Wow, you guys know me, don’t you?
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.