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.

"People who are in their early twenties are estimated to be two and half times more likely to be sexually inactive than members of Gen X were at the same age."

The New Yorker Magazine 2022-04-11 "How Everyone Got So Lonely" by Zoë Heller

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.

https://guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/1996/01/can-statutory-rape-laws-be-effective-preventing-adolescent-pregnancy

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.

Michelle Oberman of DePaul University "drawing a connection between enforcing these laws and lowering adolescent pregnancy rates flies in the face of everything we know about why girls get pregnant...

...and why they choose to continue their pregnancies. The problem is much more complicated than simply older men preying on younger women."

full text: https://www.guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/1996/01/can-statutory-rape-laws-be-effective-preventing-adolescent-pregnancy

#SPR860

There is no age of consent in Afghanistan.

The variable for them is marriage.

Far right politics does this. They want patriarchal control of women's bodies.

They're fighting against the "anarchy" of women having bodily autonomy.

In Idaho and Yemen a 10 year old can get married, with parental consent.

Their ideology is Daddy must control her sexuality until Daddy gives her away to her future husband, who has been vetted and shown to be a good Christian/Muslim.

The Left has a sincere desire to protect children.

They just got so caught up in

Stranger Danger and Sex Predators Everywhere!!!

that they totally forgot what a child is,

and how to honestly assess harm.

So everything they propose is counterproductive idiocy.

#SPR860

Over 400 million people live in EU countries where the age of consent is 14, 15, or 16

so that's a whole lot of normal respect for teens' bodily autonomy.

Civilized countries don't bring the cops in to try to do their parenting for them.

Only really fucked up countries do that

#SPR860

The young woman was 17 and she took the racy photos herself and consensually distributed them to some friends.

All indicators are that it was no big deal to her, to her friends, or even to her parents, who didn't want a federal case made out of it. https://coloradosun.com/2022/08/11/brush-colorado-school-sexting-child-porn/

The young woman is not pissed off at the principal who made a copy of the pics and stored them on a secure school server.

It was not a big deal to her.

The GIANT PROBLEM here was caused only by the effort to "protect" her.

The principal is facing 12 years in prison, and life on the sex offender registry.

I have no idea why the young woman herself was not charged with distributing child porn. She was not 18 when those pics were taken.

We desperately need to lower the age of majority to 16.

We must start to #RespectYoungAdults

Society has decided that young men and women aged 14-20 are in fact children and this massive cognitive dissonance caused a fucking volcano of confusion, dismay, anxiety, and turmoil.

#SPR860