I don't propose anything very radical. Germany has an excellent age of consent law. We should follow their example. Also 18 is too high for an age of majority. We should lower that to 16. It will have to be phased in, of course. But we can piece by piece dismantle the atrocious discrimination against 16-18 year olds.

There's also an important point about enforcement. In California literally all sex that all under 18s have is illegal and has been for 100 years. but only about half of Californians are virgins when they turn 18. That is a LOT of illegal sex which is never prosecuted. One could argue that the law doesn't need to be changed, we should just completely ignore it as we've been doing, while we work on getting people to accept the fact that teens can have happy healthy sex lives and no one need to have hysterical meltdowns when somebody has an older partner. 

New paper demonstrates why "age verification" is ineffective, harmful for restricting porn access, and most negatively impacts young black men https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/20539517241252129 "even if the system can be made to work, it should not be"

If you do babysitting badly you have a sick, injured, or dead child. If you choose a bad girl/boyfriend you'll have to break up with him or her. Babysitting is a WAY bigger deal.

Google fMRI brain scan controversy.

All the headlines you've read about brain development in the last 20 years are based on garbage science.

She stopped being a child many years ago.

#BasicBiology

Young adults aged 14-18 are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves who they want to go out with. I advocate affording them basic human respect and bodily autonomy. This is not a radical idea.

A: "Sex predators are horrible awful terrible. Why isn't 'predator' a crime?"

B: "Predator isn't a crime 'cuz it's not a real thing. It's a stupid metaphor from the animal kingdom used for fear-mongering which amps up clickbait profits $$$"

The phrase "They're trying to normalize pedophilia!!!" is vacuous nonsense. It means nothing, and only serves to scare the hell out of people.

It's insane and harmful AF.

 A gentle kiss. Great love scene. WRONG!!! RAPE!!! Samantha is raping Mitch. How do I know? She is his boss. So there's a power imbalance. So there can be no consent. So Samantha is a sex criminal.

#SexCriminal #PowerImbalance #SPR860

We see with our own eyes every day. They look and act like all other adults in every way. They do not look or act like 5 year olds in any way.

Dumb clickbait headlines wildly exaggerated what the science really said. (also those studies were garbage and couldn't be replicated)

https://www.vox.com/2016/9/8/12189784/fmri-studies-explained

#SPR860

The infantilization of teens is the  extension of helicopter parenting to older and older ages. It is already completely ridiculous, but trend might still be continuing. Stranger Danger, Sex Predator Panic, and MeToo all merged to create this bizarre intense paranoia over young people having normal natural harmless sex.

If 24 year olds are children, we have A LOT of child labor that must be stamped out. In the USA that's over 20 million people who will be legally barred from normal employment.

It's absolutely bizarre to me that my own culture, just in the last 20 years, has established a strict prohibition on *friendships* outside your own age cohort. It makes no sense on any level, but it's part of the emerging anti-age-mingling taboos.