From a more practical (heh!) angle, wouldn’t it also be hazardous to have sex with corpses – diseases, bacteria, various infections, etc?
Embalming is really only enough to make the body presentable for the funeral – it’s not going to last forever. In fact, I don’t think it’s going to last past a week. Not to mention those chemicals aren’t exactly meant for bodily consumption, at least not for the living.
Sure. The same goes for bestiality, it’s a good way to catch new and interesting diseases.
It is one thing to be sexually attracted to minors. It is something else to indulge in the attraction. The priestly pedophile scandal demonstrates that people can be durably damaged by sex with adults when they are below the age of consent. That is why sex between an adult and a minor needs to remain illegal.
About 30 years ago I was a member of a gay libertarian group, and in one of our meetings our guests were from NAMBLA. I think there were three guys, and they immediately struck me as three of the strangest men I had ever met. I didn’t get any kind of gay “vibe” from them, nor straight for that matter. Just strange.
The one thing I remember them saying is that kids today are so knowledgeable about sex from an earlier age, and reach puberty earlier, so the “age of consent” needs to be reduced. That a 15-year-old is perfectly able to consent just like an adult. I agreed with them, and I do support lowering the age of consent.
But one of the guys went on to say that there should be no age of consent, that as long as the kid is not injured, and the interaction is loving (yes, that’s the word he used), no age should be considered too young. To this day I have a really hard time understanding how anyone can have this opinion, but apparently some people do . . . if only by thinking with their genitals and not with their brains.
The thing is, if a few people have that idea today, it’s altogether possible that some future society will agree. Within my own lifetime, homosexuality was considered as unacceptable as pedophilia is today. When I was a kid, NOBODY was saying it was ok to be gay. And it was only a century ago when women weren’t supposed to expose their ankles in public, and even today there are places where women are not considered capable of giving consent . . . and other places exist where 13-year-olds are considered adults. There is no way to predict the future of sexual mores.
Well “Adult” is an arbitrary term. Who is to say that 16,18 is the right age to start having sex. Why cant it be 12 or 13? Biologically the body is mature by then. The age limits for when sex is OK fluctuates throughout history. We can expect them to change up or down in the future
The issue isn’t consent (I disagree that children are incapable of consenting to anything, despite the legal view) - the issue is *informed *consent, which I don’t think a prepubescent child is capable of in regards to sex any more than they are in regards to legal contracts.
Isn’t this how they suspect HIV moved from monkeys to humans? Some lonely monkeyfucker out in the jungle got a piece of the wrong kind of tail.
And I don’t see anything wrong with the North American Marlon Brando Look-alike Association.
That’s one theory, yes.
nm
I think that “informed consent” is what people (other than the aforementioned NAMBLA-type advocates) generally mean when they say “consent” in this context.
But possibly I’m unclear on the fine point you’re getting at here, or else have been giving too much credit to a lot of other folks.
It’s a socially defined term, it’s changed over time, and people can reasonably disagree about what it means. I agree with all of that. But what’s been constant in recent history is that people think maturity is important and that at some point there is a dividing line between adults and children.
Nobody knows for sure, but people do eat monkeys and I daresay that’s more common. I have to think that was a more likely route. I mean, there’s gotta be someone who would screw a blue whale if he could hold his breath long enough, but a chimp can’t be that tempting if you’ve seen the kind of damage they can do. They’d have no problem dislocating your shoulders, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want to give them a chance to put their hands on anything more sensitive.
I thought someone got bitten.
I think it’s a mistake to assume that all child molesters are acting out of sexual attraction. A pedophile is, by definition, a person who is sexually attracted to children, but a person might molest a child for other reasons.
There is no way I’m spending my weekend looking up studies on child sexual abuse, but based just on having heard about various instances of child molestation it seems there are people who sexually abuse children for some of the same reasons people who physically abuse children might beat a child: they want to hurt the child, they want to hurt another adult by hurting the child, or they want to feel powerful.
Or there could be somebody who molests out of an-out-control desire for sexual gratification without particular sexual attraction to a person being prepubescent (but not repulsed by it) or, a little more hypothetically, you could have a molester who does so out of an extremely, extremely skewed view of right and wrong and somehow feels they’re doing something “good” for the child.
All molestation sans pedophilia.
