Notices by Gwendolyn (gwendolyn@mastodon.cloud), page 4

Over the last 10 to 20 years Sex-Phobic Neo-Puritans have been very successfully pushing the narrative that the "dynamics" of an age gap relationship always lead to psychological manipulation.

This is patently false.

#StopTheHysteria #RespectYoungAdults

It's just clumsy wording

It's easy for people to mistake expanded opportunities to rake in enormous profits (satisfying natural human greed) for greed itself.

or they just write "greed" because it's shorter than "unregulated markets allowing anti-social levels of enrichment"

Remember when Jordan Peterson was FURIOUS that they put a plus sized model on Sports Illustrated.

He was apoplectic. I've never seen anyone so angry :-D

and the reasonable world was like "Dude, if you don't like it, don't buy the magazine" :-D

When I was young, ages 13-15 were "just learning to be an adult"

now we have pushed the"just learning to be an adult" phase up to ages 18-22.

It's extremely unhealthy for our teenagers.

Young women have every right to control their own bodies.

Obnoxious Twitter randos have no right to an opinion on their choices.

The Puritans who landed at Plymouth Rock hated dancing and swearing,

but most of all they feared and loathed Sex and Alcohol.

To this day the USA is an outlier in bizarre useless totalitarian restrictions on Sex and Alcohol.

People are not mental incompetents until they reach some mythical point of "fully mature".

Really think through this power-imbalance nonsense

https://youtu.be/F6AR5LxXUMQ

People fall in love. They shouldn't go to prison for that.

Unplanned pregnancies happen. No one should go to prison for that.

Incarceration is not the solution to every problem, America.

_"Sex involves risk of pregnancy" is a good argument for thorough sex education and free contraception.

It it not an argument for Abstinence Only Enforced By Cops and the Mass Incarceration System.

Seriously, in the USA where the age of consent is between 16 and 18 we have TWICE THE TEEN PREGNANCY rate of EU countries, and we have far more STDs.

High ages of consent do NOT solve these problems.

In fact, it looks like they cause them.

This meticulous investigative reporting shows how extremely rare but heinous crimes are so badly bungled by buffoons in uniform

and the public's hysterical overreaction does nothing to address the real failure in the system

https://features.apmreports.org/in-the-dark/season-one/

#SexPredator #Predator #CSA

Angry anti-pedo idiots on social media are not helping.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/202009/performative-rage-over-pedophilia-doesnt-protect-kids

seeking a relationship and sexual attraction are two very different things

we find people sexy all the time without any need to start romantic relationships

and vice versa

Some societies empower their young adults.

Our society disempowers them by explicitly denying their adulthood, and barring them from adult spaces.

So of course they can't gain experience as adults.

They're prohibited from entering that space until they're 18 or 21.

We live in an attention economy and the dumbest people get the most attention.

We have to find a way to deal with this phenomenon.

There are, of course, examples of parents forcing kids to grow up too fast.

but what I see in my town and in the news is 99% parents and schools forcing young adults to stay children, or child-like, for years after they could have and should have grown up.

If smart phones and social media are the cause of the mental health crisis among young adults (aka teens) in the USA why aren't they having the same crisis in Europe?

We can't impress upon a young person his or her responsibility to make these choices,

if we refuse to respect his or her right to make those choices.

That is the basic flaw in our approach.

#responsibility #choices #respect #right #flawed #approach

The brain is by far the least understood part of the human body.

Drawing conclusion about what should be illegal for whom based on junk fMRI studies is atrociously stupid.

#RespectYoungAdults