RespectTeens

16-year-olds are NOT children. To say so is unscientific garbage. Our young adults have internalized their own infantilization to such an extent that they openly deny the existence of #BasicBiology

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#ScienceDenial #teens #teenagers #infantilization #discrimination #bigotry

If you really want to understand the truth about teens, it's necessary to acknowledge that 'adolescence' is not a natural state. It's something modern society made up. We raised the age of social adulthood creating a gap between it and biological adulthood. That dissonance creates our well-known behavioral issues at that age. Cultures that don't infantilize their young adults don't get those problems.

see: Margaret Meade or Schlegel & Barry.

100 years ago racists wanted to prove that white men have better brains than everybody else. So they measured the skulls of women, Africans, and Jews and voilà! They had "scientific" proof that everyone they hate has bad brains.

Over the last 20 years we've done exactly the same thing with teens and under 25s. We use cherry-picked junk science to "prove" that they are mentally deficient then we treat them like shit.

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This sounds so friendly and nice and supportive

but the underlying message is "You're helpless because you're under 18. Only older people have power. Don't believe in yourself or your power to defend yourself. Look for an older person to defend you."

It's disempowering AF.

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"People who are in their early twenties are estimated to be two and half times more likely to be sexually inactive than members of Gen X were at the same age."

The New Yorker Magazine 2022-04-11 "How Everyone Got So Lonely" by Zoë Heller

It never works to say "In ancient Hebrew tradition 12 year old females are women, therefore we'll uncritically accept that as true"

but as a way of opening our minds, something to consider, what if they got it right and we got it wrong?

This woman says her 11 year old daughters are in puberty.

So in the old Jewish tradition their awkward adolescent phase would last about a year, until their bat mitzvah.

but since she lives in 2022 America they will likely be considered children for at least a decade.

#SPR860

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Statistically poverty, substance abuse, and dysfunctional families often correlate. Domestic abuse is in the mix too. No one can isolate one single cause, because the world doesn't work in the oversimplified way we'd like it to.

Imagine you're a girl in a poor abusive household. There's really not much you can do but pray for a better future. Then you hit puberty, and you become sexually attractive to the men in town. This may be the first power you have ever had.

Some peeps are endowed with the power to physically or psychologically dominate their peers with implied threats of violence. Others are gifted with natural leadership abilities. But not all. Then there's a group that is simply pretty and sexy.

If you are this poor young woman from an abusive family, and by chance, nature gives you a sexy body that men like, why wouldn't you start flirting with a man who treats you nicely and makes you feel loved? And wouldn't it be even better if the man had a job and a car?

Your way to get away from your hellish home on a Saturday night may literally be the vehicle owned by your new boyfriend, but your ticket to a better life could definitely seem like a serious relationship with a somewhat older man.

Young adults (aka teens) from poor families tend to have more unplanned pregnancies than their peers from rich families. There are many possible reasons for that. Better access to contraception being the most obvious one.

Young adults (aka teens) from rich families also have much better access to options for terminating an unplanned pregnancy than their poor counterparts. So statistically teenage mothers tend to be much less wealthy than older first time mothers.

There was a famous study done by Darroch in the 90s. (see below) It shows a lot of what I have outlined here. When California Gov Gray Davis saw the study, however, he ignored all the relevant data, and decided that the CAUSE of all these problems was statutory rape.

His plan was to get the cops & prosecutors to put more of the boyfriends with jobs & cars in prison as a way to solve the teen pregnancy problem. This was, of course, illogical to the point of batshit crazy. Smart people at the time pointed that out.

https://guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/1996/01/can-statutory-rape-laws-be-effective-preventing-adolescent-pregnancy

So people in the 90s screwed up. Big deal. Who cares?

The main issue here, is that Gov Davis's batshit stupid thinking went mainstream, and dominates our discourse to this day. Big TV personalities like Oprah picked it up and spread it generously.

The goofy myth based on contorted logic took on a life of its own. The general public, who never spend a lot of time digging into the research or thinking things thru, started to believe that the causation runs opposite to the reality.

That is to say, people now believe that teenage women dating men 10 years older than them causes them to be poor and show the symptoms of an abuse victim.

The obvious reality is that poverty and dysfunction is what led them to choose that partner in the first place.

Criminalizing a young woman's choice of boyfriend isn't the way to make her life happy and healthy. Incarcerating the father of a young woman's baby is one of the worst things you can do to her and her infant. We need to bring a little common sense back to this discussion.

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Michelle Oberman of DePaul University "drawing a connection between enforcing these laws and lowering adolescent pregnancy rates flies in the face of everything we know about why girls get pregnant...

...and why they choose to continue their pregnancies. The problem is much more complicated than simply older men preying on younger women."

full text: https://www.guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/1996/01/can-statutory-rape-laws-be-effective-preventing-adolescent-pregnancy

#SPR860

There is no age of consent in Afghanistan.

The variable for them is marriage.

Far right politics does this. They want patriarchal control of women's bodies.

They're fighting against the "anarchy" of women having bodily autonomy.

In Idaho and Yemen a 10 year old can get married, with parental consent.

Their ideology is Daddy must control her sexuality until Daddy gives her away to her future husband, who has been vetted and shown to be a good Christian/Muslim.

The Left has a sincere desire to protect children.

They just got so caught up in

Stranger Danger and Sex Predators Everywhere!!!

that they totally forgot what a child is,

and how to honestly assess harm.

So everything they propose is counterproductive idiocy.

#SPR860

Over 400 million people live in EU countries where the age of consent is 14, 15, or 16

so that's a whole lot of normal respect for teens' bodily autonomy.

Civilized countries don't bring the cops in to try to do their parenting for them.

Only really fucked up countries do that

#SPR860

The young woman was 17 and she took the racy photos herself and consensually distributed them to some friends.

All indicators are that it was no big deal to her, to her friends, or even to her parents, who didn't want a federal case made out of it. https://coloradosun.com/2022/08/11/brush-colorado-school-sexting-child-porn/

The young woman is not pissed off at the principal who made a copy of the pics and stored them on a secure school server.

It was not a big deal to her.

The GIANT PROBLEM here was caused only by the effort to "protect" her.

The principal is facing 12 years in prison, and life on the sex offender registry.

I have no idea why the young woman herself was not charged with distributing child porn. She was not 18 when those pics were taken.

We desperately need to lower the age of majority to 16.

We must start to #RespectYoungAdults

Society has decided that young men and women aged 14-20 are in fact children and this massive cognitive dissonance caused a fucking volcano of confusion, dismay, anxiety, and turmoil.

#SPR860

We didn't have to create the concept of "adolescence"

We didn't need to cause all the accompanying problems

#RespectYoungAdults #StopTheHysteria #SPR860

Journalists wildly exaggerate how much neurology knows about brains.

but assuming that a good prefrontal cortex is helpful for good decision making,

a soldier occupying a country w/ a hostile population where he doesn't speak the language, has a desperate need for one.

If the "prefrontal cortex" myth is true, how on earth did we send 18 year olds to war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam?

There is no job in the world that requires more rational thinking than making life or death decisions effecting civilians, all your buddies, and yourself.

but no world government has ever said that in combat they'll only have men over 25 years of age.

Never.

Not once in thousands of years of this obvious problem, has anyone noticed the problem, written about it, or tried to fix it.

(hint: it's bullshit)

but when it comes to sex,

women under 25 who decide to date a rich, famous, good-looking movie star

are immediately diagnosed with the young stupid prefrontal cortex syndrome.

Having romantic relationships

is so much harder than living in a war zone

and being sent into combat every day and trying not to kill civilians, or get killed, or let your comrades get killed...

Gotta have full brain development before you kiss a hot guy. I mean OMG.

#SPR860

Teen pregnancy correlates with poverty. Having a significantly older boyfriend does too. It's actually logical and reasonable. We need to eliminate poverty.

This is from the excellent Hines & Finkelhor meta study.

full text: https://www.unh.edu/ccrc/sites/default/files/media/2022-03/statutory-sex-crime-relationships-between-juveniles-and-adults-a-review-of-social-scientific-research.pdf

#SPR860

Real solution:

A. lower the age of majority to 16 (even runaways need legal rights)

B. decriminalize all sex work (cops should work for the prostitutes not against them)

C. triple the minimum wage (make non-sex work far more attractive and sustainable)

#NotRocketScience

This is a very common, and a very stupid argument.

"they only did that because they had to" seems fine, except that Jacqui hasn't begun to examine whether they wanted to or not.

Why the assumption that the practice was undesirable?

150 years ago people were very unhealthy. Their growth and puberty were delayed. Jacqui's example is bad.

Hunter-gatherers, however, do tend to settle down and have kids shortly after puberty, so around 14 years of age.

Do 14-year-old hunter-gatherers have to do that?

I suspect that most of them want to.

Like what else are they going to do with their time? Travel? See London? They got no airplanes.

Start a career? Maybe advertising.

Their whole culture is designed for raising babies. They've been helping with babies their whole lives.

Their tribes have structures in place to support young mothers to the utmost.

This is our natural state. We lived like this for a million years.

Of course we don't do that now.

But ffs stop pretending that that's not the most natural thing we could do.

Our society has established schools and places of employment which effectively exclude new mothers.

That's why having babies as a young woman is such a bad idea.

Because of the system we created.

That's why we have to fight against nature. Biology is not on our side.

With good sex education, contraceptive access, and free health care plenty of advanced societies do really well at handling happy young adult sex lives without having ten million pregnant teenagers.

Guess which country is really bad at sex education, contraceptive access, and free health care.

#SPR860

American age of consent laws protect no one

and senselessly criminalize the sex lives of innocent people.

Here's an Illinois lawyer explaining...

https://youtu.be/77gR1QFOcz4?t=46

#SPR860

The Hysteria dogmatically claims that age = power and the older party is always to blame for anything that happens.

In this case an unknown actress with no power at all got sexually harassed by a minor 10 years younger than her.

https://kraut.zone/w/ibFy4tuijM1UNxd5WPbcRH

#SPR860

A few months ago I saw a graph showing how many more teens were employed in the 1980s than in the 2000s and 2010s. (sadly I can't find it now)

I think this trend toward teens working less contributes a lot to the hate everybody piles on teenagers.

Back in the 80s young adults aged 14-18 socialized with older adults sometimes. Maybe with neighbors, their parents friends, during church or scouting activities, while cheering for a local football team, but mostly at work. Usually in the service industry.

Restaurants, and retail outlets had staff aged 16 to 65. They mixed. They got to know each other. They communicated. They learned from each other. In those days NOBODY had an official mentor. But everybody had half a dozen unofficial ones.

Chatting about the world with coworkers of various ages and backgrounds was Very Healthy for us. It's so much harder to hate people you've gotten to know. Fewer teens in the workplace is a sad development. It makes our society worse.

Bans on dating people 10 years older or younger are like prohibiting people from going to the bank because they might rob it.

"Letting them in the bank creates potential for abuse"

#SPR860

I've lived in countries where the age of consent is 15 and 16, and the number of teens dating people twice their age is very small even there.

Maybe we should discuss our society's frequent Hypothetical Moral Panics.

In the 80s I talked to a trad who was adamantly opposed to legalizing prostitution. He was sure that such a change would dramatically increase the number of men paying for it. (we have lots of data proving that false)

In the 80s I talked to lots of trads who firmly believed that if we legalize marijuana everyone will be stoned all the time, no one will go to work and the economy will collapse. (we now have lots of data proving that false)

There was a similar panic about the end of all marriages if we let the queers have weddings.

Now peeps are terrified that the State isn't doing enough to police the bodies of young women who might decide to make love to an "age-inappropriate" partner.

It's a simple matter of fact that most 15 year olds don't have sex anyway, and sex being legal or not isn't the deciding factor for them.

A change in the law, quite likely, wouldn't change anyone's behavior at all.

There would be a psychological boost tho'

Lowering the age of consent would send a positive message of "Hey, they treat me with a bit of respect"

#SPR860

Just by looking at her, it's not clear if a little romp in the hay with her makes a guy a sex offender or not.

Imagine your brother, 22 years old, is at a music festival. He gets a little drunk, and meets a hot chick like that, she's a little frisky...

She has to say she's 21 because they officially only let over 21s into the event.

So she and your brother enjoy great sex in addition to the great music and everybody's happy 'till her dad finds out and your brother gets arrested, and the headlines read LOCAL MAN RAPES CHILD

Tatiana was 17 when that photo was taken. She was not a child by any stretch of the imagination. But the Hysteria requires that we ignore reality, and make sure that the entire world thinks your brother is a pedophile sex predator.

#SPR860