"You're taking this discussion into some irrelevant never-land. Everyone in the "liberal anti-contact" boat recognizes female choice and female desire."

But not so much that an adult holding the trump card isn't required. You say it, and then you turn around and unsay it if her choice threatens to contradict her parents.

That's not choice in adults, so you know its not choice at all. Its just the tyrant's vision of freedom; as the choice to freely remain in a 6x8 cell.

The real world already has mechanisms to protect those who present a risk to themselves or others. To this you add "parental rights" and the superfluous need to recognize age alone as a risk factor and genetic relationship as the sole qualification to be awarded conservatorship. If these were 30somethings we were talking about the self-interest alone would make the claims about the need for a conservatorship highly suspicious.

"Molesters range from the cases we would all agree on as molestation across a line where things become more questionable."

At which point you've really ceased talking about anything recognizable as fraud, assault or rape.

You seek to conflate normal healthy sexuality with rape when nobody interested in preventing rape through intervention actually does so.

But given you previously misanthropic views about healthy sex, I suspect you are somewhat consistent in a desire to deny agency in consenting adults too. I'm afraid that applying this warped view to Pedos doesn't unwarp it.

"If they are in a different legal situation where the girl's apparent consent is taken as legally binding, then they can continue into sexual activity when the girl is not actually consenting and they have misread her ambivalence or hesitation. The law is a big deterrent."

You can't keep violently whipping yourself back and forth this way, You'll get a concussion. ;p

The LEOs cannot be relevant when you bring them in, and an example of me wandering into non-sequitur when I respond to your claims about them. You can either refrain from discussing them or allow me to do so as well.

The law which treats everything as rape is only a deterrent to consenting sex. And, as Hajduk has aptly pointed out, and incentive to commit rape. Similar logic about female asexuality led to "conjugal right" which were legalized rape.

Though when the guy who wrote that last paragraph I cited meets up with the stranger who wrote the first paragraph I cited I expect the fur to fly between the pro-choicer and the AoC law advocate. ;p

"I'm trying to construct the situation where you think girls would be worse off without an age of consent."

Lots of luck on that. You could try, while you're at it, to construct an argument for me where people are worse of without anti-miscegenation laws.

"So do we posit a man who wants to have sex with a girl and does care about what's in her interest. However, he's gotten this idea that sometimes such girls want sex, and this must be one of those times (why?). And since saying "yes" doesn't really mean consent and is the same thing as "no" he might as well just have sex with her when she says "no", on the assumption that she must want it? This makes no sense to me at all."

Only because you believe that muddying up the waters and reading ambiguity into consent cuts in one direction only.

If yes and no are the same thing legally. If yes and no are the same thing to her defective mind ( because age is a mental defect. ) If yes and no are the same thing because she caves into social pressures to conflate them ( perhaps lured away from logic by a shiny penny? ) AND we know that she may mean a yes, then the weaker person may read her hesitance ( absent of a no ) as a tacit "yes." They know that she's been beaten down by the AoC, by a denial that she has real desires and by slut-shaming.

Over here in reality Catholic guilt still exists ( and Jewish guilt &tc. ) Some women who fully want sex will fling themselves at you unambiguously ( OK, the ex-wife is my sole example, but then again she's 33% of my sampling. ) But some will shy away from the overt and try to send cues. The sensitive new-age guy ( SNAG, as in "I just hit a SNAG, ) will read the ambiguous as the ambiguous and try to make her comfortable enough to be unambiguous about what she wants.

But with the Advent of Women's Rights and the pro-choice movement this has become easier. The assumption that yes must mean yes allows the ambiguous to be read as legitimate vacillation, rather than as an attempt by a shamed female to make the guy initiate sex so that she can escape guilt ( religious or otherwise. )

Everywhere that consent has been allowed, the people formerly denied consent are better off, even those who choose not to exercise their options. And when cultures are trained to believe that consent is real for all choices they listen more and rape less. That's just how humans are.

You can't claim that consent reflects choice in one direction and doesn't in the other. You can't claim that ambiguity works in one direction but not the other.

Dante