Age, sex and maturity.

One of the favorite arguments that people make against sex between adults and children and minors is obviously that children/minors can’t give consent.

My basic response to this is that that’s an absurd claim, consent mostly just means agreement, willingness and any conscious, sentient organism can be agreeable or disagreeable, children agree to do things or disagree every single day.

Almost everyone has seen a child reject food they didn’t like before, even a dog can simplistically consent to eat food or go for a walk outside. If you are conscious, you can agree and disagree.

What they really should say is children lack intelligence and maturity, a greater foresight, i.e ability to plan and think ahead, understand consequences and ramifications of actions, this is true of children until a certain age at least.

But that wouldn’t necessarily be an argument against having sex with children/minors, because a greater future concept is only required dependent on the future consequences of the action we’re discussing, you don’t need to be able to think ahead when you’re partaking in an act that is pretty much harmless/negative consequence-free anyway, so all that’d need to happen would be for the risks of harm in the sex act between the child/minor and the pedophile/adult to be eliminated.

So an example I use is often even if a child doesn’t understand traffic rules yet, that doesn’t mean they can’t consent to ride a bicycle – it depends on the environment, in a safe and harmless environment it would be irrelevant how great their maturation and ability to think ahead is, on the freeway on the other hand, it would become a problem that the child is acting immaturely, the child could get hit by a car.

So it’d be rational to forbid said child to ride their bicycle on the freeway, but it’d be irrational to forbid it in a safe and harmless environment where it has about zero chance of being hit by a car anyway.

Similarly, there would be no reason to say that just because a child isn’t able to plan ahead or even understand much sex education yet, they couldn’t consent to sex.

So let’s say a child does find out about sexual pleasure through the exploration of their genitalia, then reach the conclusion that if it’s fun to rub themselves against a pillow, it would also be fun to rub themselves against someone’s leg, but this child is not too intelligent or mature yet, they don’t really understand much about sexual education and future risks of different sex acts yet.

Is this a problem? No, because in that situation, these risks that the child doesn’t understand don’t even exist, so there’s no need to understand them, you don’t get pregnant from leg-humping, the activity is low-risk to risk-free essentially.

So what’s to take away from this is that whether or not you need a great future concept is highly dependent on the consequences of your actions, lack of foresight is irrelevant if there’s no risk of harm, pedophobes misguidedly expect children to be able to give ”informed consent”, even when there is absolutely no particular negative risk in that situation to be informed about to begin with.

It’s just as ignorant as not allowing the child to ride the bicycle in a safe environment just because it couldn’t drive a car on the freeway yet, they’re overcomplicating the act, so they think you need to be a rocket scientist to participate in it.

Intelligence and maturity are required when there is a clear, foreseeable risk of harm to the activity you want to engage in, sex does not necessarily have such a risk of harm, so you don’t always need to be intelligent and mature in order to have safe sex.

This should be simple enough to grasp, but often times this is not enough, it seems as though the person has some kind of strict puritanical standard and starts to argue that consequences don’t even matter anymore, they keep insisting that it’s just PER SE, always wrong to have sex with the child/minor because the child/minor doesn’t have the ”right” degree of intelligence and maturity yet, so they can never consent by their twisted definition of consent.

• ”They can’t consent!”
• ”The brain develops until 25!”,
• ”Children are NOT fully developed!”

These are standard phrases they just regurgitate ad nauseam without putting any real critical thought into it, because it would lead to a pretty absurd conclusion, which is that ultimately all interactions between children and adults are bad.

If:

• P1: It’s wrong to have sex with the child/minor because they are unintelligent, undeveloped, immature.
• P2: The child/minor is arguably just as unintelligent, undeveloped, immature when they do anything other than sex.
• C: All interaction between adults and children/minors is wrong.

Or:

• P1: It’s wrong to have sex with children/minors because they can’t consent to it because they are unintelligent, undeveloped, immature.
• P2: Children/minors can’t consent because they are unintelligent, undeveloped, immature.
• C: All interaction between adults and children/minors is wrong.

If it’s just fundamentally wrong to have sex with the child as the child supposedly can never consent to anything due to its undeveloped brain and immaturity, then obviously there’s no reason why this can’t just as easily be applied to anything else a child could ever do.

It is proposing a general standard, as they’re saying that the reason why it’s wrong to have sex with the child is exactly because it isn’t fully developed yet:

• P1: Interaction requires a fully matured brain.
• P2: Children don’t have one.
• C: It’s wrong to interact with children.

Saying it’s only wrong to have sex with children due to their undeveloped brains and emotional immaturity but it’s ok to go and eat ice cream with them in spite of their undeveloped brains and emotional immaturity just sounds like special pleading to me.

It’s like saying if you smoke marijuana, you should be arrested because it’s against the law, but when I drive a little too fast, I shouldn’t be arrested although it’s against the law too, if it being against the law is the characteristic stated to make the act wrong, then obviously both are wrong.

If it’s wrong to have sex with children because they are unintelligent, undeveloped, immature, then it’s wrong to do anything else, like go eat ice cream with children as well because they are just as unintelligent, undeveloped, immature when they ingest ice cream.

Whether or not sex and ice cream are the same thing is completely irrelevant, it’s called logical consistency, we’re just discussing the attribute you put on the table as a justification, which is lack of emotional maturity in this scenario, that supposedly matters, even if it’s a danger-free sex act like leg humping where you don’t need to be intelligent to protect yourself against some kind of risk.

This would lead to an actual violation of children’s consent and interests in the real world, because what are we to do if we can’t interact with the child if it’s fundamentally bad because it doesn’t have a fully developed brain yet, what option is left?

• ”The brain isn’t fully matured until 25!!!”

Ah, so what are we to do, lock the child into a basement until 25, keep it chained up there until its brain is fully developed to the point where it can perform consent, to prevent it from being horrifically violated by every single social interaction it ever partakes in?

Or in the context of beastiality or sex with the mentally handicapped (as they use that same argument in that context as well) exile all non-human animals and mentally handicapped humans on their IQ level into a forest somewhere to prevent them from being similarly horrifically violated by participating in social interactions with agents of a higher capacity to process information and sign contracts? They can’t sign a contract in human language so every interaction with them is therefore equivalent to rape!

By this sort of argumentation, if having sex with a child/minor is simply innately wrong because they don’t have the ”right” degree of maturity, we have essentially two choices:

1. Lock the child away until the child is fully matured. Absence of consent makes an interaction wrong, and the child cannot consent ever, because the child is immature.
2. Reject their notion that one needs to be fully matured to engage in an interaction.

This would be the outcome of their delusional belief system, which would ironically result in a massive violation of children’s consent (as in, their real interests, their will) in the real world that they don’t even have any logical consistency with anyway, they just likely don’t even think about it, there would effectively be no way to not violate them by everyday interaction, every interaction with a child is a violation by that standard.

If they reject the notion that full maturation is per se required for an interaction, then we’re just back to the first issue, why do they think that full maturation is required for sex in particular as opposed to other activities that are roughly equally risky, like riding a bicycle?

They might try to cop out of this again afterwards by saying that even if children can’t consent and aren’t mature yet, we still have to make decisions in their interest and it’s ok as long as it doesn’t harm them, this rule about maturity and consent doesn’t truly apply to everything.

But obviously, then they also simply forced themselves back into the position of having to explain why they think that having sex fundamentally goes against the child’s interest and harms them, so that doesn’t work out too well for them either.

So even if someone wants to argue that consent is completely impossible, the fact of the matter is that we still socially interact with children, so they think that it is acceptable to socially interact with children despite them being unable to give consent, as long as we act in their best interest, and then they have to explain why they think that every single sex act a child could ever partake in is harmful, i.e goes against their best interest.

If they say that it goes against their best interest and harms them because they can’t consent again, that obviously can’t be the case, since they already said that children can’t consent to other things either but it’s still acceptable to interact with them in non-sexual manners.

This has the potential to become circular, if they just want to insist that it is harmful because the child is not able to consent, and therefore it is harmful, and it is harmful, because the child is not able to give consent but cannot explain why, the pedophobe is simply guilty of employing circular reasoning at that point.

The child can’t consent to sex! Why? Because sex with children is harmful! And why is having sex with children harmful? Because the child can’t consent, so it’s harmful!

I think it’s obvious that their delusional point that you need to be a rocket scientist before you engage in any sort of sex act is deep down based on some kind of intuition that sex is simply in some way intrinsically dangerous and harmful (as almost none of them would really argue we should keep a child in the basement until it’s matured), which they utterly fail to demonstrate.

No one would argue that a child shouldn’t be allowed to eat broccoli because the child isn’t fully matured yet so that must mean they cannot consent to eat broccoli, that’s because they recognize that the ingestion of broccoli is likely not going to have some kind of harmful consequence in the future for the child, so there’d be no reason to prevent the child from consenting to eat broccoli. But they would prevent the child from agreeing to sex, because they falsely believe that sex in childhood is intrinsically harmful.

It goes back to the fundamental first issue, they are just disgusted by the topic of children having sex, so they think of all the bad things that could happen and that they subconsciously associate with sex in childhood – manipulation, blackmail, force, anal penetration, STD exchange, impregnation, and then project that prejudiced version (of what they think a sexual relation between a child/minor and an adult would look like) onto every case of sex in childhood they see, failing to draw a distinction between harmful and harmless cases of sexual experience in childhood.

Intelligence and maturity are only important factors if there’s some kind of risk of harm to the act that you may fail to understand, if it’s a harmless act, which sex can perfectly be, then it’s completely irrelevant that the child is not a rocket scientist.

But pedophobes falsely, intuitively believe that sex in childhood is a harmful act, so of course they think the child needs to be a rocket scientist to partake in such highly dangerous activity that is in reality probably even less dangerous than many other things we already allow children to do, like riding a bicycle or playing certain sports.

And if you want to claim that it is simply always wrong to have sex with a child/minor due to their lack of maturity regardless of the future consequences of the act we are discussing, just literally because they are unintelligent and immature, then this of course has to be applied to all other activities as well or it just becomes a special pleading fallacy, lock the child in a basement until the brain is matured, because the child is certainly just as undeveloped and immature when they are eating ice cream as when they are having sex, so you should be just as concerned.