Dio the ballbag

[Blaster_Master]

@Dangerosa

I hate to disabuse you of your innocent and pure notions of my gentle sex but…we have been known to lie. I have a “girlfriend” who said “yes, I’m on the pill” when she wasn’t and her boyfriend at the time is paying child support sixteen years later. I have a “girlfriend” who was screwing around at 16 telling people she was 18. And one who is a lying meth whore - and still cute enough to take you to bed and fuck you, then leave your house with everything she can carry. (Please note that none of these people are my actual friends, they travel in - or used to travel in - the same circles).

Its reasonable to expect that a person you just picked up in a bar is not completely honest - about their birth control, their STDs, or their age - because many people aren’t. Just like if you are a woman - its reasonable to expect that a certain number of men in the bar are actually married even if they tell you they aren’t, aren’t actually employed even if they tell you they have great jobs. If you don’t know them well enough to feel confident in their morality, don’t fuck them. Because you can end up paying child support for a million years, getting cited in the divorce case, or ending up a registered sex offender - not to mention the STD risk.

I’m well aware of this fact. I appreciate that people lie, and in fact, it ought to be expected to some degree when picking people up in a bar. The difference is that there’s reasonable things someone can do if someone is lying about birth control, STDs, being employed, being sheisty, or whatever. The way a reasonable person knows if someone is lying about age is either from appearance or ID.

For example, a guy meets a woman in a bar, they decide they want to sleep together, and says she’s on the pill. A reasonable guy might suspect she’s lying or might have an STD and, thus, can make a decision about whether or not he wants to use a condom. That is, whether or not she’s lying, it shouldn’t be an issue because he can take reasonable steps to mitigate those circumstances.

Now let’s take a guy who meets a girl in a bar. He sees her and she looks 23. By virtue of being in the bar, the guy also knows that the person at the door (who, at least in VA, cards EVERYONE, no matter how old they look) and has also passed his visual check and verified the ID. If the guy also looks at the ID. What other reasonable steps should the guy take?

Yes, in both cases, the consequences can be completely mitigated by choosing not to have sex with a person one barely knows. Further, like I said, I think it’s dumb in either situation to have sex with someone one doesn’t know well, but I still think there’s a fundamental difference between these two circumstances because the decisions are not equally informed. That is, a guy’s decision about the girl claiming she’s on the pill can make an informed decision based on the failure rate of the condom, her potential deception doesn’t change the failure rate of the condom, and so he is fully responsible for the consequences of that decision. In the case of the girl lying about her age, the reliability of the evidence upon which he bases his decisions is unknowably deceptive; thus, his decision is not fully informed, and as such, his responsibility for the consequences is not the same as someone who fails to take appropriate precautions or does so knowing full-well that she is underage.
Again, I’m not condoning any of this sort of behavior, I think it’s stupid to have sex with someone you don’t know well, even if you’re absolutely sure she’s legal. I just that charging someone with statutory rape in this sort of case, when he’s been knowingly deceived, just doesn’t fit.

[Kimstu]

Serves you right Hamlet, how dare you gratuitously introduce rational thinking and a moderate tone into a thread where all people want to do is bitch about Dio being a tendentious prick to them.

[ETA: You too Blaster. I look away for 5 minutes to compose a post and everybody suddenly starts being calm and reasonable. Trolls.]

FWIW, I agree with you that tendentious prickery doesn’t change the basic facts of legal responsibility. Yes, it certainly is morally somewhat unfair that a well-meaning person should get jail time and the SO list just for being too credulous when a mature-looking 15-year-old stranger with a fake ID lies about her age to get him to fuck her.

Likewise, it’s morally unfair that a well-meaning person should get hit with 18 years of child support payments just for being too credulous when a sex partner tells him she’s using birth control.

However, the law has to assign responsibility somewhere. Somebody’s got to support unwanted children, and the law’s decided that in the child’s best interest, that burden should by default be placed on the child’s birth parents, even when that’s unfair to somebody who believed they weren’t running any serious risk of unwanted parenthood.

And if fucking people below a certain age is a crime (and I think it has to be, if we hold that people below a certain age simply are not capable of giving informed consent to sex), then the burden of responsibility for it has to fall on the adult who is deemed capable of informed consent, even if they honestly didn’t know that their behavior was criminal. It’s up to individual adults to make every reasonably possible effort to make sure they don’t commit the crime of having sex with someone underage.

Given that (contra Dio) many underage people do look much more mature than they are, and that fake IDs are easy to obtain, and that many underage people will lie about their age to get sex, I just don’t see how anybody can say that “she looked 18 and had an over-18 ID so I trusted that she was telling the truth about her age” counts as having made every reasonably possible effort to avoid having sex with a minor.

I think some people may be mixing up the concepts of “make every reasonably possible effort to avoid having sex with an underage person” and “make every reasonably possible effort to determine that a potential sex partner is of legal age within the timeframe offered by the opportunity to have sex with him/her”. It’s still your responsibility to avoid having sex with an underage person even if that person is lying to you about their age, just as it’s still your responsibility to avoid unprotected sex even if your partner is lying to you about their fertility and/or STD status.

[VinylTurnip]

@Gangster_Octopus

Isn’t it against the rules to call someone a troll?

Just shut up and keep walkin’, kid… or maybe you want a wedgie TOO?

[Steve_MB]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

it’s kind of contradictory for you guys to have spent so much energy arguing about how unreliable looks and ID cards can be, and then turning around and saying that looks and ID should be solid legal defenses.

No contradiction whatsoever. Normally, ID is strong (though not absolute) evidence of age. A reasonable and prudent person, presented with an ID that is not obviously fake, may presume that the person’s birthdate is as represented.

There are some cases of fraud using fake IDs that cannot be readily detected as fake by a reasonable and prudent person examining the ID with due diligence. In such cases, the responsibility for the consequences of the fraud rests with the fraudster, not with the defrauded party.

That wasn’t so complicated, now was it?

[Bosstone]

@Kimstu

FWIW, I agree with you that tendentious prickery doesn’t change the basic facts of legal responsibility.

Well, the original OP thread title is “Why is ignorance of age not an excuse?” I think we understand there’s a legal responsibility currently in place.

And your post here was vastly more reasonable than anything Dio posted in the GD thread.

[Shot_From_Guns]

@Hamlet

It is entirely possible, and actual reality in this case, for someone to think that sexual assault of a minor should be a strict liability crime, without agreeing with Dio’s arguments and, in fact, finding him to be every bit as obtuse as you do.

Go read the threads that started this pitting. You’re telling me that having sex with someone who looks 21, acts 21, and has an ID that for all intents and purposes look legitimate and confirms their age should render you a rapist if it turns out that it’s really, say, a 16-year-old who hit puberty when they were ten, has a really great fake ID, and deliberately misled you?

We have at least **TWO **doctors on this board who’ve stated that it’s entirely possible for a teen or even a pre-teen to legitimately appear to be 18+.

P.S. You got my gender wrong, too.

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

EVERYBODY is saying they’re unreliable. Read the fucking threads. They’re full to the brim with anecdotes about fake or fraudulently obtained IDs. If you personally think that checking a girl’s ID in a bar is reliable way to verify her age, then you’re the only one and you’re a gullible fucking chump to boot.

No, **YOU **say they are unreliable. **EVERYONE ELSE **says that they CAN be faked, but that they are USUALLY a reliable method of identity verification. I notice that you *yet again *(that’s, what, at least three or four times now) blew straight by the speedometer parallel, because it yet again proves that you’re a fucking moron.

Also, the fact that you insist on continuing to ONLY make this about men fucking underage females points pretty strongly to your personal dog in this fight. Just lock your daughters up until they’re 40 already and leave everyone else alone.

[Steve_MB]

@Shot_From_Guns

Let me break it down for you: two perfect strangers have a legal right to fuck.

As I noted on the other thread, this is the real heart of the problem. Dio’s proposed solution of requiring an extended traditional courtship (rather than the solution used in all other cases such as alcohol and tobacco sales, which is to apply the usual reasonable-and-prudent person standard) is an attempt to leverage legal protections created for other purposes into an enforcement of his personal preferences. It is similar to the schemes of anti-abortion activists to leverage the (reasonable in itself) concept that a patient should be fully informed and using it to generate various arbitrary hoops to be jumped through before an abotion is permitted.

[Oredigger77]

I used a similar hypothetical in on of the other threads but I’ll try it here since Hamlet may not have seen my other one.

Let’s say that I’m back in college and there is a cute girl in my Prob/Stats class. I’m shy so I don’t talk to her one day I see her out at the local bar, being slightly buzzed I decide to chat her up. She bitches about her roommate and classes and then we decide to head back to my place. Since she looks a little young and demand to see her ID which says she’s 21. Where did I fail to be diligent enough?

I knew a girl in high school who was emancipated at 16, got her GED, and was enrolled at the local college at 17. I also know she had a fake ID. How do you prove that the girl in my previous scenario isn’t my high school friend?

[Hamlet]

@Shot_From_Guns

Go read the threads that started this pitting.

I did. I remain unconvinced that people shouldn’t be held responsible for the repurcussions of having sex, including if their partner is under the age of consent.

@Shot From Guns

You’re telling me that having sex with someone who looks 21, acts 21, and has an ID that for all intents and purposes look legitimate and confirms their age should render you a rapist if it turns out that it’s really, say, a 16-year-old who hit puberty when they were ten, has a really great fake ID, and deliberately misled you?

No. I’m saying that having sex with a person under the age of consent should be illegal, even if one of the partners thought the one who was under the age of consent actually wasn’t.

@Shot From Guns

We have at least **TWO **doctors on this board who’ve stated that it’s entirely possible for a teen or even a pre-teen to legitimately appear to be 18+.

I don’t deny that. Again, you have a serious reading comprhension problem. To no one’s surprise.

@Shot From Guns

P.S. You got my gender wrong, too.

Your kind of stupidity knows no gender bias.

No, **YOU **say they are unreliable. **EVERYONE ELSE **says that they CAN be faked, but that they are USUALLY a reliable method of identity verification. I notice that you *yet again *(that’s, what, at least three or four times now) blew straight by the speedometer parallel, because it yet again proves that you’re a fucking moron.

Also, the fact that you insist on continuing to ONLY make this about men fucking underage females points pretty strongly to your personal dog in this fight. Just lock your daughters up until they’re 40 already and leave everyone else alone.
[/QUOTE]

[Mangetout]

If you’ve never once mistaken a minor to be an adult, you could think ‘I cannot be fooled’

If you’d mistaken one, or many minors to be adults, but never had the mistake revealed to you, you could think ‘I cannot be fooled’

The only ways you could think ‘I cannot be fooled’ and be certainly correct involve unlikely scenarios such as always having access to reliable background information, so you could always verify your impression.
So thinking ‘I cannot be fooled’ either means you cannot be fooled, or it means you indeed can and have been fooled. Not very useful.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

I don’t care if strangers fuck, as long as they’re both consenting adults.

“Courtships” are also not the only way to know who somebody is. Just because you haven’t hooked up with a person before doesn’t mean you haven’t known them already. Coworkers, friends, social groups, neighbors, classmates, etc.

Even total stranger hookups can be done without any rational doubt about age, but the risk is higher, and the younger they look and act, the higher the risk. I don’t have a moral thing about consenting adults. I don’t know where people get that. I just think that people have to be responsible for their choices and know the risks. There is no right to guaranteed, consequence free sex.

[Dangerosa]

@Blaster_Master

I’m well aware of this fact. I appreciate that people lie, and in fact, it ought to be expected to some degree when picking people up in a bar. The difference is that there’s reasonable things someone can do if someone is lying about birth control, STDs, being employed, being sheisty, or whatever. The way a reasonable person knows if someone is lying about age is either from appearance or ID.

For example, a guy meets a woman in a bar, they decide they want to sleep together, and says she’s on the pill. A reasonable guy might suspect she’s lying or might have an STD and, thus, can make a decision about whether or not he wants to use a condom. That is, whether or not she’s lying, it shouldn’t be an issue because he can take reasonable steps to mitigate those circumstances.

Now let’s take a guy who meets a girl in a bar. He sees her and she looks 23. By virtue of being in the bar, the guy also knows that the person at the door (who, at least in VA, cards EVERYONE, no matter how old they look) and has also passed his visual check and verified the ID. If the guy also looks at the ID. What other reasonable steps should the guy take?

Yes, in both cases, the consequences can be completely mitigated by choosing not to have sex with a person one barely knows. Further, like I said, I think it’s dumb in either situation to have sex with someone one doesn’t know well, but I still think there’s a fundamental difference between these two circumstances because the decisions are not equally informed. That is, a guy’s decision about the girl claiming she’s on the pill can make an informed decision based on the failure rate of the condom, her potential deception doesn’t change the failure rate of the condom, and so he is fully responsible for the consequences of that decision. In the case of the girl lying about her age, the reliability of the evidence upon which he bases his decisions is unknowably deceptive; thus, his decision is not fully informed, and as such, his responsibility for the consequences is not the same as someone who fails to take appropriate precautions or does so knowing full-well that she is underage.
Again, I’m not condoning any of this sort of behavior, I think it’s stupid to have sex with someone you don’t know well, even if you’re absolutely sure she’s legal. I just that charging someone with statutory rape in this sort of case, when he’s been knowingly deceived, just doesn’t fit.

I’m not sure how this is any different than anything else a person might lie about in a bar. He says he isn’t married and he isn’t wearing a ring. She says she is on the pill and even has the case in her purse. Yeah, some of these things you can take secondary precautions on - a condom is a good idea for STDs even if you see her take the pill every day for a month. But many of them can’t - you really don’t know if someone is indeed single or not based on what they tell you and if they are wearing a ring. You don’t know someone’s addiction status, or their past criminal history.

Maybe its that I’m female and so every date has always been evaluated as “how much risk is there that this is a crazy fucker and I’m going to end up in a bad situation?” - and cheap sex has NEVER been worth that risk - and therefore I have very little sympathy for “she said she was 18!” Yeah, and he said he just wanted to come up for a “drink.”

[Kimstu]

@Bosstone

And your post here was vastly more reasonable than anything Dio posted in the GD thread.

Oops, sorry about that, I will try to be more Pitworthy. Eh, on second thoughts, no I won’t. Thanks.

@Steve MB

A reasonable and prudent person, presented with an ID that is not obviously fake, may presume that the person’s birthdate is as represented.

Under certain circumstances, sure. If you sell alcohol to an under-21 with a realistic-looking fake ID, for example, you generally won’t be charged. However, I don’t see why that criterion should automatically be assumed to carry over to all other circumstances.

A liquor store has to sell alcohol to its customers in order to stay in business. Nobody has to have sex with strangers (at least, it’s never legal for sex with strangers to be a requirement for staying in business). So ISTM that the law is not being that unreasonable in imposing stricter requirements for not having sex with minors than for not selling alcohol to minors.

[Hamlet]

@Oredigger77

I used a similar hypothetical in on of the other threads but I’ll try it here since Hamlet may not have seen my other one.

Fine, as long as it isn’t the typical “I had good reason to think she was above the age of consent” one that has been beaten to death repeatedly.

@Oredigger

Let’s say that I’m back in college and there is a cute girl in my Prob/Stats class. I’m shy so I don’t talk to her one day I see her out at the local bar, being slightly buzzed I decide to chat her up. She bitches about her roommate and classes and then we decide to head back to my place. Since she looks a little young and demand to see her ID which says she’s 21. Where did I fail to be diligent enough?

Dammit!!

When this happens here in reality, I will fully support a deferred sentence with no conviction whatsoever on your record (assuming you actually had sexual contact with her and she wasn’t 12, you left that out.) You should not have a conviction for that kind of action.

@Oredigger

I knew a girl in high school who was emancipated at 16, got her GED, and was enrolled at the local college at 17. I also know she had a fake ID. How do you prove that the girl in my previous scenario isn’t my high school friend?

Did anyone get convicted for having sex with her? Didn’t think so.

Look, I completely understand that it is completely possible to somewhat reasonably think that someone is not under the age of consent (although I will say that the thousands of examples that are always trotted out in these cases are extremely rare here in real life). And, in those excruciatingly rare cases, the “defendant” should not have to suffer a conviction.

[Bosstone]

@Kimstu

Under certain circumstances, sure. If you sell alcohol to an under-21 with a realistic-looking fake ID, for example, you generally won’t be charged. However, I don’t see why that criterion should automatically be assumed to carry over to all other circumstances.

A liquor store has to sell alcohol to its customers in order to stay in business. Nobody has to have sex with strangers (at least, it’s never legal for sex with strangers to be a requirement for staying in business). So ISTM that the law is not being that unreasonable in imposing stricter requirements for not having sex with minors than for not selling alcohol to minors.

I actually asked about this in the GD thread, but hey, we’ll pursue it here.

Why shouldn’t it carry over? The store doesn’t have to sell alcohol. There is no legal, moral, biological, or otherwise requirement. It could be a soda and candy shop instead. It’s just legal to sell alcohol to adults. It’s also legal to have sex with adults. Quite honestly I see no difference between the two situations; one exists only if you put sex on its own separate pedestal, which isn’t too unusual for the US I suppose.

If you sold alcohol to a minor, then you sold alcohol to a minor, regardless of mitigating circumstances such as a mature appearance and fake ID. If you have sex with a minor, you had sex with a minor, regardless of mitigating circumstances such as a mature appearance and fake ID. What’s the difference? Both laws are in place because it’s assumed that minors do not have the capacity to make wise judgments about what they can do with their own person.

[Kimstu]

@SteveMB

Dio’s proposed solution of requiring an extended traditional courtship (rather than the solution used in all other cases such as alcohol and tobacco sales, which is to apply the usual reasonable-and-prudent person standard) is an attempt to leverage legal protections created for other purposes into an enforcement of his personal preferences. It is similar to the schemes of anti-abortion activists to leverage the (reasonable in itself) concept that a patient should be fully informed and using it to generate various arbitrary hoops to be jumped through before an abotion is permitted.

I don’t think this analogy is quite accurate. If the law were requiring, or if Dio or anybody else were advocating, that people “jump through various arbitrary hoops” before being legally allowed to hook up—you must exchange two forms of picture ID, you must obtain a notarized affidavit from the other party’s employer or educational institution, yadda yadda yadda—I would agree that that’s an unreasonable burden inappropriately imposed to discourage certain types of legally permissible behavior.

But AFAICT, nobody’s actually suggesting that there be any such “extended courtship” requirements. Consenting adults are still free to hook up at the drop of a shoulder strap without any formalities being observed whatsoever, which IMHO is perfectly fine. It’s just that if your hookup turns out to have involved sex with a minor, whether you knew it or not, you’re still on the hook for the legal consequences.

[ivan_astikov]

@Kimstu

(at least, it’s never legal for sex with strangers to be a requirement for staying in business).

One word - Brothels.

Alright, that’s 3, but fuck it. Say a brothel has took on some new staff, they all pass the usual rigorous background checks and a year down the line it turns out one of them was only 15…should everyone who has schlepped her be hunted down and charged with child abuse?

[Miller]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

I don’t have a moral thing about consenting adults. I don’t know where people get that.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say, “They read your posts.”

[Kimstu]

@Bosstone

Why shouldn’t it carry over? The store doesn’t have to sell alcohol. There is no legal, moral, biological, or otherwise requirement. It could be a soda and candy shop instead. It’s just legal to sell alcohol to adults. It’s also legal to have sex with adults. Quite honestly I see no difference between the two situations

AFAICT, the difference is just that the state permits (and profits from) the distribution of alcohol as a commercial enterprise. However, the state repudiates and forbids individual sexual encounters as a commercial enterprise. Therefore, sexual encounters with minors don’t get the “business-friendly” leeway that alcohol sales to minors do.

Again, I’m not saying that these rules aren’t in any way morally unfair; I just think there’s a case to be made that they’re legally reasonable.

[ETA: And this bears on ivan astikov’s “brothels” example too. I would definitely expect that where sexual encounters are a legal form of commercial transaction, penalties for unknowingly transacting business with a minor would be somewhat different.]

[Bosstone]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

I don’t care if strangers fuck, as long as they’re both consenting adults.

snip

Even total stranger hookups can be done without any rational doubt about age, but the risk is higher, and the younger they look and act, the higher the risk. I don’t have a moral thing about consenting adults. I don’t know where people get that. I just think that people have to be responsible for their choices and know the risks. There is no right to guaranteed, consequence free sex.

The problem is, the punishment is extremely harsh. If you’re convicted of statutory rape, you have to serve time and register as a sex offender. That’s a terrible punishment when you’re in your 20s and hooked up with someone else you thought was in their 20s. If you’re going to go with a zero tolerance policy as you’ve been advocating, then the best thing to do is for nobody to have sex (without producing passports or birth certificates) until their 30s. And at that point, you are interfering with consenting adults.