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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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"Barely legal" is a category I find distasteful. It's "if I were just a bit less of a coward, I'd fuck underage girls" consumers, and it's not much help that 'well the women are much older than they're pretending to be'. A guy who likes to fantasise about 16 year olds* probably also likes to fantasise about 14 and 15 year olds, and how low do we go before we're hitting actual paedophilia?

*Age of consent being a tricky one; 'barely legal' may mean 'pretending I just turned 16 yesterday' in one country and 'just turned 18' in another.

But hey, it's legal (as much as any porn is); porn is highly reliant on taboo and 'forbidden fruit' for its appeal, because why would you bother with vanilla stuff, hence the fantasy of barely legal; men are hardwired to like the same age range of women despite getting older themselves, so whether a man is 18 or 60 he's still going to like 18 year olds, and at least it's not kids.

Yet.

"Barely legal" is a category I find distasteful.

Considering that it's usually 25yos in pigtails and knee socks, I wouldn't get too het up about it.

Pretty much all datasets on the matter I've seen show a strong preference in most men for women as young as they can get, being bounded by a minimum age of 18, only because that's the lowest the chart shows.

https://medium.com/@okcupid/the-case-for-an-older-woman-99d8cabacdf5

I suspect that if the researchers uncapped it and offered images of even younger women, the modal preference would be around the age of 16. Leaving aside issues of cowardice, it's illegal in many jurisdictions to fuck someone that age if you're not covered by Romeo and Juliet clauses, and often filming porn of them is illegal even if that's not.

So if you disapprove of this, you are necessarily disapproving the preferences of almost all men, which is to catch them as young as they feasibly can. Not me, I like older women myself, to a degree, but even just looking at the most popular OnlyFans creators or their Tiktok equivalents reveals how insanely in demand outright neoteny in. Shame biology as it stands isn't so obliging.

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