"Ephebophiles"---sting operation

Great Debates
21

Wow, you guys know me, don’t you? :slight_smile:

I lost my virginity at age 16 to a 21-year-old friend of mine. This is an event upon which I look back with unalloyed gratitude and satisfaction.

I believe that age of consent laws are not a good basis for determining whether a sexual act was an assault. According to the laws of the land, what he and I did was legal. However, if I had chosen to do the same thing in a district in which the age of consent laws were different, he would be considered to have assaulted me. Sex in Montreal is consensual; the same sex at point B is rape. That makes no sense.

If we had chosen to have anal sex, that would also have been illegal, if I’m not mistaken. In other words, I was old enough to consent to a blowjob, but not old enough to consent to get fucked (or to fuck, for that matter). That makes as little sense.

I’m trying to find a cite for this, so it’s not quite accurate, but I believe I have the salient facts, to wit: a young guy in the US midwest (I think he was 19) had sex with his 17-year-old boyfriend. They got found out. He was arrested and sent to prison for some time. He’s now a registered sex offender. That is an injustice. By the time I was 17 I had had sex several times already, often with men older than I, and I can state categorically that none of those encounters were coercive in any way. I see no reason to believe that 17-year-old males in the Midwest are less mature somehow than 17-year-old males in Montreal. (You take the jokes from there.)

Certainly, it is important to prevent and punish coercive sex: sex in which the person is too immature to consent qualifies. Sex without consent is rape, whether the lack of consent takes the form of refusal or insufficient maturity.

But the danger of age of consent laws is that we can become fixated on the age itself. The age can only be a shorthand, a rule of thumb, an approximation for the time when one becomes aware enough and has a strong enough character and will to be able to consent to sex. There are 16-year-olds who are mentally and spiritually capable to consent to sex, and there are 20-year-olds who are not.

In my view, if the young person knew what they were doing, and consented, there is nothing wrong. Whether they can consent is a matter of psychology, life experience, character, and intelligence. It is not a matter of a number on their birth certificate.

When dealing with something so critical and inflammatory as sending someone to prison and tarring them with the label “sex offender,” determining consent via birth date is terrifyingly facile. It’s an artificial imposition of precision upon a fluid reality, a true/false answer to an essay question, and it cannot help but lead to injustice.

22

Originally posted by Hazel

  1. Mr. Suave is a guy who wants to rack up high numbers; that is, have sex with a lot of partners.

  2. If you could interview all of Mr. Suave’s former flames, you’d probably find that some of those who wished they’d never met him were in their twenties at the time of the relationship, and some of those who were 14-17 at the time will smile and say, “Mr. Suave? Oh, yeah, I remember him; we had a great time.”

  1. The ephebophiles that I have been observing are not Mr. Swave’s (alphas), they are Mr. Sleeze’s (betas).

  2. The 14-17 year old females that I have been observing all possess the traits of beauty, youth, and intelligence (alphas), and possibly some of them are unused.

I am not a card carrying Eugenicist, but I am a parent of two alpha daughters, and I do not think that the parents of alpha females like their daughters mating with beta males. I also do not think that these females have had enough life experiences to determine an alpha male from a beta male.
Also, I do not think that parents want their daughters mating with males that are old enough to be their parents.

Using David Buss’s book “The Evolution Of Desire” as a reference, I do not recall any females desiring to mate with males old enough to be their parents, much less, males with beta male traits.

The problem as always, every parent wants their daughters to mate up, not down, and as I have stated before, Alpha males are a limited commodity in a zero-sum environment.
jesse

23

jesse morrison, from reading your last post, it’s now unclear to me if your objection is to post-pubescent, legally underage females “mating” with beta-males, or with any older males.

Frankly, your couching your discussion in terms of “mating” and alpha males is a bit unusual.

But let’s see if we can unravel it. Do I understand you to say that, if the male involved with a sixteen-year-old girl is 25, physically fit, the owner and president of a seven-figure company, and has all his teeth, your objection to the sexual union vanishes?

  • Rick
24

Why did you include the phrase “postpubescent”? If age is irrelevant, why is whether someone has breasts or not relevant? Would having sex with a fourteen year old who is menstruating be okay, but not with one that isn’t?

P.S.
jesse morrison, you seem to not have a completely solid grasp on reality. Perhaps instead of concerning yourself with the lives of others you should address your own issues.

25

Originally posted by Bricker

  1. From reading your last post, it’s now unclear to me if your objection is to post-pubescent, legally underage females “mating” with beta-males, or with any older males.

  2. Frankly, your couching your discussion in terms of “mating” and alpha males is a bit unusual.

  3. But let’s see if we can unravel it. Do I understand you to say that, if the male involved with a sixteen-year-old girl is 25, physically fit, the owner and president of a seven-figure company, and has all his teeth, your objection to the sexual union vanishes?

  1. My last post was directed to Hazel, she left out the Mr. Sleez’s. I am still against adults mating with underage adolescents. If anyone does not like their state laws on age of consent, then they should go thru the proper channels to change the law.

  2. Mating, alpha males, and beta males are commonly used terms in scientific journals on human behavior. Alpha females, and beta females are less commonly used for obvious reasons.

  3. My objection does not vanish, but if I had to make a choice of which male I would hope that my daughters would choose, I would choose the Alphas over the betas, and so would you.
    jesse

26

I doubt that Mr Sleeze is interested in “mating”. He is ineterested in copulation certainly. But I find it highly unlikely that his objective is to impregnate these women.

If Mr Sleeze is having consensual sex with many partners, wouldn’t he then by definition be a superior male?

27

jesse morrison, I apologize - but I’m still unclear as to what, precisely, you wish to debate. Your OP seems to suggest that the resources now being spent in prostitution enforcement would be better spent going after adult males who seek sexual relationships with teenage females - especially if the adult males are “beta males” as opposed to “alpha males.”

This is kind of cat-herding proposition, since there are several broad areas, all of which lend themselves well to some debate.

(A) There are those that argue the law is not a valid yardstick to measure the “rightness” of a particular relationship. In support of this, posters such as matt_mcl and tracer have suggested that different levels of maturity amongst teens mandates against a “cookie-cutter” approach to deciding the rightness of a particular relationship. In addition, tracer points out that the age of consent laws vary dramatically from state to state, suggesting that, at least to some extent, sexual contact between teenagers and adults is malum prohibitum (wrong simply by virtue of being illegal)rather than malo in se (wrong in and of itself). Before accpeting the proposition that resources should be devoted to fighting the problem, it seems to me you must build a case for the seriousness of the problem.

(B) Your proposed sting operation has a number of practical flaws. Prostitution is more of a crime of opportunity = that is, you can place your decoy on the street and she’ll start getting unsolicited offers in a matter of minutes. You can thus do a complete sting operation, netting many johns, in one evening. Moreover, since both the john and the prostitutes are committing a crime, you can vary the tactic – sending in undercover male officers to get solicited, and female undercover officers to pose as working girls.

But the “coffee shop pickups” you describe seem much more involved. Perhaps times have changed, but in general, I don’t see too many high school girls hopping into bed with a smooth-talkign guy on fifteen minutes’ acquaintance. Undoubtedly these adults are spending time and showing interest and concern - be it real or feigned - in their victims’ lives. “Stinging” this type of operation would involve an investment of weeks or months.

It also is susceptible to problems of entrapment. The working girl on the has committed a crime the moment she proposes a payment from the decoy for a sex act. This is not entrapment. Building a relationship of sorts with the coffee-house rake will require the decoy to act friendly and interested, crossing the line from passive observer to partner in crime. In general, the government is not permitted to create the opportunity for the crime, encourage the actor to commit the crime, and then arrest him for falling prey to the government’s inducements.

Which general objection do you wish to tackle first?

  • Rick
28

Originally posted by DocCathode

If Mr Sleeze is having consensual sex with many partners, wouldn’t he then by definition be a superior male?

He could possibly be superior at deception. Using deception to attract females is not an Alpha Male fitness indicator. Alpha Males have no need to use deception, they can out compete their beta male competitors by using their Alpha Male fitness indicators. The problem is that unexperienced teenage females do not know when they are being deceived, also, Alpha Males are outnumbered 4 to 1 by beta males, using the 80/20 law.

Email Ruth Bass, and ask her about Alpha Males, and their fitness indicators, to get a female perspective.
jesse

29

I always feel conflicted about this issue. I’m a straight male, and practically all of my sexual experience from the age of 15 to 18 were with adult women. (A 23 year-old and three women in their thirties.) At no time did I feel like I was victimized by any of these women-- I was very attracted to them and would have been upset if any of it had negative consequences for them. If I hear about a man in his thirties having consensual sex with a boy in his mid-teems, I have a knee-jerk “something’s wrong there” feeling about it. Isn’t this largely cultural conditioning? Nothing was ever a “secret”, and the only repercussions we had were the occasional snide remarks about “cradle-robbing.” If the relationship is truly consensual, is a heterosexual male teen given more freedom in this regard than a gay or lesbian teen, or even a het girl? If so, how can this be justified?

30

Superior traits and genes are those that allow a creature to survive and mate with the most partners. If Mr Sleeze can have sex with more women, he is more fit. The technique-be it deception, displays of strength, demonstrations of the ability to provide-is unimportant. The result is the only indicator of genetic fitness. Read Origin Of The Species By Chuck Darwin, or anything by Stephen Jay Gould.
What is the 80/20 law? I would appreciate a quick definition of that as well as your definition of “alpha male”.

31

I think you answered your own question when you said:

However, there is some evidence that it is becoming less acceptable for boys to have sex with older women. Remember Mary Kay Letourneau?

jesse, you seem to have an odd basis for this debate. For what reason are you so interested in this topic, and why are you spending so much time “observing” those you think are commiting this “crime”?