Should the age of consent be raised to 20?

[Person Man]

Are you insane?

[Person Man]

I'd support an "absolute" age of consent around 25, with consent for lower ages being based on age ranges (say, 1 year for 15-year-olds, 2 years for people aged 16 or 17, 3 years for people aged 18-20, and 5 years for people aged 21-24).

That's actually similar to the law in Florida. I know this because of all the cooks I used to rent to would talk about how there are people in their kitchens on the beach who were felons that violated the law for having sex with a 16 year old when they were 25. The AoC is 16 for anyone under the age of 24 and 18 thereafter.

[Person Man]

I think the issue here is that Antonio is French and believes in certain quite classic principles of French political thought, notably the idea that the State is or at least ought to be a moral undertaking. This contrasts with the Anglo-German conception of the State which holds that it is a morally neutral entity that simply exists to implement the commands of political actors.* So from Antonio's perspective something that he considers to be morally abhorrent must logically - at least in a somewhat more ideal world - be prohibited by law. Which is a stance quite alien to those of us brought up with a different concept of the State and its purpose.

_{*Which, perhaps paradoxically, was not historically inconsistent with the idea - critical to traditional Conservatism across Northern Europe once upon a time - that nevertheless one must be loyal to it, absolutely.}

That's an excellent point, and indeed it's probably at the root of almost every instance when I take an overwhelmingly unpopular stance on this forum. Usually that doesn't generate quite this degree of mockery and performative denunciation, though.

To be fair, your unpopular stances are usually not quite as far outside the Overton window or disconnected from the way ordinary people think about the law as this one is. I've made it very clear that I disagree with it myself; I just know you well enough to know that you deserve better than people exploding at you even more viciously than at the guy who wants to make revenge porn legal. If everybody on this forum was candid about every weird, extreme view they'd ever entertained, most of us would have been permabanned years ago.

I'm still not convinced that it's as uniquely extreme. Okay, the specific numbers I spat out yesterday as a quick off-the-cuff take were way out there, I'll give you that. But I do think the idea that the state might want to take a closer look at relationships with big age gaps when the younger party is just barely an adult is something that plenty of regular people would take seriously. I think I've voiced plenty of takes in the past that are far more extreme in mainstream discourse, such as my very narrow conception of freedom of religion (something we sparred about a year or so ago!) or the fact that I want to eventually get to a place of banning tobacco altogether.

The only difference I see here, honestly, is that sexual and relationship issues is something this forum is uniquely defensive about.

Literally no country in the world has an age of consent above 18 or any type of such restrictions on consensual relationships above that age aside from ones that ban all sex outside of marriage, and that's even including Japan and South Korea which view 20 instead of 18 as the age of adulthood, so yeah this is a pretty extreme position (and even more extreme in France where implementing age of consent laws like in the US would be pretty out there.) The reason though I think is simply that most places seem to agree that upon age of adulthood generally around 18 people have full rights and it's easier to regulate that than create a sort of Byzantine system based on certain things and certain ages and infantalizing people who are still legally adults. And yes the US does do this for a few things which is uncommon outside the US, but I don't think anyone would argue that those examples are particularly effective or grounds to be emulated further. Someone who attended a US university should know this.

I'm surprised that when I went back for 3 years, the cops never asked me whether I was too old to be drinking illegally.

[Person Man]

I'd support an "absolute" age of consent around 25, with consent for lower ages being based on age ranges (say, 1 year for 15-year-olds, 2 years for people aged 16 or 17, 3 years for people aged 18-20, and 5 years for people aged 21-24).

That's actually similar to the law in Florida. I know this because of all the cooks I used to rent to would talk about how there are people in their kitchens on the beach who were felons that violated the law for having sex with a 16 year old when they were 25. The AoC is 16 for anyone under the age of 24 and 18 thereafter.

That's not what he's talking about. The age of consent is still 18 but 16 under certain circumstances. He wants the unconditional age of consent to be 25 and even people older than 18 for it to be illegal to have consensual sex with if the person is above a certain age.

So, yes....it's a Romeo and Juliet law, but you can still technically "rape" a 18-24 year old. Yeah. That's unreasonable. If I had met my wife 2 years earlier (When I was 31 and she was 24, that would have been rape under his law).