People like moral clarity. They like a hero vs villain movie. Good vs Evil. So narratives that make them heroes and demonize the other guy are very attractive. American Puritan culture likes to believe that young people are pure, meaning asexual. "kids good. sex bad" Simple.
Money, beauty, talent, self-confidence, belonging to a social network that includes powerful people. There are tons and tons of things that give folks more or less power. Age is one of the least relevant of them.
Our society disempowers them by explicitly denying their adulthood, and barring them from adult spaces. So of course they can't gain experience as adults. They're prohibited from entering that space until they're 18 or 21.
Nature makes animals, and most plants, sexual. People cannot "sexualize" other people. The whole idea is absurd.
Fifty years from now people are going to look back at the primitive idiots of 2024 who actually believed that 16 year olds were small children who must be protected from the magic brainwashing powers of anyone older than them. OMG!!! They might have SEX!!!!
It's appalling that people just throw around vague notions like "Well, I think 18 is pretty young" and think that a law should be based on that. To justify imprisonment you need solid evidence that someone is actually harmed by that type of "crime" (in this case it's lacking)
Puritan right wing fundamentalists realized that most of the population no longer perceived prostitution as evil, so they made a conscious decision to rebrand it as SEX TRAFFICKING. It was a propaganda coup. It was very successful in manipulating the minds of ordinary folk.
You can join the US Army at 17.
You can join the British Army at 16.
Pretending that teenagers are too stupid to control their own sex lives is outrageously dumb.
#TeensAreAdults #nature #biology #teens #teenagers #infantilization #ageist #bigotry #TheHysteria #Respect #SPR860
About 100 years ago Margaret Mead went to Samoa and lived with the people there. The Samoans had no adolescence. It didn't exist. When she described it they laughed at the silly weirdos who live in the USA.
Our culture created teen behavior. It is not innate.
#SPR860
Most of these people mean well. But they don't realize that expanding the definition of the word rape to include a broad swath of things which are clearly not rape, does not help rape victims at all.
We didn't have to create the concept of "adolescence"
We didn't need to cause all the accompanying problems
It is Vile Anti-Teen Bigotry when a young woman who is old enough to work full time, drive a car, pay taxes, have sex, choose a career is called "a school girl"
WTF is wrong with us?!?!
We let 17 year olds join the military FFS, but suddenly when it comes to sex or alcohol they have to be treated like toddlers? That is total bullshit. The deficient brain crap is just an excuse to infantilize young adults. It is used selectively and hypocritically.
Half the replies to this were: "That's ridiculous. No one's oppressing 14 year olds"
and the other half were: "At 14 they have no brains. They're stupid annoying vermin that should be forced to shut the fuck up."
When birds fly around and can reproduce we call them adult birds. Mammals about the same. Criteria are:
size
secondary sexual characteristics
fertility
but over the last 10 or 20 years peeps have decided that none of these normal criteria apply anymore. the new idea is that brain development is the only relevant factor. and not even brain development, only one type of brain cell means anything in their model :-D
The human brain reaches maximum size around age 13.
Any objective assessment finds this fact relevant :-D
The idea that all mammals become adults through a process called puberty EXCEPT humans who have to wait over a decade post puberty for some obscure and mysterious brain cells to grow an extra 0.3% in order to become adults is completely ridiculous.
Do you hate teenagers?
Do you make hateful remarks out them?
Congrats. You're a bigot.
