Lately there’s been a lot of teachers in the news for underage sex. I think its a huge waste of court time and an unnecessary punishment.
Sex with men is different then it is with women. Obviously guys don’t get pregnant. Also guys aren’t nearly as sentimental about sex. A 16 year old girl just reacts more strongly to a love affair. She’s really in love and vulnerable. To put it crudely, sex for young guys is one step above masturbating.
It wasn’t that long ago that some fathers took their sons to prostitutes. Learn how its done. No woman wants a clumsy inexperienced lover that will prematurely ejaculate before he even gets it in. Guys are expected to know how to please a woman. It takes experience.
Whats says the great and wise SDMB? Should the sexual age limit for men be 16?
This is just one typical example. The man was 17 and woman 27.
It’s statutory rape. It’s about a line the law has drawn to say that “from age X downward, a person does not have the cognitive ability to understand their actions with regards to sex and sexual relations.” It’s about protecting the minor child from being taken advantage of. Yes, even if some of those kids really really want it and some of those kids will not, in retrospect, have emotional damage that results from the actions of the adult.
It has nothing to do with whether a person gets pregnant or the sentimentality of the actors involved in it.
There are several different issues you have going on there. Let me say this - No matter the gender or age, sex between teachers and students is always a problem for very simple reasons. A teacher cant accurately assess a student’s performance if they are having sex with them… And even one can claim they can, they are an exception, not the rule.
By the way, your poll is a pretty stupid question. First of all, the point of your OP is that boys and girls are different, which isn’t even hinted at in your poll.
Second, about half the states ALREADY have statutory age limits of 16…for boys and girls. Heck, some have it at 14 (which is ridiculous, IMHO, but there you go).
ETA:
Also, it appears the ones who had it at 14 have since changed it according to this link.
I think there should be no statuatory rape as it’s currently defined (although the definition has improved over the years with Romeo&Juliet exceptions). Below a certain age, which is not 18, consent is impossible. However the idea of having sex with someone a reasonable person cannot determine is underage is a problem, as well presuming that 16 and 17 year olds cannot consent. I wouldn’t weaken the laws much, but remove cases where consent is clear to a reasonable person.
Traditionally women weren’t prosecuted for sleeping with younger guys. It may have been technically illegal but it just wasn’t prosecuted.
That changed in the 80’s. Equal treatment for both sexes. Even though the issue of pregnancy is so obvious for women. No parent wants their teen girl knocked up. It’s the parents that will have the burden of raising that baby. Thats why its illegal for adults to sleep with a teen girl. Plus you don’t want some 25 year old jerk with a shiny car seducing and marrying your teen daughter. It can wreck her life before it even gets started.
It’s totally different for men. Young guys just aren’t as sentimental. I certainly wasn’t interested in marriage until years after college.
Guys also grow up playing with fire trucks and six-shooters. Girls get barbies and play-skool kitchens. If, as men, we were told by society that our goal in life is to find a good woman and marry her and that failure to do so would mean , perhaps these teenage relationships that you think young men shrug off would be a little more scarring. (Note: I don’t claim that young men are less traumatized as teenagers or that there is no biological reason why one gender might feel the effects of such a relationship harder, but that it’s certainly more complicated than the OP lets on.)
And more to the point, if someone steals 20 dollars from me, even if I’m ok with the theft, it doesn’t make it right.
But, they can get their partners pregnant. Sex between a minor and an adult that results in a pregnancy is problematic even if it’s the adult who actually gets pregnant.
This may have been true for youm and it may be true on the average, or true for more boys than girls, but it is not always true. There are some boys who are very sentimental about sex and love, and some girls who are not.
OP: What if the adult and the 16-year-old were both male?
The problem isn’t with the ages, it’s with the power/authority differential. The age of consent in many states is already 16 or lower, so that’s not going to fix the problem. I think it’s wrong for teachers to have sex with students, no matter if the student was 18 and the teacher was 22. That is a perfectly allowable age gap for 2 college students. But the fact that one is a teacher means there’s an authority gap. Professionals should know better than to shit where they eat.
A lot of people in this thread are zeroing in on student-teacher relationships. I think that may not have been the OP’s intended focus of discussion. FWIW, those sorts of relationships are a bad idea even when both parties are consenting results, e.g. a college student sleeping with his or her professor.
So what about relationships with no official superior-subordinate status like that? What if a minor child is getting it on with his friend’s mom or dad?
I got bagged by a lady I was babysitting for when I was about 14, I think she was about 36. Looking back on it I think it may have changed the way I became attracted to woman. I was always attracted to older mature woman, most of the women I found myself attracted to were very similar to her in a lot of ways. I quickly became disenchanted with girls my own age and found myself hanging out in bars that didn’t question my ID several years before I was legal to drink. Not aware then but looking back I think it did have negative affects on how my life progressed.
Relationships with an unequal power dynamic are always questionable. A teacher-student relationship is clearly a no-no, no matter who is involved. It’s not even okay for university professors to sleep with their grad students. You don’t sleep with people you have that much power over.
The essentialism here is nuts. Plenty of teenage boys have wrecked their life mooning after a girl. Plenty of teenage girls have sex without any emotional attachment. Both boys and girls contribute to pregnancies, and both boys and girls have mechanisms available to them to prevent pregnancy. Both boys and girls can contract life-altering STDs, especially if they are convinced not to use a condom. Sex is a good thing, but it needs to be entered into freely, without pressure, for mutual enjoyment.
Statutory rape laws are not about protecting sweet girls from being knocked up or having their feelings hurt. It’s about not allowing sexual predators to have sex with kids. Nobody should having sex with kids. Nobody should be having sex with their students.