What is the ideal age of consent?

Reacting to Sectionalism Archive

I was asked to respond to Sectionalism Archive’s (SA) recent post Going to Bat for the Age of Consent. He mentions my juvenalia pen name, and includes two charts I made in the article. SA writes intelligently and calmly in favor of the age of consent status quo in the United States. Nonetheless, I have a few factual and philosophical disagreements with him.

Before we begin, I want to make a few remarks on this topic. I believe this is the most taboo topic in the USA. Potentially in the West in general. Many people think anti-semitism and racism are more taboo, but this is not true if you do not weight the topics by intelligence. It is true that among university professors, racism and anti-semitism are more taboo than the age of consent and even “hard” pedophilia issues. For example, academia published a paper in a pretty nice journal which argued that child molestation is not actually traumatic to children. The paper was then denounced by the politicians in both chambers of Congress (it is interesting to consider what this means regarding the role of expertise in social science, and social science in politics). In contrast, the demos regularly elects racists to Congress and other offices, who are then denounced by academia. Academia does not allow race and intelligence research to go in nice journals, and there is constant harassment from liars on this topic from inside academia. But I can pretty easily cite Mankind Quarterly at a Republican Party event without stirring up any outrage.

In taboo topics, outrage is often fueled by misconception. For example, on the race issue, leftists often allege that race realists are genocidal. This is supposed to whip up outrage among more centrist types. It’s of course not true. Likewise, on this topic, trolls like to allege things like obsession with salacious topics, intentions to harm young people, tendency toward marital infidelity, and so on. I will forestall this by pointing out that I have a large corpus of writings which revolve around questioning social norms from the perspective of a naturally socially conservative sociobiologist, so nobody can seriously entertain the idea that I occasionally write on this topic due to a mere lascivious predilection. Rather, I am happily married, and believe both adultery and divorce are serious sins, so at this point the topic only has concrete relevance to my future children. It is only of abstract interest to me personally. But as an abstract topic, it is obviously well suited to be analyzed by me, since current norms are not those of an ideal socially conservative society, and reproductive norms specifically are of special importance to sociobiology, which studies men as animals who evolve through a continuous cycle of death and selective sexual replication.

More concretely, questioning the status quo is baked into my thought and writing. I therefore find status quo defense to be quite boring. It is pretty obvious that the status quo could be improved. The interesting question is how and why. By merely defending the status quo, SA fails to offer an ideal to critique. He does not try to defend the status quo as ideal, merely as good enough. Good enough is a low bar, and such a low bar preempts higher thought.

What, then, is my ideal solution to the age of consent problem? The general issue in the US is that the there is a complicated patchwork of relatively high ages with a lot of exceptions and oddities spread throughout the country. This almost looks like it was designed for so-called “brown-ops”, in other words confusing men into accidentally violating these laws. This is added to by the fact that in many states, age of consent laws are bizarrely prosecuted under strict liability — this means a 17 and 364 day old’s handler can show you a fake ID showing she is 19, and you can prove this in court, but you get convicted anyway. And then on top of that, you’re 1 day over the speed limit, so what happens? Do you get convicted of a misdemeanor? Pay a fine? Decide to be more skeptical of teenaged girls? Quit fornicating in fornication land? No, your epic win with the bros in fornication land (bros I totally BANGED this HOT 19 year old!) turns into you getting convicted of a sex-offender felony and do at least 1 year in jail, often more. His friends switch to “ew, she was actually 17 and 364 days old? You sick fuck! I hope you get sodomized by a black man in jail! By the way, I, a voting citizen of the supreme sovereign demos the United States of America, fully equal in all ways, believe I am sexually moral. I hope I get laid at the club tonight by a hot 19 year old!”

Obviously there’s a lot of room for injustice in this status quo any way you look at it. From a purely technical point of view, a massive improvement would be a national age of consent of 18, with reasonable exceptions like the abolition of the clownishly unjust strict liability standard. You could also do something like, make it a misdemeanor on your first offense if she was 16 or 17, perhaps only if you are within 10 years of age, so that no 23 year old men who are told by society that banging an 18 year old is an epic win are sent to prison forever for knowingly banging a 17 and 364 year old in a moment of horny drunkenness. I believe as long as the female victim in this case attests that she is not traumatized by her consensual sex she likely sought out with a popular, slightly older young man, it would be enough to put the man on probation and make him take a class on how to fornicate ethically in the democracy of the United States of America, where the sovereign, overweight 100-IQ People in all their wisdom have voted that their 17 year old and 364 day old daughters are agencyless children. If the man does it twice knowingly, obviously he was not just unlucky, and it is much more just to go back to the old penalties.

I can already anticipate that many Americans would call this scheme wildly lenient on dangerous pedophiles, which is funny because it’s incredibly strict by the standards of the rest of the West.

A more normal national standard would use a dividing line somewhere between 14 and 16, not 17 or 18. As a sociobiologist I find this to be far more educated and in line with history and human development, but at least a line of 18 with reasonable penalties would work much better than the current standard due to being less arbitrary and schizophrenic.

If we are to be stuck with socially liberally attitudes towards sex and relationship, I believe the US should simply adopt German or French law. This is because other than being schizophrenic and doing injustice through its arbitrary complexity, US law mainly exists to persecute college kids who have relationships with high school girls. Germans and French do not prosecute the majority of cases the US prosecutes, because they do not persecute such relationships. Based on knowledge of historical marriages (eg usually between a mid-teens girl and an early-twenties man), I am strongly biased towards believing that these relationships are natural, positive, romantic, and loving the majority of the time, and that the state must prove that there is abuse in a particular case before interfering. This should not be hard to do in a rich surveillance state with very little clannism! Ironically, hard and high lines of 18 are more suited to places like Algeria, which doesn’t have it or doesn’t enforce it, where a relationship between a 15 year old and a 21 year old means the poorly fed 15 year old drops out of school and has a premature baby (as her body is probably as developed as a well-fed western 13 year old), thus keeping the economy behind and the population fragile. In the US it means Stacy’s boyfriend is a frat boy at a local college instead of some kid on the high school football team. That’s all it means. They probably love each other more than they would if they were the same age, because people evolved to have 3-6 year age gaps in marriage. Many girls evolved to be attracted not to old men, and not to boys exactly their age, but to slightly older young men. This is why high school same-aged relationships never last, they’re not natural.

And this is what you see if you look at the data. The median People’s Republic of the United States of America age of consent case is a 15 year old girl and a 19 year old boy. That’s because it’s real rape if the girl doesn’t consent. Girls actually don’t normally consent to being an adulterous 40 year old man’s side piece, even if their brains are only 15 or 16. American age of consent laws, in substance (ie factoring out the schizophrenia), are largely a war on young love, which is why most of the online people who complain about it are single males aged 16 to 23. It’s not 43 year old girldads who want to cheat on their wives with a 17 year old. I think they are perfectly fine with 19 and 20 year olds for that purpose. It’s young men who are tired of having their natural dating pool arbitrarily restricted.

All of this said, I’m a social conservative, so I have a policy idea that is more ideal than the French or German model: minimum age of marriage of 14 or 15, but a much higher age of consent. It could be 21, or even just no sex before marriage. I would prefer it to be above 18 because most girls would not be married by 18, and I do not like it when 18 year olds start OnlyFans and ruin themselves for marriage. Girls ought to be saved for marriage at least until 21, perhaps even 25. Also ban or seriously discourage divorce, and ban adultery. Adultery ought to be at least as illegal as statutory rape. It produces a very real victim, which is the spouse that was cheated on. It is absurd that adultery is tolerated in the Proletariat States but they pretend to have some alternative sexual morality. Totally schizophrenic.

I asked for my wife’s input on this idea and she said that she thinks men might try to do serial monogamy with teens under increasingly large age gaps, and thought a 10 year age gap rule would fix this. I support that idea. Whether it be a general 10 year age gap rule, some kind of increasing gap as a function of age, or a 10 year age gap rule when the girl is under the age of consent (eg 21 or 25), I believe that is rational. One thing is that I would permit separation in some circumstances but ban divorce, which means you may leave your spouse but you cannot re-marry ever, since marriage is a life-long contract whether or not you are living together. This would automatically protect maidens from serial monogamy without any explicit age-gap rule. Also, of course, I think parents should have the right to sign off on their daughter’s marriage, unless this is overruled by the government in the case of the parents being unfit because they are behaviorally disordered in some way, or the girl is orphaned. This way teenage girls can’t just elope with a random man that her parents don’t even know.

I will point out that this model is the model of Europe until the last 50 or so years. See Canon Law 1083 of the Catholic Church:

Can. 1083 §1. A man before he has completed his sixteenth year of age and a woman before she has completed her fourteenth year of age cannot enter into a valid marriage.

And on parental consent and divorce, Can. 1071 §1.

Except in a case of necessity, a person is not to assist without the permission of the local ordinary at:

1/ a marriage of transients;

2/ a marriage which cannot be recognized or celebrated according to the norm of civil law;

3/ a marriage of a person who is bound by natural obligations toward another party or children arising from a previous union;

4/ a marriage of a person who has notoriously rejected the Catholic faith;

5/ a marriage of a person who is under a censure;

6/ a marriage of a minor child when the parents are unaware or reasonably opposed;

7/ a marriage to be entered into through a proxy as mentioned in can. 1105.

So, under my ideal, you can be prosecuted for fornication, but you know it will happen because we have abolished fornication culture generally. In exchange for taking away your fornication culture, I will provide you with a wife, and young men will be free to have a pretty open courting pool as young as in their late teens. It is completely up to bachelors, maidens, and their families as to whether they want to marry very young, or delay marriage. I just know some people will be happy marrying young, and this is 100% okay, historically normal, romantic, and it’s not the place of an uncultured and impure demos to violently interfere with the affairs of these families, which are entirely Christian and within the norms of all societies everywhere until radical feminism and LGBT got a little too much say-so 50 years ago in the intermittently totalitarian peasant democracy of the United States.

Philosophically, what are we doing with this new ideal? The way I see it, it takes freedom away from the unvirtuous and gives it to the virtuous. In the one-size-fits-all democracy, modern American age of consent laws exist to protect the lower ends of the demos from the negative consequences of their bad behavior, without really addressing the bad behavior. They live a risky, harmful, r-selected fornicative lifestyle, which apparently the younger members among them cannot handle. As soon as you go back to the fundamentals of marriage, then the laws of human history make perfect sense. You can see the American schizophrenia model as a form of socialism which taxes the morally pure, eg the 18 year old who would like to marry a freshman girl he goes to school with, to protect, for a couple of years, the “town bicycle” as they call them, who more often than not comes from a low class home of criminals and undesirables, from the men of her own class. The French or German model bites the bullet and throws the low end under the bus. My way, I think, is more fair, and history showed it emerged in societies with little room for inefficiency. A bad war or a famine could wipe out some of these societies. And in that furnace of selection pressure they evolved my ideal norms. I think they might be the best! Chesterton’s fence.

Responding to Sectionalism Archive

With my positive vision laid out, let me end by directly addressing some of what SA wrote.

Argument 1: “Men are naturally sexually attracted to underage girls, so the Age of Consent is anti-male!”

It is true that studies have shown that most men are attracted to teenage girls, and cannot consistently differentiate between teenagers below and above the age of consent. However, this heightened sexual response is predicated on the men being unaware of the true age of the woman.

Access to invisible information can change whether someone finds something attractive. Many men have attractive siblings, but would likely be turned off if they knew this individual was their sibling, because we have been conditioned both by nature and by society to find incest to be disgusting. Furthermore, there are a small minority of transvestites who actually do pass as the opposite sex, but most heterosexual men could not bring themselves to be aroused by them if they were given the knowledge of the inner mannishness of that person. So, it would be more accurate to say that men are attracted to neotenous-looking adults, which is kind of a nothingburger. It is already well-known that women have more neotenous traits than men, but if you believe these features are worth selecting for then you obviously should support high ages of consent, because it would be impossible to select for the retention of youthful features if you’re selecting people who aren’t actually fully developed.

19 year old boys are attracted to 15 year old girls, and age of consent laws primarily exist to persecute these relationships. I agree that older men are not very attracted to 15 year old girls; this is actually a reason to return to traditionalism, as I laid out above. The study SA cited had a sample of males with mean age 34 years old, and a standard deviation of 12 years. If you consult the graphs above, these men are a small minority of American age of consent prosecutions, which again, indicates that SA is correct for this age group, they have very low revealed preferences for teenaged girls and seem to prefer women over 20 or 21.

Argument 2: “The brain is finished developing at [insert age below 18], so that’s when the age of consent should be!”

What is not mentioned about this argument is that, while the increase in intelligence and judgment from 16 to 20 is insignificant, the increase in intelligence between 12 and 16 is quite dramatic. The average 14 year old is around 0.5 SDs dumber than the average 16 year old, and the average 12 year old is a full SD dumber.

The age of 16 is only an average age at which mental maturity is reached, so it’s likely that some people reach mental maturity later than 16, and some reach it earlier. However, mental maturity should be treated as an unknown variable, because there’s no real way to measure it before it is complete. Because of this, if you believe it is very important to not have sexual relations with people before they are at the peak of their biological intelligence, you should consider raising the age of consent some years above that. This is one of the great flaws in the arguments that AoC skeptics make — they assume that, because the variance is so great in maturation, we should use the lower tail of the variance as the standard for maturity. This is ridiculous and runs contrary to what is normal in safety measures, which is using the upper tail of the variance as the standard for maturity.

First, this is an intelligent use of the data. I think he’s correct about it (he is sourcing it from my chart, after all, so he can’t be right without me having been wrong). However, my gut response relates to what I bolded at the bottom; this is a bad faith criticism unless you are also a radical eugenicist. If the minimum age of marriage in my traditionalism scheme needs to by higher due to 7 points of IQ development, then people under 93 IQ should be totally banned from marrying and reproducing. In theory, if this measure can be shown to be eugenic without serious blow back on the economy, I would support it, and change the minimum age of marriage to a minimum IQ of marriage of 100. Perhaps also with a minimum reproductive development standard.

It’s not just intelligence that determines ability to consent, either. The main reason that people under 16 cannot consent is due to the ways in which we legally restrict U-16s. They cannot drive. They can only work so much. They cannot live on their own. Because of this, there is no possible relationship between a grown adult and a 13, 14, or 15 year old that can be considered on equal footing.

A 19 year old and a 15 year old can bond over their shared lack of alcohol rights in the US. Remember, we’re not talking about a 15 year old and a 45 year old here, that is very rare in practice and not at all representative of what age of consent laws do, which is persecute males aged 15 to 20 for dating teenaged girls that are not more or less exactly their own age. The misconception-stereotype of a massive age gap can be addressed easily with keyhole solutions, such as the 10 year age gap idea I outlined in my trad proposal.

Also, these critiques apply to 14 and 15 year olds, but not 16 or 17 year olds. So you could obviate them in my trad plan by making the minimum age of marriage 16, instead of 14. The raw difference here is very tiny, so I find it not worth thinking about too much — perhaps you could run some natural experiments to see which is more ideal. That is, is the immaturity gap between 14 and 16 much more important than the restriction of young mens’ courting pool? It could be. Maybe 15 or 16 is a better minimum age of marriage, that means the girl is high school aged. You could also lower the driving age slightly if you made the minimum age of marriage 15.

We’re talking about young females here, not males, and their IQs seem to be developed by around 15. But in general I find these critiques basically impotent regarding my trad proposal if you make the minimum age of marriage 15. Courting takes time anyway, and probably wouldn’t be done before 14, so 17 or 18 year old boys could still court a 14 year old and marry with her parent’s permission the next year, if that is what they want.

Secondly, one can accept that quid pro quo is fake and gay, and that power dynamics are necessary goods, in which case relationships with minors are bad because it subverts the authority of the parents.

Under my trad scheme, parents would be expected to know their daughter’s suitor and give their consent, at least until she is 21, which was the historical norm in the US.

Argument 3: “The Age of Consent is modern and doesn’t correspond to history. Large age gaps used to be historically common, and young marriages were normal for women”.

I feel my ideal is consistent with what he writes in here already. He seems to have decades-sized age gaps in mind when he says large, but those were never historically normal. Rather, 3-7 years was historically normal. He discusses some average ages of marriage, but averages are not minimums. Historical minimums were all lower than 14-16; the Catholic Church minimum is modern; before modernity (eg medieval times) the Church minimum was 12 for girls; Anglo common law was the same. So my suggestions here are very modern and high and have female development in mind.

He offers one counter-example:

We know from Caesar and Tacitus that this was also the case for the Germanic tribes during antiquity. According the Caesar, it was considered disgraceful for men and women alike to have lost their virginity before the age of 20. So, in that case even the minimum age was quite high.

On this specifically, if you read Hopkins 1965, he discusses how this was likely untrue; I don’t think it was Caesar who wrote this, but Tacitus, and it was during an exhortation on chastity. So it was one of those cases where ancients made up something mythic to demonstrate a point, it was not true.

Societies with low average marriage ages are usually more dysfunctional. One of the great findings of John Hajnal was that non-Western societies, particularly in the Indo-Islamic and Southeast Asian world, had quite low ages of female marriage. The average was often below 15. Meanwhile, an integral element of the Western European Marriage Pattern was relatively late marriages.

This may be true regarding child marriage, but not teen marriage. Causality is lacking here as well. I propose it runs backwards; poor societies can’t mess around; only the richest one on Earth, which is ruled democratically by a gaggle of simpletons, can afford to have retarded laws on something like marriage (eg persecute many young couples, but legalize adultery, promote divorce, and delay marriage until near infertility).

People ought to be free to delay their own marriages, but not those of others. If delayed marriages are really favorable, then people will evolve to delay marriage. People did not evolve to delay marriage so much, though, so it’s more likely a lot of the persecution of teenaged couples is done out of Hamiltonian spite.

Argument 4: “The Age of Consent is anti-male. It was invented by feminist hags to deny men access to beautiful babes”

There is one environment where it is pretty easy for men to get a girlfriend though, and that’s high school. If the age of consent was lowered, then high schoolers would suddenly have to also compete with older men for these teenage girls, effectively destroying the prospect of young love and ensuring the tyranny of the old over the young.

It’s college students that high school boys would be competing with, not older men. High school boys are usually not fit for marriage and they know it, and girls know it. They should be free to have exactly same aged relationships if they want, but in a free romantic market most relationships will show 3-7 year age gaps.

It’s not even easy to get a girlfriend in high school, because the girls are not attracted to boys, who are developmentally behind. Thus, high school relationships are strained and quid-pro-quo. The boy must offer entertainment and popularity, because he is not even attractive to the girl. If you ever wondered why all the girls around you in high school seemed like lesbians, just try dating an 18 year old when you are 23. She will actually like you for being you! It’s like magic! Never go against nature.

Source

Letting high school boys go to town on captive girls is a great way to ruin a bunch of virgins and get no marriages, which is exactly what happens in American high schools. They prosecute college students if they date high school girls, but let high school boys do what ever they want.

The United States is a soyciety where it’s a felony to date a high school girl if you’re of normal bachelor age (19-22), but yet a majority of high school girls graduate with their hymen missing. They do not marry the same aged boy that they aren’t even attracted to. It’s schizophrenic and depraved.

If you believe in the goodness of young love, you must also believe in the necessity of a high age of consent. This is the only way in which young love can be normal. There is no going back to young love if you are a grown man, and this is obvious if you think about it for a second. What makes being young so great isn’t how the world treats you, it is the way everything feels so incredibly fresh and new. It’s an internal phenomenon. The amount of joy that grown men could extract from a relationship with a teenager does not compare to the amount of joy lost by the teenager whose crush he stole.

He might have 45 year old men in mind, but yes, 20 year old males can feel young love. In fact, they feel it more than 16 year old males.

There is no way that a 14 year old boy could compete with some 20 year old man with a job and a car, even if he would in actuality be more compatible with a girl of his age.

Boy/girl comparison factor is probably 3 years, so a 14 year old boy is like an 11 year old girl, and a 17 year old boy is like a 14 year old girl. There’s no girl for 14 year old boys to date in nature, as they usually don’t want to date little pre-teens. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. And what’s the correlation between age and compatibility anyway? It would seem couples with 3-7 year age gaps are the most compatible, so there you go.

Argument 5: “Women hit the wall after 23/Fertility/whatever”

The wall isn’t real, but if two people want a cornerstone marriage instead of a capstone marriage, that’s their right.

Argument 6: The Age of Consent is Arbitrary, and changes from country to country. Women are already fertile after Menarche!

Female fecundity actually probably peaks at 20. Teenage marriage is more about romance, liberty, fidelity, monogamy, and intimacy, than it is about fertility or maturity. The earlier you get married, the more the marriage is really a life-long promise. Sure you can have some kids after marrying in your 30s, but it’s going to be less romantic, intimate, and monogamous, as the same coupling in the teens. You missed each other’s youth and there were probably other relationships in that time. Note that nobody who is for the status quo even wants chaste teens; they just want a closed-circuit high school fornication culture. It’s nasty. My solution either makes teens get married, it it makes them chaste. Either way you get more monogamous and intimate marriages.

I believe the persistence of low ages of consent in Europe is due to the desire to protect men who unwittingly slept with underage women. The reason American ages of consent developed to be higher is due to the increased reliance on cars in America compared to Europe. The need for a car to get from place to place greatly reduced the ability for young adults to interact with people below 16 in the US, which makes stories of accidental violations of the age of consent much more suspicious. Europeans just walk everywhere, or bike everywhere, or take the train. I could be wrong about this, but if I recall correctly Europeans also had historically lower legal drinking ages. Younger people were able to invade alcoholic spaces, while in America they would be unwelcome.

I think the American age of consents are higher because of religiosity. Age of consent laws were all originally chastity laws that only applied to unmarried girls. Americans were more religious and about the Christian virtue, so they had more serious laws than Europe, where, eg, in Hitler’s Reich the law was 14. The girls could be married under the age of consent and this always excepted them. The laws also did not even cover boys. These laws were inherited by the crazy leftists, who find them useful for persecuting young men now, even though that’s the opposite of their original intent.

Obviously, the law should promote people having long-term, monogamous relationships for the sake of social stability, and emphasizing low ages of consent does the exact opposite. People aren’t getting married to 14 year olds. I don’t care what Isekai fantasy land you have conjured up in your head where you believe this will be the case. Parents no longer need to consider it for the reasons they did in the past, and so they won’t. There is literally zero benefit to marrying your daughter off at 14. I imagine that if such people did get married to a teenager, they wouldn’t even be happy. Teenagers are really quite devilish in their attitudes.

14 would be either the bare minimum or even under the minimum, only suitable for courting by a teenaged boy, in my proposal. That said, all of my relatives except my parents go married as teens. My parents started dating as teens. Both my grandmothers were 16 when they married. So no this is not “Isekai world”. In fact, teen marriage is not even illegal now, it’s just heavily taboo to try it, but the laws as written are actually the chastity laws with a bunch of holes poked in them. I know several people who married between 16 and 19 from my high school. They’re all happy. I also know a guy who got charged with statutory rape for sleeping with a 9th grader at a mixer. He was a high school senior, 19 year old, as he had started school a year late. The girl had snuck in and her parents later complained. She’s where you could predict now.

So in essence, I would like to get rid of all the schizophrenia in the laws, prevent raising the minimum marriage age, discourage premarital sex and encourage traditional romantic norms.

The only thing that would result from lowering the age of consent is a bunch of teenagers getting taken advantage of by men only interested in sex, which provides no fulfillment for anyone involved. You may respond with “okay, but let the punishment fit the crime”, and I can’t say I’m particularly concerned about that. In medieval times, non-violent thieves received the same penalty as murderers if they stole enough stuff, and we’re better off for it today. People need to forget about “punishment”. The prison system exists to cordon problematic people off from the rest of society, not retribution or rehabilitation.

This is cruel, completely out of place if you’re not for more general, Galton style eugenics, and potentially wrong, as a lot of people persecuted by statutory rape laws are sexually successful frat boys. If you’re one of those jock-pilled guys, you think jocks all only date girls exactly their age? No, they are exactly the guys who get caught up in the age of consent laws. You know, white, popular, handsome 20 year old Rugby players that are always invited to the parties. Age of consent laws are abstract to anime rightists because you have to get consensual sex for it to matter at all to oneself personally. Something to think about.