You may have some points but there are a number of errors in your
thinking that I decided to reply.

On Apr 14, 8:54 am, good...@rock.com wrote:

The reason that sex with children is generally illegal is because most
children are neither emotionally nor physically ready to be having
sex. If you want to argue that perhaps some of the restrictions are
archaic hangovers from victorian-style morality you'll get no argument
from me. If you want to argue that some of the restrictions are
merely ways of inserting religious doctrine into the law, you'll also
get no argument from me. If you want to argue that the usual age of
consent is too high that's a reasonable argument; for the states that
set it at 18 that probably is too high; it ignores the reality of sex
among teenagers. There then comes the issue as to whether they should
be having sex. I mean, for obvious reasons we do not give teenagers
liquor and car keys because they're often irresponsible.

The argument might be, are they irresponsible because of their lack of
adult capacity, or are they irresponsible because they've often been
coddled as children? That's another issue to consider.

The law is not normally designed to tolerate 'nuance' very well;
nobody wants a statutory scheme for setting rules where it means one
thing if you read it one way and another thing if you read it a
different way. Thus it sets a flat prohibition on sex below a
certain age because we have discovered that children below a certain
age are not normally capable of handling sexual activity with others
and typically sexual activity between adults and children is
exploitive in nature.

On the other hand it is arguable that the prohibitions on sex are
because the state wants to essentially license sex and prohibit it
unless you have a license, or because they have to allow sex to allow
the species to continue, but because of puritanical attitudes the
attempt is to make almost all sex illegal because they don't like it,
not because of any real concern over the victims of abuse or those who
are unfairly taken advantage of by adults who should have known better
than to exploit children who are not really ready to be having sex.

But, of course, then, there is the issue: is it exploitive because it
does wrong to the child, or is it exploitive because the child, who
otherwise wouldn't have thought of it that way, comes to believe they
have been victimized because they've been told they have been?

I mean, I may be old fashioned, but I see it as an entirely different
issue if some 30-year-old woman was having sex with a 14-year-old boy,
and some 30-year-old man was having sex with a 14-year-old girl. The
first one wouldn't bother me; the second, I might wonder if she's
being exploited.

Again, the thing that I am concerned about is, if some young boy is
having sex with some older woman, he's probably thinking this is great
and wonderful, and then he's told that he's been exploited sexually
and is a child molestation victim and would never have believed he was
a victim if he wasn't told that he was. (At least I see it that way;
when I was 14 I was thinking about sex and probably would have been
delighted to get it from some woman.)

On the other hand we hear stories of priests molesting young men and
it's clear they have been damaged by what happened to them. I suspect
those cases are closer to rape than anything consensual and the issues
are entirely different. So maybe I'm comparing apples and oranges.

Whether you agree or disagree with the setting for the age of consent,
what's most important is that it be clear. Most legislatures, if they
thought could get away with it, would make all sex outside of marriage
a serious crime, and a number of them have made the rules rather murky
so it's hard to be certain exactly what is the age of consent. It was
only a couple years ago that Virginia's anti-fornication statute was
found to be unconstitutional; the New Jersey Supreme Court came to the
same conclusion more than 30 years ago.

The legislatures have, however, in some places, come to realize that
the laws should be there to prevent exploitation of minors by adults,
not to target consensual sex between teenagers. California, for
example, makes sex between minors only a misdemeanor instead of a
felony if the two are 3-years or less difference in age. Colorado has
gone further than this; while it's a felony to have sex with someone
under 18, this is waived if the older person is within 4 years of the
younger one, meaning that it's legal for a 19-year-old to have sex
with his 15-year-old girlfriend, but it's still a felony if he were 21
and she were 15 or 16, but would be legal if she were 17. Some
people say the limits should be raised to 6 years. That's a
reasonable thing to argue as it still leaves an issue of when someone
is 'too young' to be having sex because it does make the point that
children should be protected from exploitation by adults.

In Japan the age of consent is 13. So there is grounds to argue that
perhaps the limits are too high and criminalize what might not
actually be criminal behavior. It's a fine line and there are
reasonable arguments on both sides. But I don't know that reducing
the age of consent to 0 is valid because I do believe that there are
some ages where they don't really understand what is going on and sex
at their age would be exploitation, since it almost certainly would be
initiated by an adult. I see some guy talking some little girl into
performing oral sex on him either by offering her candy or by putting
something sweet on his penis and 'encouraging' her to lick it off as
the sort of thing we should protect children from as, to me, it
represents pure exploitation. Somehow I think a guy like that, if he
gets caught, might just deserve what 'Bubba' in the local state
institution does to him. But I am kind of concerned about how the
kid, if they weren't told they'd been victimized, might not become
traumatized by what happened. I think that because it's sexual in
nature, the puritan culture goes berserk over what is going on rather
than try to let the child know that we consider that the man did
something to her that we don't approve because he is supposed to know
better, not instill in her some horrible fear over how horribly she's
been degraded by the depraved pervert.

There was a man by the name of Rene Guyon - I think that was his name
- who wrote at least one book where he wanted to essentially argue the
point that we shouldn't have an 'age of consent' or that it should be
0. But without simply dismissing it out of hand as 'enabling child
molestation' I'll simply say that I do not agree with this because I
do believe that below a certain age a child has neither the emotional
nor the physical capacity to be able to consent to sex, at least with
adults. For the moment I'll grant for the sake of argument that
children of similar ages might engage in certain types of play that
would possibly be classified as sexual in nature with each other which
is not harmful to them (like little kids playing 'doctor' and seeing
each other naked or touching each other's privates). But I think that
there is a big difference between, say, a 9 and 11 year old trying
oral sex on each other and some man my age wanting to do that to a 12-
year-old girl.

This has made me think for a bit, because I am wondering, for rape or
other similar misconduct, if we could separate the sexual construct
from the assault, might it be possible to allow victims of such crimes
to be able to heal better than those who dwell on the sexual aspect of
what has been done to them. If someone hits you in the face, or the
stomach, even if it's more than once, it's painful but we can take it
less personally than if one is being raped. And to some extent I
think that our failure to be able to allow ourselves the ability to do
that has allowed attackers to have more power over their victims and
the results of what they have done than we should be allowing.

I am somewhat confused on this issue myself. I understand the
arguments that photos of underage persons having sex is prohibited
because it's often evidence of real abuse or rape against children.
The thing that bothers me is that it can sometimes be prostituted into
cases that have nothing to do with exploitation or abuse. Sometimes
parents take pictures of their kids when naked; technically such
photos have a very high probability of being considered child
pornography.

Another issue concerns the case of an underaged girl and boy who did
video of themselves having sex. Apparently, where they lived, they
were within the age limit rules that it was legal for them to have
sex, but unfortunately filming themselves having sex was a crime, and
they were both convicted for making child pornography. Apparently the
appeals court felt that the law was necessary to protect them and
upholding their conviction was meant to punish them for such
reprehensible conduct. That I think this sort of decision was
ludicrous does not necessarily mean I think that the idea of
protecting children from being exploited is a bad idea. I just think
in this case the results were wrong for the wrong reasons.

I think the issue here is that supposedly it's easier to declare all
images of minors naked or engaged in sex is illegal and the police
don't have to try to figure out which are of exploitation and which
aren't. I don't know what the right answer is; with an outright ban
you have the ridiculous situation I noted above where two teenagers
filming themselves fucking get jail time and a felony conviction,
without a ban you legitimize images of child rape.

So maybe you can have some exceptions but then it raises a whole new
can of worms, to mix a couple of metaphors. The fact of the matter
is that in general, the various legislators would probably make all or
almost all pornography illegal, or even material discussing sex to be
a crime. We aren't that far from the Comstock act, where one man
essentially made himself censor over what could be mailed and what
couldn't be.

Even as recently as 1972, the manager of a theatre in Albany, Georgia
was convicted, and his conviction upheld by the Georgia Supreme Court,
for showing a film that was considered to be obscene: "Carnal
Knowledge", starring Art Garfunkel, Jack Nicholson and Candice
Bergen. The U.S. Supreme Court had to finally decide in Jenkins v.
Georgia, 418 U,S, 153, that the film was not obscene, in effect,
'reeling in' the state courts that had gone a little too far in trying
to claim almost any coverage of sexuality was obscene.

Actually, the idea that one could commit rape on one's spouse is
relatively new, not much later than the 1970s, I think. In most
states, if not all, before this, the law specifically excluded one's
spouse as a person one could be capable of committing rape upon.

I think this basically reinforces a point that goes right along with
the statement I made regarding Virginia's continued making of
fornication a crime until last year when the case of Martin v. Ziherl
ruled that because the U.S. Supreme Court decided that gays having
private sex was legal in Lawrence v. Texas meant that a law making
private sex among heterosexuals illegal could not stand either. The
laws which existed basically made marriage a license to have sex, and
any unlicensed sex would be a crime in most states if they could make
it that way. This is part of the long puritanical culture of the U.S.
on the issue of sex.

There is a belief in this country that marriage is something that the
community and the state have a right to become involved in as opposed
to something which basically should, at best, be a religious matter
which the state should not have an dealings with. What has happened
is that the economic contract which marriage represents has been
confused with the romantic relationship which has been (no pun
intended) prostituted as part of marriage instead of admitting that
love and marriage have exactly zero relationship with each other.

Marriage is basically an economic contract where two people agree to
provide economic security to each other and their children (if any),
because we live in a world where there is no economic security except
for what we can manage to provide to each other. But that contract
has now been changed because now the State is a third party to the
contract and will now dictate the terms under which you can get out of
it.

The people who support same-sex marriage have it right: there are
something in excess of (it is claimed) 300 special benefits you get by
being married that you don't have by being just two people who are
friends or lovers, ranging from automatic inheritance if you don't
have a will to right to visitation in a hospital if you get sick.

Dump 'pull out'. That's not a good example. There are other methods
available for women, including contraceptive foam and a new product
called 'film'. It's inserted similar to foam only it's a strip like
those instant breath strips, and melts due to body heat spreading
inside the vagina. The package indicates that you could use it alone
as a form of birth control.

I agree with your point about two forms of birth control, but do you
know why? It is simple arithmetic; your average form of
contraception, even if used precisely, has a failure rate as high as
3%% or sometimes more. By using two forms simultaneously the failure
is the exponent of the two, so that instead of 3 in 100 for one, the
potential for failure is 9 in 10,000.