this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
-40 points (2.4% liked)
Ask Men
2013 readers
1 users here now
A community to Ask Men questions and discuss any and all issues relating to them.
Unlocking Perspectives, Advice, and Empowerment for Men Everywhere.
Rules
Follow the rules of lemmy.world, which can be found here.
Additionally:
- Be respectful
- Try to engage in a positive & constructive manner
- No harassment, hate speech, or trolling
- Use appropriate language & tone.
- Share relevant content.
- Follow guidelines and moderators' instructions
- Report content that violates rules or needs moderator attention
Notes
-
The title of your post should contain the actual question being asked.
-
The rules are not meant to be exhaustive and may be modified/extended should if deemed necessary.
Would you like to help with moderating AskMen? Send a PM to the top mod.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
TL;DR I think that's stupid.
Never heard such an argument before. There's a distinction between what's ethical and what's legal, but age is merely an approximation for several factors: mental development, experience, the capacity for agency and consent, "life stage", and various social/cultural nuances. It's not practical nor feasible to define or test all of the possible metrics for every case: we must draw the line somewhere, and that somewhere is defined as a sufficiently developed brain and the (presumed) capacity for meaningful consent. Anything beyond that has exponential less significance... There's a common saying: "half your age plus 7"; not that anything else is immediately unacceptable but that it may be suspect or deserving of greater scrutiny. Ultimately it doesn't really matter so long as the meaningful consent requirement is satisfied. Unless someone can point to some data about significantly worse outcomes or harms, it's my belief that age delta is largely irrelevant. And even if that were the case, it doesn't automatically mean that such things should be restricted or socially punished (e.g. drinking and smoking causes harm but is permitted)