If it's 1955 and you don't have the publicly available and well-known data on the long-term effects of child molestation that we have today, what kind of decision making algorithms actually do come to the conclusion that "men having sex with other adult men is okay actually (given consent, etc.)" that don't also come to the conclusion "30 year olds having sex with 13 year olds is okay actually (given consent, etc.)"?
This was not a hypothetical problem for the early gay rights movement, as there were various people who argued for both those positions at the same time, on the (now discredited) basis that denying young teenagers the freedom to have sex with whichever consenting partner(s) they want is as unjustifiable as denying homosexual adult men that same freedom, and for the same reasons.
There are a bunch of things I object to in the framing of the above. I'm not sure if the comment section here is the right place to have the full conversation but I'll note that it's weird to leap from "we have lots of data on the long-term effects of CHILD MOLESTATION" to an implied "therefore we know a bunch of stuff about consensual sex."
(I ordinarily would be loath to even type that sentence, because of can of worms concerns, but we're literally in the comments to social dark matter and the whole point was to get readers to notice leaps like that. Think, for a moment, about what you would believe about sex, period, if you confined yourself to ONLY data gathered from convicted rapists and their victims. You would be confused and wrong!)
Well, I was trying not to take the "pro" side of the stigmatized position too hard - one might unfortunately set off a witch hunt that way, and "child molestation" is basically defined today as including even sex acts that would have been considered consensual if the only thing changed about the circumstances was the age of the youngest participant. I'm pretty well insulated from that kind of thing on the basis of having nothing to lose, but I also don't want to bring the Internet witch hunters down on *you* the way they sometimes go after Aella. Or the way that people went after the researchers in the Rind et al controversy. :/
Yeah. I can at least say "if e.g. literally any sexual contact between 13 and 30 year olds is harmful, then I wish to BELIEVE that it is harmful; if it is not, then I wish to believe it is not" and then the Real Actual Problem I am gesturing at is THE SOCIETY DOES NOT CARE TO ACTUALLY FIND OUT.
Agreed. And whether or not it falls in the category of "not literally always harmful but still unacceptably risky" (like driving drunk, or serving undercooked chicken) is also important to know, but yeah, trying to do a real risk assessment and/or cost-benefit analysis on anything to do with underage sex tends to set off the witch hunters. (Even the HPV vaccine sets some people off!) But I certainly have sympathies toward the "literally always harmful one hundred percent of the time with no exceptions ever is a blatant exaggeration" position. I mean, even something as extreme as *cutting someone's chest open with a blade* isn't always harmful, because heart surgery is a thing and it saves lives. But unfortunately there's no good way to make it <i>impossible</i> for a fool to read about heart surgery and end up concluding that Ghostface must be a lifesaving heart surgeon because he's stabbing people in the chest with a knife. 😞
If it's 1955 and you don't have the publicly available and well-known data on the long-term effects of child molestation that we have today, what kind of decision making algorithms actually do come to the conclusion that "men having sex with other adult men is okay actually (given consent, etc.)" that don't also come to the conclusion "30 year olds having sex with 13 year olds is okay actually (given consent, etc.)"?
This was not a hypothetical problem for the early gay rights movement, as there were various people who argued for both those positions at the same time, on the (now discredited) basis that denying young teenagers the freedom to have sex with whichever consenting partner(s) they want is as unjustifiable as denying homosexual adult men that same freedom, and for the same reasons.
There are a bunch of things I object to in the framing of the above. I'm not sure if the comment section here is the right place to have the full conversation but I'll note that it's weird to leap from "we have lots of data on the long-term effects of CHILD MOLESTATION" to an implied "therefore we know a bunch of stuff about consensual sex."
(I ordinarily would be loath to even type that sentence, because of can of worms concerns, but we're literally in the comments to social dark matter and the whole point was to get readers to notice leaps like that. Think, for a moment, about what you would believe about sex, period, if you confined yourself to ONLY data gathered from convicted rapists and their victims. You would be confused and wrong!)
Well, I was trying not to take the "pro" side of the stigmatized position too hard - one might unfortunately set off a witch hunt that way, and "child molestation" is basically defined today as including even sex acts that would have been considered consensual if the only thing changed about the circumstances was the age of the youngest participant. I'm pretty well insulated from that kind of thing on the basis of having nothing to lose, but I also don't want to bring the Internet witch hunters down on *you* the way they sometimes go after Aella. Or the way that people went after the researchers in the Rind et al controversy. :/
Yeah. I can at least say "if e.g. literally any sexual contact between 13 and 30 year olds is harmful, then I wish to BELIEVE that it is harmful; if it is not, then I wish to believe it is not" and then the Real Actual Problem I am gesturing at is THE SOCIETY DOES NOT CARE TO ACTUALLY FIND OUT.
Agreed. And whether or not it falls in the category of "not literally always harmful but still unacceptably risky" (like driving drunk, or serving undercooked chicken) is also important to know, but yeah, trying to do a real risk assessment and/or cost-benefit analysis on anything to do with underage sex tends to set off the witch hunters. (Even the HPV vaccine sets some people off!) But I certainly have sympathies toward the "literally always harmful one hundred percent of the time with no exceptions ever is a blatant exaggeration" position. I mean, even something as extreme as *cutting someone's chest open with a blade* isn't always harmful, because heart surgery is a thing and it saves lives. But unfortunately there's no good way to make it <i>impossible</i> for a fool to read about heart surgery and end up concluding that Ghostface must be a lifesaving heart surgeon because he's stabbing people in the chest with a knife. 😞