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[–] SNOOKI_SNACKHOUSE ago 

I agree there is way too much criminalization of victimless crimes but drunk driving is a shitty example. There should be regulation for the privilege of operating heavy machinery and there is a very clear and well defined issue with driving drunk which involves victims who are not the driver.

As for statutory rape, that stuff gets a lot more complicated. Part of the difference between now and "then" is that we live in a society where adolescence exists and although it is somewhat of a construct, it doesn't mean it isn't real by the nature of us having made it real. You can say "well what is the difference between 16 and 18" and you would be right that it is arbitrary, that there is no sudden "switch" the gets flipped on your 18th birthday. But, we have structured current society to treat 18 as the age of majority and while the age itself is arbitrary, it is internally consistent for the most part. If 17 had been chosen as the year you would generally leave high school and home, then the age would be 17. If it was 22 when you leave high school and home, it would be 22. The point is, the concept of adolescence from 13 through 18 was created and standardized throughout American society, as arbitrary as it may be if you step far back and ask "why 18?"

I have mixed feelings about statutory rape laws because I don't like this notion that men should be forced to check IDs before having sex with someone they met in an adult context but who could possibly, by some crazy stretch of the imagination, be underage. I also don't think people who are 19 sleeping with 16 year olds should be punished, so there should be a buffer. But when it comes to people in their 20s or 30s sleeping with young highschoolers who aren't prepubescent, yet aren't that old, it comes off as predatory. While I'm unsure of how to best divide up the predatory vs consensual sex in this context, I don't think that the stigma is incorrect when you hear about a man who is a bit older sleeping with a 13 or 14 year old even if they have hit puberty. The implication is that this person must scrape the bottom of the barrel and manipulate "newbies" of the adult world into sex because they are unable to meet anyone who has experience because those people can see through their bullshit. I would argue in this day and age, it is extraordinarily rare for someone with good intentions to meet a pre-18 year old adolescent, and part of that is in fact due to the arbitrary nature of dividing society up at the 18 year old mark and thus self-fulfilling but also not as clear-cut as being "just an arbitrary number" because that is just how things are now.

If a couple hundred years ago, a man was introduced to a 13 year old girl as a potential wife while he was in his 30s, that was the custom at the time. People were prepared for childhood to end around 13 or 14 and society was structured without any concept of adolescence, just youthful adults. But now, we do have adolescence and so because society now operates in that way, it leads to any context where a 30 year old is courting a 13 year old as being implicitly corrupted because that is no longer how things are done. Who does this hurt? It hurts the 13 year old. Why now and not then? Because then, the 13 year old's role in society was to become an adult. Now, the 13 year old's role in society is to have an extended period of youth and then hopefully to some degree follow their dreams in their 20s because we live in the 21st century, not the 17th century. So it is lecherous to try and interrupt this for one's own sexual pleasure.

I know that it sounds like circular logic to say "well it's wrong because it's illegal" but I'm not saying it's wrong because it's illegal, I'm saying it's wrong because society is structured differently now and society, not just nature, factors pretty heavily into social dynamics (who would have thought).