- Joined
- Feb 4, 2013
- Messages
- 28,659
- Reaction score
- 18,803
- Location
- Charleston, South Carolina
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Very Conservative
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
Isn't that what I just said?
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
Isn't that what I just said?
If the other alternative available is to simply have children without being married, marriage would actually probably be preferable.
Again, they're not "children." They're sexually mature young women.
While you can blame men for bad behavior, you really cannot blame them for perceiving sexually attractive women for what they are.
I still think that you might be confusing the chicken and the egg here. Most normal people aren't getting married as teenagers.
If they are, they probably have a pretty awful life to begin with.
To be fair here, unwed single mothers are at a greater risk for abuse.
Marriage: Still the Safest Place For Women and Children
Even divorced women are apparently less of a risk than those who have never been married.
Well, yea. That's kind of exactly the point though.
It's everything else that affects the safety of teenage girls, not arbitrary (and difficult to enforce) laws telling every one "hands off until she's 18."
Again, that's really not what the statistics show.
Pushing Age of Consent back from 16 to 18 (or even 14 to 18) doesn't seem to have any appreciable impact on "deterrence" whatsoever. We actually score worse with regards to virtually all problems linked with teenage sexuality even in spite of having a higher age of consent.
There's clearly more to this than law alone.
Ehhh... Let's be honest here. Some of the more "liberated" progressive posters on this board do seem to encourage exactly that. :lol:
The dangerous minority who will not still exist. Women ignore their presence at their own peril.
Which is exactly why they need to be educated otherwise. :lol:
Women need to be wary of strange men. We're not all nice, you know. lol
True, but there's really not any evidence to suggest that our current age of consent laws actually do anything to protect these kinds of girls.
If someone is Hell bent on seeking out the wrong kind of attention, they are going to find a way to make it happen either way regardless.
Fair enough. That is not what you said earlier though. lol
Honestly, I think you give 18 year olds too much credit, and 16 year olds too little.
It's not like young girls in either age group are rushing out to have sex with men twice their age in any eventuality.
It's true. :shrug:
It doesn't matter whether that's what you actually support or not. It is what the law results in.
Most of the people it affects are not lecherous pervs decades older than their prey, but simple young adults who happen to be a couple of years older than the people they're involved with.
The Age of Consent in South Carolina (and even Superfly's state, Georgia, ironically enough) is 16.
If I wanted to run out and have sex with a 16 year old, I could. Trust me. :lol:
I do not, because it's not something I'm interested in. I'd feel a little weird even being with an 18 year old, as a matter of fact.
I think it has something to do with having younger sisters. :shrug:
That being said, however; I simply find it annoying when people get overly "high and mighty" on this particular issue. 18 really isn't an age that should necessarily be "set in stone," IMO, especially if it's only going to become an excuse to slap kids with trumped up charges that are going to follow them around for the rest of their lives.
I also find it amusing that, if many of the more absolutist posters in this thread had their way, I probably wouldn't even exist. They would've had my grandfather thrown in jail for dating a 15 year old when he was in his early 20s.
Nevermind the 50 year marriage or 7 children their relationship resulted in! Dating anyone under the age of 18 is just wrong!!!! Grrr!!
As far as I can tell, it's just a lot of overly exaggerated silliness over nothing. The rest of the world already knows this, but we Americans insist on making a mountain out of a mole hill for the Hell of it anyway regardless.
If the other alternative available is to simply have children without being married, marriage would actually probably be preferable. . . . . .
You HAVE to stop with these super long posts. Not only did I time out trying to respond, but between the two of us there were too many characters. PLEASE STOP THAT. Thank you in advance. :mrgreen:
But this next one is going to be suuuuper long though! :lol:
Eh. Fine. I'll try to trim some of the more repetitive elements out. :2razz:
You HAVE to stop with these super long posts. Not only did I time out trying to respond, but between the two of us there were too many characters. PLEASE STOP THAT. Thank you in advance. :mrgreen:
But this next one is going to be suuuuper long though! :lol:
Eh. Fine. I'll try to trim some of the more repetitive elements out. :2razz:
If a woman is truly "single" then who is "beating" her?
This is from the super biased Heritage Foundation too.
Analysis of ten years worth of findings from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has conducted since 1973, demonstrates that mothers who are or ever have been married are far less likely to suffer from violent crime than are mothers who never marry
What? This doesn't even make sense.
Again, you are wrong, and the study I posted proves it.
The law is certainly a deterrent. Why would you deny that? The studies I posted clearly demonstrate that.
I'm sorry, but I've never heard of any poster here stating that they encourage irresponsible behavior in their children.
According to the link I posted, there is plenty of evidence to suggest just that.
We have to go with the general consensus and that is that most 16-year-old girls are immature, not very responsible and don't make very good decisions, hence the fact that they still rely on parental control and guidance and hence the fact that they would not be very successful people at living on their own without any outside help. This should be Captain Obvious stuff here. It is just common sense.
This is absolutely untrue. Most states have Romeo/Juliet amendments to their laws.
Again, this is not true. It is pretty rare where a teenager gets put on a sex registration list for having sex with another teenager. It does happen, yes, but it is not the norm. Go look at the sex offender registry list for yourself in your state. You will see how WRONG you are.
This is why the law needs to be changed.
AHA! You have little sisters. How would you feel if your little sister was having sex with a 30 or 40-year-old man? A man older than your father perhaps? Is that okay? And why or why not?
As many of us have exhaustively repeated, no one wants teens to be prosecuted for being with other teens, yet you keep persisting with this.
times have changed a LOT since then.
No we are NOT. I KNOW personally the effects, so don't you try to tell me.
You HAVE to stop with these super long posts. Not only did I time out trying to respond, but between the two of us there were too many characters. PLEASE STOP THAT. Thank you in advance.
Boyfriends, I would assume.
Most women aren't exactly celibate even if they aren't married. :shrug:
Not quite.
Marriage: Still the Safest Place For Women and Children
Their source for this data was actually the US Department of Justice.
Not really. All it proves is that teenage pregnancy tends to be bad for a person's long term prospects when they're broke and uneducated.
I never denied that because it's common sense.
However, what you have not demonstrated is that having the AoC being set at 18 makes teenage pregnancy any less likely in the first place. To the contrary, nations with ages of consent set several years lower than our own actually have significantly less of a problem with teenage pregnancy than the United States.
This would seem to indicate that there are really no benefits to having AoC set at 18 rather than 16, or even 14.
Then explain why Europe's doing so much better than we are even with AoC's set as low as 13 in some countries.
They don't consider "slutty" attire to be irresponsible. :shrug:
The fact that we have the highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrialized world and the highest average AoC alike would seem to indicate otherwise.
We are apparently just about the only country out there that thinks so, and it isn't even really working out for us.
That should tell you something. :shrug:
What you're trying to tout as being some kind of "natural law" here is really anything but.
Which are still patently ridiculous by and large, as they only apply to sex between minors under the age of 18 anyway (Why would that even need to be prosecuted in the first place?), and still result in prison sentences in many cases.
It's a pretty damn silly solution to a problem that only exists because we insist on being so damn anal retentive about our laws in the first place. Most of the rest of the world has no need for such things, and gets on just fine as such.
It's not rare at all. There are hundreds of people on the sex offender registry for statutory rape charges alone. Most of them weren't much older than their teens at the time themselves.
Is this an almost religious conviction for you, or what? :roll:
Again, you haven't demonstrated any way in which setting the law to 18 can even be said to objectively benefit anyone. You simply seem to want the age raised for the sake of raising it.
It'd be vaguely creepy, and I probably wouldn't approve. However, if the relationship was consensual, and they seemed happy, I wouldn't see myself as having any grounds to try and stop them.
Superfly and Gina have both stated that any man who dates a girl younger than 18 should be prosecuted in this thread.
Why? We're the same human beings we've always been.
If it wasn't "wrong" on any kind of objective basis back then, it shouldn't be "wrong" now either.
Again, my whole point here is that things are not as absolute as you are making them out to be. Mixed age relationships are a case by case affair.
Frankly, your own story is just more evidence for why having AoC set at 18 is pointless in the first place.
Having an arbitrary "line in the sand" around age 18 certainly didn't do anything to prevent you from winding up pregnant.
Hey, did you see that I inadvertently made a joke? :2razz:
Blah! Still too long, and I already told you I'm done talking about yoga pants for tonight!![]()
Characters, huh? :2razz:
![]()
Yea... I tried to shorten that last one up a bit.
I'm not really sure I succeeded though. :lol:
Nope, not biting. This is a dodge and nothing but an excuse. Everyone is responsible for their own actions. Period. Not once have you acknowledged that.
I don't know what AoC laws have to do with teen pregnancy rates. I don't see the link there, but, and I'm not sure you want to go down this road, one reason teen pregnancy rates are lower in Europe (from your own link)
So the AoC can hardly be said to have much of an influence on teen birth rates when the teens in those other countries use birth control at a higher rate than those in the U.S.
A young man, should be, and in Oregon they are, taught not to have sex with girls that are too young. The only guys I read about here, ruining their lives, are predators. Again, self-control and responsibility. As the text you quoted said: If the girl is over 16, then a guy up to 19 is fine. Why does a 20 year old or older man need to be dating a 16-year-old girl? Be a man and don't get involved.
You want to make girls responsible for the clothing they wear but not young men for their choice to having sex with age inappropriate girls. Why is that? I think it's much more serious and useful to teach young men to avoid having sex with "jail bait". Again, males get a pass on personal responsibility. Romeo and Juliet laws protect really young men in any case.
Nope. That does not have anything to do with what you said:
Which would leave those who are not brought up right (by your standards), to the wolves. Those are the kids who are most at risk of being manipulated into sex by adults.
Yes, it's got to be tough to be young and to be told to look like the models in ads seen 400 times per day, and then be subjected to slut-shaming for trying to look like them.What a great point. That makes SO much sense. I agree. I think it is quite confusing to be a teenage girl and to be constantly barraged with conflicting messages.
Oh, I think they do realize it. If a guy doesn't want to get caught looking, he's going to look away as quick as possible, and pretend he's looking at something else.:lol: I think some men don't realize this, and they will just stare and leer, not even realizing how creepy they look.
Yes, you were probably young and fearless, and they were worried about everything that happens and has happened to some other teenage girl in the news.I also have no daughters, but I WAS a daughter, so I do understand somewhat at least. I'm SURE I was a handful for my parents.![]()
Well, that's your choice who you want to spend time talking to. My problem wasn't extreme opinions, it was changing stories and shifting belief claims around, so that I start suspecting he's just playing games, rather than trying to debate or discuss anything. I have a limited amount of time online, I don't want to waste it on someone who's just going to toy with me.Oh, if you're talking about Gathomas, he is actually a very nice person. We certainly don't agree on a lot of issues, and I agree that he has some extreme views, but he's always been nothing but kind towards me. Actually, I'm the one who gets heated towards him, and I'm surprised he hasn't blocked ME yet. :lol:
Yep. I'm through the looking-glass, down the rabbit hole, choose an analogy. It's just weird how personal responsibility ends at what a minor wears.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I think it's the rare girl who would show up at school wearing "booty shorts" or "booty pants" simply because it really wouldn't be that acceptable to other peers in school either. I think most girls (especially those of high school age) DO practice some kind of common sense when it comes to how they are dressed.
Quite frankly, and not to be mean, but most people in general wouldn't be able to get away with wearing those super tight booty pants anyways because they would NOT be looking very good. I think most girls and women realize what clothing they can get away with wearing. Unfortunately, a lot of our people in our country are at least a little bit overweight.
Now, that I'm going through these pages, I'm hoping this is just an online trolling thing, and not a growing acceptance of misogyny combined with pedophilia.I was thinking something very similar, Gina, before I even got to your post. I was reading some of these posts, and my mouth was just dropping open. When the hell did it become OK, or normal, or acceptable, or desirable, to want to have sex with a 16 year old?
I also sense an almost "sneering" hatefulness from some of the men involved in this thread regarding my posts on this topic and protecting teen girls and stating the obvious, that just because they may be physically mature that in no way means they are mentally or emotionally mature and do need protection because of their vulnerability.
I wonder why this is SO upsetting to some men? I would think that this is just common sense stuff IMO.
Now, that I'm going through these pages, I'm hoping this is just an online trolling thing, and not a growing acceptance of misogyny combined with pedophilia.
I wasn't talking you specifically, I was talking you collectively, as in all the guys in this thread who seem to be OK with this type of behavior.
When the hell did it become OK, or normal, or acceptable, or desirable, to want to have sex with a 16 year old?
It's a hallmark of rape culture, from what I've heard...victim blaming...it's not his fault....she provoked him by the way she was dressed etc.. Guys were getting off on rape charges back in the old days (when charges were laid) with those kind of lame excuses, but way back in my youth, we were supposed to be transitioning from that attitude to one where no excuses were acceptable. And that was happening at a time when we were getting used to seeing girls in short miniskirts at school. I really don't get where some of these comments about boys being distracted are coming from. We were able to keep from getting too distracted in school, and I expected my boys to be responsible when they were going to high school as well.
But all of them, Commie? Most all of the guys in the thread are saying the same thing GaThomas is saying. THAT is what's scary. If it were one guy, I'd be like, "OK, that's peculiar. I'm glad I don't live near this guy." But it's a lot of guys. Scares me more as a mom of teenage girls, because it looks like it's more the rule, and not the exception.
For 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18 year old males.... it's pretty much been a normal, acceptable, desire since the dawn of time. :mrgreen: