You are not discussing what I have written. Forget that I mentioned Islam and just imagine that this is a new law someone is suggesting to replace the age of consent. This would help you think.
I don’t disagree that it’s different, but that’s just not what the word is trying to say. The word has a meaning, and it doesn’t care that 15 year old are different from 19 year olds. Even if the difference is “non-arbitrary” that has no bearing on the word ephebophile.
And, just to reiterate: it refers to attraction, not to the social implications of that attraction. People who are ephebophiles are attracted to kids/people in that age range. It’s a word that describes different people, and there can be different outcomes.
If you want to say “someone who wants to have sex with someone who is so young that it is sorta inappropriate for various reasons”, then, well… you’re just going to have to say that.
Or we could make up new words. How about “inappropriatophile”…? 
But it also doesn’t mean what the op describes, which is having a superficial physical attraction to a woman who is physically impossible to differentiate from an older woman, and who is being presented as such. For ephebophile to mean anything, it must mean being attracted to individuals because of their age, not despite it. And when describing orientation, we generally assume a level of preferential attraction stronger than visual appreciation . . .we generally mean “strongly preferred sexual and romantic partner”
Getting off to Traci Lords movies doesn’t make you anything. No one has to defend 40 year olds trolling chat rooms for high school sophomores in order to defend their own arousal at the sight of an old porn film…
Yeah, and the father probably clubbed her in the head and dragged her away first. Want to go back to that, too?
I’ve been one of those for decades!
The problem is the second part. Most parents are pretty decent and have the best interests of the child at heart. However there are some who really don’t care at best and are actively abusive at worst. There has to be some protection for kids (boys as well as girls) in cases like that. An admittedly arbitrary and imperfect AOC law is probably the best we can do.
(There should be Romeo and Juliet laws though. No 19 year old should go to jail or be a sex offender for having sex with a 16 year old.)
I also question whether “biological maturity” if that’s code for starting your period. The skinny sixteen year old who hasn’t had her period is not less ready for a sexual relationship than the ten year old who has.
Do we actually live in a culture where it’s common to “hypersexualize” pre-pubescents?
How many people have you met in your entire life who put their small children in kiddie pageants? I’ve never met a single one. It’s a tiny fringe thing, something probably fewer than one percent of people are into, and which derives such fame as it has mostly from the fact that it’s held up as being a total freak show.
An attraction to Jewish women? That’ll be me. (researching) Oh. It’s not that. Instead it’s creepy instead of just being the Impossible Dream.
You don’t get off THAT easily, Bucko:
Nope. That is one very important reason. Probably the single most important reason. It is an act that they do not have the necessary power to resist and reject. It is predatory. But it isn’t the only, exclusive reason…young children aren’t physically and psychologically prepared for sexuality is also a reason it shouldn’t happen. To dismiss it as “not a problem” is wrong-headed.
There can be more than one good reason for something.
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** spends some time considering your response **
I think that when I tend to consider the possibility of young children and sexual experience, I’m envisioning the things they might do with each other. (As I said, I think older people getting sexually involved with children is an unfixably unworkable proposition; the older have too much power in the relationship to the point that consent is a meaningless construct; hence, having roped them out of the picture, I’m thinking of two children of equivalent age).
a) “aren’t physically prepared for sexuality”. Usually when I encounter that phrase (or other versions thereof) it’s referring rather specifically to girl children’s physical capacity for penis-in-vagina sex and furthermore most of those discussions are about girl childrens’ lack of physical accommodation to a male ADULT’S penis for penis-in-vagina sex. Let’s clear the mindspace of adult males and their penises. Are young girls physically unprepared for penis-in-vagina sex with boys of the same age? Yeesh, is that likely anyhow? OK, maybe now I’m the one assuming children to have less of a specific sexual nature/appetite than (some of them) do… just because my sexual interests and nature and whatnot hadn’t gotten to that point until I was at least 15 doesn’t mean that’s true of all children, so… hypothetical pair of 5th graders, 11 years old, they want to “go all the way”. The question being whether either of them, or both of them, is physically incapable in such a way as to make them vulnerable to physical damage of some sort. ?? I’m not a doctor… honestly I can’t imagine the attempt physically hurting the guy, but if someone were to assert that the girl’s vaginal tissues, etc, would be hurt by the attempt, I admit I would not know otherwise…
b) “aren’t…psychologically prepared for sexuality”. Meh. If two fifth graders want to touch and fool around and nudge each other’s sexually responsive regions as an expression of their sexual feelings, my gut reaction is that we, as older folk, do far more harm trying to intervene and keep them from doing so than they would to to each other as consenting 11 year olds. Again I admit I am drawing from my own memory of what I felt and was ready for and so on and it sure as hell wasn’t penis in vagina sex, not then, not yet. If I had known that I wasn’t some kind of pervert for liking girl shapes down there, how girls are different from boys, and had had the courage to tell a girl about those feelings? If I had had a girlfriend in 5th grade the way I had had in 3rd grade? If she had indicated that she had reciprocal feelings about boys and boy parts? I have no idea if that’s a very likely scenario, but just on the off-chance that some occasional young kids communicate and share openly enough to share that kind of secret, and end up in that situation, honestly I think they’d probably go at it in a healthier way than the average 17 year old, whose approach to sex is going to be far more polluted by standardized scripted stuff. I’m open to counterarguments but I just don’t see it as a worrisome harmful thing.
Stepping back out to my original statement that the ONLY thing making sex that involves children wrong is power differential. Hmm, yeah on re-read I can see how that could read as a claim that the only thing making sex BETWEEN CHILDREN AND ADULTS wrong is the power differential, as if we could somehow wave that away (even in a hypothetical situation) and then be discussing sex between adults and children without a power differential to worry about. That’s not where I was going with that. I don’t think that’s ever, under any circumstance (hypothetical or otherwise) possible. Adults are more ADULT than children. You can’t fix that. It’s an inequality. Umm, so I wasn’t thinking in those terms as far as what makes it bad for children to be involved in sex.
Like this One? :eek: