16-year-olds are NOT children. To say so is unscientific garbage. Our young adults have internalized their own infantilization to such an extent that they openly deny the existence of #BasicBiology
#ScienceDenial #teens #teenagers #infantilization #discrimination #bigotry
If you really want to understand the truth about teens, it's necessary to acknowledge that 'adolescence' is not a natural state. It's something modern society made up. We raised the age of social adulthood creating a gap between it and biological adulthood. That dissonance creates our well-known behavioral issues at that age. Cultures that don't infantilize their young adults don't get those problems.
see: Margaret Meade or Schlegel & Barry.
100 years ago racists wanted to prove that white men have better brains than everybody else. So they measured the skulls of women, Africans, and Jews and voilà! They had "scientific" proof that everyone they hate has bad brains.
Over the last 20 years we've done exactly the same thing with teens and under 25s. We use cherry-picked junk science to "prove" that they are mentally deficient then we treat them like shit.
This sounds so friendly and nice and supportive
but the underlying message is "You're helpless because you're under 18. Only older people have power. Don't believe in yourself or your power to defend yourself. Look for an older person to defend you."
It's disempowering AF.
It never works to say "In ancient Hebrew tradition 12 year old females are women, therefore we'll uncritically accept that as true"
but as a way of opening our minds, something to consider, what if they got it right and we got it wrong?
This woman says her 11 year old daughters are in puberty.
So in the old Jewish tradition their awkward adolescent phase would last about a year, until their bat mitzvah.
but since she lives in 2022 America they will likely be considered children for at least a decade.
#SPR860
Statistically poverty, substance abuse, and dysfunctional families often correlate. Domestic abuse is in the mix too. No one can isolate one single cause, because the world doesn't work in the oversimplified way we'd like it to.
Imagine you're a girl in a poor abusive household. There's really not much you can do but pray for a better future. Then you hit puberty, and you become sexually attractive to the men in town. This may be the first power you have ever had.
Some peeps are endowed with the power to physically or psychologically dominate their peers with implied threats of violence. Others are gifted with natural leadership abilities. But not all. Then there's a group that is simply pretty and sexy.
If you are this poor young woman from an abusive family, and by chance, nature gives you a sexy body that men like, why wouldn't you start flirting with a man who treats you nicely and makes you feel loved? And wouldn't it be even better if the man had a job and a car?
Your way to get away from your hellish home on a Saturday night may literally be the vehicle owned by your new boyfriend, but your ticket to a better life could definitely seem like a serious relationship with a somewhat older man.
Young adults (aka teens) from poor families tend to have more unplanned pregnancies than their peers from rich families. There are many possible reasons for that. Better access to contraception being the most obvious one.
Young adults (aka teens) from rich families also have much better access to options for terminating an unplanned pregnancy than their poor counterparts. So statistically teenage mothers tend to be much less wealthy than older first time mothers.
There was a famous study done by Darroch in the 90s. (see below) It shows a lot of what I have outlined here. When California Gov Gray Davis saw the study, however, he ignored all the relevant data, and decided that the CAUSE of all these problems was statutory rape.
His plan was to get the cops & prosecutors to put more of the boyfriends with jobs & cars in prison as a way to solve the teen pregnancy problem. This was, of course, illogical to the point of batshit crazy. Smart people at the time pointed that out.
So people in the 90s screwed up. Big deal. Who cares?
The main issue here, is that Gov Davis's batshit stupid thinking went mainstream, and dominates our discourse to this day. Big TV personalities like Oprah picked it up and spread it generously.
The goofy myth based on contorted logic took on a life of its own. The general public, who never spend a lot of time digging into the research or thinking things thru, started to believe that the causation runs opposite to the reality.
That is to say, people now believe that teenage women dating men 10 years older than them causes them to be poor and show the symptoms of an abuse victim.
The obvious reality is that poverty and dysfunction is what led them to choose that partner in the first place.
Criminalizing a young woman's choice of boyfriend isn't the way to make her life happy and healthy. Incarcerating the father of a young woman's baby is one of the worst things you can do to her and her infant. We need to bring a little common sense back to this discussion.
We didn't have to create the concept of "adolescence"
We didn't need to cause all the accompanying problems
#RespectYoungAdults #StopTheHysteria #SPR860
Teen pregnancy correlates with poverty. Having a significantly older boyfriend does too. It's actually logical and reasonable. We need to eliminate poverty.
This is from the excellent Hines & Finkelhor meta study.
#SPR860
This is a very common, and a very stupid argument.
"they only did that because they had to" seems fine, except that Jacqui hasn't begun to examine whether they wanted to or not.
Why the assumption that the practice was undesirable?
150 years ago people were very unhealthy. Their growth and puberty were delayed. Jacqui's example is bad.
Hunter-gatherers, however, do tend to settle down and have kids shortly after puberty, so around 14 years of age.
Do 14-year-old hunter-gatherers have to do that?
I suspect that most of them want to.
Like what else are they going to do with their time? Travel? See London? They got no airplanes.
Start a career? Maybe advertising.
Their whole culture is designed for raising babies. They've been helping with babies their whole lives.
Their tribes have structures in place to support young mothers to the utmost.
This is our natural state. We lived like this for a million years.
Of course we don't do that now.
But ffs stop pretending that that's not the most natural thing we could do.
Our society has established schools and places of employment which effectively exclude new mothers.
That's why having babies as a young woman is such a bad idea.
Because of the system we created.
That's why we have to fight against nature. Biology is not on our side.
With good sex education, contraceptive access, and free health care plenty of advanced societies do really well at handling happy young adult sex lives without having ten million pregnant teenagers.
Guess which country is really bad at sex education, contraceptive access, and free health care.
#SPR860
Just by looking at her, it's not clear if a little romp in the hay with her makes a guy a sex offender or not.
Imagine your brother, 22 years old, is at a music festival. He gets a little drunk, and meets a hot chick like that, she's a little frisky...
She has to say she's 21 because they officially only let over 21s into the event.
So she and your brother enjoy great sex in addition to the great music and everybody's happy 'till her dad finds out and your brother gets arrested, and the headlines read LOCAL MAN RAPES CHILD
Tatiana was 17 when that photo was taken. She was not a child by any stretch of the imagination. But the Hysteria requires that we ignore reality, and make sure that the entire world thinks your brother is a pedophile sex predator.
#SPR860
No demographic gets more hate than young adults (aka teens). It's vile. They deserve respect.