"Prepubescents are just very rarely interested in sexual activity, and if they are it's more a curiosity than passion."

BS

Some are, some aren't. We have enough testimony to the contrary to know that this isn't always the case.

Human rights aren't about deciding what the majority should want for them, nor about allowing the most popular choices to nullify those with fewer takers.

And the claim to speak for them about how they feel is insulting at best. But that's what you do, put your own words in the mouths of others in order to deny that authentic alternative experiences exist. "That's what they say, buy they don't believe it," is your default position. It is a way to silence children whose experiences rebuke your opinion.

"Young teens may have an intense desire, but they can easily wait a few years for sexual activity with little harm (or do it with peers -- laws restricting sex between kids of similar age are insane). On the other hand, sexuality is so important to adults that it trumps risks."

There are no valid arguments that adults cannot wait.

Fertility treatments get better each year. Any argument to wait for 18 IS a valid argument to wait for 30. No argument that allows the 18 year old whose development is still ongoing disallows the 15 year old.

And the assumption that peers are somehow OK partners by virtue of being peers just flies in the face of all the real risks and abuses. ( Risks and abuses which do not nullify consent, but certainly must be factored into statistics about REAL sources of harm vs imaginary sources of harm. )

Heck, there are very good arguments that the peer-pressures which arise in mid to late adolescence and are largely absent by young adulthood make boys much more likely to see girls as a "conquest" which is expected of them by other boys.

"Are you still a virgin?" "If you aren't gay why aren't you banging your GF?" These are teen locker-room convos that are pretty much gone by the mid 20s.

But its all too convenient and selfish for the bully to deny to the weaker what they refuse to deny to themself. That sort of ageist exceptionalism trumps all logic to set a different date ( in either direction ) nor to admit that kids shouldn't be punished for loving who they will.

"Also, young teens are in general much less good at discerning intentions of their potential partners."

I could say "cite or STFU," but we both know you will do neither.

Discerning intentions is not a strong human skill at any age. But with all the social pressures on late adolescents and adults to conform, and with all the years of training to "defer to authorities" younger kids often are better BS detectors than the "bright shiny objects" fictions that you offer in their places.

At least I know one teen who deferred to her younger sister as a better judge of human character; and not because the older was particularly unskilled.

Society doesn't like the idea of other whites conspiring to help their slaves do things against the owners' wishes. (Radical abolitionists dismiss this, of course, but that's a separate discussion.)

Children aren't property.

Of course they have been treated as such throughout most time. But like women's rights, the admittance and expansion of youth rights are the mark of a more civilized society.

Heck, society ALSO doesn't like the idea of parents' wishes when they want to allow their child to marry at an earlier age it agrees upon, work, &tc. So even a coherent stance on parental "rights" gets tossed out. There is no logic or principal. There is only the support for an accidental hodge-podge of admitting this and denying that as if it had been created coherently rather than arrived at by accident. And an elevation of the present laws as if only the laws of the past needed improvement and we have "arrived" at some perfect moment which needs only a slight tweak, but no actual rethinking.

And yet its the "absolutists" who have been proven right at every point in the history of civilization.

The rule of Kings didn't need moderation, it needed abolition. The rule of men over women didn't need to promote a more just master, it needed to abolish his mastery.

"Age of consent laws are good for protecting young teens from indisputable rape."

False and you know it.

It does nothing whatsoever about rape. Nothing.

It criminalizes sexual activity on the basis of ages without ANY regard to whether rape occurred. And the statutes cannot be invoked in ACTUAL cases of rape where there was no AOC violation.

When you can stop saying such obvious untruths with a straight face, folks might take you seriously.

True, preventing ALL sex based on arbitrary demographics would prevent rape between those demographics.

Of course preventing all sex is not actually possible.

And the fact that AOC laws punish age differences grievously can inhibit someone who has been wronged from coming forward where they don't want to bring the other party under the full penalty of the law. ( And most girls are unaware that they too may face horrible violations for being treated as a "victim" against their will. )

But that is ALWAYS the perverse consequences of criminalizing any consensual activity. It drives good actors away but not the bad. It removes any possibility of oversight ( even parental oversight. ) And it makes someone LESS likely to seek justice when they know that the penalties will be very unjust.

Of course because I am above the magic age I can seek redress for rape. But I can also ask for compensation for theft if my one-night-stand steals my stereo without placing her on the hit list SO registry for life as a rapist.

And I'm less likely to end up with her in the first place because discussing her bad habits doesn't involve being treated like a rape victim and having blood drawn, my *ss probed &tc. Other guys can say, she's funny, pleasant, nice in the sack, but she's a klepto without fear of iatrogenic harm to them.

( Just ask the gals who went to the cops to compel Assange to take an STD test, and found that he stands accused of rape [ and they still have no test results ] whether they would go to the police again. )

"On the other hand, teens should not be coerced into saying they were against something if they weren't, and as long as they say they consented, prosecutors should use discretion and not pursue a case."

Oh, so its the fictional AOC Laws in your head that are good. The ones where struggling girls haven't been held down and deflowered by a rape kit while denying that anything happened. The ones where no teen has been jailed for an indeterminate period in order to have their testimony coerced against their "rapist."

The law is what it is not what you claim you want to support when it goes against you. And then you turn around and tell others that society has valid reasons for keeping it as it is. And that the motives to change it must be assumed to be selfish when they come from Pedos.

You cannot both support it at present, ask for change at present AND decry those who ask for change.

Nor can you pretend that Nons will budge on every "reasonable" change you wish to make and argue that society will resist all other changes and that there will be a backlash.

Of course you do argue these things.

"The world is in fact full of men (pedophile or not) with much sleazier intentions leading to more sordid realities. The law can't tell them apart, so it has a strong motivation to prohibit all."

That might even make sense if prohibition were possible.

But since it isn't, we must ask whether girls are harmed or helped by the laws as they are.

I cannot see how anyone who thinks that rape is bad should seek to eliminate the notion that a child can be raped.

But that is what you do.

Rape is the violation of the ability of the other to consent. It is what happens when the choice of another is overridden and sex is forced upon her against her will.

You claim that girls have a will when it comes to sex. Then you argue that when their will goes against yours that you know better, thereby denying them a will. And that laws which nullify any will to affirm are the best tools to prevent rape.

No wonder you fabricate child-prostitution desires out of whole cloth. Because everything you support essentially makes the child the sexual puppet of another; except in this case the other gains gratification from enforced celibacy.

Now I don't suffer per se from laws anywhere banning homosexuality. But I suffer from living in a world which did and still does punish others for the sex I don't presently want. And I know that it would be a grave injustice if I could not change my mind.

The State has no business telling me that the sex I don't presently want is rape. It has no business conflating my potential affirmative choice with rape. And it has no business deciding that I cannot be raped; that if no demographic statute was violated, nor the rights of society nor my masters that it cannot be rape. I believe that my own right to not be raped stems from me and my choice.

But AOC laws are entirely unconcerned with the rape of a child.

I think we can do better and must.

Dante