Are all younger/older age gap sexual relations equally taboo?

Great Debates
1

By young old age gap, I am specifically thinking about young teenagers (not pre teens) and someone in their 20s or early 30s.
This came up because of the recent flap with milo seemingly condoning pedophilia, or at the very least enjoying his encounters with an older man when he was a teenager.

This prompted people on the right to dig up old videos of George Takei talking about a similar situation and sentiment regarding a camp counselor that was in his late teens while George was around 14 or so.

In Georges case, he actually mentions not being against it near the end of the video because he thought the guy was attractive. There has been an avalanche of bitter people on the right that support Milo in other things waxing on and on about the deviancy of gays in general, asking were they ALL molested? Are they all into this? And if they are OK with it happening to them, would they be more likely to engage in this behavior themselves? This story has not spread, but then Takei is not part of a concerted hit job to bury him, People hated Milo and wanted to see him taken down. But back to the subject at hand, is this just as taboo as non consensual sex between a male minor and an adult?

This is not limited to gays.

Remember those stories about female teachers that were screwing their male students? There was a rash of such stories for awhile.
I might be a horrible person for this, but my gut sentiment is that a consenting male that has hit puberty having sex with an older male or female is not as bad as a non consenting teenager doing the same. Further, this sentiment of it not being as bad does NOT extend to younger females having sex with older men, even if it is consensual.

There is nothing logically consistent about this, but the closest I heart to a rationale came from the real time with bill maher show YEARS ago.
They were talking about one of those stories with a fairly attractive female teacher having sex with a male student, and someone on the panel quipped if it was a male teacher having sex with a younger female student, they should get the death penalty.

Then Irshad Manji asked, oh, so do you think there is a double standard?

And then Bill chimed in (paraphrasing)

Bill Maher: Yes, because there are two sexes. An older man having sex with a younger girl can cause real damage, and older woman (or presumably a man) having sex with a younger boy can cause good esteem.
None of this is to say that we should alter the standards of consent legally, or that any parent should be happy and contented with their male children going sex crazy with any and everyone, but is a younger male having sex with a slightly older male really as bad as everything else? I don’t think it is.
Now tell me how psychologically damaged and broken I am.

2

It might be within the realm of possibility that some such relationships can be truly consensual. But I see no way to separate them from the almost certainly overwhelmingly larger number that are highly damaging, and thus any defense of such relationships strikes me as highly immoral and dangerous.

3

I think this goes to the nature and differences of male vs female sexuality. The center of mass of male sexuality, gay or straight, is more towards the side of wanting to engage in more casual sexual encounters. Assuming there is a base level of attraction. This beaks down if one party forces themselves on another or there is no mutual attraction. I think far fewer 14-15 year old guys would be psychologically damage by having sex with someone in their 20s that they were attracted to, compared to 14-15 year old women doing the same.

4

I’ve said before that, when I was a teen, I would’ve been enthusiastic and delighted at the thought of having sex with a woman in her twenties – but decades later, I now look back and realize I’d tell my younger self “well, you’re absolutely right.”

5

Defense of a subset is immoral? I don’t agree.

Let’s see, you can legally get married in the USA at the age of 13 in New Hampshire with parental and judicial consent. In a many states there is no lower age limit to marriage with judicial and parental consent. Is that immoral and dangerous or is that an appropriate safeguard to allow those with better reasoning capabilities, that is a judge and parents, the ability to make a judgement based on individual circumstances?

Maybe marriage is the anachronistic requirement to having a legal relationship. Maybe there should be no exceptions in law. Debating the issues is not immoral.

Here is something contrived. If a 15 year old male is about to die of some terminal cancer wanted to have sexual relations with a willing 20 year old female before his imminent death it would be immoral and dangerous for the two of them to engage in sex? It would be immoral and dangerous to consider it?

Personally, I’m very wary of vast power differentials and the dangers they pose in relationships. So I don’t think it’s good that society doesn’t have any restrictions. But I don’t see how requiring parental and in many cases judicial consideration is not a useful compromise between anarchy and prohibition.

6

I can’t say I’d feel much concern if the age of consent was 15. It was 14 for a time in Canada and I don’t recall any particular moral collapses.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s fair to Yiannapoulos to accuse him of promoting pedophilia. The evidence for it (that I know of) is weak. He’s far more deserving of harsh criticism on multiple other issues.

7

A guy I knew who sold cars for a living told me once, “If I’m happy, and the customer’s happy,then we both got good deals.”

And I told him he was mistaken. The customer buys cars once every five years or so. You sell ten or more cars per month, I said. You’re intimately aware of the true costs and profit margins involved. The customer may think he got a good deal, sure. But of the two, only you KNOW whether he did.

The parallel to this discussion: a sexually mature teenager may well want sex with an adult. Certainly if Lena Söderberg or Farrah Fawcett had shown up at my doorstep willing to hop into bed with teenage me, I’d have been eager and happy.

But society forbids adults to do this for good reason. It wouldn’t have been an equal relationship; I’d have been putty in Lena’s hands. She could manipulate a teenager in ways he doesn’t even recognize, and won’t until he’s had his share of relationships. Both Lena and I might have honestly said we were happy, but Lena would have held the whip hand and I never would have known how to articulate just how that was wrong.

8

Soderberg and Fawcett were pretty, I grant, but I don’t know that either were sexual experts in the way that, say, an experienced prostitute might be. Besides, it’s unlikely that both participants in an initial sexual encounter will have identical levels of experience and knowledge.

9

Well, the thing is, society doesn’t strictly forbid it. And how many relationships are strictly equal? Does a billionaire and his wife have the same power? Does the president of the US and an intern have the same power?

Does a 24 year old with a 160 IQ and an 18 year old with an 87 IQ have the same power? Equal power in a relationship seems to be an impossible standard.

The car dealership is an interesting example. Is justice a good deal or a voluntary exchange?

10

FWIW:

My first romantic / sexual relationship started when I was 18; my partner was a 32-year-old woman. She absolutely held all the cards in the relationship, and I was too immature and inexperienced to even realize that at the time. At the time, I was in heaven – I had the attention of an attractive, sexually adventurous older woman, and it felt amazing.

But, after about a year, due in large part to differences in maturity level, as well as the fact that I was undoubtedly more invested in the relationship than she was, she dumped me. I was emotionally wrecked for the better part of a year, and it took me several years (and several missteps in dating women closer to my own age) before I really realized that my relationship with her had given me some mistaken ideas about how relationships worked. There’s no doubt that she “used” me for her own ends, even if she did have some level of affection for me.

Now, I was 18 when she and I started out – I was legally an adult, even if my maturity level was questionable. Assume, for the sake of argument, that our relationship had started three years earlier – that I was 15, and she was 29. Nothing about the motivations behind that relationship would have been any different, but my emotional and psychological maturity levels would have been even lower, and the relationship (as “consensual” as it would have been) might well have been even more damaging to me, and for longer.

11

The problem there isn’t age-related, though. I’m okay with restricting sexual relationships between, say, teachers and students if the teacher has some authority over the student. If it’s a 15 year-old student and a teacher who works at a school the student does not attend, it’s far less of a concern.

12

To me it is all about CONSENT.

Non-adults cannot legally consent to virtually anything without parental permission.

Once one has reached the age of consent, Whamo! Have at it with as many partners and in as many orifices that you desire.

13

I do think having a relationship with such a large age gap that early own is probably more damaging than not. But a quick sexual encounter?

I forgot to bring up the sports illustrated swimsuit example, but others have mentioned similar examples, but what guy in his teens, even 13/14, if given the chance and offer from some mid 20s centerfold that was literally POPPING out of her clothes would not jump on that? Who thinks they would be scarred for the experience?
All that said, I do think there is directional asymmetry. To me it’s FAR more understandable for a younger guy to be into an attractive older person and want to jump on any opportunities that arose than it is for the older person to look at the 13-15 year old as a prime candidate for a sexual encounter. That last is more suspect. But people were getting their panties in a bunch over Milo, and later George Takei enjoying their sexual experiences with older people when they were in their teens, as many other straight guys have done before. People are pretending that is some TOTALLY alien reaction in any guy, which is absurd.

14

Sorry, but you wrote after your first sentence clearly means that for you it’s all about the law, not about consent per se.

15

OOP:

This is inherently in error.

The fact that you try to establish a GENERAL RULE about harm to individuals, is a mistake. It’s a contradiction of your basic set up of the situation, too.

If you ask instead, “is it ALWAYS harmful for people of significantly different ages to interact sexually?”, the answer should probably be “no.”

But we know also, that harm very much DOES occur, in MANY cases where significant ages are involved, for a variety of reasons.

We have discovered in our society, that if we do NOT make general rules for everyone, and just allow everyone to interact as they will, that a great deal of harm occurs, inevitably. If nothing else, in places and times where there was no law and law enforcement, the nature of existence was that you went about your life as you wanted to, but constantly risked someone else taking issue with you, and killing or severely injuring you as a natural reaction.

Few things in our society are more emotionally involving than sex. Therefore we have a lot of laws about it. And those laws have to be applicable equally to everyone, in order to preserve the rule of law itself (argue that elsewhere if you like, I think it’s axiomatic).

I myself do NOT think that there is any difference between males and females, or people of whatever sexual orientations, when it comes to whether or not it can be harmful to them, and thereby to the society which they are a part of, to be involved in sex with other people of significantly different ages. Even the few anecdotes mentioned already, support this, by their very differences.

I would contend that even when a person appears to have benefited positively from an interaction, that harm can still have been done to the society they are a part of, going forward. It is every bit as damaging, and sometimes more damaging, for a member of the group to think they are SUPERIOR to others in some way, as it is for them to believe they are INFERIOR to others, owing to whatever experience they had.

16

I disagree. A lot of things are more emotionally involving than sex. Plenty of people have sex while being less emotionally involved with their partner than they are with, say, the friend they had a couple beers with one hour before.

We have a lot of laws about sex because we have a cultural heritage of considering sex as at the same time sacred and disgusting, a sacrament and a sin. Sex (and everything that people link to it, like for instance nudity) is put apart from any other kind of activity. People feel entitled to have a say in other people sexual life in ways that would be immediately considered as totally unacceptable if it applied to anything else.

People feel disgusted at the idea of someone having sex with his first cousin, with an animal (even though they won’t have an issue with said animal being castrated for convenience, then rode for fun, then rendered into pet food and shoes), with a person of the same gender, with a person they’re paying, and so on… And somehow they feel entitled to pass laws forbidding other people from having the kind of sex they personnally don’t like and dissaprove of.

We fear that kids could seeing porn while allowing them to see violent (or non violent, for that matter) deaths onscreen, even though death is vastly more emotionnally involving than sex. Most people will just take that the former is a worst thing as granted, without feeling the need to justify it, which shows that it’s a culturally acquired opinion, not a well thought one. Those who will actually try to justify it will use standarts that once again they wouldn’t apply to anything else. For instance that seeing porn will give a distorted view of sex, while they won’t have an issue with a Disney movie giving a distorted view of love, or a chick flick giving a distorted view of courting and relationships, even though, once again, love and relationships are much more emotionnally involving than sex. I hardly ever saw anyone crying or depressed for months because the person who dumped them was such a good lay, but many a time because they loved him/her.

I don’t deny that there’s (or at least can be) intimacy in sex, of course. But there’s a lot of meaningless and unimportant sex, and not much unimportant love or unimportant death.

Sex is put in a special place in all its expressions. Emotional abuse is a way, way, way less serious offense than rape. People will giggle at a totally stupid joke by a TV anchor simply because it includes an oblique reference to sex. Sex with minors is almost the only crime where showing intent isn’t required (while it would be if you murdered said children). People in a relationship will get away with all sort of bad behaviours, but having sex with another person will get them an instant divorce (even when they didn’t have sex anymore with their regular “partner”). . Prostitutes might be considered lawbreakers, but more importantly, whether they are or not, they’ll be despised by the wide majority of people, including their own customers and including those who pretend to stand for them (and know better, of course, than the prostitutes themselves).

Almost none of these"hang ups" about sex can be rationally justified if you look at it closely. Sex with children might be one the only contrary example (maybe also sex with incompetent adults, even though see for instance the relatively recent GD thread about the man sentenced for having sex with her spouse suffering from Alzheimer to see that it’s not obvious), and even there we run into all sorts of weird things, like the kids prosecuted for owning child porn because they took pictures of themselves.

So, no, I don’t think that we have a lot of laws about sex because it’s so much more emotionally involving than anything else, but because sex is still, to a large part, taboo (in both the “forbidden” and “sacred” sense) for cultural, not rational, reasons.

17

When I was teen and male, I was putty in the hands of someone who was teen and female; she was as manipulative as she was busty, and she was pretty busty.

So, yeah, I’d probably have been at a disadvantage with a busty twentysomething; but, again, I was probably going to be at a disadvantage with anyone busty; and, of course, I’m constantly assured that women are more sophisticated and emotionally aware than the men they run rings around when it comes to communication and social skills, so I assume I’m being manipulated by someone busty even now.

In conclusion, I’m apparently a big fan of the word “busty”.

18

Excellent post. And perfect evidence that it is indeed possible, assuming emotional maturity among the participants, to engage in debate even on difficult or taboo subjects.

19

There’s a tension between the goal of equality of power in relationships, and the goal of freedom to choose one’s romantic partners.

And the way society resolves that tension is by creating an age-based rule.

20

When I met my husband, I was 42 and he was 22. But although I was more mature in most respects, he was more sexually experienced and knowledgeable, and had a more diverse history of relationships. It took us many years to reach a sort of equilibrium. So it’s not only about age.