[nikdaheratik]

I think your response is very self centered at best. Feeling of being "`raped` of your free agency" is not enough to make a law unjust. It certainly doesn't outweigh the actual exploitation that was what led to these laws to be written to begin with.

The bottom line is that your agency wasn't removed as a minor, you were just left with the same choice as many other minors, to obey the laws regarding drinking, smoking, pornography, etc. Or to break them in order to gain whatever you felt you were being denied. The laws were written to punish people who exploit minors, and the consequences of those crimes pretty much always fall on the adult in the situation (for good reason).

When I was 17, and unable to vote or see certain movies, or 20 and unable to legally buy alcohol, I definitely felt like my freedom was abridged, but it didn't make the laws behind those immoral, it just made them slightly unfair. And that was for some low stakes stuff compared to sex trafficking or adult exploitation of children.

[jelliclesfarm]

Right. I hear you. Let’s work through this:

1. I don’t want anyone to be ‘raped’ by ‘free agency. I was speaking of consent. Can someone be raped while being a minor? Of course. Age has nothing to do with whether one can be raped. One can be raped as a minor just as a 50 y/o ..dare I say..male can be raped. Age also has nothing to do with sexual desire or urges either. A 12 year old boy can be horny and a post menopausal woman can snap shut at the rumor of sex.

Rape should be about consent. Not age.

2. It is infantalization of young adults and taking away their instincts and consequently the ability to provide consent that is confounding to me. Biologically, sexual instinct begins way before puberty.

3. Creating ‘laws’ is a symptom of a society failing to manage itself. Shame and shunning used to work before. Every law automatically includes a legal loophole. Laws make society weaker, not stronger. It is the mass handover of power to the state..power we should have over ourselves as citizens and society.

Human beings may be holding super computers in the palms of our hands, but our instincts are still cave man instincts. The human instinct that seeks sexual pleasure also seeks justice and revenge and disgust.

How many rape victims have been screwed over by the ‘system’ that the law is supposed to uphold?

4. So something is wrong with the legal system that lets more people slip through the cracks by ‘failing’ them. I am not condoning rape.

I am just saying that it is wrong that minors should be deemed ‘mentally deficient’ to give consent.

5. When my body says that I am ready for sex and the law says no, I am being denied my right.

6. Jewish infants are circumcised without their consent. Is that sexual assault or rape? Young girls suffer genital mutilation in the same name of religion. Why doesn’t the law step in and make it illegal?

7. Voting or alcohol consumption are not biological imperatives. Children are..to an extent..property of parents until they can fend for themselves. To curtail freedom to consent by law is actually also curtailing freedom of ownership of their instincts. When did the courts and the state start taking over the role of parents?

8. Let’s take Greta Thurnberg. She is a child instructing adults. Some of us are ok with that. Others aren’t. The same girl if she had consented to have sex with a non-minor while she was a minor in the USA would have been considered ‘mentally deficient’ to give consent.

9. I am not..for even a second..condoning rape. I am just concerned that the advent of an biological instinct when it is earlier than the age of consent is a handicap to a young adult.

What are you thoughts and I hope I had clarified my position.

[drblast]

Laws are made to apply to everyone, not the exceptional person who is sexually mature well in advance of her peers.

Your argument might well be that the age of consent is too high. That's fine, it's arbitrary. But there does need to be one to prevent all sorts of horrible things from happening.

And no, the laws don't prevent everything but that's not an argument that they shouldn't exist at all.

[nikdaheratik]

I feel like your position would have more traction with me if we as a society were better about enforcing the existing laws regarding sexual assault and consent. Adults in that situation are willing to go on the record and state that the acts were not consensual and no one is willing to believe them. At least not enough to investigate and put their rapist away in a majority of cases. I can't imagine a child would have an easier time of this no matter how mature they seem, but at least with the consent laws, they wouldn't be forced into the same thing that seems to happen with a number of victims where a lawyer puts them on the stand and tries to make them look like they are lying about everything.