When I was a teenager, I probably would have given my right arm to have been ‘taken advantage of’. But I agree, it’s a double standard, and there are indeed reasons why we have these laws. Even if you don’t necessarily agree that it ‘damages’ a male minor, I’ve always felt that these laws should exist out of respect for his parents, who have a right not to have their child corrupted.
The point is, all of the sarcastic attributions you just made really do apply to some men and women.
Laws and policies should not deprive the gender-variant minority of equal protection just because we are in fact a minority.
Attitudes are trickier. I don’t expect people to cease expecting the normative. I would like to insert an understanding of gender-variant people into the culture’s Overton window. That would probably be sufficient w/regards to attitudes: “oh, I get it, this is one of those feminine males and I’d be closer to the mark assuming what I’d ordinarily assume about women when it comes to this guy”. etc.
So established that there is no debate that as to the issue of consent and emotional/cognitive maturity boys 15 years old and under are generally less mature (by about two years) than are girls the same age, so are, if anything, less competent to give consent, whatever they think they want.
Despite the no greater to less competency to give consent the argument is being made that girls 15 and under, in general, are coerced, while boys are eager and grateful. (Citation for this basically being recalled wet dreams and Penthouse Letters enjoyed.)
The scenario the OP started us off with was a 36 year old neighbor who had sex with a “troubled” 15 year-old boy had been getting mother figure support from. Her sentence was 1 to 2 years and it was criticized as an unjustified double standard.
How is this double standard justified?
Do we assume that a boy who is having a very difficult time at home who is getting emotional support from a woman playing mother figure 21 years older than him, is being taken advantage of less, is less a victim of an abused power dynamic, is less coerced than a 15 year old girl “seduced” by a man in a similar position above her? Because “boy” means horny and eager and “girl” means blushing shy flower?
In what manner was this less coercive than Roy Moore’s (alleged) “seductions” of similarly aged girls when he was a relatively mere 31 and 32?
Let’s also do the very annoying act of throwing facts and data into the conversation. Yeah, [URL=“https://www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2005/09/Sex-Between-Young-and-Old.pdf”]
Most of the sexual activity between young teens and older individuals is not with those twice their age, instead
The typical age gap between young teens and older individuals who are sexually
involved is three to four years." The power differential is not that level of extreme. These events cannot be conflated with the 30 year old individual having sex with a child 15 years old or younger.
As to this sex with the individual a few years older than they are:
(The majority (53%) of girls 15 and under with older partners were “mixed” about it though, which is the same majority that felt the same way otherwise starting sex under 18.)
Also, even though most of these encounters in both genders is not forced their is an association in both genders such that
Yes there are consequences.
Boys and girls commonly view sex differently. Boys are less mature emotionally and cognitively and therefore easier to take advantage of. Teens 15 and under having sex with a dramatically older individual (e.g. 30 or over, like Roy Moore or the example of the OP) are uncommon in all gender pair-ups and are as abusive, inclusive of a child who says they “wanted” to have the sex.
You seem to think the significant distinction at issue here is that between male and female sexuality. It’s not; it’s the distinction between an adult’s and a child’s sexualities. The case that prompted this thread was an adult abusing a child; the fact that the adult is female and the child male is irrelevant.
In my opinion, anyway.
Oh. This tautologic tripe needs comment.
The argument that we must passively accept double standards and stereotypes because double standards exist and people hold stereotypes, facts on the ground, is absolutely inane on its face. In this society right now a vulnerable boy that was groomed for abuse who says they were coerced by an older (and “attractive”) female into sex will be judged by cultural norms as less of a man, less of the man he wants to be. They are less likely to report so and even if they do, are less likely to be believed, the perp judged less severely than if she was a man. “He didn’t really want it? What kind of boy is that? I fantasized to that! If he didn’t want it why did get an erection? Men are not raped.”
Can you at least appreciate the self-sameness with a '50s argument of “homosexuality is a disease” and queers should be demonized on the basis of the culture stating it to be so? So gays should have stayed closeted and we all should have accepted the standard.
Amen to that… there’s a real stereotype that men just HAVE to be good to go with nearly any woman that is even vaguely attractive, or there’s something wrong with him in a fundamental way. It’s probably more intense for teenage boys- nobody can believe that they wouldn’t just jump at the chance, or worse, they feel like they HAVE to do it because it’s what’s expected of them by society and their peers/other males.
That’s a sort of coercion I’d say, even if it’s not direct.
IAAL. I criminal defense lawyer. A few points to make:
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In every case, male or female, where the perpetrator was more than 8-10 years older than the child, regardless of gender, the child was pretty emotionally fucked up. For all the reasons one would think. Adults who are incapable of “scoring” a near-aged sex partner, which lead them to form a relationship with a child, are incapable for a reason. And those reasons manifest themselves in being pretty manipulative and shitty romantic partners. It’s not so much the sex or sex-act. It’s the emotional manipulation and grooming that fucks kids up.
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Sex offender evaluations. In my state, and I’m sure in most, any person charged with a felony sex crime is going to be subject to a forensic psychosexual evaluation. Using data for recidivism rates, among other things, the evaluations will look at multiple factors to determine long-term risk. Interestingly, there are so few female sex offenders, i.e., the pool is so small, that there are no scientifically validated recidivism studies that predict whether a female is a risk to re-offend. So in my jurisdiction, a male being sentenced by a judge is going to have a 30 page forensic evaluation detailing where they fit in this ‘risk spectrum,’ and suggestions for treatment modalities based on their risk. Whereas the report for a female will essentially say, there is no scientifically validated way for us to predict risk for women… so… um… therapy? This essentially leaves judges to guess.
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Hypothetically: I may have had a client who was a 40yo woman who met a 16yo boy on a World of Warcraft forum. They talked over a course of months and the relationship morphed into nude photos, love declarations, and promises to meet and rescue each other from this cruel cruel world. She solicited nude pics, sent nude pics, and made plans to come meet him for sex. Parents found out and contacted law enforcement. Client was arrested. This kid was seriously fucked up emotionally about this case. It was terribly sad. The male prosecutor had a very, “get this boy his luckiest boy in the world” attitude and did a shitty job of advocating for the state. I did my part. My hypothetical client got a time served sentence (4 months), and the Judge waggled his finger at her and reminded her not to contact him again until he is 18.
It was a great result for my client. I was digusted.
Btw nobody here is talking about kids under 15.
Majority of my examples use 16, which is age of consent in many states.
One thing that seems to show some consistency here is that somewhere between 15-16 we no longer treat people as complete children in sexual matters.
14 and under and In some places 15 and under just puts it into the category of child molesting.
We can do whatever we want to change double standards and stereotypes, changing them by first putting a bunch of people in prison and worrying about the rest later just isn’t a great way of going about it.
Which is why the law itself is the same for everyone… Punishments are based on case specific evaluation.
By this logic, if the 16 year old boy does not have sex with the attractive 16 year old cheerleader that propositions him, then he will feel that something is “wrong with him in a fundamental way” and that if he does have sex with her it was “coercion…even if it’s not direct.”
It’s hard to see by this statement how any (at least single) man can ever turn down sex at any time lest society shame him.
See , now there’s one that no sense to me.
Clearly this woman needed therapy. This was a missed opportunity to probably actually help someone.
Idk in what way this kid was fucked up, but I know I probably would have been most fucked up at that age that my parents had the power to put my " girlfriend" in jail because “they didn’t like that i found someone I related to and how dare they ruin my life like this” … Or something along those lines. In other words the whole legal involvement would probably have been the most traumatic part.
Though again facts are if I had never got into the relationship in the first place because she should have known better …than I could have avoided that trouble through her adult decision.
Aye, but people arguing that “but men and women are different” sound to me as if they’d be ready & amenable to changing the law. Meanwhile, sentencing guidelines, while not “laws” per se, constitute policy; it may be formal or it may be informal but the law is a respecter of tradition and hence of doing thing the way they’ve been done.
And as such, the law, as a matter of its own attitude towards how it doles out justice, should always seek to be gender-neutral out of fairness. Even if attitudes will continue to reflect what is normative in people’s experience.
Well, one way we can say it’s definitely not equal is what llcoolbj77 brought up.
There exists such a low number of female sex offenders that they can’t actually base sentencing the same way they do for males, which is partly a psych eval to determine risk of a repeat offense.
Even if they tried to be gender neutral, it would be scientifically impossible to apply that system equally.
This is somewhat applicable to other offenses as well, since the idea of our justice system is not simply to punish but to protect people and discourage offenses. If women are highly unlikely to re offend when given a certain sentence then that sentence is adequate in circumstances where that is a consideration.
I absolutely and utterly disagree with this opinion. The teen isn’t his parent’s property. The only things that matters is whether he’s harmed or not. The opinion of the parents about their pure baby being tainted is irrelevant. If the child is in an healthy and satisfying relationship, the parents can go fuck themselves if they’re still unhappy about it, as far as I’m concerned. “Parents don’t think their baby should have sex” is definitely not a reason to prosecute someone who otherwise has done good and no harm. Victim-less crimes shouldn’t be prosecuted, let alone because a third party is offended, be it the parents.
I don’t believe so. I have an issue with the seemingly prevalent idea that a girl having sex with an adult man is going, 100% guaranteed, to be terribly fucked up for life, while a boy having sex with an adult woman will remember it forever as his fondest memory. I believe that this perception is in large part false, and that for the part that might be true, it’s mostly the result of culture.
But, on the other hand, if it was demonstrated to me to be true, I would have no issue with the law not being gender-neutral. Once again, in my opinion, a “crime” should be prosecuted only if harm was done. If having sex with adults is, hypothetically, harmful for girls and beneficial for boys, then I’m all for sentencing men having sex with girls and giving a medal to women having sex with boys.
If there are actually differences between genders, then, sure these differences must be taken into account, and it would be absurd to prosecute someone who did no wrong just to be “fair” and respect equality between genders.
In saying this, did you mean harmful for all girls and beneficial for all boys, or would you be OK proceeding with it if it were demonstrated to be harmful for the majority of girls and beneficial to the majority of boys?
Like most human behavior, sexuality exists on a spectrum with several axes. At one end are adults who want a sexual relationship with someone a lot younger and we see that as abnormal. At the same time, there exists a part of the continuum where very young people find themselves wanting a sexual relationship with someone much older. We automatically assume that these people are too stupid to know what they’re doing and blame it all on the adult–which is somewhat valid, but it does remove agency from people who might actually possess that agency and embrace it. I was raised in the '70s and I knew a LOT of girls who very much preferred partners in their 20s, who had jobs and cars and disposable income and who might actually have learned how to produce an orgasm in a woman without a lot of fumbling.
I’ve long thought that being sexually active really ought to be a license category–licensed to fuck, as it were. Like driving. Anyone past puberty who thinks they can handle their own sex life should be able to pass a psychological maturity test, be fully educated on birth control and STIs such that they can pass a fairly gruelling test, have a birth control method already in place (and boy howdy don’t I wish there was a long term reversible option for men) and get an endorsement on their driver’s license or ID (like a motorcycle sticker) that says they are validly DTF regardless of age.
Benefit here is that any sexual contact with a person not yet declared DTF would then be a criminal matter for both parties. If a non-licensed person consents to sex without first getting licensed that’s an offense that is dealt with in whatever manner seems appropriate to society, and so does the licensed person who was so hot 'n heavy to get down they didn’t check or didn’t care. Again, penalty ensues. One great benefit of this would be that an asexual person could elect never to get licensed, which would mean anyone pushing sexual contact on that person is going to open themselves up for some big problems regardless of the age of the person they assault. Because it would always be assault if you didn’t check for a valid DTF indicator and your partner didn’t have it. No matter what.
A person who’s been declared to be sexually adult is thereafter never able to duck behind their age in any question of sexual assault, the entire concept of statutory rape is no longer dependent on an arbitrary age limit that doesn’t work for people on the far ends of the continua and any issues of assault are then based solely on the facts of each individual case. I think it would work.
Oh, and parents don’t own their kids’ sexuality in any way, regardless of what they think. You can try to raise your kids with appropriate values and standards but if they don’t respect your ideas on the matter it shouldn’t be a legal club to beat them with.
In an ideal world, it should be dealt with on a case by case basis.Which would mean that, in this hypothetical, women would be sentenced less often, and on average less harshly. If it’s just a matter of statistics, giving systematically a lower sentence to women because it causes harm to, say, 40% of girls but only 20% of boys doesn’t seem ideal to me.
Assuming that we can’t differentiate between “it was harmful” and “it wasn’t harmful” on an individual basis easily, and/or that we want deterrence, then there’s a point where harm is likely enough that everybody should be sentenced and a point where it is unlikely enough that nobody should, however. If the difference between boys and girls were really very important statistically (say, 70% of girls are harmed, but only 10% of boys), then yes, I would favor different level of sentencing for men and women because there’s less need for deterrence, and because punishing severely someone for a potential harm that is very unlikely doesn’t make sense. Up to the point where it would be only say a misdemeanor for women, or even not prosecutable at all. Shooting at you with a 44 magnum and shooting at you with a water pistol aren’t the same thing. If it happens that men are 44 Magnum and women water pistols, then so be it, and we shouldn’t sentence water pistol wielders the same as 44 magnum wielders.
If there’s a large enough difference in the outcome, we’re not talking in fact about the same acts, even if they look superficially similar, and we shouldn’t, once again, punish people who do nothing wrong just so that we’ll look like we’re “gender blind”. If having early sex with older women is good for boys, then we should encourage it, not deter it, even if at the same time, men go to jail because it’s harmful for girls. But that would requires the existence of a very significant, and biology-based, difference between boys and girls wrt early sex, which I don’t believe exists.
And in fact, it wouldn’t even be based on the gender of the perpetrator, but on the gender of the victim, and so, homosexual men would walk free while lesbians would go to jail.
And about my last sentence : in fact, I’m not terribly convinced that the majority of people who clamor that women shouldn’t be sentenced, or should only be sentenced lightly, because boys are so eager to have sex with older women and because of supposed biological differences between boys and girls will be very willing to extend the same courtesy to homosexual men having sex with those same boys (maybe yes on this message board, but it’s not terribly representative. And even of that I’m not so sure, because I suspect that most of the answers given are based on emotions, not reason, and that people who are thinking “oh! I’d so much have fucked my big-titted 8th grade female biology teacher, no way it would harm a boy” would feel the same if they pictured their hairy male 8th grade biology teacher with a boy instead)
You say the kid was seriously fucked up. My question is how/why was he fucked up?
If I was 16 and ended up in court to prosecute my lover I think I would be fucked up too.
As a 16 year old being “in love” is pretty powerful. I remember “being in love” at that age, dating for, like, a whole month and breaking up and being utterly crushed. I was sure I would never love again. I wanted to kill myself. I cried. I was miserable. If you saw me then you would surely deem me a seriously fucked up kid. But this was all bog-standard puppy love stuff and I got over it. Part of growing up.
If you had dragged me to court in order to prosecute my love then I really would get messed up. So the poor kid was in the midst of this infatuation and then had to be a part of the prosecution of his love and also had the law and his parents and the school and his friends all squarely focused on him.
I am not surprised he was fucked up but not due to the relationship. All the other shit had to be waaay more overwhelming.
Thank god you were all there to save him from trauma! :rolleyes: