@Suiseiseki @PurpCat @get @sally @LostInCalifornia

Petition to make the "half your age plus seven" rule into law? :blobcat-joy:

50 year-old with a 30 year-old? Nope, off to jail!

That'd be way too strict of course, but I sure wouldn't mind raising the age of full adulthood above 18, with a "sliding window" sort of rule like is already the case for minors in most places. E.g. 19 and 17 is not a problem in most places from what I Know, and it seems quite stupid to make that illegal; likewise with 20 and 22 if we were to raise full adulthood to 21.

Digression: In some places, the sliding window is way too lax. In California, a 25 year-old can be with a 15 year-old, because an age gap of up to 10 years is allowed when the younger person is at least 14 years old. That's not OK, in my opinion.

If it were up to me, I would probably implement something like: "Half your age plus 6 is the lower limit, until the younger person is 25 at which point it becomes unrestricted." I'm choosing 6 instead of 7 because legal rules should generally be more relaxed than moral rules to allow for moral edge cases.

By the way, it should be said that in practice, most of the focus when judging people's relationships should go into assuring that there's no *actual* exploitation going on, which can't be decided with some simplistic formula. But at the same time, it's extremely difficult to codify into law what exactly is and isn't exploitative in a relationship between two people, so formulaic rules like this have their place in law.