Count Arioch the 28th wrote:How come every time I see or hear someone talking about the "degeneracy" of our/western society, they always say they think the age of consent should be lowered to 12 or something crazy like that if you keep them talking long enough? Just seems random but I've seen it enough times...
1) Because they're conservative, and the age of consent used to seriously be 12 or lower in some of the United States until shockingly recently.
2) Because the current age of consent is pretty much arbitrary. It's not like kids all mature physically or mentally at exactly the same rate, and there's little or no physical, mental, or emotional distinction between someone that's 1 day shy of their 18th birthday and someone that's 1 day older than it.
I say
pretty much, because there's a good reason the age of sexual consent was raised: we realize that young adults and children are physically and mentally immature and are not ready for the rigors of childbirth (for girls), the emotions that go with sexual relationships, or the decision-making ability to handle the short or long-term consequences of their actions.
Which does nothing to stop teenagers from having sex, and never has. Especially with each other. But it DOES largely serve as a restriction on adults taking advantage of children and young adults for sexual purposes, and that as much as anything is why we have an age of consent in the first place.
So 18 is the general guideline in most states (special circumstances and creepy dudes with laminated rape cards notwithstanding). It's arbitrary, sure, but most teenagers are done with their first growth of puberty at that point, girls are generally getting their period, there's a good coming-of-age event in high school graduation, and lots of other things tend to unlock at 18 too. From a societal standpoint, 18 is completely arbitrary but acceptable.
So why 12? Because that's often an age when puberty starts, especially for girls. Yep, teenager girls often get their first period around then and boys their first boners, sometimes younger or older depending on environment and how well they eat and other factors. We don't see 12 year olds as
adults because they often have quite a bit of growing to do - it's the
start of puberty, not the end of it. And if you're focused on sex as a measure of "ability to physically conceive a child Y/N," then you can see why that would be important. The fact that 12 year olds should
not be having kids is beside the point, if you're focused on babymaking as the sole qualifier. And really, that is the sole qualifier for arguing changing the age of consent to 12.
Setting the age of consent to age 18 has some weird effects. You get a lot of porn, for example, focused on the ages hovering immediately around it - 17 and 19. You get weird laws that legalize statutory rape if the participants are within three years of each other, so a 19 year old doesn't go to jail for having a 16 year old girlfriend. In terms of child pornography, you can have 17 year olds arrested for sexting pictures of themselves. That all sounds bad...but it's the same kind of thing you would have at any age of consent. You set the age of consent at 12, you're going to have lots of "Yesterday I Was 11!" porn videos come out, "13 And Pregnant" on television, etc.
That's a bad thing. We have an age of consent in the first place because we recognize that minors need protection against sexual predation from adults. We recognize that minors are not themselves mentally developed enough to enter into adult-style relationships, even if physically capable of sex. Their decision-making abilities just aren't there yet. It's why they aren't allowed to sign contracts or manage huge sums of money or even work for the most part. And let's not forget, sex can be physically damaging for people no matter at what age, both in terms of the act itself and the aftermath - STDs, hygiene, secondary infections, pregnancy in the case of girls - and that is generally something that kids aren't ready to handle either.
And we recognize that plenty of people are attracted to teenagers and young adults. Why? Because they went through puberty at around that age too, and their sexual awakening often fixated on people around their own age. For some people, those tastes change throughout their life; for others, it doesn't. Because we hold sex with "jailbait" as taboo, it even becomes fetishized, and some people respond to that and get attracted to younger partners than they might otherwise. And yes, there are a few people that are sexually interested in pre-pubescent children, and that's even more egregious in the eyes of most people.
3) Sometimes, people take stances because it aligns with their personal preferences. Some people are maybe willing to push for the age of consent to be lowered to 12 on principle, but more often than not I think they just want to make it local to pick up sexual partners at the local middle school.
Which is creepy as fuck, but people will try to justify a lot of preferences and views that are terrible on the face of it.
It's kinda why people that don't like homosexuals marrying each other like to argue it's a slippery slope to allow bestiality; they operate on mistaken assumptions that homosexuals are sexual perverts and that recognizing any aspect of their relationship as normal or acceptable is going to lead to something worse being legalized. They seriously just see homosexuality and bestiality as being on a spectrum of sexual perversion. A spectrum that, if you pressed them hard enough, probably includes sodomy, masturbation, and interracial marriage. Seriously, fuck those people.
