[QUOTE=Thrash the Almighty]
While I never had sex with one of my teachers, when I was 16-18 I did have sex with several women old enough to be my teachers. Every one of those experinces was wonderful, and I have good memories of each. I regret nothing. I certainly was no one’s victim. In every situation I initated the relationship. If I had any hot high school teachers I would have pursued them. No bragging here, just fact.
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But would you have felt the same way if Miss MILF had, by virtue of her interaction with you, become Pregnant Miss MILF, and instead of following your own desires after high school you had been forced to work to care for the unexpected Thrash, Jr? Or if Mrs. MILF’s hypothetical boyfriend had recent experience with a low-budget prostitute, and had passed you a fun case of syphilis through Miss MILF?
Look, every time you have sex, you are taking on a series of risks. If I go out tonight and meet a girl in a bar and decide to have sex with her, I’m tacitly accepting any number of risks and responsibilities: the risk of pregnancy and the attendant responsibility if one occurs; the risk of contracting an STD; the risk that my wife will find out and my marriage will suffer; the risk of experiencing unexpected emotional attachment and subsequent emotional damage. Now, I’ll be 31 this year. I have a wife, a child, and have had a full-time job for a decade. I have 27 years of reading, watching the news, and engaging in social intereactions under my belt. I know what rent costs, what parenthood entails, how to read certain emotional signals; what risk I take on, I take on as an experienced, educated, and understanding adult.
Obviously, when I was - say - eight years old, none of these things was the case. Ten dollars was a fortune. The idea that intercourse can lead to pregnancy and most kinds of intimacy can transmit illness was in my head theoretically, but I had no tools to grasp the meaning of those things. I think we’d all agree that, while I probably could have been easily persuaded to “consent” to have sex with a 25-year-old woman with the promise of a new video game, I was in no position to understand the implications of that consent and therefore it was meaningless.
At some point between eight years old and now, I attained that understanding. When did it happen? Twelve? Fourteen and six days? Sixteen and three quarters? Twenty (which is when I actually had sexual intercourse for the first time)? Twenty-two? Identifying a moment like this is impossible, as it is for all people. It is certainly so that some 14-year-old boys (or girls) are ready to make an informed decision about sex, and that others still aren’t ready at 21. So what do we do? Thrash suggests this:
In a world where justice is dispensed by an omniscient being who can precisely judge a person’s readiness to provide informed consent, this would be a nice system. But we don’t have that sort of world. How, exactly, would you propose “judging each situation on its own merits?” A 28-year-old woman has sex with a 14-year-old boy. Let’s judge it on its merits. How do we decide whether he was ready to consent in an informed fashion, in which case everything is fine, or whether he was not, in which case she has victimized him?
Ask the boy? “Hey, Tommy, do you feel emotionally scarred by this?” Well, I mean, how does he know? I guess you could ask him in a decade, and prosecute then, but that’s kind of silly. “Hey, Tommy, do you fully understand the ramifications of what you did?” If he doesn’t, he’s not going to know he doesn’t, you know? I suppose you could administer some kind of psychological test to every kid from the age of 13 on up, once every six months, to test readiness to consent to sex, and grant the ones who pass a sort of “license to screw,” but that’s not a practical answer.
There is a practical answer, though. You draw a line. You draw it high, so that the majority of kids will fall under it. You pick an age and say, "by this age, most people have sufficient knowledge and experience as to be able to grant informed consent for sex. Some people may have that knowledge and experience sooner, but whereas we have no way of testing for that - and whereas “banging adolescent boys” is not a Constitutional right that we are aware of - we’re just going to say “keep off the grass until the grass is 18.”
And if you cross that line, you get punished. Seems reasonable, practical, and fair to me.
