Youth rights snippets

Over at Alas, a blog, they're discussing the idea of raising the legal age to appear in porn from 18 to 21 -- in a misguided attempt to save adults who aren't "really" adults from making a decision they might regret later. My comments there touched on some basic points of my youth rights philosophy that might bear archiving here:

The way we treat minors as immature and incompetent, right up to the moment they do something bad, at which point we want them to take full adult responsibility for their actions, is shockingly hypocritical and it needs to stop.

In any democracy, the government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. The principle at the heart of “no taxation without representation” is that laws can only be legitimately enforced against people who are given a chance to vote, to decide what those laws will be. If minors aren’t allowed to vote, then it’s unjust and offensive to hold them responsible for breaking laws, at least to the same degree as we’d hold an adult - which is why we have a juvenile justice system anyway.

This idea of raising the age of consent for porn to 21 is just stupid. When you turn 18, you can lock yourself into a mortgage, start a pack-a-day habit, or ship off to die in Iraq. How can anyone possibly be mature enough to do that, but still too immature to get paid for a few nude photos?

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The problem is, they won’t mature if we don’t give them an opportunity to. If we raise all the ages from 18 to 21, I think we’ll find that 21 year olds become as “immature” as 18 year olds are today. You can’t lock someone in a box for three years, away from any important decisions, and expect them to come out 3 years more mature at the end of it. Adult judgment doesn’t spring forth from the developing brain in a vacuum; actually practicing judgment and exposing oneself to situations that call for it play an important role.

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As a youth rights advocate, my primary concern is ensuring that young people do not have their agency taken away. Taking away 20-year-old Mary’s right to make decisions about her own life, in order to confer a potential benefit on 40-year-old future Mary who might regret those decisions, might be “feminist” but it’s in direct opposition to youth rights.

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The idea that decisions can’t be made correctly by a brain which will continue to develop is based on the assumption that there’s an ideal, “finished” brain that makes decisions in one particular way, and any other brain’s decisions are necessarily flawed.

But any two individuals will approach the same problem from different angles, applying different logic and priorities, and perhaps come up with different answers. People of any age are capable of reasoning and making informed decisions, even if they come up with different answers at different points in their life. If I choose A and my neighbor chooses B, that doesn’t mean my neighbor is incapable of decision-making; just like if I choose A today and would’ve chosen B ten years ago, that doesn’t mean I was incapable back then… or does it? Those who say young people can’t make decisions seem to think it does.

And I think that’s really what it boils down to. If you ask an 18 year old whether they want to appear in porn, you’ll get an answer, and if you ask why they gave that answer, you’ll get an explanation. No one claims 18 year olds can’t answer the question — they just claim 18 year olds will answer incorrectly. Why? Not because there’s anything wrong with the explanation, but because they might answer or explain differently when they’re older; the answer and explanation given by an older person is presumed to be the right one, which makes any other thought process wrong by default.

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Are you suggesting discrimination is OK because people don’t stay at the same age forever? It seems to me that only makes the discrimination more insidious, by constantly adding newly-oppressed people at one end while depriving the group of motivated activists at the other. Would sexism be OK if every year, a number of women were permanently granted “honorary man” status?

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You, at age 40, might look back and think some decisions you made at age 20 are stupid. But at the same time, you at age 20 might look ahead, consider a decision you might make at age 40, and think that would be stupid, even if you know your opinion might change over time.

Everyone’s opinions change over time, in every aspect of life, but they’re still opinions. As long as 20-year-old-you wasn’t missing the knowledge or reasoning capacity needed to make the decision, the difference can only be due to a different set of priorities. And the only way you can conclude that 40-year-old-you’s priorities are objectively the “right” ones is if you’re simply biased toward older people.