" You aren't so evil as to think or say out loud, "Sometimes, when a man beds down a child of 14, it's not rape..." Are you?"
Dan
Yet, strangely enough, this is precisely the position of a very large number of people in 2026. It is the position of those who changed the law of a nation of almost 45 million people. Yet, strangely enough, this is precisely the position of over 20 counties (including China, Japan, Italy and Germany) which have an age of consent under 15 years old. As well as the position of many other countries with and age of consent under 16. Apparently billions of people disagree with you.
" "Aren't you one of the ones who have infamously, vulgarly said, "Some teenaged girls LOOK like women!" in defense of child rape?""
Dan
It is possible to note the reality that more and more children dress and act in ways that are not age appropriate or that end up with a 14 year old girl appearing to be significantly older, while not suggesting that her appearance demands that she be "raped". Clearly billions of people across the globe agree that 14 year old girls are old enough and mature enough to consent to sex. Is the a situation where one egotistical ASPL attempts to place his hunches on the topic over that of billions of others? Is the suggesting that two 14 year olds having sex is automatically rape? Do 14 year old girls lack agency or are they exempt from "my body my choice"? Why can 14 year old girls consent to any number of medical practices or other things that will permanently alter their bodies, but not to sex with anyone? It's not out of bounds to note the increasing number of social media posts for junior high dancethats where the girls are dressed and made up in a manner that makes them look significantly older, but also emphasizes their sexuality. It's also not our of bounds to think that doing so is bad for the girls and bad for society.
Further, when we have two generations of "influencers" who've gotten famous for selling their sexuality or for using their social media to drive traffic to their adult content and an entire genre of porn dedicated to making women of legal age look as young as possible, is it any wonder that our girls are so precocious in how they dress and act.
I am all for protecting our children from things that are better faced as adults for as long as possible, obviously I strongly object when I see young children violently and repeatedly raped because of their culture/religion and when those rapists are treated lightly by the authorities. I strongly object to a culture that so slavishly emulates their founder that they legalize marriage to 9 year olds. I strongly oppose the immense number of women and girls sold into sex slavery or raped before being killed to defile them and keep them out of "Heaven". It seems strange to overreact to someone who notes the fact that younger and younger girls dress and act more adult and "hot", than was the case in the past, by jumping to the "you support child rape" conclusion.
I'll close with a reminder that we had a fine upstanding gentleman strongly defended by his faith community when he was caught for kidnapping and raping a 12 year old right here in River City. That fine upstanding gentleman got what seems like an extraordinarily soft sentence for this heinous crime. This represents a noticeable trend across Europe and the UK, and increasing in the US. Maybe that is something that is actually worth getting upset about.
What Dan is doing here is what all atheists do when they say they don't need a god to tell them what constitutes moral behavior. It's an arbitrary law regardless of how one justifies it with psychological argument. But it's necessarily something one can argue from Scripture as there is no definitive age restrictions given for what constitutes how old a female must be in order to be an acceptable object of male erotic attention. Moreover, it demands that one's erotic attention is a matter of self-control or self-discipline--OR--it must be as uncontrollable, immutable and innate as the erotic response of a homosexual when lusting after another of the same sex. Once again, after years of exposure to school girls in my various jobs, Dan is absurd to pretend he can look at a girl and know she's "legal"...that it's impossible not to know when a girl isn't over 18.
ReplyDeleteThe reality is that Dan needs to find whatever ways he can to disparage his ideological opponents...to portray them as immoral and corrupt, while he carries on with his defense, tolerance, celebration and enabling of immorality. I don't know what "magic holy rule book" he uses to come to his conclusions in setting his standards.
While I agree with your characterization of Dan's vaunted "moral code" and it's subjective foundation, I'm not sure how much it is in play here. This seems like more of his "I find this personally icky" driven objections. It's more like his conniption fit about the GOP rep who was in his late teens/early '20s and dated a girl who was almost 18 (ended up marrying her as I recall). As you note, it seems problematic to ignore the recent spate of high profile cases of gay couples buying children through surrogacy and sexually abusing them at very young ages.
DeleteAs you also note, it is sometimes impossible to accurately determine a girl's age from her appearance, and as we know, girls never lie about their age.
It also seems germane to not the number of ASPL celebrities who regularly date women who are decades younger than themselves and get put on magazine covers for their ability to do so.
On a side note, there is room for a discussion about best practices around age gaps, but it's hard to get too worked up about a 50 year old dating a 20 year old when you see 60 year olds marrying 9 year olds. Ultimately, people can date who they want for the most part and whether or not others are comfortable probably shouldn't be an issue. Of curse you're dealing with idiots who refer to old guys who sleep with 17-20 year olds as "pedos" so there is that.
One interesting aspect of the whole "pedo" conversation, as it applies to women over 17, is the biological aspect.
DeleteIf we accept the premise that the highest goal of Evolution is to reproduce and pass on our genes to as many women as possible, then it simply makes sense that older men would be sexually attracted to younger women. If Evolution has coded us for this behavior, then there must be something hard wired into us that makes younger women more sexually attractive. Because, of course they should be more fertile. Now birth control and abortion have screwed up the gene passing aspect, yet the underlying behavior remains.
The "problem" is that, as men age, they have less and less on common with the women who they find sexually attractive, beyond the sex part. Yet we still see men in their '70s and older pulling hot, young women.
Coming from a Christian perspective, the whole "marry one woman, fidelity, cleaving, etc" thing is foreign to both evolution and much of secular society. When you add in the billions of Muslims and Mormons who would love to have multiple wives, things get even weirder, especially given the fact that the later wives tend to get younger and younger.
In many ways, Dan's outrage is almost an outlier position, as he's not completely aligned with historic Christian thought, he's more aligned with secular thought (easy divorce, unlimited access to abortion and birth control), yet he's at odds with societies acceptance of large age gaps. Finally, for someone who's generally a big supporter of Islam, he stays silent on the forced child marriages and multiple wives (along with the welfare fraud we see in the UK) more than you would think. He gets very angry at Trump based on virtually zero evidence, yet sits silently by when it's anyone but Trump.
I'm sure we're simply supposed to assume things from some vague, general comment he made at some point in the past. While simultaneously honoring his demands that we not make assumptions.
You give Dan way too much credit (as if you have a better understanding of "grace" than he'll ever have) with regard to judging age by appearance. I was well into my 30's and still being carded when seeking alcohol and no one pegs me for 71 (and I haven't yet had my first fast lift!). I always get a chuckle when someone several years younger than I tells me "wait until you're MY age!" I tell them I don't remember what it was like when I was their age. Some simply don't look their age and it can go in both directions; older than/younger than. It's that simple.
DeleteDan can't honestly deny he knows this. He just needs whatever he can get his effeminate hands on to disparage people in his "embrace grace" manner. The mere mention that one my age might still find a particular 14 year old to be a "hot babe" gives him such opportunity. "What a lecher!" Yet, this attitude suggests he's judged me as someone who lacks the self-control his lesbians don't have. It's another attempt to inflate the negatives of his opponents while mitigating worse negatives of himself and his kind. He doesn't care about the welfare of females of any age. It's all posturing.
I’m not sure that pointing out the fact that many girls put a lot of effort into looking older than they are is giving Dan credit for anything.
DeleteNoting the reality that young woman is attractive isn’t the same as having sex with her.
As with many things, Dan is more concerned with weaponizing than with protecting young women.
Attractive young girl gets brutally murdered by an illegal or criminal who should not be walking the streets, and Dan says nothing.
FWIW, the hookerization of young girls is a failure on the part of parents who let their kids dress like pop stars and influencers.
We have a generation of girls who believe that success based on how much of your boobs you show on IG, or that OF is a great career opportunity starts by dressing like their idols from the age of 12. We need different role models for our daughters and granddaughters.
There is a whole subculture of female gym influencers who wear as little as possible to public gyms, then get pissed when men look at them. Heaven forbid someone tries to ask them out. Choices have consequences.
DeleteLook at the animal kingdom. It’s normal for opposite sex animals to attract mates, but somehow women won’t acknowledge that they are trying to attract male attention. How many women on social media expose and focus on their boobs (or other body parts) more than necessary? Again, they can choose what they do, but they sound idiotic when men focus on the body parts they push forward. Jedediah Bila points this out regularly.
Effects have causes, choices have consequences, perception is reality. If you present yourself by showing off your boobs, don’t get mad when people only show interest in them.
The meaning of pedophile used to be about sex with pre-pubescent children. Throughout history it has been acceptable to marry when the women reached puberty, often as young as 14. My mom married at 15 and my dad was 19 and nowadays they'd say he was a pedophile. Somewhere along the line law required parental permission for under 16 to marry, and Ohio was one of those states. So, my parents went across the border to Indiana to marry because her parents wouldn't allow it. Things may have changed but it wasn't that long ago when 17-year-olds could marry without permission from parents.
ReplyDeleteMy point is that someone having sex with underage girls who have reached puberty are not pedophiles. Now, I don't think those young girls really know what they are doing if they consent to sex and an older man using them is raping them if they are coerced. I don't think it's right for any older man to be having sex with teens but that is another moral/legal problem and not pedophilia.
That is still the meaning, except when the meaning can be changed for political purposes. The argument about an appropriate age of consent is a completely different discussion. As we see, there is quite the range of ages of consent.
DeleteThe change in consent rules is the result of a mix of psychological reality (regarding how "adult" someone under 18 is likely to be) and its result on the general population. But it's all a subjective thing and I find no fault in either those who agree or those who don't. But as the law is the law, we go by the law regardless of whether or not we agree with the subject age cutoff. If there's any evil in wooing a physically mature 14 year old, it's in the disregard for the established law regarding such things. Dan wants the very notion of an older man being attracted to an attractive girl to be evil so he can find more reason to disparage those who might have less with the notion on a theoretical level. I've seen many hot looking middle school girls. If Dan ever saw the girls I've seen and tries to tell me he isn't attracted to their obvious beauty, he'd just be lying. This is even more true if he was unaware of their actual ages and they looked older than their ages would suggest to most people.
DeleteIf it's not perverse and immoral for Dan to be sexually attracted to dudes of any age, how can it be perverse or immoral for a normal man to be attracted to an attractive 14 year old girl?
I agree, that the conversation around a legal age of consent is fairly subjective and is not something that I necessarily want to get too bogged down in. Having said that, the fact that they’ve changed the age of consent in Afghanistan to nine seems problematic. Obviously historically we’ve seen young women getting married, and to some degree or another it has seemed to work. Our problem is in society, is that we have dragged childhood out to the point where an 1819 or 20 year-old is still considered a child.
DeleteAs I noted earlier, purely from an evolutionary standpoint, men should be attracted to younger women. There are evolutionary benefits to spreading your genetic material far and wide among young and fertile women.
M yeah, Dan is definitely trying to demonize any level of attraction to anyone under whatever his mystery age of too young is. I would say, that there is a difference between walking down the street seeing a young woman of indeterminant age who is very attractive and noting that fact to yourself, and immediately turning it into something sexual.
This is one more example of Dan and his double standard, especially given how many prominent ABC activists end up being accused or convicted of molesting children.