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This term is, in fact, controversial - at least in the discourse space you and I are participating in. It is, in fact, an extremely tendentious framing, and I do in fact reject it. (The mere fact that the “age of consent” differs so dramatically between different jurisdictions worldwide illustrates that people do in fact disagree substantially about the validity of the framing.)
We absolutely do not agree on this. First off, we would have to ask a number of very important questions which you hand-wave away. Does the man know she’s 18, rather than 21? (If he met her in a bar, the answer is almost certainly “no”.) Does he know that she “doesn’t know her limits”? Why would he assume that a grown adult is unable to exercise basic agency over her own decisionmaking?
Your scenario doesn’t mention anything about misdirection, subterfuge, etc. (i.e. spiking a drink without her knowledge) He’s just offering her drinks, and she’s willingly accepting those drinks.
And once she’s finished all of those drinks, how “visibly drunk” is she, actually? Surely you are aware that there is a wide spectrum of intoxication; someone can be buzzed or tipsy without being genuinely unable to exercise basic control over his or her faculties. Someone can be drunk enough to make decisions which one would not make if stone-cold sober, and in some cases that’s the whole point of drinking in the first place. (“Liquid courage” is a term for a reason.)
And an observer cannot always reliably detect, based on observing outwardly-obvious behavior, a person’s internal level of confusion/inebriation. Nor can simply knowing how many drinks she has had reliably tell you the extent to which she has lost control of her faculties. I know plenty of people who can down five shots of tequila and still maintain quite a bit of mental acuity and functionality; I also know plenty of people who will have one mixed drink and then be a stumbling mess.
You are requiring this man to be able to accurately gauge everything about this situation, at penalty of going to prison for a substantial chunk of his life, and having a permanent felony record, if he misjudges any of it. I thought I was one of the more authoritarian and pro-law-and-order posters here, but apparently you put me to shame.
All of this would, of course, be quite different if we lived in a culture in which it was widely understood to be extremely aberrant behavior for a woman to consume alcohol and then have sex with a man she just met, or barely knows. If we lived in a culture where the vast majority of women were chaste, monogamous, and averse to the mere thought of having casual hook-ups, then in the rare scenarios when a woman does do that, we could at least assume that foul play and predatory behavior on the man’s part may be involved.
However, in the culture we do live in, women do in fact willingly and enthusiastically consent to hookups all the time - very often after consuming some amount of alcohol! In such a milieu, any man who capitalizes on this opportunity now has to accurately - usually while intoxicated to at least some degree himself - whether this particular woman is hooking up with him because she is so plastered she’s lost all control of her mind and body, OR because that’s just a normal thing that tons of women do willingly all the time these days.
I am strongly in favor of a sea change in cultural morality toward a far more sexually-conservative set of cultural norms. However, that whole suite of norms would have to develop basically simultaneously, with all parties involved holding up their respective ends of the bargain. In the meantime, you’re asking far too much agency from men and none at all from women, with predictably disastrous consequences.
In Bahrain, a man who violently rapes a woman can escape all legal culpability if he agrees to marry her. The fact that Bahrainis "disagree substantially about the validity of the framing" (namely, that rape is a heinous and despicable crime, and not just because it may be harder for the victim to find a husband) does not give me cause to update my views on rape or reject the conventional western framing.
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I don't think the moral importance of age of consent in general is controversial even on here. Don't get me wrong, I'd welcome any interesting discussion you'd like to have here.
But, I think the fact on the ground is that while posters would disagree on exact ages, allowances across cultures, etc, most people think there should be some age and/or age-gap that makes it definitionally impossible to consent.
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But women do have massively less agency than men. They're called the meme gender for a reason and that goes both ways. There is a reason that for all 5,000 years of recorded history men have led and women, with very rare exceptions, followed- that's just the way it shakes out. Again, that goes both ways- insisting on women's empowerment is usually dumb, but so is counting on women's agency to get anything done.
Making plans on the basis of 'women will have agency to change cultural morality' is a bad plan. Particularly around sexual norms; do you think women are initiating these encounters at a rate that even cracks the high single digits?
That's even ignoring that open and liberal sexual norms aren't particularly what women want anyways. They're something that's mostly desired by men, for biological reasons.
This is an inherently hazardous activity and my sympathy for such men is limited. If they get it wrong they deserve to pay the price because there's a high chance of getting it wrong and that seems generally foreseeable and known.
And
One can recognize the need for some sort of line to draw without thinking that every particular line is obvious rather than arbitrary. Almost nobody thinks that an adult should be allowed to have sex with a 13 year old. On the other hand, having sex with a 17 year old doesn’t seem any different from having sex with an 18 year old. But having sex with a 16 year old doesn’t seem different from having sex with a 17 year old and having sex with a 15 year old doesn’t seem different from having sex with a 16 year old and having sex with a 14 year old…
At some point ‘if a=b and b=c then a=c’ breaks down. This point is necessarily arbitrary, but it does exist, so the important thing is to find a common point to draw the line.
I don't know if men in our society would have a problem with having more responsibility than women, provided that women admitted this. If the messaging was "men need to protect women because men are stronger and have more agency", that might be acceptable. It was acceptable for almost all of recorded history. That's the tradcon way.
The problem is that feminist messaging refuses to say this. Instead they say that women are just as capable as men, except for the fact that men are holding them down, and therefore it's men's responsibility to help women, in order to apologize and make women more powerful. It villainizes all men, most of whom have never wanted to hurt women and have always wanted to protect them.
FWIW, I'm not a tradcon, I probably think something in the middle. But mostly, I think women are strong, and need to embrace this and take responsibility, and actually act as such, and stop blaming men for their problems. How does that look for rape situations? Dunno, maybe they should start carrying around guns so if they find themselves in compromising situations, they have the actual firepower to overcome the man's brute strength. But that's for more of the violent rape situation. For the "I'm too drunk for my decisions to matter", I think the solution is for women to actually take responsibility. And I think that feminism's focus on victim-based empowerment isn't helping them.
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Okay fine, again, I’d be very happy with a return to traditional sexual morality, in which a man is guilty of criminal seduction if he has sex with a woman before getting to know her family and asking her father for permission to marry her. However, that world is very far away from the world we live in now. You are, for practical purposes, proposing a world in which women have exactly the same degree of recognized agency as they do right now in every single aspect of life except for sex. (If not, how do we get from here to a world in which women lose all of this agency they’ve accrued?) This is obviously insane and unsustainable, and I hope you would understand why so many men would vociferously object.
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