This has turned into a rather monster post, so feel free to ignore. If your gunna quote, do so selectively and read to the end if you are going to *****.
@RabbidKuriboh... You reap what you sew dude. You started a thread on a pretty mainstream site about if paedophiles might ever be socially accepted, you are reaping the shitstorm of hate that comes around those issues.
To put it as succinctly as I can: Homosexuality and Underage Sex are in no way similar, despite what social attitudes may be. What happens between consenting adults should be no business of anyone else and definitely not the law. On the other hand, sex with children cannot fail to be rape. If you cannot give consent, then it MUST be rape, and thus if rape is illegal then sex with children must be illegal too.
Personally, I think that those nations with more indepth and understanding laws relating to age of consent, those with 'close age exemptions', have the right idea, especially since I was once a horny kid who was occasionally involved in hanky panky with other horny kids. It shows far greater maturity of society and law makers to go down that route.
However, when you get to the point of adults having sex with children there is almost no way that it could not be abusive, exploitive and generally to great detriment of the kid involved. Even assuming that a one in a million case shows up where a pre-consent teenager and an adult genuinely fall in love, what's the big deal about waiting until they are of age to have sex ? Also, what kinda circumstances come around where kids are hanging around with grown ups enough to actually HAVE that kind of relationship ?
Basically, no matter how grown up or mature kids think they are, they really aren't. We all have a baptism of fire in our first few relationships at whatever age and even at its best it can be very painful when your first love turns out to just be out for some nookie. Add to that the messed up psychological baggage you get from trying to please someone the age of your father.
Finally, on the subject of how emotionally immature teens can be: How hard does anyone 'grown up' (ie someone who has a job, a car, their own house and a reasonable kind of disposable income) have to try to chat up someone in their teens ? I mean, you can do stuff for them that no-one else they ever met could. From the point of view of a 14 year old, you can go ANYWHERE, do ANYTHING, stay up late, buy booze, buy drugs, have all the coolest stuff and generally sweep them off their feet so fast, they don't even know it. It is not hard, if you so wish, to utterly make someone love you at that age.
Hell, I used to do that kinda stuff to totally legal 17 year olds when I was 19, fat, beared, drove a clapped out car and was near on flat broke. But I could take them drinking, or share a few joints and stay up till 3am on a school night. Now I'm a reasonably nice guy, but I'm not going to deny that a few quid well spent can get a man to a great many desirable places. It still works today on 20 and 21 year olds.
Basically, the point I'm trying to make is that kids are naive and innocent (or stupid and easily manipulated if you like) and they are uniquely unprepared for the charms of grown men and women. Nor should they have to be prepared. Kids should have stupid relationships with other kids, and more power to them. People get their hearts broken, and sometimes sleep with people they would rather not have done. But at least then it's a level playing field. Kids doing kids stuff with other kids. Changing that offers dangerous precedent.
If you'll indulge me, I'd like to take you through a thought experiment of the social consequences of the social acceptability of grown men sleeping with 14-18 year old girls. Going much younger than that makes me more uncomfortable than I want to be while discussing this.
So... We've established that its not that hard to nail a schoolgirl if you want to. And to put it in no uncertain terms, a lot of people are going to want to. With our 'real world' eyes, that sounds icky. But this is a world where its all cool. If they're hot and no-one cares, and come pre-uniformed (if not you aren't lurking in the right car-park) what are you waiting for ? Flash some cash, get yourself a hot little girlfriend.
So we have a whole generation of horny teenage boys who absolutely can't hope to compete with grown ups for girlfriends, which leads to them looking at even younger girls, which pushes a generation of only just pubescent girls into relationships with mid teen boys who will settle for anyone they can get. That should obviously be a bad thing. Even as it stands boys are pushing girlfriends to have sex before they are ready, going a couple of years younger still is going to create bigger problems.
Next up, we have a bunch of twenty-something girls who are finding that all the guys their own age are going out with teens because we all know that younger = better in those matters, and that teenage girls are as I mentioned much more naive and open to easy seduction, while a couple of times round the block twenty something girls are gunna make you work for it. That puts those young women dating thirty something guys looking for a wife, which means that either they end up in marriages and with families (which history teaches us leads to unhappy lives) or into short meaningless relationships failing to find anyone their own age who they actually like.
Is this an alarmist vision of the future ? Sure. We all know it wouldn't end up exactly like that, but you open those flood gates and its going to start causing big problems in our sexual politics.
I'm all in favour of kids making their own mistakes, but we have always tempered the harsh sandbox of life by ensuring that they make those mistakes with other kids. We even (somewhat illogically) group kids by age not ability, so until they start moving beyond the boundaries of school they will have friends only within months of their age.
Even the law forgives practically all of your misdeeds as a kid because its all a part of growing up. Does anyone here still hold contempt for their first bad break up ? Chances are that it was someone at your school or within a few years of you in age. Sure it sucks at the time, but its a kind of safe-crappy. It's the emotional equal of throwing up after too much candy. Throughout you recognise that the other party was pretty much like you, and even if they were cool or a little older, they still live with their parents, and chances even the most experienced kid still didn't really know what to do with a partner as you did.
Eventually you forgive them and yourself and remember you were all just stupid kids.
Contrast to children who's first sexual experience was with an adult, who either kicked them to the curb once they were done, or continued to mess with them until they got old enough to escape depending on circumstances. Some of them come out ok, or at least okish. More of them end up with huge baggage, with various flavours of depression being the top of that list, while some are just terrified of sex in general and anyone who would want to sleep with them.
Put simply, society is not going to even let it be acceptable for consent age girls to sleep with much older men. It is also not going to let older men sleep with much younger girls than that. Although some people may think they want to do it, kids are stupid, and society is content with the (frankly true) assumption that men who want sex are the most deceitful people on earth, and they don't get to cruise our school-age kids without getting arrested.
Oh, and why have I kept focusing on men with young women ? Because lets no delude ourselves. That is what we are talking about here. Women don't wanna sleep with young boys, because they have emotional needs and don't appreciate fart based humour nearly as much, and as for same-sex underage relationships, I think the same applies. If you want great sex with a male, regardless of gender, you just don't go for someone under 16. They either lack the practice or the size to get the job done. If your a woman and want to sleep with young girls... Well go you. IIRC that's really hard to prosecute. However, I still think that a combination of sloppy teenage technique and lack of emotional maturity is going to mean you look at college girls not kids.
Why haven't I looked at pre-teens ? Because fuck you that's why. If I think its a bad thing for men to sleep with teens, how do you think I feel about pre-teens. Why are you asking that question ?
To help you recuperate, heres some music *hums 'The Girl From Ipanema'*
