Yes , exactly. So we tend to base the punishment on the extent of the coercion.
This is precisely why Ohio enacted a 16yr age of legal consent with a two ( i think) year close in age clause.
If we punish all instances equally , then every 16 ,17 ,18, year old that has sex with each other in a lot of states would have to end up on the sex offender list.
As for what if she got pregnant the answer would be the same, or at least very similar regardless of her age.
As I recall I had a great many more conversations about that with my mother than I did with the girlfriend.
Her conclusion was there was no way in hell she was going to be able to stop me from having sex short of locking me in the basement and I was probably better off with the 20yr old than another 16 yr old if something like that would occur. Also I reassured her that i was using condoms. She asked specifically if I could get them because she wasn’t gonna get them for me . Also she was thankful my plan was to join the military anyhow (which I did) so within a year of having the kid id be able to provide some level of support if that were to happen.
I think we give 16 year olds a lot less credit for this than they should get. The lack of taboo and level of education in this area is far far better than it used to be. Do we really thimk they’re perfectly capable of operating cars but not condoms?
Those carry life and death consequences too.
All of those consequence factors are extremely similar if not identical , regardless of the age of the partner.
I agree with this. As I try to explain to my clients, marriage is an economic partnership. What was built during the marriage by each party is marital property equally owned by both. You get a situation where the man makes $200k/yr and the wife either didn’t work or worked a smaller paying job—so she could take time off and be with the kids.
So the man’s salary goes to making the mortgage payments and filling up the 401k and now upon divorce he complains that she is taking “his” money. It’s not “your” money, dude, it is both of your money.
You got to make that big salary because she was taking kids to soccer practice, you were coming home to a clean house, and your shirts were pressed for work every day. You both agreed to that arrangement and now that she has decided not to pursue a career because of the promise that you would be spending a life together does not mean she can now fend for herself.
I thought you followed my point, then you typed this sentence which I think ignores it again.
The point is, no-one has shown all instances of girl-man are worse than all instances of boy-woman, if anything just “more often” or on average.
And “more often” is not necessarily something that can/should be codified into law.
Not really codifying into law. Just saying I really have no issue with it and I’m not complaining about the judges decisions most often being far more lenient in boy woman cases
You’re saying judges should base it on the individual case and the degree of coercion. And it happens to be that coercion is more common for girl-man and so that’s why the sentences are harsher. But it’s not that judges should be saying “Oh it’s girl-man, therefore I should be more severe…”
Yes! , Sorry , I know I’m unclear quite often. I’m not intending to be.
IMO the sentencing patterns generally reflect exactly that. Though there is probably a tendency to amplify it somewhat beyond a proportional level for girl-man …maybe idk.
Either way woman-boy commonly being lenient is probably mostly due to them judging less coercion in the given circumstance. Rightly so, as it’s a generally a bit harder sell to say a 16 yr old boy was coerced into sex…though I’m sure In some instances the boy is more like he’s 12 and others hes more like he’s 20.
Kinda ties in to the comment about the adult power/male power dynamic evening things up a bit more.
For me at 16 I was 6’ 175lbs. , had a job, had a car ( for a while) , hung out with older kids, had already had a situation where the prosecutor declined to press assault charges when I beat up my stepdad in defense of my mother…it would have been hard to convince a judge I was heavily coerced by a 100lb adult female.
While for my youngest brother at 16 he still couldn’t make himself food or pick out his own clothes or make friends his age because he was just still so much a child.
Well I wouldn’t put it like a mental age thing. Someone can be quite mature in general but not ready or willing to be in that kind of relationship and get dragged into it.
In fact I might go further than that: I’m not convinced the level of coercion is necessarily higher for girl-man. As I say, I am sure plenty of girls are willing participants in that kind of relationship (disclaimer: doesn’t make it yadda yadda), so the ratio of willing-coercion may end up being the same.
But I am leaning towards thinking the potential harm may be greater on average.
I think if a woman that I wasn’t physically attracted to coerced me into sex, I would be able to forget about it pretty easily. Anecdotally, I think it’s not the same for women. And, though attitudes are changing, the social stigma is still not the same.
There’s a lot of what ifs. I generally agree with judges decisions in cases of woman boy that ive paid any attention to.
Even physical stature adds a lot to psychological coercion. The teacher student
dynamic adds an element…so on and so forth.
Though I definitely agree with that last part.
In fact as an adult I once woke up to an extremely unnatractive woman performing oral.
When I went from dreaming to awake and realized what was going on I just tried to go back to the dream and enjoy it, didn’t work. So I stopped her and went on about my day. A humorous experience for me, actually I just felt bad for her, that’s a pretty harsch rejection for a woman i think.
One of my wife’s former students got a teaching job and shortly thereafter got into a relationship with one of her female students. And went to jail for it - rather stupidly, because if they’d held off on the sexual relationship for a few more months the girl would have been over the age of consent. The teacher still would have been fired and blacklisted but not jailed.
I submit to you all that the modern laws and sentencing are rooted in ancient laws and sentencing which are tied to the values of patriarchal societies and those modern laws still have yet to be modernized.
The value of the female seducee is reduced. If the seducer was male, then (at the very least) the seducee’s virginity is (at best) questionable. These matters reduce the value of the seducee to prospective husbands and could therefore require a larger dowry in order for a man to “redeem his chattel.” A male-dominated society concerned with the male lineage of its descending generations would want to impose harsher penalties on those who throw into doubt the lineage and rights-of-inheritance of their daughters’ children. The crime is less about the psychology or even physical welfare of the seducee; it’s about the value of the daughter to her parents as a trading-piece.
In contrast, sons (or their parents) were recipients of dowries (if any) and the fact that a teacher might have ‘spoiled’ him doesn’t typically reduce his marketability or put the (male) lineage of his offspring in question.
–G!
If you completely ignore the traditionally “women’s jobs” of childbirth, child rearing and homemaking, that is, not to mention sex work.
Even in a developed country like the US, the rates of death or serious injury from pregnancy and childbirth are greater than the rates of workplace death or injury in almost any majority-male profession. The mothers of most of the resentful men whining about men’s “more dangerous jobs” have undergone greater risks and traumas from birthing and rearing those men than the men themselves will ever experience in their workplaces.
That doesn’t necessarily affect the question of who should get paid more in a particular job, but it does put into perspective male complaints that it’s unfair to describe men in the aggregate as “privileged”.
I’m willing to hazard a “no”, on the basis that this is one of those very rare situations where trying to establish legal equality is too much at odds with biological reality, like trying to give the biological father an equal vote on whether or not the woman he impregnated can get an abortion.
Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that some think it’s a good thing for a 30-year-old woman to seduce an underaged boy. Teachers may well be one of the more sexualized occupations in porn after all. Yet it’s still wrong.
Let’s look at the other side of this: a mature woman thinks a pubescent boy is hot–a boy who probably watches the Cartoon Network, shaves once a week even though he doesn’t need to, and won’t have a drivers license for at least another year. A boy who, were he to get injured or in deep trouble, will want his mommy. She’s attracted to that? That’s pretty sick.
It’s illegal for a reason. Hell, he’s too young to put it in context or to see down the road. A man in an office job can realize beforehand it’s a mistake to get into a sexual relationship with a subordinate and can see what’s likely to happen down the road. A 15-year-old boy can’t. And that female teacher is supposed to be an authority figure, but she can’t be that to him any longer. Is she really going to call his mom when he’s been tardy too many times or hasn’t turned in his homework?
So yes, she should get the same punishment as a man in the same position, regardless of whether things will “even up” somehow down the road. They’re not “even” now. It doesn’t matter how willing he is. Suppose she comes on to him, kisses him, etc., and he’s not interested for some reason–maybe because she looks like Ernest Borgnine in drag (Sure, that’s shallow, but he’s a kid. Besides, you weren’t thinking all these predatory female teachers are gorgeous, were you?) or because he’s got religious convictions against it. You think he wouldn’t be afraid to turn her down because it could hurt his grade, get him sent to the office, etc.?
Teachers know all this. Those who choose to ignore it should be banned from the profession and should, male or female, receive the same legal punishment.
Not a single person has argued such a thing. Not one.
As far as your other points, this is not 1975. Let a teacher just try to get the kid in trouble or mark down his grades after an allegation of an attempted sexual encounter. If her job remains intact after the accusation, and if by some miracle he remained in her class, she would be foolish to attempt to try to do so; that would just be more evidence that she was guilty and was taking retribution.
The only thing I want to bring up is the ‘cultural’ problem where we discount the cultural differences between the sexes. They should be taken into account, largely because all crimes are cultural constructs.
Murder is pretty universal, but there have certainly been cultures where murder wasn’t seen as a crime (beating a slave to death as an example.) Crimes are simply torts against a socially agreed upon framework. As such, the fact that we find 15 year olds incapable of consent is itself a cultural construct. If we find that 15 year old boys are not ‘harmed’ as much as 15 year old girls in a May-November relationship, then that’s a feature of society, not a bug. Our society has largely decided to downplay gender differences. There are lots of reasons for it, primarily economic, but also philosophical. That doesn’t mean that we are required to always downplay gender differences-it’s OUR cultural construct to tweak as we see fit. We have girls sports as an example. I see no reason why we can’t say minor boys and minor girls respond to sex differently and so crimes regarding them can be treated differently.
Yes, it is the same and should be treated the same.
That is not to say that each *case *is the same, nor that more egregious and problematic cases might not be seen more on one side of the equation than the other but each case has to be treated on its own merit and the respective gender of the people involved should be disregarded.
I can well imagine circumstances where a 16-year old and a 30-year old can have a meaningful and consensual sexual relationship and the law should be able to accommodate that.
Agreed. And the age is arbitrary as well. It is difficult to see why a 30 year old should get a horrific penalty for having sex with someone such that if he would have waited three months until she was 16 it would have been perfectly legal.
I understand that some laws have to be arbitrary for the possibility of enforcement, but someone closer to the line should get a lesser penalty. For example, I see the reason to set a drinking age, and 21 is objectively as good as 18 or 19. But a 20 year old drinking is less of an issue for society than a 14 year old drinking. The latter is a far greater problem even though the same law is violated.