a habit to lock the bedroom door at night and shove a chair under the knob so no one can come in; she’ll wait up, trembling, until everyone at a party is passed out cold before she can comfortably fall asleep. She’s learned to avoid being alone with friends’ dads, or with grandpas at village potlatches, or with boys at basketball games, who’ve repeatedly groped her breasts and buttocks. “It’s just random, like, you’ll think everything’s all normal and then you’ll feel something on your backside,” she says. “You just freeze.”
Geneva is a tall basketball player with bright eyes, rectangular black-framed glasses, and a wide, eager smile. She has no trouble listing accomplishments and affinities: She’s ambidextrous by choice, grew up doing all the rugged outdoor chores men do, raves gleefully over beloved local foods like fried moose heart and walrus in seal oil.
But for years, she felt scared, hypersensitive, and depressed. She never told her parents about the incident; she was too afraid of what would happen, and anyway, when she told one of her sisters, the only response she received was a dry laugh. “It happened to all of us,” her sister had said. “Just leave it alone.”
(Bernard)
Then again, I recall
earlier this year when a study emerged suggesting young women were more and more coming to expect sexual violence from their male partners as a matter of routine, the cost of having a relationship. In Alaska, that's not exactly the case. Rather, it would seem that expecting sexual violence from men, period—
i.e., regardless of whether or not an assailant is also an intimate partner—is the norm along America's Last Frontier.
Oh, and by the way? Geneva, featured in the article, is all of
thirteen.
____________________
Notes:
° A simplified way of looking at it: Don't come inside? Don't come in my mouth? I don't want it in my hair? Right. While the idea is simple enough—establishing boundaries between partners—many men seem to look at boundaries like other rules; that is, they were made to be broken. And, yeah, guys, if you don't know how hard it is to get semen out of your hair, well, you owe it to the next person who gives you a blowjob to find out.
Works Cited:
Bernard, Sara. "Rape Culture in the Alaskan Wilderness". The Atlantic. September 11, 2014. TheAtlantic.com. September 12, 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/rape-culture-in-the-alaskan-wilderness/379976/