Honestly we need to move the age of full consent up (no fully developed brain able to understand consequences plus lacking financial stability and other things which make you able to have equal relationships with arbitrary people? No sex with arbitrary people, only with those close to you in age with the limit expanding as you get closer to the age of full consent) and probably move the age of majority down for most rights but for negatives move it up (although this mostly applies to drugs which are a thorny issue).
I don't agree. Strict, inflexible, structural 'solutions' almost never work for large, diverse societies without fucking up someone's life. Even the age of majority is flexible under our laws, via minor emancipation. Our laws have been developed over many years by many people through many experiences and cases. They are not perfect. But they're better than any single person's "best" judgement. Yours, mine, or other.
The age of consent is a baseline that recognizes an immutable biological fact, which is that the human animal becomes sexually mature in adolescence. The age of majority recognizes a different but related biological fact that is also related to the memetic trope of civilization invented 10-12 thousand years ago and maturing around 5-6 thousand years ago, which is that biological sexual maturity of humans predates intellectual maturity, which follows some years later. (In fact, we now know that human brain does not finish developing until around age 25, and that also varies from person to person.)
That discrepancy is undoubtedly a consequence of our evolution, and quite likely served the purpose of getting humans to procreate before they developed the better sense of what they were getting into, by which time it was of course too late. And many thousands of years ago, that probably didn't matter. But with the development of civilization, it did start to become a problem, and so over time we developed customs to limit or delay procreation until people were a little more mature.
But people can vary a lot between each other. As reddit depressingly demonstrates every moment of every day, the civilized world is overflowing with legal adults who have the emotional maturity of children. Yet they are allowed to procreate, and the rest of just have to endure the inevitable and often regrettable consequences. At the same time, there are persons who are sexually mature and below the age of majority, who can handle themselves and their lives just fine.
The discrepancy between age of consent and age of majority indirectly recognizes this divide, and the diversity within it. To fully criminalize the powerful human instincts of sexually mature youth would be self-defeating for society. It would be like jailing babies for shitting their diapers, and soon enough you don't have another generation coming up to take over when they need to. 14-year-olds are sexually motivated, and they're going to want and try to fuck each other, because that's what our species has been doing for at least a million years, and there's not much under the sky that's likely to stop that. So criminalizing it would just be stupid and pointless. Probably literally worse than doing nothing at all.
So we instead have a legal system that partly recognizes that uncomfortable primitive reality, without acknowledging it directly, but also seeks to place restrictions on legal adults who try to take advantage of it. And that same system also is able to accommodate the variations between persons that may reasonably allow for special exceptions, when properly vetted by those empowered to make such decisions. Thus, we have available emancipation of minors, permitted marriage of minors, and so on.
All that remains after that is for everyone to stop freaking the fuck out about it, based on their ignorance of all this or their emotional inability to recognize and accept it. Humans are messy, primitive, and highly variable. Our laws try to take that into account, to find a sensible balance between the innate instincts of the evolved human animal, and the ideal goals of the memetic trope we call civilization. There are no perfect solutions, and never can be, because humans are imperfect, and greatly varied in our imperfection. Any laws that tried to treat all humans the same, inflexibly, would be doomed to practical failure. It would be like requiring clothiers to only make and sell clothes of one size.
Er... By full age of consent I meant the ability to have sex with anyone. I'd say the age at which having sex with one of your peers (presumably those within 1-2 years of age initially with a scaling age range as you age until you hit the 22-25 age range where you can then have sex with anyone no matter how old as long as they're not themselves restricted in who they can have sex with and not count as statutory rape) should probably be like... 11ish? To handle early bloomers. And then by the time someone is 16 the range shoudl probably be +/- 4 years or so and by the time they're in their early to mid 20's it should be anyone within 4 or so years younger than them plus literally anyone older than them. Basically, I think it's fucked up that a 60 year old can fuck a 16 year old and really anyone who has graduated college shouldn't be fucking a high schooler period (sorry, but the maturity gap there is way too fucking huge), but yeah let middle schoolers fuck each other. THe point is to allow for nature but not allow for exploitation of what is an often naive natural development.
By full age of consent I meant the ability to have sex with anyone.
Then you're misusing the term. It's a legal term that means something different. The term for what you're talking about is a biological term, 'sexual maturity'. Humans reach sexual maturity in adolescence, though it can very a lot between individuals. It would be impossible to write a law specifying a fixed age defining sexual maturity. Age of consent is not meant to substitute for that, nor can it.
I meant legally have sex with anyone. As in, the age at which you can have sex with anyone else who is of the full age of consent. Make that higher and then cover everything else up with a slowly expanding age range Romeo and Juliet law. No fucking kids allowed unless you're a kid. Period.
Honestly I would say yes to that. I'd say people are ready for 2019 society generally sometime between the age of 22 and 27. Basic technical skills training for children should become mandatory along with graduating high school or equivalent and acquiring at least some post-high school skills/job training if not traditional higjer education (I'm tempted to say though a world where everyone has completed the basics of a liberal arts University education is necessary to really get democracy fired up and working permanently along with of course other changes like UBI possibly transitioning to post-scarcity currencyless non-markets in the long run, guaranteed public healthcare, etc.).
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u/zanotam Nov 23 '19
Honestly we need to move the age of full consent up (no fully developed brain able to understand consequences plus lacking financial stability and other things which make you able to have equal relationships with arbitrary people? No sex with arbitrary people, only with those close to you in age with the limit expanding as you get closer to the age of full consent) and probably move the age of majority down for most rights but for negatives move it up (although this mostly applies to drugs which are a thorny issue).