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

!

#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.

!

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.

!

"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

!

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.

!

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's a scene in the Game of Thrones where a man called The Hound finds out where an old farmer has hidden his silver. The Hound promptly robs him. There was, of course, no way to call the police. The state was not there to defend the old man's property. This was a fairly typical problem in ancient and medieval times.

In modern times if Mr Jones kept a bag of gold on his kitchen table, few would try to steal it because most peeps would be deterred by the threat of incarceration. Jones can call the cops. The state sometimes fails, but it sincerely tries to protect Jones' property rights. But even this low level of risk is too much for most people. Mr Smith prefers to keep his money in the bank. The state insures his deposits there. Official channels allow him to access his monetary assets, and he has legal recourse if there is any dispute.

The BitCoin ideology however says that the state should have no role in the financial system. So BitCoiners take their money out of legally existing institutions. They might put their virtual cash on an exchange, the crypto equivalent of a bank, but those have been collapsing as their founders simply stole the money.

So crypto enthusiasts are left trying to figure out how to keep their valuables (which are really just long chains of letters and numbers stored on a computer) safe in their own homes. It's a return to ancient times where everyone has to fend for themselves. Today it's not likely to be a nasty barbarian with a battle ax, but the chances hackers will try to get your crypto wealth thru digital trickery are very high.

If you want to spend the rest of your life trying to stay one step ahead of the hackers who would love to steal the virtual bag of cyber-gold you keep in your living room, go ahead and convert your assets to BitCoin. The vast majority of the population will not join you on your journey back to the medieval stateless Wild West of crypto-finance.

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

Clicked on a title containing an interesting topic. The title ends with "Here's Why" (which is of course a lie. YouTubers don't know. They don't tell you why, and if they did, they'd be wrong.)

I see an attractive extrovert who loves the sound of her own voice. She's not very bright. She reads a few lies from some magazine articles.

She repeats some long ago debunked garbage about testosterone.

She repeats some of the trite old observations like "I find it so interesting that when the woman is older, she's a cougar and that's like cool, but if the man is older then he's seen as creepy" Wow. Fucking Einstein here.

The comments surprised me tho'

Under a vid about young people not having sex, everyone, tons of people were writing their age, sexual history, and why they are or are not having sex.

To me this is totally bizarre. Why the fuck would anyone care? and WTF would motivate you to post that on the internet?

I guess some part of my brain is missing. The part that makes you want to type out your sex life for the world to see in the YouTube comment section.

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

The revival of Puritanism is making everyone yap about the horrid thought crimes that were committed against them.

"I was 12 when a guy thought I was cute and made eyes at me."

Utterly boring, typical behavior is reframed as sexual abuse. Usually facilitated by some extremely vague but negative sounding word like "sexualized"

#SPR860

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