Does a society have the right to make a harmless act into a harmful one?

A common disagreement in the discussion about sex in childhood/youth is intrinsic vs. extrinsic harm. Some things are intrinsically harmful, in and of itself harmful, e.g. someone sticking a knife in your eye when you clearly don’t want that, we could argue that is always harmful.

But some things are only extrinsically harmful, e.g. a girl wears a skimpy dress and gets raped, this doesn’t prove that wearing a skimpy dress is in and of itself results in harm. Someone instigated harm in response to it, but it doesn’t in and of itself always result in harm.

Those with philosophical positions accepting of sexual relationships between children/minors and adults generally make the point that sex in childhood/youth is not intrinsically harmful, what can be harmful is when someone is manipulated, blackmailed, forced into sex regardless of age, in which case the coercion is the real harm, not the child sex itself obviously.

Or when society has an overtly harmful, negative reaction to a completely voluntary sex act that was intrinsically harmless, but then society made it extrinsically harmful by reacting in this hysterical fashion, harm caused by social stigma, the child/minor enjoyed the sexual encounter but was shocked to find out how society feels about it.

Those opposed to all such relationships often have an intuition that all such relations are harmful because children and minors are fundamentally asexual (or ”innocent”, whatever that means, sex supposedly makes you guilty) and would never have sex unless someone forced them to, or they believe that for some reason even if some want it, ”we just have to draw a line somewhere” and not even try to distinguish between the harmful and harmless cases in a more detailed manner in court.

Even when you point out to these people that in case a minor simply wanted to have sex with an older person, they weren’t manipulated, it didn’t result in any harm to them, except the negative reaction from society, some of them would still say ”but there are still social consequences to this that the child cannot comprehend yet!” although there is no evidence that these consequences are anything but self-caused, society’s fault and nothing else.

Basically blaming the victim, appealing to a self-created consequence, just like a rapist ironically. Even if dressing like a whore isn’t harmful, who cares? Once I rape you, you’re still harmed, so that proves dressing like a whore is harmful.

Even if having sex with a child/minor isn’t intrinsically harmful, who cares? Once we send you to jail and socially ostracize you for it, you and the minor (by extension) are still harmed by our hysteria, so that proves that sex at a young age is harmful, because we harm you for it.

• Which raises the question: does a society have the right to make a perfectly harmless act into a harmful one by having an overtly negative, violent reaction to it?

It doesn’t have to be sex, we could pick any other subject for demonization and public hysteria and we would have the same argument, anything can be made extrinsically harmful.

Let’s just say as an example to test for consistency, we had a society that didn’t demonize children receiving orgasms, but children eating broccoli, both can be perfectly healthy if someone is not overtly averse to receiving either.

This society does believes that giving a child broccoli is always child abuse, automatically it is assumed that when a child eats broccoli, it can never be anything but harmful, it must have involved force and coercion – innocent children should not be eating broccoli. Period, end of discussion, if you question this, you’re one of these disgusting assholes who forces children to eat broccoli at knifepoint as well.

If a child finds out that they might like green vegetables by having eaten another one first (similar to how some children find out they would like to have sex by discovering masturbation and porn), and then they voluntarily receive broccoli from an adult, society has an overtly negative reaction to it:

• The adult is socially ostracized, sent to jail.

• Everyone is hysterically screeching at the child, asking them about their abuse.

• People make jokes in front of the child how this evil abuser is now hopefully going to get repeatedly assraped in prison. Don’t drop the soap you piece of shit, HAHA, if you give kids broccoli you get raped in jail, so therefore, broccoli is unhealthy, it’s basic logic!

• The child repeatedly hears that they now ”lost their innocence”, there’s something indescribably magical about never having eaten broccoli under a certain age, and if you did it before, you ruined your ”innocence” for life, now you are guilty! Oh no! What a travesty!

• If the child doesn’t admit how horribly abused they were, everyone will assume they are completely mentally defective and just don’t understand how horribly abused they were, so the therapists won’t stop harassing the child, they become a social outcast, the weird victim of broccoli who doesn’t even admit they were victimized, how outragous! The evil broccoli pervert certainly manipulated this child!

After a while, this takes a toll on the child, the child feels confused and bad about it.

Society reaches the inescapable conclusion:

• Broccoli is bad and unhealthy for children, it’s obvious!

Most humans are socially imitative creatures who don’t have it in them to tell all of society to go fuck itself, so what does the child do? The child grows up to parrot the lies that have been imposed on them by the anti-broccoli cult, the child grows up to associate the negative feelings that were really caused by society with the person who gave them broccoli, and grow to resent that person, when really it would be more reasonable to direct that hatred at society.

Therapists and psychologists who aren’t really deep thinkers but just social status quo enforcers who have similarly just been socially indoctrinated into thinking broccoli is the devil now conduct a study in which people like this, who have eaten broccoli as children partake, even people who did not voluntarily eat it, but have been forced to at knifepoint (which is the same in society’s eyes anyway, since children can NEVER consent to broccoli! NEVER!).

They reach the conclusion that people who have eaten broccoli as children indeed often times grow up to feel very bad. See, this settles the debate, broccoli is bad. A perfect post hoc fallacy, is it not?

Child eats broccoli, child is traumatized at some point after, this proves broccoli traumatizes children.

A happened, then B happened, therefore, A directly caused B. The child left the house, the child was wetted by the rain, therefore, leaving your house causes you to get wet, even when it does not rain outside. Ironclad reasoning right there.

• Should this society really have the right to insist on their stupid taboo and claim that they have demonstrated that eating broccoli causes harm to children? Or would anyone who has not been indoctrinated into their insanity think of them as primitive barbarians in desperate need of being educated (perhaps even forcibly) in order to change their ways?

I think the answer is obvious, you wouldn’t accept this type of picking a subject and making it into a taboo in any other context unless it were actually legitimately proven to be harmful, so it’s logically inconsistent and hypocritical when you do so when it comes to child sexuality.

I’m sure if they observed this behavior in a cult where something else would be demonized that isn’t sex, like broccoli, they would be perfectly able to observe the fact that these imbeciles have never come up with a reason as to why they think broccoli is inherently harmful to children and point out to them how society isn’t exactly making it easy for the child to enjoy eating broccoli.

• ”You fucking retard, YOU YOURSELF are creating this negative consequence, children don’t have to be harmed by broccoli, YOU HARM THEM by having this negative bigoted reaction to it! This is no better than saying homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed to raise children, it’s harmful, just because you raise your children to bully children of homosexual couples, you’re clearly the asshole here!”.

But when it comes to seeing that they are the ones that create the harm in response to sexual relations between children/minors and adults, they completely fail to recognize that they are the monster and somehow manage to rationalize the harm that they inflict as harm done by the perfectly harmless orgasm.

• ”My 14 year old daughter voluntarily had sex with a 30 year old man, she got an orgasm and was overall satisfied, so I beat him to a bloody pulp in front of her! She started to scream in panic, see, this proves that orgasms are traumatizing unless you’re exactly the holy age, like 16, 17 or 18 that our religious cult has deemed to be the only correct one!”.

It’s idiotic, come up with a reason for why you think x is harmful, don’t just appeal the to the fact that people who engaged in x as children often grow up to feel traumatized and depressed in the confines of a society that does everything in their power to make children feel bad about x, whatever x may be.

If you don’t accept the ”evidence” of the anti-broccoli cult, then it’d be inconsistent for you to accept the ”evidence” pedophobic bigots lay out for how sex in childhood and youth is harmful, because they’re using the same method: lumping voluntary and in-voluntary sex together and ignoring social pressures and biases.

If an act is only harmful because society reacts badly to it, then the act isn’t really harmful, it’s society that is being harmful. So why not ban the harm caused by society rather than the act that it demonizes based on irrational grounds? Because they’re just irrational, so they just fail to see that they’re being irrational, that’s the most plausible answer here.