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Big Laconian "IF". Hilariously, also a Big Lacanian "IF".
But you've kind of proven my point. You don't really have any way to justify this sort of boundary. So, when they come and ask, "Why can't children consent?" I guess, you're gonna be like, "Well they can, but I have a giant gray ball of arbitrary murkiness, if you'd like to look into it!" And I mean, uh, they're not going to give much of a shit about your giant gray ball of arbitrary murkiness; they're going to hear that you said that children can, in fact, consent, and they're going to view your giant gray ball of arbitrary murkiness as just some superstitious, sex-negative, religious prude bigot weirdness that they can safely ignore, because, "Ew."
Life is full of murky areas where we make arbitrary cutoffs.
We have to make such decisions over what “consent” even means in any given context. “One drink” is a standard some places for lacking the ability to consent, for example.
I’m not trying to defend the specific one here as it is, or attack it, I’m pointing out something like an age cutoff is basically inevitable and that “consent” is both complicated and insufficient as a principle.
Age of responsibility/adulthood issues are their own mess before you even bring in the separate mess of consent.
Congratulations! You appear to not be a subscriber to a consent-only sexual ethic. Unfortunately, this probably means that you're a bigot. Right-thinking people know that consent-only is the proper sexual ethic, because that is how we justify our other political positions. As soon as you start letting concerns other than consent into the picture, it's harder to smugly say that any concerns other than consent are just some backwater religious shit.
You are now no longer even relevant to the conversation when they ask the question, "Why can't children consent?" because as soon as you try to pipe up with, "Uh, actually, I have other concerns for my sexual ethic than just consent," you will immediately be deplatformed as an obvious bigot, and the public conversation will just be between people who can at least try to maintain some message purity on the basics of the movement.
The funny thing here is you’re blatantly wrong about the present dynamic among progressives/youngins.
Go read about age gap discourse and get back to me.
Also, progressives already don’t live by a strict consent-based moral framework. They frequently believe the right of consent should be taken away (organ donation for money, and anything else they perceive as involving a potential power imbalance that could involve “exploitation” of the oppressed).
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