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Our Weird and Inconsistent Views on Sex and Consent
I have been sitting on this post for quite a while, but the Roy Moore accusations really bring the lie to our stupidity when it comes to teenagers, sex, and consent. In many ways, this involves many issues. It has been my contention for a long time that treating teenagers like kids makes them ineffective adults. Why do we treat teenagers like kids? Because their brains are going through huge developmental changes.
Yet those huge developmental changes don’t keep us from saturating in-utero fetuses, babies, toddlers, and preschoolers with a smorgasbord of information and education: classical music, books, mathematics, languages … you name it, we throw it at them. Why? Because some insane amount of the brain is developed by the age of three or four. Neural plasticity thinks that what’s baked into the process makes kids more likely to succeed in those areas later in life.
Ok, but teenagers can’t? When we talk about what happened to our young adults, maybe it shouldn’t be too hard to show that this concept of adolescence has had a huge detrimental effect on them. They aren’t children. They are adults in training. And everyone knows this. How do I know everyone knows this?
Because when someone brings up teaching teenagers abstinence, we think those stupid fuddy-duddies have their heads in the sand. “Don’t you know they are doing it anyway?” we say, derisively. Hmm … do you think its ok for children to be having sex with children? What’s your limit? When is it to early for kids to have sex with kids? Can we get all Brave New World and go with three-four year olds? Or does that offend your sensibilities a little too much? The Germans did it. We like emulating Europe, right? Oh, but its Germany. They disqualified themselves on moral uprightness with Nazis. So maybe eight? Eleven?
According to one of our members, pediatricians comment with complete neutrality on how she should expect her 11-year-old daughter is having sex. Really? I could have sworn the age was 15. At least it was when I was a kid. I was still playing with dolls at 11. My sex fantasies at that age involved dreaming of a girl in the 1860s, sleeping by the fire in a heavy dress, with some cowboy cuddling her. Everyone is fully dressed, FYI. Boom, pregnant. How’s that for 11-year-olds and sex?
Oh, I had it all figured out by the time I reached puberty. Don’t let my innocent, childlike fantasies fool you. I most certainly was a child at 11. And I’m quite certain I was a child at 13 and 14, too, albeit a pretty mature one. When I was 15, I had a crush on my softball coach. I remember my sister confiding in me on how hot Coach H was. Oh, absolutely, I agreed (I was 16, by then … my sister had just started high school). “Which one do you like?” she asked. <Blush> You see, the coach I had a crush on was the 50+-year-old history teacher who had been coaching softball and teaching for nearly 15 years. My sister was talking about his college-aged twin sons who helped coach.
But I didn’t hit on him. I didn’t flirt with him. I had myself together. Does that mean I didn’t know other students who did flirt with teachers? Oh yes, I did. I also knew girls in high school dating much older men. Willingly. You see, if you accept that they are old enough to be having sex, then you are expecting them to be old enough to make life-changing decisions. But we, the real adults in the room, don’t actually think that. But that is the message you give teenagers.
What exactly is the benefit to making life-changing decisions with a fellow teenager stuck in high school and still having to complete four to six years of college to get a decent job? Are you seriously telling me you think girls (who carry the majority of the risk in sexual relationships) are going to be ok with that dynamic? No. Seriously. Tell me. You really think girls are going to be okay having sex with someone who isn’t financially secure? Girls think guys in high school are stupid and not worth their time.
<Insert a Clueless movie clip here.>
So we came up with these laws of legal consent. We knew young, sexually mature girls would be interested in having sex with older people. So we told the older people, the onus is on you — you can’t do anyone under this age. Different states, different rules. My state is 18, with some Juliet laws at 16. Some states have 16.
So for that moving target of adolescent sexual maturity, we have a legal age. Roy Moore allegedly took advantage of that legal age. And in three out of four cases, he engaged in a chaste relationship lasting several months (according to the girls). The fourth one (with a 14-year-old) is the problem, but the people who are out to burn Moore* (who I know nothing of other that the 10 Commandments and this episode) think all four are the problem.
Some of those people who think all four are the problem would be totally cool with their 16-year-olds having sex with their irresponsible 16-year-old boyfriends. Heaven forbid they share a kiss or two with a 32-year-old man!
These are some weird, bizarre, and completely inconsistent views on sex. And I’m not going to claim any kind of moral superiority here — I’m confused as hell, too. On one had, we have teenagers reaching physical and sexual maturity who haven’t a clue how to be mature because we don’t think they are capable of it. On the other hand, we have cultivated an idea that it is ok for children to be having sex (if you are ok thinking teenagers are children and that teenagers have sex, you are good with children having sex).
I understand the point of these “age of consent” laws — at least I think I do. It’s to protect children who reach sexual maturity at incredibly insane ages, like five to eight. But our teenagers are getting mixed messages. Ask me how I know. (I grew up in it!)
So, figure it out. Do age of consent laws mean anything?
*This isn’t about Moore. It’s about how we talk about each of these cases. Three were perfectly legal, but we want to claim that there’s something wrong with them. He wasn’t their teacher, so you don’t get to fall back on that tired line. Either they are old enough to consent or not.
Published in Culture
There’s a vast unexplored territory between “just fine” and “the moral equivalent of rape.” The problem is that our culture lacks any vocabulary apart from the language of consent to call into question the propriety of a sexual relationship. So we shout that a 14 year old cannot give consent (she clearly can), because while our innate sense of decency recoils at such a relationship, it has become unthinkable that innocence might have value in its own right. I think this may be true especially within today’s vulgar conservatism with its fetish for “adulthood” and attachment to pre-Christian hedonistic ideas of masculinity. Consider that in a more civilized era many women would never reach adulthood by todays standards as men would watch their language around them and protect them both from the horrors of war and the rough and tumble of the market place. The point was not only to protect women; there was also the hope that the feminine virtues would rub off on men so that the responsibilities of adulthood would not harden their hearts completely. Failure to cultivate responsibility in a generation of young men, is a problem. So is pervasive crudity. By my light’s today’s culture is far too “grownup,” that is to say too savage, vulgar and emotionally sterile.
Yeah… that isn’t accurate.
The age when rabbis could open their own “schools” and gather disciples to teach them was 33. Not that that was an adult. Just the age he had finished learning from his own rabbi enough to teach himself.
Jeremiah was also 33 when he started prophecying. I think study bibles get more into this custom when intoducing Jeremiah.
Speaking of revealing, some idiot I heard on the news this morning thinks asking parental permission to date someone implicitly means they are too young to be dating you.
Really? So courtship dating is wrong?
My mom was 18, my dad was 29. Only when I had my own kids did that seem…wow! Strange. Or…not?
I think it’s more strange now because kids grow up much slower than they used to (there’s even a study that proves it). Even with my generation, being in your early 20s meant you were only technically not a kid, but still got treated like a kid by all the adults in your life.
Well, now, that’s just silly. There are idiot parents out there who’ll unwisely say “yes” to the weirdest of men’s requests (one of the weirdest being when mama’s boyfriend wants a go at mama’s daughter, too). But asking parental permission is pretty much orthogonal to what we consider acceptable age gaps. A guy in your own high school asking your parents for permission to take you to the prom hardly means you’re too young for him – it often means you and he are the same age, fer cryin’ out loud.
My grandmother got married at 18 to a man 13 years her senior; she says this was normal back then because of the war.
Re: comment # 61
“So we shout that a fourteen year old cannot give consent (she clearly can)…….”
Gaius, agreed with everything else you said. With this, I disagree.
I’ve known a lot of fourteen year old girls. They were all very much more mature by sixteen. At fourteen, they were so imaginative, so given to wishful thinking, so governed by their emotions that, no, I don’t think, if they had sex, they could be said to have sanely consented to it.
It is worth noting that in 1958, Jerry Lee Lewis, 22 at the time, married the 13 year old daughter of his first cousin.
The country was scandalized. Jerry Lee’s cousin was not too happy about it either.
And how old was Priscilla when she married Elvis?
Priscilla was 14 when she met Elvis (1959) but they did not marry until a month before she turned 22, in 1967. She claims they waited until they were married to have sex. She did move to Graceland in 1963, just before her 18th birthday.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscilla_Presley
How old was Elvis?
I was reading somewhere that early American history, 14 was marrying age and 16 was consummation age. I don’t know how accurate that is.
But the youngest consent laws seem to be 14 for close in age, and likely because they are not updated to our current modes of thinking (reinforced by our infantilization of teenagers).
So, 13 I can see as scandalous. But also,
2nd cousin is the bare minimum to pass incest laws, isn’t it.Heh… I need to correct this. She was 1st cousin, once removed. I don’t think that passes incest laws muster.So he was a double wammy. Not sure how that coincides with Moore or my post, though.
There are places in the U.S. where you can marry your first cousin right now. But it’s not the south, as many would guess. Try New England.
I see now that there is another woman making serious allegations. So, as Emily Litella would say, “Never mind.”
Re: comment # 73
I watched this 5th woman a few minutes ago. With the exception of one unimportant thing, I think she’s telling the truth. I’d be very interested to know how she seems to other people on Ricochet.
My reaction after watching her was “this guy needs to go away”.
You bring up an excellent point, However, a big problem for the older young people is the availability of lots of alcohol and the tremendous stupidity that results. Eleven year olds are not encouraged to chug shots of vodka (hopefully) and aren’t “playfully” dragging a semi-conscious young college freshman up to some guy’s room at a frat or college dormitory.
The eleven year olds also might all know each other, some from back to much earlier days. Unlike those young adults attending college parties who are strangers to one another.
Eleven year olds presumably also see their parents often. College kids are on their own. They definitely need to be told that it is not just the birds and the bees, Sweeties, it is more complicated than that. For the Young Guys: the “friendly sex” you have with a drunk girl could result in a rape charge, and for the Young Women: the drinks you allow into your system could make your life hell the next morning when you find out you had sex with four guys you didn’t know from Adam.
Just feeling a need to make this clear.
This post is not intended to be about Moore. There is another thread for everyone to stay up to date on those happenings.
I know we like to do organic conversations, but I’m thinking my point that I wanted to get out of this post has been lost in the Roy Moore thing. Rather than being a spring board for a good conversation concerning our social behavior, Moore is weighing this down.
In a nutshell, our culture is permissive of teenagers engaging in sex (which is an adult act) while insisting they are still children.
While I think we would benefit as a society by treating our teenagers as young adults, I also think we should be teaching them to wait for sex until they can be responsible for the outcome (which is, actually, treating them more like an adult than being permissive “because they do it anyway”).
When I was 17, my 18 year old boyfriend got a threatening phone call from my father saying approximately the same thing.
I did not greatly appreciate it and it did not force me to break off the relationship. If the 6 months of difference made such a big damn deal to my folks, it just pissed me off that much more. This is how statutory rape laws are abused. He was a great guy, he just happened to be a Freshman in college, whereas I was a Senior in HS. My folks’ problems had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the way that they continually stifled me from the time I was 12 as being somehow overtly sexual (which is nothing I recognized and still deny).
The problem was not the guy, it was me and my own rebellion.
As for shaming someone, that only works when someone has shame. It used to be that a parent could call another parent or just level with the dude. People do not respect the authority of a parent anymore.
That is actually how I am raising my daughter. I am reminding her of the consequences of the act (emotional and otherwise), but I’m also letting her know that the real fulfillment with the act comes as an adult. It is much more difficult to appreciate at a younger age and to have the privacy and maturity to explore it in a way that is not significantly damaging to the psyche.
I hope that it gets through to her, but I’ll just keep saying it and keeping my door open.
I should clarify: by “not the worst” I meant “might be efficacious” when it comes to cowing a younger teenage girl. It also… might backfire. I imagine it would become more likely to backfire as teens get older. Either way, it raises the stakes.
And yeah, emotional blackmail can come from a pretty dark place and have some pretty gnarly consequences.
Oh, I meant shaming the daughter, chiefly. Daughters who aren’t rebellious enough to be immune to shame seem fairly common.
Eleven year olds drinking? Nah, they’re more likely to be doing drugs. See their parents more often? Yuh–and the parents are telling them it’s OK to have sex! We’ll supply the condoms and pay for the Gardasil.
Oh I do agree that boys need to be warned that they’ve left the Arcadian free love Paradise where they cavorted a few short months ago . Before 18, they’re Hansel, just another Babe in the Woods–at 12:01 on their 18th birthday, they morph into the Big Bad Wolf.
Sounds like you’re saying it’s really alcohol they’re inexperienced in. Well hey, let’s start giving them wine with their mac’n cheese while they’re in middle school. That might not be a bad idea, actually, very , ah…Continental...
I just checked back here to @cm‘s excellent post ( thank you, Stina!) and I saw the phrase “moral equivalent of rape”. I object! There is no “moral equivalent”. Rape is like murder, a violent physical attack that damages you physically. Is there a “moral equivalent of murder”?
Gross negligence? Extreme incompetence that causes people’s deaths?
Frankly, I consider sexual assault almost worse than murder; those who are murdered are rarely blamed for their own murder, do not have to go to court to be publicly flogged for it, and don’t get to live through it for the rest of their lives (with the often futile hope that the pain goes away).
No, gross negligence and extreme incompetence are not the “moral” equivalent of murder. If they result in death, they are its physical equivalent: manslaughter.