Intelligence, maturity, consent.

Consent at its core implies agreement and wanting, for your desire to be in accordance with something or not, I offer to give you a cake, you consent, agree, want it, or you don’t consent, you disagree, you don’t want the cake. A simple enough concept.

You cannot consent to get raped or be a slave, that would be what we call an oxymoron, because it innately implies unwanted sex, what might be meant by ”wanting to get raped” is that you want someone to have sex with you who doesn’t care whether or not you want to have sex with them, but ultimately you still wanted the sex, so it wasn’t truly non-consensual.

A common argument against having sex with children/minors, or also mentally handicapped humans of similar intelligence or non-human animals (beastiality) is that they cannot consent, because they are unintelligent and immature.

Intelligence and maturity of course have nothing inherently to do with consent, you can consent to, agree to, want to do things even if you are stupid and immature. A child can disagree to eat broccoli, a child can agree to eat ice cream instead. A dog can disagree to go for a walk outside, a dog can agree to take a shit in the garden instead. Every conscious organism can agree to, want things, or disagree to, and not want certain things.

The argument to my understanding is really about whether or not we should allow children, the mentally handicapped and other animals to consent to certain things, because they may lack the intellect and maturity to make decisions in their best interest and appreciate future ramifications and consequences of their actions, they may be vulnerable to certain harms and risks.

The problem here is the idea that sex is innately dangerous, risky, harmful, so parents don’t want to allow children to agree to sex, whereas in reality, it is not inherently dangerous, risky, harmful, so there would be no reason to not let children agree to it. I would argue:

• P1: Intelligence and maturity are required when the act has a clear risk of future harm.
• P2: Sex does not inherently contain a clear risk of future harm.
• C: Not all sex inherently requires intelligence and maturity.

Whether or not you need the ability to understand future consequences is entirely dependent on the future consequences of the act.

Here we can use differing examples to make this point in both sexual and non-sexual contexts. Let’s say a child isn’t able to understand traffic rules yet, but this child wants to ride a bicycle. Can this child consent to ride a bicycle?

Depends on the environment and consequences would be the answer. On the freeway, no, the child shouldn’t be riding the bicycle, but in a safe and harmless environment with no traffic going on inside it, it’d be perfectly fine.

We can allow the child to ride the bicycle in a safe environment, but we shouldn’t allow it on the freeway. Now let’s use a sexual example, let’s say a child is sexually curious, found out about the existence of sexual pleasure and wants to experiment with it, but is too immature to understand sex education and take it seriously. Can we allow this child to consent?

Again, depends entirely on environment and consequences.

Would it be a good idea to let such a child go to have unprotected anal sex with 100 strangers in a row despite not even knowing what an STD is?

No, of course not, we can entirely agree with the anti-pedo folks here that that would be a bad idea. But would it be bad to let such a child hump the leg of a pedophile they know and trust? No, because that would be a harmless scenario, there’s no risk to that that the child may fail to appreciate due to their childishness, so it’d be perfectly fine to allow that.

• Similarly, we can use such examples in the context of disabled people.

Can a severely intellectually handicapped person that wants to play with blue marbles but has a tendency to swallow them (and fail to comprehend that this is unhealthy) consent to play with blue marbles?

Depends on the environment and consequences. Alone in their room with no one at home? Probably a bad idea, probably shouldn’t be happening. But under the supervision of someone who makes sure once in a while that they don’t swallow the blue marbles? Fine, no problem, they can consent.

Now let’s use a sexual example again.

Let’s say there’s an adult woman on the mental level of a 5 year old child that doesn’t understand sex education, but it is clear that she wants to someone to stick his dick in her pussy. Should we allow her to have sex? Again, depends on the environment and consequences.

Should we sell her out on the streets to have an unprotected threesome right away? No, bad idea. But let’s say she finds a partner, and he’s willing to stick it in her, and he takes care of the contraception process. Then why not? No problem, she is consenting to receiving the sexual experience, and the risks she doesn’t comprehend are no longer present, there’s no need to comprehend them.

You only need intelligence and maturity to understand potential negative future consequences of your actions, if those potential negative future consequences actually even exist.

We don’t forbid children to eat broccoli, and that is because there is no great foreseeable future consequence to eating broccoli that this child may feel bad about later on, so anyone who would screech that children can never consent to eat broccoli and you should be put in prison for giving a child broccoli would sound insane, but there is an age restriction for alcohol, and the idea there is that while a child may agree to drink a bottle of whiskey, they may not appreciate the risk of harm that it later on imposes on them, so they didn’t really agree to all aspects of it.

• Some also call it a difference between simplistic and informed consent.

So simplistic consent would just be the ”I want something” statement/indication which a child, mentally handicapped person or even non-human animal can do, informed consent refers more to also understanding the consequences and ramifications of wanting and agreeing to things.

Then the argument would be as follows:

• P1: Clear risk of harm requires informed consent.
• P2: Sex does not necessarily have a clear risk of harm.
• C: Therefore, sex does not necessarily require informed, but only simplistic consent.

So what I’m arguing is mostly to take away from this is that if you are interacting with someone who is less intelligent, less mature, has impaired foresight – there’s extra responsibility on you to make sure that the individual is not harmed by anything you do, because they may not be able to take care of that by themselves, but that doesn’t mean they are fundamentally incapable of consent. In that sense you could even argue that it’s sometimes even better if a young girl who is still somewhat irresponsible would have sex with an older man rather than someone her age, on her maturity level, who would equally be too irresponsible to use a condom, since that is often a concern parents have.

The adult has to make sure the child that doesn’t understand traffic rules isn’t riding the bicycle on the freeway, the caretaker has to make sure the retarded person doesn’t swallow the blue marbles, and similarly a pedophile would have to make sure they are not subjecting the child to some undesirable consequence of a given sex act. Adults already do this with children in other aspects of life, so I don’t see why the same reasoning shouldn’t consistently be applied to sexuality.

This idea that children can never consent to sex is based on the assumption that sex is automatically, inherently and always dangerous/harmful, so no one feels comfortable with allowing less intellectually equipped individuals, like young children, the severely disabled or non-human animals have sex – this becomes apparent when they then like to bring up dangerous scenarios where children supposedly consented to do certain things but have to be stopped by adults because they were endangering themselves, they use these examples to invalidate the idea that we should let children consent to anything, or take their consent seriously.

• ”So what if a child consented to run across the streets without looking left and right???”

If this is happening in a dangerous environment where the implication is that the child would definitely get hit by a car, then obviously, the child did not actually consent to run across the street at all, because the act of running across the street encompasses getting hit by a car, so obviously if the act ”crossing the street” encompasses ”getting run over by a car”, and the child in question does not want to get hit by a car, then the child did not consent to run across the street.

• The question to these pedophobes here should really be – what is the harm in sex that the child always fails to see (due to their childishness)?

They never want to allow a child/minor to agree to sex, even if we eliminate all potential harmful factors. It’s true that we don’t always just allow children to do whatever they think they want, but that is because there’s usually some kind of danger to it that the child/minor may fail to see.

Why should I think that sex is so inherently dangerous that a child should never be allowed to have it? Why should one believe that?

Let’s say the child found out about sexual pleasure on their own by humping their pillow, they were not manipulated, blackmailed or forced to hump the pedophile’s leg. The pedophile didn’t do anything to the child that the child did not want, like penetration, the child cannot get an STD or get pregnant, no such risky sex act was performed.

• Now where’s the risk of harm that requires the child to be a rocket scientist first in order to be able to circumvent it?

In these examples that they give to discredit the idea of a child consenting, they always smuggle in some kind of later on harmful consequence that will befall the child, like the child running across the street and then getting hit by a car, or the child refusing to get vaccinated and then dying of small pox – so I would agree with them that if there is such a harm to an activity that the child wants to do or not do, the child shouldn’t be allowed to do it.

But what is the harm to sex, why should I assume sex is per se harmful? Why would a child agreeing to sexual pleasure necessarily result in harm to the child? There is nothing inherently about sex that makes it so that whenever you have it under 16, 17, 18 (or whatever is considered to be the particular holy age), it would automatically result in pain and trauma, there are acts I’ve listed like voluntary leg humping that don’t carry any significant risk of harm, so it’d be non-sensical to suggest that one needs to have high intelligence or maturity first before they consent to it.

Possible pedophobe answers might be:

• ”The child could regret having sex later on!”

That is true of every activity a child, minor or even adult could possibly engage in, including riding a bicycle or eating ice cream, so we cannot allow the child to do anything by that standard, they could always regret it later on. I see no reason to think sex what be particularly regrettable unless society started to make a big deal out of it.

• ”There are still social consequences that the child might not be equipped to deal with yet!”

True, there are certain social consequences to sex between the child and the pedophile that the child might not be equipped to deal with, like being hysterically screeched at by everyone around them how they got raped, forced to have sex, when they really were not forced at all, which confuses the child, plus they witness their partner being ostracized and arrested – a lot of unnecessary drama.

Those consequences definitely exist, but society is responsible for creating them in the first place, they are not innate to the sexual encounter, so if they appeal to those self-created consequences, they are just committing an argumetum ad baculum fallacy – it’d be like saying children can never consent to buy ice cream, it’s harmful, because we live in a society where we burn people alive in front of children for selling ice cream to them, and children aren’t mature enough to deal with that possible traumatic consequence yet. Don’t wear a red hat, it’s harmful, because if you wear one, I’ll cut your head off and set you on fire.

So again, in that case the social environment can be expected to be safer for the less intellectually equipped/less mature individual, why not? Why should they insist on inflicting harmful social consequences after such an act, if the act itself wasn’t harmful?

• ”I don’t care, the child is still emotionally undeveloped and immature, so the child can NEVER consent, period!”

That is just blind dogmatism at that point. If it’s just per se wrong to have sex with a child just because that child is unintelligent and immature, it’s also wrong to do anything else, e.g. hug children non-sexually or give them ice cream, because the child has the exact same level of IQ and maturity while they’re eating the ice cream as when they’re having sex.

• P1: It’s wrong to have sex with children/minors because they don’t have fully developed brains and/or cannot consent.
• P2: Children/minors don’t have fully developed brains and/or cannot consent.
• C: All social interaction with children/minors is always wrong, not just sex.

If it’s just per se wrong to have sex with a child because they are unintelligent, undeveloped, immature, then it is just as wrong to give a child ice cream because they are just unintelligent, undeveloped and immature when they eat ice cream. If a child can never consent to sex because they are unintelligent, undeveloped, immature, then a child can likewise never consent to eat ice cream because they are just as unintelligent, undeveloped, immature when they are offered ice cream. It’s logical consistency, if you like apples because they have a round shape, you must like oranges because they have a round shape.

You actually need to specify why intelligence and maturity are prerequisites for all sex acts, not just say ”they are unintellligent and immature”, because their level of intelligence and maturity is exactly the same in all other areas of life, so if that makes sex with them wrong/unethical, then it makes all other interactions with them wrong/unethical, logical consistency 101.

In conclusion, I would say you only need to be intelligent, developed and mature when you want to engage in acts that carry a significant risk of future harm, sex is not necessarily an act that carries a significant risk of future harm, so sex does not require you to be intelligent, developed and mature by default, a child/non-human animal/mentally handicapped person on the IQ level of a dolphin can perfectly consent to sex under many circumstances.

No one would forbid a child to consent to eating broccoli (or go as far as to say they are somehow intrinsically unable to consent), because they recognize there is no harmful consequence to eating broccoli that this child fails to understand due to their childishness.

The reason why pedophobes won’t allow children to consent to sex is because they already falsely believe sex is intrinsically harmful, based on irrational feelings of disgust and repulsion towards pedophiles, leading them to conflate harmful cases of child sex (where coercion and violence were involved) with harmless cases of child sex (where no coercion nor violence were involved), so they reach the false conclusion that it is innately impossible for a child to consent to sex.