One more YR snippet

And finally I'll copy this response to two questions, the first about the difference between taking away a toddler's agency to stick his finger in a light socket and taking away a young adult's agency to appear in porn, and the second about age-of-consent laws in general:

I think we can distinguish between a mind so immature that it really can’t make decisions that are rational, explainable through some logic and set of priorities, and one that can. That is, between a mind which is objectively lacking knowledge or reason, and one which has the necessary knowledge and reason but applies them in a way that another might find distasteful.

A toddler who’s about to stick his finger in the socket doesn’t know what he’s doing. He may not know that electricity lives in there, or that live wires are dangerous to touch, or he may not be able to make the logical connection to conclude “it would be dangerous for me to touch these wires”. He’s not making a value judgment or weighing risk against reward.

A sober 20 year old woman who’s about to appear in porn, however, is not missing the knowledge or reasoning capacity needed to make her decision. She knows what porn is, what she’ll be doing, and what she’ll receive for it. She knows that she may regret it later, and she’s weighing that risk against the immediate reward, using her own tolerance for risk. You can argue with her priorities, but that’s a matter of opinion; her decision is still informed and rational.

As for consent laws, it’s hard to take a firm position because of the woeful state of sex education in this country. Fundamentally, I think the key things a person needs to know in order to give informed consent are what sex is, what it can lead to (pregnancy, disease, emotional impact, etc. as well as secondary effects of those), and how to prevent or deal with those consequences. Those are fairly open-ended topics, and many pages have been written about them.

I think the age of consent should at the very least be made an even 16 across the country, but it doesn’t make sense to go much further than that until addressing the fact that a lot of teenagers, who may be quite capable of grasping those elements that put the “informed” in informed consent, still have not learned them. That makes it difficult to set a lower age without causing a lot of false positives. (Ideally, we could test on a case-by-case basis whether informed consent was given, but that isn’t practical.)

However, short of lowering the age, I do think the laws can be improved in other ways. They should include an exception for couples who are close in age, where one is just above the line and the other is just under, and when both parties are below the line, neither should be found guilty. Also, the law should not presume that a younger person’s consent is entirely worthless; a case of actual rape should be treated far more harshly than a de-facto consensual sexual relationship, without having to rely on a judge being sympathetic to the 19-year-old with the 15-year-old girlfriend.