I think I thought of one: “Most children enjoy genital stimulation.” I’m not 100% sure that is true, but I think it is true. At least, I know I did and I believe that many children engage in a fair amount of self-stimulation. I can’t think of any situation where I would be comfortable discussing the positives of giving sexual pleasure to children.
Most Western people don’t want to allow sexuality even to post-puberty teenagers, at least before the ages of 15-16. Some people are even opposed to any sort of sexual education.
The issue is more socially complex than the (true) fact it’s taboo. Most people are not guided by “what would be best / most enjoyable for the children”, but rather “what would be proper” or “what would build the kind of society we want when the children grow up”.
There’s also the rather disturbing trend of parents treating their children, to a greater or lesser degree, like pets. This is a relatively modern development, since the point that children were no longer required to work from a young age. Pets having sex is, at best, eye-rolling.
I tend to prefer this kind of explanation because “what would build the kind of society we want when the children grow up” seems too sophisticated and neat to be an accurate description of what’s going on. I suspect that dynamic comes into play only sporadically, with moralizing (what’s proper, what’s presentable or impressive, what doesn’t discomfort me) taking centre stage most of the time.
I realize not everyone is familiar with or has witnessed or has even heard of the kind of interactions that are described when children are compared to pets, but it still baffles and surprises me on a gut level whenever someone asks about it.
Here’s a few contrasting examples as a (weak) attempt to McGuyver an intuition pump:
To Roommate: “Your music’s bothering me, I need to concentrate / have calm for XYZ reasons, could you please turn it down a bit?” (justification usually given or implicit) To Pet: “Your meowing’s loud, shut the fuck up.” (optional addition: *gives a cookie to shut it up*) To Child: “Turn down your music! It’s loud!” (No justification given, usually even upon request)
To Roommate: “Could you wash the dishes? I’m really tired and I still have to do XYZ. (or insert X’Y’Z′ reason)” To Pet: … (pet eats in dirty dishes, or at best rinsed with flowing tapwater) To Child: “Do the dishes before 5 PM.” “Come do the dishes NOW or I’m unplugging your computer / gaming console / (insert other arbitrary unrelated top-down punishment)”
To Roommate: “I’ll take care of cleaning my room/space, I don’t care about yours as long as it doesn’t stink or infest the whole place, although you should help me clean bathroom/kitchen/living room/etc for XYZ reasons” To Pet: (trains to not be messy, yell at whenever it makes a mess of its personal space) To Child: “Clean your room by the end of the day or you can’t go out this weekend.”
In other words / to generalize, what is meant with “treating children like pets” is that the interactions, decisions and their properties are, in the case of children, more accurately modeled by a decision tree / graph like that for Pet interactions than one for Roommate / Significant Other / Actual Other Human Being Living With You interactions.
For many families, though I don’t know how many, the interactions for children is extremely close to the counterfactual “pets if my pet could talk”, and completely incompatible with the “Roommate” examples (my .5 is 70-80%, .95 for 40-95%).
In a large number of situations I’ve seen personally, replacing the child with a roommate for a similar situation being treated similar to the child would have resulted in a civil or perhaps even criminal lawsuit, even if the roommate was otherwise similar (say, a cousin living there and going back to university that for some family circumstances you’re stuck living with, but who still doesn’t / can’t pay rent and food and amenities, e.g. because 100% of money goes for studying).
But their child? “People can educate their children however they want, they have a right to their children’s education” (read: They have a “right” to decide what the child does, how they do it, which rights the child is entitled to or not, etc.)
Also compare the rights of parents and what parents are allowed to do with their children legally to what they have towards pets, versus what they have with other-people-just-living-with-or-near-them.
Basically, this is similar to what rationalist!Harry sometimes complains about in the early parts of HPMoR. Children are Not People.
Yes, this is exactly what I mean. In my case I was also thinking of the way some parents train their children to make their parents look good—as objects to show off, just like dogs or cats at a show, not individuals whose accomplishments are largely their own.
I don’t think this is so much “treating children as pets” as it is “treating children like not your peers”. When your boss asks you to do something, does she say “Hey, would you mind helping me out with X? I’d really like to get it done this week.”? More than likely, she says “I need you to finish X by Friday.”
You only need to give justifications to peers. A person in a higher position of authority can make a request of a subordinate without justification. So it is with officers/privates in the military, managers/employees, and parents/children.
To adress your second point:
The point isn’t in justification. The difference I’m pointing at is the attitude and mental model of the world of the Commander, i.e. the parent. And this causes some crucial differences in behavior that aren’t accounted for by the lack of need to justify oneself or even the consideration of not being a peer.
Sure, we could say some (or perhaps even most, YMMV) workplace managers behave a certain way that is similar to those parents and children. We could say the same for militaries. I care little for what one could say about the similarities or the words that can or “should” be used.
Key point: Children are often treated by their parents in a manner completely dissimilar to every other case of family member or person with whom they live.
Key point 2: This behavior of parents towards children has sufficient differences from typical cases of social-class or not-peer behaviors for me to not label it as a standard case of such. I believe it would be very misleading. Parents often carefully control the “private life” of their children; what they eat, what they do at any given time, who they interact with, what they say, and even what they think to some extent.
Even in military settings, moreso in workplaces, these examples are not at all carefully monitored and controlled with punishments and threats of various kinds, and even those that are generally end the moment your shift ends and you walk out the door, with some exceptions regarding PR and such (e.g. politicians and people with similar occupations).
Key Point 3: Behaviors, social norms and laws differ between all those cases, and I would argue that laws and social norms, at least, are more similar between pets and children than they are between children and employees/nonofficers. If an employee doesn’t behave as a manager wishes, they are limited in their options, and the interactions and roles are socially clear. A manager cannot threaten to confiscate an employee’s phone for not properly cleaning up after themselves in the bathroom, nor are they legally and socially allowed to dole out corporal punishment for an employee that talks back to them or asks the wrong questions.
Yes, this is a touchy issue for me, so I apologize if I come across as less polite than I think.
In other words / to generalize, what is meant with “treating children like pets” is that the interactions, decisions and their properties are, in the case of children, more accurately modeled by a decision tree / graph like that for Pet interactions than one for Roommate / Significant Other / Actual Other Human Being Living With You interactions.
In some ways the child in your examples is actually treated worse than the pet (particularly along the scale of invasive coercion).
In some ways the child in your examples is actually treated worse than the pet (particularly along the scale of invasive coercion).
I know right?
Guess the best part. Go on.
(spoiler: All of them are true examples of things that have happened dozens or hundreds of times to myself or other humans in my circles during their childhoods, and they’re only select examples that are easy to compare out of dozens more similarly-bad cases I could list.)
Fair disclaimer: This subject engages me a lot and it’s on my long laundry list of Subtopics Of Things To Protect.
There’s also the rather disturbing trend of parents treating their children, to a greater or lesser degree, like pets. This is a relatively modern development, since the point that children were no longer required to work from a young age. Pets having sex is, at best, eye-rolling.
On the other-hand the taboo against children having sex isn’t a modern development.
I tend to prefer this kind of explanation because “what would build the kind of society we want when the children grow up” seems too sophisticated and neat to be an accurate description of what’s going on. I suspect that dynamic comes into play only sporadically, with moralizing (what’s proper, what’s presentable or impressive, what doesn’t discomfort me) taking centre stage most of the time.
Rather, questions of propriety and morality refer to memes that were presumably selected by memetic evolution for some combination of the children’s individual and collective benefit.
On the other-hand the taboo against children having sex isn’t a modern development.
It’s not? Damn, that 12-year-old girl in feudal England must be so happy that there’s a social taboo against children having sex. That way she doesn’t have to worry about being done stuff she doesn’t even understand when she gets married next moon to some 19-year-old page boy she’s only ever met twice.
Oh wait.
(TL;DR: [citation needed]) Edit: (gwern wins some more internets—by actually providing citations! I stand corrected.)
I’m not an expert on developmental sexuality in preindustrial Europe, but for most of the feudal era child marriage was a lot rarer than pop culture would have us believe and almost exclusively an upper-class phenomenon. It also didn’t necessarily imply immediate consummation; most of the feudal women we know about that did marry at thirteen or fourteen didn’t bear children until a few years later. Women from the peasant and mercantile classes (the vast majority of the population) often wouldn’t marry until their early twenties, for a variety of basically economic reasons.
Upper-class feudal women did marry young by our standards, but usually that would have meant sixteen to eighteen, not twelve.
In Asia, as Malthus knew, the norm for women was early and nearly universal marriage. Recent studies of family lineages and local population registers suggest that first marriage for Chinese women around 1800 took place on average at age 19. A full 99 percent of women in the general population married.9 Men also married young, first marriage occurring on average at 21. But the share of men marrying was much lower, perhaps as low as 84 percent. Chinese males were no more likely to marry than their northwestern European counterparts. This was because female infanticide created a surplus of males, and men were more likely than women to remarry after the death of a spouse.10
Egypt:
The one even earlier society for which we have demographic data is Roman Egypt in the first three centuries AD. As in preindustrial China and Japan female marriage was early and universal. The estimated mean age at first marriage for Egyptian women was even lower, at 17.5.15 Marital fertility rates, however, were lower than in northwestern Europe, but higher than in China and Japan: about two-thirds the Hutterite standard. This early and universal marriage, and relatively high fertility rates within marriage, would seem to imply high overall fertility rates. After all, at these rates Egyptian women married from 17.5 until 50 would give birth to 8 or more children. But in fact birth rates were 40–44 per thousand, implying a life expectancy at birth of 23–25 years. In comparison French birth rates in 1750 were about 40 per thousand. So Roman Egypt, despite early marriage, had fertility levels only slightly higher than those in eighteenth-century France.16 The intervening factor that kept Egyptian birth rates lower than we would expect was again social custom. In northwestern Europe younger widows commonly remarried, but not in Roman Egypt. Furthermore, divorce was possible in Egypt. But while divorced husbands commonly remarried younger women, divorced women typically did not remarry. Thus while in Egypt almost all the women got married, the proportion still married fell steadily from age 20. Consequently women surviving to age 50 typically gave birth to only 6 children rather than 8.
Europe:
Yet despite the apparent absence of contraceptive practices, the birth rate in most preindustrial western European populations was low, at only thirty to
forty births per thousand, because of the other features of the European marriage pattern. These were as follows:
A late average age of first marriage for women: typically 24–26.
A decision by many women to never marry: typically 10–25 percent.
And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.
Men in Ancient Greece and Rome were usually 30ish at the time of marriage, while women were actually girls—they were between twelve and fifteen at the time of their first marriage. They would usually have several marriages, as their husbands died, but after the first they were firmly “mothers.” They would still usually be younger than their husband by a significant amount, even in their later marriages—by the time they surpassed the age of the pool of potential suitors, their sons or sons-in-law would have taken up their care.
Thanks! This makes a strong enough case to upturn the history book I read (in high school, and of typical epistemic quality for high school history books).
I’d say it’s more that ‘it’s complicated and dependent on region’. After all, there is a specific claim there that in Grecoroman society the stereotype that girls got married the moment they started bleeding was true. And no doubt anthropologists could list societies fitting every marriage age bracket from before conception to ‘never’. (But it does mean that we can’t pride ourselves on how civilized we are compared to our barbaric ancestors as of, say, 5 centuries ago.)
Really the only acceptable conversation I can think of goes something like:
Pediatrician: Don’t worry about it. It is totally normal. Punishing a prepubescent child for private self-stimulating behavior is not good for the mental health of the child.
If memory serves, it was something about not hitting 6-month-olds for touching themselves in Marriage and Morals that prevented Russell from teaching at City College years later...
Really the only acceptable conversation I can think of goes something like:
With the another evident exception being this conversation and those like it that employ sufficient indirection. The ancestor is currently at +4, 100%.
Hrm? I’m not sure why you think I disagree with your comment. Taking a step meta is generally acceptable. People claim the Holocaust never happened is not taboo, even if The Holocaust never happened is taboo in many contexts.
I think the ancestor is a +12 because it is a great example of what the OP requested—a true, probably taboo sentence.
I’m not sure why you think I disagree with your comment.
You presumably don’t, but it contradicts what you said. (See below.) I expressed the additional information because it makes the conversation less wrong.
Taking a step meta is generally acceptable. People claim the Holocaust never happened is not taboo, even if The Holocaust never happened is taboo in many contexts.
If you look closely at the actual information communicated you may note that this qualitatively different. Your example is of an entirely meta claim being made. The case in the grandparent is a meta claim being made as a prefix to an actual object level claim. Specifically:
I’m not 100% sure that is true, but I think it is true. At least, I know I did and I believe that many children engage in a fair amount of self-stimulation.
An analogous “holocaust” claim would therefore be “People claim the Holocaust never happened. I’m not 100% sure that it never happend but I think it didn’t. At least I know all the evidence I’ve encountered is faked and I believe that a relevant general class of people faked evidence.”
I think the ancestor is a +12 because it is a great example of what the OP requested—a true, probably taboo sentence.
I agree entirely. That it also happens to be an additional way to actually make claims about the subject while not triggering the taboo penalties is secondary. And incidentally an example of a generalizable social tactic.
Can you give an example of how one might apply the tactic generally, outside of the context of having been asked for a true taboo statement? I don’t doubt you, but I find myself unable to work it out. After all, the whole problem with statements like “children enjoy genital stimulation” is the implications of having brought the subject up.
I mean, I understand that “People claim children enjoy genital stimulation; I’m not sure myself but I think they might be right” is safer than “Children enjoy genital stimulation.” alone, by virtue of multiple levels of indirection and hedge phrases and whatnot, but it doesn’t seem possible to say either one in response to, say, “My child cries all night long, I wish there were some way to quiet them down!” (or, more generally though less entertainingly, to volunteer either of them) without triggering taboo penalties.
This hasn’t been a taboo since Freud’s time. (For one data point, I never masturbated until I was about 15, as far as I can remember, but… teenagers talking about when they masturbated as children weren’t terribly uncommon.)
I guess that “taboo” in the OP means ‘what you can’t say’, not ‘what you can say but still lots of people are wrong about’. Otherwise it’d be faaaar easier to find taboos.
Yeah, I debated a separate post on that point. To me, it is pretty clear that the OP is using taboo in Graham’s sense. Then I decided too much time had passed to make that post worthwhile.
Perhaps it should be? I’m not sure how we can rely on ourselves to give sexual pleasure without any sort of self-gratification, and using children for sexual gratification is a big no no in my book. Lots of moral hazard in this form of pleasure that is quite avoidable by finding one of the billion other things kids like doing.
That seems like an astoundingly arbitrary position. Good thing + good thing somehow equals bad thing?
Mind you, I’d say any argument that even tangentially endorses pedophilia—including all those arguments that are trivially wrong but filled with applause lights—is massively taboo.
I agree with the second part of your comment, as I’ve said.
Good thing + good thing? I don’t think that using children for sexual pleasure is a “good thing” at all. It would be if we lived in a universe where the formula is pleasure + pleasure, but it obviously isn’t. Do terms such as “meaningful consent” or “exploitation” have any relevance here?
No, sorry, that was what I meant to imply by “holodeck”.
As for the actual mechanics of it, maybe it pulls data from parallel universes, maybe they’re the puppets of a (sentient) AI (zombie-master hypothesis) or maybe consciousness is easier to fake than you might expect, so they run sophisticated chatbots certified by a nonperson predicate. Damned if I know.
It’s basically an experience machine / catgirl volcano lair, is the idea. Only, y’know, icky.
In that case, it doesn’t squick me much more if they’re children than if they’re adults. But then again, few of the examples in section “Emotion and Deontological Judgments” in this post squick me much, so I may be the wrong person to ask.
I think his fantasies are perverse and contrary to values I have about human autonomy, but I don’t think the situation is significantly worse. His actions are not going to put a kid in therapy.
If children masturbating makes them feel good, and pedophiles feeling good about having sex with them isn’t inherently bad, then pedophiles helping kids masturbate is just efficient use of labor. Goes the logic.
Goes the logic that works so long as you do not care about meaningful consent. This is a lot like the “if she’s sleeping, it’s not rape” argument we heard in the aftermath of the Steubenville case.
Goes the logic that works so long as you do not care about meaningful consent.
What is this meaningful consent thinghy you mention? Do I need it to play tag with other children (given that I’m a child)? Does an adult need it when playing tag with children? Do you need it when washing eachothers’ backs in the bath? Do you need it when washing your child in the bath? Do you need it when your child asks for a massage? Do you need it when your child asks for a “massage”?
Where, and how, and why, does one draw the line?
My value system is incompatible with your statement and has no entry for this reference of “meaningful consent”.
FTR: If I had any sort of relationship like this when I was a minor (sadly, I didn’t) and someone sued my S.O. / partner over this “meaningful consent” thing, I would have resented them and would still resent them to this day, and would most likely have pressed charges and sued them back into oblivion as soon as I turned legally capable of suing people, over all kinds of privacy breach, life alteration, or whatever other morality-based claims that I could find, in the same way I would sue anyone who pressed charges against me for having sex with my current girlfriend.
Not really. I’ve always found the moral intuitions most people have here rather lacking.
Put a 3-year-old in her mother’s body. The kid wants to have sex ’caus she has her mother’s biosystem, drives and body. Is it okay?
Put a 40-year-old in a 6-year-old’s body. Or better yet, take one of the existing people who just have the same body they did when they were 12. Is sex okay?
Take a 2-year-old WBE that ran at a subjective time factor of 50 since their start. They get transferred to a modified cloned 9-year-old body that has already gone through puberty. Is it okay to have sex?
So yeah. Doesn’t really matter, as long as both parties are aware of the typical downfalls and issues and are capable of enjoying it. (and that they actually do enjoy it, or stop if they don’t)
Put a 3-year-old in her mother’s body. The kid wants to have sex ’caus she has her mother’s biosystem, drives and body. Is it okay?
How, exactly, do you do that? Doesn’t puberty alter the mind as well as the body? You’d have to create a whole new mind, extrapolating what the 3-year-old would be like with “her mother’s biosystem, drives” without making any of the other alterations aging brings.
Put a 40-year-old in a 6-year-old’s body.
Assuming they’re mentally unchanged, I would guess most people would be OK with it, albeit somewhat squicked at the thought. Although some people object to cartoon child porn, so maybe you’d get people claiming it encourages pedophiles or something?
Or better yet, take one of the existing people who just have the same body they did when they were 12.
Holy cow, that’s a thing? What?
Take a 2-year-old WBE that ran at a subjective time factor of 50 since their start.
Are they simulating baseline human biochemistry?
So yeah. Doesn’t really matter, as long as both parties are aware of the typical downfalls and issues and are capable of enjoying it. (and that they actually do enjoy it, or stop if they don’t)
I’m sympathetic to this position—I’m pretty sure these so-called intuitions are just social mores, other societies marry and such much younger—but I think you’re failing to account for power imbalance. We don’t let officers in the military sleep with their subordinates, and with the kind of power adults have over children in our society, the same logic applies.
I’m sympathetic to this position—I’m pretty sure these so-called intuitions are just social mores, other societies marry much younger—but I think you’re failing to account for power imbalance. We don’t let officers in the military sleep with their subordinates, and with the kind of power adults have over children in our society, the same logic applies.
Yeah, power (im)balances is the most important form of many variants of coercion, both implicit and explicit, that come rain down on my ideals of optimal sexual interactions and freedoms. And they can be so insidious or deeply implicit or just so dang entangled that sometimes, even if we do know the full situation, we can’t make sense or trace any sort of natural line. In some cases there’s even no schelling point.
But there’s so much to say here about this topic it might grow into an entire article’s worth of stuff if I keep going, and I’m sure there could be more optimal ways to communicate or use both of our times, especially considering that I suspect many of the issues I’ve thought of have also crossed the mind of most people on LW. Or, at the very least, there should be some significant overlap between any two given people. I don’t quite know enough yet to pinpoint which of my insights overlap and (more importantly) which don’t.
Anyway, power and perceived power can majorly fuck up most heuristics and investigations we’re currently capable of using/doing.
Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing any post on LW about social power balances and the many ways they influence peoples’ decisions or patterns that come up where sub-optimal situations arise because of them (or the perception of them). I’ve seen some things alluding to it or passing mentions as if everyone knew all the aspects of the topic, though. And I’ve found one old post on the current subject too.
However, I suspect the science on this to be rather… incomplete. Thoughts?
Or better yet, take one of the existing people who just have the same body they did when they were 12.
Take a 2-year-old WBE that ran at a subjective time factor of 50 since their start.
Are they simulating baseline human biochemistry?
Why does that part matter? Maybe consider if they are, and then if they aren’t, and see where the difference is? To me there’s no relevant difference as far as I can tell.
Yeah, power (im)balances is the most important form of many variants of coercion, both implicit and explicit, that come rain down on my ideals of optimal sexual interactions and freedoms. And they can be so insidious or deeply implicit or just so dang entangled that sometimes, even if we do know the full situation, we can’t make sense or trace any sort of natural line. In some cases there’s even no schelling point.
In this specific case, I think the socially-constructed adult/child divide might actually work—sure, it’s arbitrary, but it should largely reflect whether the kid in questions views someone as An Adult or just another kid.
Of course, this sorta falls apart when you have to deal with two kids of different ages.
Or, for that matter, “young adults” who view older people as somehow authoritative, although that’s not as pervasive.
Hmm, maybe we should use the infamous half-your-age-plus-seven “creepiness law”?
Regarding that, here’s probably the most extreme case we’ve ever seen.
Oh, I vaguely heard about that. I though that was unique though?
Why does that part matter?
Well, most of these intuitions are dependent on a human biochemistry. You want to fuck a robot, knock yourself out. Unless it’s, like, a sex-hating robot.
That said, a hundred-year-old human in an adolescent body sounds like they would be allowed to have whatever sex as they wanted, within the usual limits. Indeed, I believe it’s a common excuse in Japanese stuff to have that girl actually be a 700-year-old demon in human form.
Hmm, maybe we should use the infamous half-your-age-plus-seven “creepiness law”?
What’s that? O.o
In this specific case, I think the socially-constructed adult/child divide might actually work—sure, it’s arbitrary, but it should largely reflect whether the kid in questions views someone as An Adult or just another kid.
I think in most circumstances that would be relevant, social roles largely outweigh and override this. In most cases, minors are forced into roles by circumstance and because people who already have greater power force them to be in such roles.
For a better intuition pump towards what I mean, think of The Internets, particularly hacker culture. There, age is probably the most irrelevant out of any culture I’ve seen—only maturity, skill, and some online social likeability matter. Some mature 12-year-olds wield immense power (relatively speaking, in terms of social and cultural power within the limited scope of hacker culture) over some of their peers, and this almost certainly leads many major adults to take suboptimal decisions or actions within the context.
Sometimes, gamers can also form similar small groups where young people with the proper, more powerful “role” can wield relatively disproportionate power over the leisure time and entertainment quality of their peers. I’ve sometimes experienced this firsthand, though the worst cases I saw didn’t happen to me personally.
For a toy example of what I’m talking about, consider gaming “clans”, groups of people who for some reason or another end up gaming with eachother and forming a common In-Group mentality and generally acting like a tribe for the purposes of playing videogames (or some small set of games). Often, some gamers will get really invested in this tribe, emotionally and psychologically, and will make friends there, and spend lots of time making emotional attachments, and so on. More often than not, these groups have a “Leader”, who holds rather disproportionate authority, much like a tribe. In fact, these usually work pretty much exactly like a tribe.
Anyway, this emotional involvement can mean that that kid who would be considered a minor and unable to consent due to power imbalances actually has more power over you now, because failure to comply can, in typical tribal fashion, get you kicked out—which, while not as bad as getting kicked out in the ancestral tribe, in many cases will still sound pretty shitty, and may deprive people of otherwise-reliable good entertainment, and generally just lowers the quality of their leisure time quite a bit depending on how much they enjoy the game and the community they play with.
And then all the meta and game-theoretic concerns apply: if I’m wary that failure to comply might get me kicked from the tribe, I may try to implement the same kind of social status strategies we see in other tribelike contexts. This includes anticipating possible things that the tribe leader might care about and conforming pre-emptively, which would mean I’m taking an action that is sub-optimal or that I don’t want to do, based on my anticipation of possible failure-to-comply situations, without any form of intentional coercion from the group leader.
All of this leads up to: Situations like what I just said, where no actual coercion happens but where someone is accepting some action or situation or thinking in some way that they would prefer not to, generally build up gradually. I would not be surprised if this could easily lead a person into thinking in this manner about sexual interaction (given a social culture that has less taboos against sexuality), and make them build this up into eventually accepting or even offering to have sex with someone solely because they anticipate that them not making this offer could lead to eventual bad consequences for them due to the power imbalance, or something.
This all reminds me of situations where, for example, A wants to blackmail B, but C watches closely for any explicit form of blackmail, so instead A will create a favorable situation by removing all of B’s options and power, and then present themselves as willing to help, in a manner where B contextually knows that A is in a position to mess up their life if they don’t offer, say, sex.
From the outside, it will either look as if B just fell prey to A’s superior prowess, which is normal in many domains such as competitive businesses, or A and B suddenly formed a partnership due to friendly human interactions that were apparently fully voluntary on the part of B (since B initiated it, after all).
So merely the perception that offering sex to A is the only way for B to stay afloat¹ creates a subtle blackmail-like situation that in many cases no one could form a legitimate legal case around in most instances. Many variants of this exist or could happen in various situations.
One of my fears about making sexuality less socially taboo is all about how the above dynamics might factor in more strongly, and reduce the apparent rape rates while making such horrible non-choice not-quite-blackmail scenarios pervasively omnipresent.
I word this quite innocently, but it’s generally made implicitly obvious in such situations that “not staying afloat” implies some Very Very Bad Things—such as being forced to live on the streets while pictures of you mysteriously appear on shady websites and so on. Sometimes, the whole situation already happens with the premise that some other group will kill/maim/otherwise-permanently-make-your-life-much-less-interesting as soon as protection from them is removed by A or cut off because you no longer have the ability to afford this protection.
As the name I referred to it by suggests, you divide your age by two and add seven; anyone below that would be “creepy” to sleep with or otherwise engage romantically. Not sure where it comes from, but it’s been featured in XKCD at least once.
[snip social-pressure rape description]
Yup. And in our society, all kids are in these situations, and many (especially younger) kids may assume such a context in pretty much all interactions with adults. Not to mention the fact that, currently, most people who actually do have sex with children are in such a position of “soft power” over the child.
I’ve always found “informed consent” (probably the same thing) to be a damn good heuristic, myself, although I certainly don’t terminally value it. Are those meant to be rhetorical questions?
… actually, I’m of the opinion that conflating that sort of thing with, y’know, the sort of thing people picture when you say “rape” leads to both overestimation of the harm it causes and devaluing of the suffering caused by violently raping someone. It is, of course, bad, and it should be discouraged with punishments and so on, but I don’t think it shares a Schelling point with “real” rape.
However.
What about this “meaningful consent” that renders it valuable? At what point does consent become “meaningful”? We usually allow parents to consent on behalf of their children, presumably because they will further the child’s own interests; should this apply to sex? What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it? Let’s pry open this black box!
[Side note: I personally am against legalizing such relationships, but I worry that I’m smart enough to argue convincingly for this position regardless of its truth, so I’m not going to elaborate on my reasoning here.]
the sort of thing people picture when you say “rape”
Which in my experience people picture extremely inaccurately. They picture girls getting grabbed off a park sidewalk by a ravenous stranger. That’s a very atypical case. Outside of prison, rape is typically perpetuated by friends and lovers and dates. This is unsurprising given pure opportunity, just as it’s unsurprising that children are typically victimized by families and trusted friends of their families, not by strangers with candy.
Requiring rape to be “violent” is to require that most extra-penal rape be reclassified as not-rape. There is usually the implicit threat of violence, and the (typically) women in such circumstances are made to understand they have no choice or power. Anyone who looks at this issue will quickly meet people who insist that it isn’t “rape” if the woman did not violently resist and never succumbed, or if there were no beatings involved.
“Rape” is only as meaningful as “meaningful consent.”
At what point does consent become “meaningful”?
Babies cannot give meaningful consent. Children can sometimes give meaningful consent, but it is difficult to determine. We allow parents to make decisions for their children in weighty matters—within strict limits. We do not allow them to give their kids liquor and cigarettes nor restrict them to “alternative medicine” for deadly disease. All of this makes sense: by and large, we do not allow families to stunt and cripple development.
(I give one exception: it is still considered acceptable to give a child a poor diet to the point of severe obesity. I think this should be at least as criminal, if not more, than allowing cigarette-smoking.)
“Meaningful consent” comes in degrees: adults are better at it than young teenagers. Most states have age of consent laws which, while allowing sex with minors, only allows it within a certain age bracket. Differential intellectual capacity matters.
You’ll notice that I haven’t tried to give a definition. With complicated concepts, it is often better to talk about them as if they were meaningful, and notice that they are, that we can recognize their presence or absence from different circumstances. If you are wholly unable to recognize such circumstances, let me know and I’ll try being more precise.
There is a difference between “I said no, but he was more able to overpower me because I was drunk”, “I didn’t say no, but only because I was too drunk to realize I was making a bad decision”, and “I got drunk so I had an excuse for not saying no”.
Which of these count as “meaningful consent” by your definition?
Which in my experience people picture extremely inaccurately. They picture girls getting grabbed off a park sidewalk by a ravenous stranger. That’s a very atypical case. Outside of prison, rape is typically perpetuated by friends and lovers and dates. This is unsurprising given pure opportunity, just as it’s unsurprising that children are typically victimized by families and trusted friends of their families, not by strangers with candy.
Point.
Still, you know what I mean. Forcible rape, not things-that-are-bad-and-sexual-so-we-call-them-rape.
Requiring rape to be “violent” is to require that most extra-penal rape be reclassified as not-rape.
Well … yeah? That’s not the same thing as it being perfectly acceptable, mind.
There is usually the implicit threat of violence, and the (typically) women in such circumstances are made to understand they have no choice or power. Anyone who looks at this issue will quickly meet people who insist that it isn’t “rape” if the woman did not violently resist and never succumbed, or if there were no beatings involved.
Oh, yeah, threats should totally be included AFAICT. But the example under discussion was a sleeping/unconscious victim, wasn’t it?
“Rape” is only as meaningful as “meaningful consent.”
That is to say not meaningful at all, because you’re treating meaningful consent as a fundamental property of things.
Babies cannot give meaningful consent.
Why not, if they can express desire for sweeties or whatever? At what point do they stop being “babies” and become “children”, under this schema? Are we including toddlers here?
Children can sometimes give meaningful consent, but it is difficult to determine.
Aha! He admits it! Pedophilic relationships can be OK!
We allow parents to make decisions for their children in weighty matters—within strict limits. We do not allow them to give their kids liquor and cigarettes nor restrict them to “alternative medicine” for deadly disease. All of this makes sense: by and large, we do not allow families to stunt and cripple development.
There are some issues where we can safely say we know better, just like, say, an adult consenting to an addictive drug. But how could sex be one of those cases, when it’s only harmful if the person doesn’t consent in the first place? (Ignoring for a minute STDs and such, which parents (and many kids) should be able to take into account.)
“Meaningful consent” comes in degrees: adults are better at it than young teenagers. Most states have age of consent laws which, while allowing sex with minors, only allows it within a certain age bracket. Differential intellectual capacity matters.
Why?
You’ll notice that I haven’t tried to give a definition. With complicated concepts, it is often better to talk about them as if they were meaningful, and notice that they are, that we can recognize their presence or absence from different circumstances.
From hence did this meaningful concept come to you? What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?
What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?
I wish we could get past slogans.
Ok, we’re trying to determine whether or not “meaningful consent is meaningful”. A question: could you guess with high reliability what situations I think constitute meaningful consent or not?
A scenario: suppose I slip a girl a roofie, slip her into my car, take her home, and fuck her. Then I sneak her back into the party.
Was my crime “slipping a girl a drug”, or was my crime “that and rape”?
This particular slogan was selected for usefulness. It retains it’s meaning when considered as a question solely in the current context.
Ok, we’re trying to determine whether or not “meaningful consent is meaningful”. A question: could you guess with high reliability what situations I think constitute meaningful consent or not?
Sure. All I have to do is check what the culture you live in condemns.
A scenario: suppose I slip a girl a roofie, slip her into my car, take her home, and fuck her. Then I sneak her back into the party.
Was my crime “slipping a girl a drug”, or was my crime “that and rape”?
As I have indicated before, I consider the term “rape” to include multiple Schelling points in act-space, most of which I condemn and advocate pushing, but to different degrees. As such, I would appreciate if you tabooed “rape” when asking this sort of question.
Taking my own advice, his crimes were slipping the girl a drug and violating her right to bodily integrity, the same as if he had preformed surgery on her, given her a piercing or tattoo etc.
Note that a crime is not the same a harm; technically the girl has not been harmed, we just prefer to enforce this right for game-theoretic reasons. Also, I note you failed to specify if it was “safe” sex.
This particular slogan was selected for usefulness. It retains it’s meaning when considered as a question solely in the current context.
When I try to believe that, I become confused. I’ve found in this and other threads that my being reminded of rationalist truisms correlates with something other than a failure of rationality.
Sure. All I have to do is check what the culture you live in condemns.
Right, which is why you’d be able to guess that I support lowering the age of consent under certain circumstances and relaxing penalties in others. You have a bad discriminant. You are weak at something you shouldn’t be.
As I have indicated before, I consider the term “rape” to include multiple Schelling points in act-space, most of which I condemn and advocate pushing, but to different degrees. As such, I would appreciate if you tabooed “rape” when asking this sort of question.
That’s another thing. My being asked to taboo something here usually—there are exceptions—correlates not with understandable confusion or ambiguity, but with something else.
Taking my own advice, his crimes were slipping the girl a drug and violating her right to bodily integrity, the same as if he had preformed surgery on her, given her a piercing or tattoo etc.
So her “right to bodily integrity” extends to penis-in-vagina? We’re trying really hard to not see the obvious. Go on, use the word.
Note that a crime is not the same a harm; technically the girl has not been harmed, we just prefer to enforce this right for game-theoretic reasons.
She hasn’t? Under what “technically” are we working? Are “we” just preferring to enforce this right for “game-theoretic reasons?” Are you assuming too much on the part of “we”?
Also, I note you failed to specify if it was “safe” sex.
This particular slogan was selected for usefulness. It retains it’s meaning when considered as a question solely in the current context.
When I try to believe that, I become confused. I’ve found in this and other threads that my being reminded of rationalist truisms correlates with something other than a failure of rationality.
Maybe. I was genuinely asking, not censuring you for failing to follow the tenets of our faith.
Are you intending to respond to my question, or just muse about my motives in asking it?
Sure. All I have to do is check what the culture you live in condemns.
Right, which is why you’d be able to guess that I support lowering the age of consent under certain circumstances and relaxing penalties in others. You have a bad discriminant. You are weak at something you shouldn’t be.
Except that doesn’t necessarily reflect anything real besides the details of the culture in question. See also: witchcraft.
As I have indicated before, I consider the term “rape” to include multiple Schelling points in act-space, most of which I condemn and advocate pushing, but to different degrees. As such, I would appreciate if you tabooed “rape” when asking this sort of question.
That’s another thing. My being asked to taboo something here usually—there are exceptions—correlates not with understandable confusion or ambiguity, but with something else.
In this case, while I am not confused by your meaning, you are rendering this discussion too ambiguous for me to make my point. If I insisted on referring to homosexuality as a “fetish”, (or “perversion” or something else that boiled down to “sex thingy that’s not mainstream”,) and replied to arguments about how homosexuality is qualitatively different with discussions of “fetishes”, asking me to taboo “fetish” and talk about the facts of the matter would be reasonable, don’t you think? (This is not a hypothetical example.)
So her “right to bodily integrity” extends to penis-in-vagina? We’re trying really hard to not see the obvious. Go on, use the word.
I submit that giving someone a tattoo while they’re drunk is not the same as raping them.
Note that a crime is not the same a harm; technically the girl has not been harmed, we just prefer to enforce this right for game-theoretic reasons.
She hasn’t? Under what “technically” are we working? Are “we” just preferring to enforce this right for “game-theoretic reasons?” Are you assuming too much on the part of “we”?
OK: I prefer to punish this in order to discourage it in general, even if, in this specific case, it has negative net utility.
And yes, having something happen to you that does not cause physical damage or mental distress (because you don’t know it happened) can reasonably be categorized as not containing “harm”, although obviously there are different possible definitions of the word “harm”.
Also, I note you failed to specify if it was “safe” sex.
That “failure” was deliberate and appropriate.
Well, I guess it’s a good thing I noted it then, isn’t it?
Seriously, though, that failure is not appropriate, because there is a difference in the resulting harm caused by safe and unsafe sex; to whit, possible pregnancy and the risk of STD transfer. Both of these have measurable effects that the victim remembers, and indeed are likely to reveal that the rape occurred (depending on the individual in question.) You are deliberately trying to conflate different things, here. Stop it. Even if it turns out what we care about is identical in both cases, what you are doing amounts to refusing to discuss the question at all.
Except that doesn’t necessarily reflect anything real besides the details of the culture in question.
Except [supporting lowering the age of consent under some circumstances] doesn’t necessarily reflect anything [real] besides [culture], [like witchcraft!] Word salad. What you could have said is, “I was mistaken, as I could not have predicted that,” or, “I was correct, because lowering the age of consent is a really popular right now.”
And yes, having something happen to you that does not cause physical damage or mental distress (because you don’t know it happened) can reasonably be categorized as not containing “harm”, although obviously there are different possible definitions of the word “harm”.
I think people should have a say in what happens to them, be it politically or otherwise. Would it “harm” a child to keep him locked in a giant playground/amusement park, with everything he could ever want provided, but kept from any education? Would it “harm” the human race as a whole to be kept in a state of perpetual orgasm, kept alive, but forgetting everything else? Is a slave being harmed, even if his master does not beat him and feeds him well?
I’m with the old-school utilitarians on this. Utility is not hedonism. Immediate pleasure and pain are not the sum of all harm. I think that women and men should have some say in what happens to their bodies. That’s why I’m not fond of circumcision, especially fgm. (Another cultural prediction?) That’s why I have no problem with almost any type of relationship between consenting adults. Bondage? Sure. Open relationships? I’ve had them and they’re my favorite. Polyamory? Why not? Homosexual? Obviously. Incest? With some exceptions concerning guardian/minor relationships, but otherwise, why not? I would even support tax breaks/rights for polyamorous relationships similar to those now granted for monogamous couples, the scale of which to be determined after research into outcomes for children and other—to my knowledge—unknowns.
But this is obviously “culture”, which you would have predicted. That’s why it wouldn’t have helped you to use “meaningful consent”, right? If I were to give some other LWer a checklist of predictions about my feelings about sexual relationships, and tell him to use “culture”, he—statistically a `he’ - might use polls. If I tell him to use “meaningful consent”, how much more accurate would he have been?
If your answer is “no more accurate”, I’ll propose an experiment. If your answer is, “yes, significantly more accurate,” then we know that other people understand something that you do not, and that the problem is not the phrase but your own comprehension of it.
Well, I guess it’s a good thing I noted it then, isn’t it?
No, it’s not. I’m trying to establish that something is an offense, and I’m not interested in whether or not something else aggravates it. I might have cut off her foot, too. Who cares. That’s not “conflation.” What’s clear is that you don’t think that violating self-determination is “harm”. That’s the difference between us. Keep it to the internet, though, because if you touch a sleeping girl, you might find “Schelling points in act space” won’t help you.
Are you intending to respond to my question, or just muse about my motives in asking it?
Just muse.
Pretty please?
Except [supporting lowering the age of consent under some circumstances] doesn’t necessarily reflect anything [real] besides [culture], [like witchcraft!] Word salad. What you could have said is, “I was mistaken, as I could not have predicted that,” or, “I was correct, because lowering the age of consent is a really popular right now.”
Huh? A minute ago you were complaining I was being contrary because the predictions worked fine. I can predict what you’d disapprove of for reasons of “”informed consent” just fine. I just don’t think it refers to anything in the territory beyond the bit of the map labelled “informed consent”. Or at least, if it does, you seem to be having trouble pointing to it.
I think people should have a say in what happens to them, be it politically or otherwise. Would it “harm” a child to keep him locked in a giant playground/amusement park, with everything he could ever want provided, but kept from any education? Would it “harm” the human race as a whole to be kept in a state of perpetual orgasm, kept alive, but forgetting everything else? Is a slave being harmed, even if his master does not beat him and feeds him well?
I’m with the old-school utilitarians on this. Utility is not hedonism. Immediate pleasure and pain are not the sum of all harm. I think that women and men should have some say in what happens to their bodies. That’s why I’m not fond of circumcision, especially fgm. (Another cultural prediction?)
As I said, I recognize the right to bodily integrity, which is violated in both cases. I also value, y’know, not traumatizing people (which you seem to dismiss as “hedonism”.)
Also, honestly, I think you probably overestimate the value of freedom and choice and so on. They’re nice and all, but they’re massive applause lights in our culture; other cultures don’t seem to have been so impressed by them.
That’s why I have no problem with almost any type of relationship between consenting adults. Bondage? Sure. Open relationships? I’ve had them and they’re my favorite. Polyamory? Why not? Homosexual? Obviously. Incest? With some exceptions concerning guardian/minor relationships, but otherwise, why not? I would even support tax breaks/rights for polyamorous relationships similar to those now granted for monogamous couples, the scale of which to be determined after research into outcomes for children and other—to my knowledge—unknowns.
Thanks for the extra data o pinpoint the precise subculture I should be checking.
But this is obviously “culture”, which you would have predicted. That’s why it wouldn’t have helped you to use “meaningful consent”, right? If I were to give some other LWer a checklist of predictions about my feelings about sexual relationships, and tell him to use “culture”, he—statistically a `he’ - might use polls. If I tell him to use “meaningful consent”, how much more accurate would he have been?
Except you cannot explain “meaningful consent” except by pointing to culture/yourself-as-black-box. Why should I treat them as separate theories to be tested? How should I treat them as separate theories, if I haven’t already grown up in our culture?
Well, I guess it’s a good thing I noted it then, isn’t it?
No, it’s not. I’m trying to establish that something is an offense, and I’m not interested in whether or not something else aggravates it. I might have cut off her foot, too. Who cares. That’s not “conflation.” What’s clear is that you don’t think that violating self-determination is “harm”. That’s the difference between us.
Hey, it could be worse—your point might have simply sailed over my head.
He could have cut off her foot. In fact, lets talk about that scenario. Lets say there’s a well-known crime, stealing someone’s purse. This traditionally involves cutting off their foot, because people chain their purses to their feet. But sometimes, a cunning criminal tricks someone into giving them the key to this chain, or steals it out of their pocket, resulting in a purse-theft without the loss of a foot.
Is it a good idea to talk about how this gut is a foot-thief just because the dictionary says a “foot-thief” is someone who teals the purse someone attached to their foot, and attack anyone suggesting (say) a lighter sentence or something as defending those horrible people who cut off feet? Is it useful to ignore the loss of people’s feet and increase the penalty for all foot-thefts across the board, instead of punishing them separately?
(Of course, the correct punishment may not be fitted to the damage done for game-theoretical reasons, but I hope you appreciate the idea.)
Keep it to the internet, though, because if you touch a sleeping girl, you might find “Schelling points in act space” won’t help you.
Considering my repeated statements that such behavior should, in my opinion, be harshly punished, this particular jab falls a little flat.
(Also, if I were to ignore the fact that I don’t want this happening to me so I want to discourage it, I wouldn’t be sadistic enough to tell the victim, harming them again at significant cost to myself.)
I think I thought of one: “Most children enjoy genital stimulation.” I’m not 100% sure that is true, but I think it is true. At least, I know I did and I believe that many children engage in a fair amount of self-stimulation. I can’t think of any situation where I would be comfortable discussing the positives of giving sexual pleasure to children.
Most Western people don’t want to allow sexuality even to post-puberty teenagers, at least before the ages of 15-16. Some people are even opposed to any sort of sexual education.
The issue is more socially complex than the (true) fact it’s taboo. Most people are not guided by “what would be best / most enjoyable for the children”, but rather “what would be proper” or “what would build the kind of society we want when the children grow up”.
There’s also the rather disturbing trend of parents treating their children, to a greater or lesser degree, like pets. This is a relatively modern development, since the point that children were no longer required to work from a young age. Pets having sex is, at best, eye-rolling.
I tend to prefer this kind of explanation because “what would build the kind of society we want when the children grow up” seems too sophisticated and neat to be an accurate description of what’s going on. I suspect that dynamic comes into play only sporadically, with moralizing (what’s proper, what’s presentable or impressive, what doesn’t discomfort me) taking centre stage most of the time.
What do you mean by parents treating their children like pets?
I realize not everyone is familiar with or has witnessed or has even heard of the kind of interactions that are described when children are compared to pets, but it still baffles and surprises me on a gut level whenever someone asks about it.
Here’s a few contrasting examples as a (weak) attempt to McGuyver an intuition pump:
To Roommate: “Your music’s bothering me, I need to concentrate / have calm for XYZ reasons, could you please turn it down a bit?” (justification usually given or implicit)
To Pet: “Your meowing’s loud, shut the fuck up.” (optional addition: *gives a cookie to shut it up*)
To Child: “Turn down your music! It’s loud!” (No justification given, usually even upon request)
To Roommate: “Could you wash the dishes? I’m really tired and I still have to do XYZ. (or insert X’Y’Z′ reason)”
To Pet: … (pet eats in dirty dishes, or at best rinsed with flowing tapwater)
To Child: “Do the dishes before 5 PM.” “Come do the dishes NOW or I’m unplugging your computer / gaming console / (insert other arbitrary unrelated top-down punishment)”
To Roommate: “I’ll take care of cleaning my room/space, I don’t care about yours as long as it doesn’t stink or infest the whole place, although you should help me clean bathroom/kitchen/living room/etc for XYZ reasons”
To Pet: (trains to not be messy, yell at whenever it makes a mess of its personal space)
To Child: “Clean your room by the end of the day or you can’t go out this weekend.”
In other words / to generalize, what is meant with “treating children like pets” is that the interactions, decisions and their properties are, in the case of children, more accurately modeled by a decision tree / graph like that for Pet interactions than one for Roommate / Significant Other / Actual Other Human Being Living With You interactions.
For many families, though I don’t know how many, the interactions for children is extremely close to the counterfactual “pets if my pet could talk”, and completely incompatible with the “Roommate” examples (my .5 is 70-80%, .95 for 40-95%).
In a large number of situations I’ve seen personally, replacing the child with a roommate for a similar situation being treated similar to the child would have resulted in a civil or perhaps even criminal lawsuit, even if the roommate was otherwise similar (say, a cousin living there and going back to university that for some family circumstances you’re stuck living with, but who still doesn’t / can’t pay rent and food and amenities, e.g. because 100% of money goes for studying).
But their child? “People can educate their children however they want, they have a right to their children’s education” (read: They have a “right” to decide what the child does, how they do it, which rights the child is entitled to or not, etc.)
Also compare the rights of parents and what parents are allowed to do with their children legally to what they have towards pets, versus what they have with other-people-just-living-with-or-near-them.
Basically, this is similar to what rationalist!Harry sometimes complains about in the early parts of HPMoR. Children are Not People.
Yes, this is exactly what I mean. In my case I was also thinking of the way some parents train their children to make their parents look good—as objects to show off, just like dogs or cats at a show, not individuals whose accomplishments are largely their own.
It’s a good thing I asked—my guess was that you meant that children were coddled but not trained.
I don’t think this is so much “treating children as pets” as it is “treating children like not your peers”. When your boss asks you to do something, does she say “Hey, would you mind helping me out with X? I’d really like to get it done this week.”? More than likely, she says “I need you to finish X by Friday.”
You only need to give justifications to peers. A person in a higher position of authority can make a request of a subordinate without justification. So it is with officers/privates in the military, managers/employees, and parents/children.
To adress your second point: The point isn’t in justification. The difference I’m pointing at is the attitude and mental model of the world of the Commander, i.e. the parent. And this causes some crucial differences in behavior that aren’t accounted for by the lack of need to justify oneself or even the consideration of not being a peer.
Sure, we could say some (or perhaps even most, YMMV) workplace managers behave a certain way that is similar to those parents and children. We could say the same for militaries. I care little for what one could say about the similarities or the words that can or “should” be used.
Key point: Children are often treated by their parents in a manner completely dissimilar to every other case of family member or person with whom they live.
Key point 2: This behavior of parents towards children has sufficient differences from typical cases of social-class or not-peer behaviors for me to not label it as a standard case of such. I believe it would be very misleading. Parents often carefully control the “private life” of their children; what they eat, what they do at any given time, who they interact with, what they say, and even what they think to some extent.
Even in military settings, moreso in workplaces, these examples are not at all carefully monitored and controlled with punishments and threats of various kinds, and even those that are generally end the moment your shift ends and you walk out the door, with some exceptions regarding PR and such (e.g. politicians and people with similar occupations).
Key Point 3: Behaviors, social norms and laws differ between all those cases, and I would argue that laws and social norms, at least, are more similar between pets and children than they are between children and employees/nonofficers. If an employee doesn’t behave as a manager wishes, they are limited in their options, and the interactions and roles are socially clear. A manager cannot threaten to confiscate an employee’s phone for not properly cleaning up after themselves in the bathroom, nor are they legally and socially allowed to dole out corporal punishment for an employee that talks back to them or asks the wrong questions.
Yes, this is a touchy issue for me, so I apologize if I come across as less polite than I think.
In some ways the child in your examples is actually treated worse than the pet (particularly along the scale of invasive coercion).
I know right?
Guess the best part. Go on.
(spoiler: All of them are true examples of things that have happened dozens or hundreds of times to myself or other humans in my circles during their childhoods, and they’re only select examples that are easy to compare out of dozens more similarly-bad cases I could list.)
Fair disclaimer: This subject engages me a lot and it’s on my long laundry list of Subtopics Of Things To Protect.
On the other-hand the taboo against children having sex isn’t a modern development.
Rather, questions of propriety and morality refer to memes that were presumably selected by memetic evolution for some combination of the children’s individual and collective benefit.
It’s not? Damn, that 12-year-old girl in feudal England must be so happy that there’s a social taboo against children having sex. That way she doesn’t have to worry about being done stuff she doesn’t even understand when she gets married next moon to some 19-year-old page boy she’s only ever met twice. Oh wait.(TL;DR: [citation needed]) Edit: (gwern wins some more internets—by actually providing citations! I stand corrected.)
I’m not an expert on developmental sexuality in preindustrial Europe, but for most of the feudal era child marriage was a lot rarer than pop culture would have us believe and almost exclusively an upper-class phenomenon. It also didn’t necessarily imply immediate consummation; most of the feudal women we know about that did marry at thirteen or fourteen didn’t bear children until a few years later. Women from the peasant and mercantile classes (the vast majority of the population) often wouldn’t marry until their early twenties, for a variety of basically economic reasons.
Upper-class feudal women did marry young by our standards, but usually that would have meant sixteen to eighteen, not twelve.
From Farewell to Alms; Asia:
Egypt:
Europe:
To put these averages in perspective; from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
I’ve seen claims that ancient Greece & Rome may have been very different from the later medieval patterns; from http://community.feministing.com/2010/02/14/misogyny-and-relationship-inequality/comment-page-1/
(Quotes extracted from searching my Evernotes: http://www.evernote.com/pub/gwern/gwern )
Thanks! This makes a strong enough case to upturn the history book I read (in high school, and of typical epistemic quality for high school history books).
I’d say it’s more that ‘it’s complicated and dependent on region’. After all, there is a specific claim there that in Grecoroman society the stereotype that girls got married the moment they started bleeding was true. And no doubt anthropologists could list societies fitting every marriage age bracket from before conception to ‘never’. (But it does mean that we can’t pride ourselves on how civilized we are compared to our barbaric ancestors as of, say, 5 centuries ago.)
Or feel ashamed at how much more sexually repressed we are as savageorange was doing above.
More materials: http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/GESUND/ARCHIV/GUS/HISTORYCHHS.HTM http://womenofhistory.blogspot.com/2007/08/medieval-marriage-childbirth.html
That’s.… a really good one, actually. Perhaps disguise the idea in a critical discussion of Brave New World?
Really the only acceptable conversation I can think of goes something like:
If memory serves, it was something about not hitting 6-month-olds for touching themselves in Marriage and Morals that prevented Russell from teaching at City College years later...
With the another evident exception being this conversation and those like it that employ sufficient indirection. The ancestor is currently at +4, 100%.
Hrm? I’m not sure why you think I disagree with your comment. Taking a step meta is generally acceptable. People claim the Holocaust never happened is not taboo, even if The Holocaust never happened is taboo in many contexts.
I think the ancestor is a +12 because it is a great example of what the OP requested—a true, probably taboo sentence.
You presumably don’t, but it contradicts what you said. (See below.) I expressed the additional information because it makes the conversation less wrong.
If you look closely at the actual information communicated you may note that this qualitatively different. Your example is of an entirely meta claim being made. The case in the grandparent is a meta claim being made as a prefix to an actual object level claim. Specifically:
An analogous “holocaust” claim would therefore be “People claim the Holocaust never happened. I’m not 100% sure that it never happend but I think it didn’t. At least I know all the evidence I’ve encountered is faked and I believe that a relevant general class of people faked evidence.”
I agree entirely. That it also happens to be an additional way to actually make claims about the subject while not triggering the taboo penalties is secondary. And incidentally an example of a generalizable social tactic.
Can you give an example of how one might apply the tactic generally, outside of the context of having been asked for a true taboo statement? I don’t doubt you, but I find myself unable to work it out. After all, the whole problem with statements like “children enjoy genital stimulation” is the implications of having brought the subject up.
I mean, I understand that “People claim children enjoy genital stimulation; I’m not sure myself but I think they might be right” is safer than “Children enjoy genital stimulation.” alone, by virtue of multiple levels of indirection and hedge phrases and whatnot, but it doesn’t seem possible to say either one in response to, say, “My child cries all night long, I wish there were some way to quiet them down!” (or, more generally though less entertainingly, to volunteer either of them) without triggering taboo penalties.
Well … yeah, that would be a pretty terrible context to interject this little factoid in.
A better one might be in response to someone waxing eloquent over protecting the purity of The Children.
See this excellectly written blog post on should we allow sex play in Kindergarden? (SFW, seriously)
This hasn’t been a taboo since Freud’s time. (For one data point, I never masturbated until I was about 15, as far as I can remember, but… teenagers talking about when they masturbated as children weren’t terribly uncommon.)
Prepubescent children? Babies touch themselves while being changed—most of the parenting books I read said not to worry or make a big deal about it.
Such a warning seems unnecessary if most people normally followed the advice.
I guess that “taboo” in the OP means ‘what you can’t say’, not ‘what you can say but still lots of people are wrong about’. Otherwise it’d be faaaar easier to find taboos.
Yeah, I debated a separate post on that point. To me, it is pretty clear that the OP is using taboo in Graham’s sense. Then I decided too much time had passed to make that post worthwhile.
Perhaps it should be? I’m not sure how we can rely on ourselves to give sexual pleasure without any sort of self-gratification, and using children for sexual gratification is a big no no in my book. Lots of moral hazard in this form of pleasure that is quite avoidable by finding one of the billion other things kids like doing.
That seems like an astoundingly arbitrary position. Good thing + good thing somehow equals bad thing?
Mind you, I’d say any argument that even tangentially endorses pedophilia—including all those arguments that are trivially wrong but filled with applause lights—is massively taboo.
I agree with the second part of your comment, as I’ve said.
Good thing + good thing? I don’t think that using children for sexual pleasure is a “good thing” at all. It would be if we lived in a universe where the formula is pleasure + pleasure, but it obviously isn’t. Do terms such as “meaningful consent” or “exploitation” have any relevance here?
Perhaps this example will help:
A pedophile lives in a holodeck and molests holographic children. Is this worse than a analogous situation involving holographic adults? Why?
Are the holographic people actually people (as defined by the Turing test/the generalized anti-zombie principle)?
No, sorry, that was what I meant to imply by “holodeck”.
As for the actual mechanics of it, maybe it pulls data from parallel universes, maybe they’re the puppets of a (sentient) AI (zombie-master hypothesis) or maybe consciousness is easier to fake than you might expect, so they run sophisticated chatbots certified by a nonperson predicate. Damned if I know.
It’s basically an experience machine / catgirl volcano lair, is the idea. Only, y’know, icky.
In that case, it doesn’t squick me much more if they’re children than if they’re adults. But then again, few of the examples in section “Emotion and Deontological Judgments” in this post squick me much, so I may be the wrong person to ask.
I think his fantasies are perverse and contrary to values I have about human autonomy, but I don’t think the situation is significantly worse. His actions are not going to put a kid in therapy.
I also completely fail to see the relevance.
If children masturbating makes them feel good, and pedophiles feeling good about having sex with them isn’t inherently bad, then pedophiles helping kids masturbate is just efficient use of labor. Goes the logic.
Goes the logic that works so long as you do not care about meaningful consent. This is a lot like the “if she’s sleeping, it’s not rape” argument we heard in the aftermath of the Steubenville case.
What is this meaningful consent thinghy you mention? Do I need it to play tag with other children (given that I’m a child)? Does an adult need it when playing tag with children? Do you need it when washing eachothers’ backs in the bath? Do you need it when washing your child in the bath? Do you need it when your child asks for a massage? Do you need it when your child asks for a “massage”?
Where, and how, and why, does one draw the line?
My value system is incompatible with your statement and has no entry for this reference of “meaningful consent”.
Edit: Split away irrelevant part of the comment.
FTR: If I had any sort of relationship like this when I was a minor (sadly, I didn’t) and someone sued my S.O. / partner over this “meaningful consent” thing, I would have resented them and would still resent them to this day, and would most likely have pressed charges and sued them back into oblivion as soon as I turned legally capable of suing people, over all kinds of privacy breach, life alteration, or whatever other morality-based claims that I could find, in the same way I would sue anyone who pressed charges against me for having sex with my current girlfriend.
When you say “minor”—are we talking teens, preteens, infancy? A month below the local AOC? Does it matter?
(Also, good luck with that lawsuit.)
Not really. I’ve always found the moral intuitions most people have here rather lacking.
Put a 3-year-old in her mother’s body. The kid wants to have sex ’caus she has her mother’s biosystem, drives and body. Is it okay?
Put a 40-year-old in a 6-year-old’s body. Or better yet, take one of the existing people who just have the same body they did when they were 12. Is sex okay?
Take a 2-year-old WBE that ran at a subjective time factor of 50 since their start. They get transferred to a modified cloned 9-year-old body that has already gone through puberty. Is it okay to have sex?
So yeah. Doesn’t really matter, as long as both parties are aware of the typical downfalls and issues and are capable of enjoying it. (and that they actually do enjoy it, or stop if they don’t)
Good to know.
How, exactly, do you do that? Doesn’t puberty alter the mind as well as the body? You’d have to create a whole new mind, extrapolating what the 3-year-old would be like with “her mother’s biosystem, drives” without making any of the other alterations aging brings.
Assuming they’re mentally unchanged, I would guess most people would be OK with it, albeit somewhat squicked at the thought. Although some people object to cartoon child porn, so maybe you’d get people claiming it encourages pedophiles or something?
Holy cow, that’s a thing? What?
Are they simulating baseline human biochemistry?
I’m sympathetic to this position—I’m pretty sure these so-called intuitions are just social mores, other societies marry and such much younger—but I think you’re failing to account for power imbalance. We don’t let officers in the military sleep with their subordinates, and with the kind of power adults have over children in our society, the same logic applies.
Yeah, power (im)balances is the most important form of many variants of coercion, both implicit and explicit, that come rain down on my ideals of optimal sexual interactions and freedoms. And they can be so insidious or deeply implicit or just so dang entangled that sometimes, even if we do know the full situation, we can’t make sense or trace any sort of natural line. In some cases there’s even no schelling point.
But there’s so much to say here about this topic it might grow into an entire article’s worth of stuff if I keep going, and I’m sure there could be more optimal ways to communicate or use both of our times, especially considering that I suspect many of the issues I’ve thought of have also crossed the mind of most people on LW. Or, at the very least, there should be some significant overlap between any two given people. I don’t quite know enough yet to pinpoint which of my insights overlap and (more importantly) which don’t.
Anyway, power and perceived power can majorly fuck up most heuristics and investigations we’re currently capable of using/doing.
Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing any post on LW about social power balances and the many ways they influence peoples’ decisions or patterns that come up where sub-optimal situations arise because of them (or the perception of them). I’ve seen some things alluding to it or passing mentions as if everyone knew all the aspects of the topic, though. And I’ve found one old post on the current subject too.
However, I suspect the science on this to be rather… incomplete. Thoughts?
Regarding that, here’s probably the most extreme case we’ve ever seen.
Why does that part matter? Maybe consider if they are, and then if they aren’t, and see where the difference is? To me there’s no relevant difference as far as I can tell.
In this specific case, I think the socially-constructed adult/child divide might actually work—sure, it’s arbitrary, but it should largely reflect whether the kid in questions views someone as An Adult or just another kid.
Of course, this sorta falls apart when you have to deal with two kids of different ages.
Or, for that matter, “young adults” who view older people as somehow authoritative, although that’s not as pervasive.
Hmm, maybe we should use the infamous half-your-age-plus-seven “creepiness law”?
Oh, I vaguely heard about that. I though that was unique though?
Well, most of these intuitions are dependent on a human biochemistry. You want to fuck a robot, knock yourself out. Unless it’s, like, a sex-hating robot.
That said, a hundred-year-old human in an adolescent body sounds like they would be allowed to have whatever sex as they wanted, within the usual limits. Indeed, I believe it’s a common excuse in Japanese stuff to have that girl actually be a 700-year-old demon in human form.
What’s that? O.o
I think in most circumstances that would be relevant, social roles largely outweigh and override this. In most cases, minors are forced into roles by circumstance and because people who already have greater power force them to be in such roles.
For a better intuition pump towards what I mean, think of The Internets, particularly hacker culture. There, age is probably the most irrelevant out of any culture I’ve seen—only maturity, skill, and some online social likeability matter. Some mature 12-year-olds wield immense power (relatively speaking, in terms of social and cultural power within the limited scope of hacker culture) over some of their peers, and this almost certainly leads many major adults to take suboptimal decisions or actions within the context.
Sometimes, gamers can also form similar small groups where young people with the proper, more powerful “role” can wield relatively disproportionate power over the leisure time and entertainment quality of their peers. I’ve sometimes experienced this firsthand, though the worst cases I saw didn’t happen to me personally.
For a toy example of what I’m talking about, consider gaming “clans”, groups of people who for some reason or another end up gaming with eachother and forming a common In-Group mentality and generally acting like a tribe for the purposes of playing videogames (or some small set of games). Often, some gamers will get really invested in this tribe, emotionally and psychologically, and will make friends there, and spend lots of time making emotional attachments, and so on. More often than not, these groups have a “Leader”, who holds rather disproportionate authority, much like a tribe. In fact, these usually work pretty much exactly like a tribe.
Anyway, this emotional involvement can mean that that kid who would be considered a minor and unable to consent due to power imbalances actually has more power over you now, because failure to comply can, in typical tribal fashion, get you kicked out—which, while not as bad as getting kicked out in the ancestral tribe, in many cases will still sound pretty shitty, and may deprive people of otherwise-reliable good entertainment, and generally just lowers the quality of their leisure time quite a bit depending on how much they enjoy the game and the community they play with.
And then all the meta and game-theoretic concerns apply: if I’m wary that failure to comply might get me kicked from the tribe, I may try to implement the same kind of social status strategies we see in other tribelike contexts. This includes anticipating possible things that the tribe leader might care about and conforming pre-emptively, which would mean I’m taking an action that is sub-optimal or that I don’t want to do, based on my anticipation of possible failure-to-comply situations, without any form of intentional coercion from the group leader.
All of this leads up to: Situations like what I just said, where no actual coercion happens but where someone is accepting some action or situation or thinking in some way that they would prefer not to, generally build up gradually. I would not be surprised if this could easily lead a person into thinking in this manner about sexual interaction (given a social culture that has less taboos against sexuality), and make them build this up into eventually accepting or even offering to have sex with someone solely because they anticipate that them not making this offer could lead to eventual bad consequences for them due to the power imbalance, or something.
This all reminds me of situations where, for example, A wants to blackmail B, but C watches closely for any explicit form of blackmail, so instead A will create a favorable situation by removing all of B’s options and power, and then present themselves as willing to help, in a manner where B contextually knows that A is in a position to mess up their life if they don’t offer, say, sex.
From the outside, it will either look as if B just fell prey to A’s superior prowess, which is normal in many domains such as competitive businesses, or A and B suddenly formed a partnership due to friendly human interactions that were apparently fully voluntary on the part of B (since B initiated it, after all).
So merely the perception that offering sex to A is the only way for B to stay afloat¹ creates a subtle blackmail-like situation that in many cases no one could form a legitimate legal case around in most instances. Many variants of this exist or could happen in various situations.
One of my fears about making sexuality less socially taboo is all about how the above dynamics might factor in more strongly, and reduce the apparent rape rates while making such horrible non-choice not-quite-blackmail scenarios pervasively omnipresent.
I word this quite innocently, but it’s generally made implicitly obvious in such situations that “not staying afloat” implies some Very Very Bad Things—such as being forced to live on the streets while pictures of you mysteriously appear on shady websites and so on. Sometimes, the whole situation already happens with the premise that some other group will kill/maim/otherwise-permanently-make-your-life-much-less-interesting as soon as protection from them is removed by A or cut off because you no longer have the ability to afford this protection.
As the name I referred to it by suggests, you divide your age by two and add seven; anyone below that would be “creepy” to sleep with or otherwise engage romantically. Not sure where it comes from, but it’s been featured in XKCD at least once.
Yup. And in our society, all kids are in these situations, and many (especially younger) kids may assume such a context in pretty much all interactions with adults. Not to mention the fact that, currently, most people who actually do have sex with children are in such a position of “soft power” over the child.
I assumed that Randall Munroe had just made it up on the spot.
I’m pretty sure I heard of it before the comic.
I’ve always found “informed consent” (probably the same thing) to be a damn good heuristic, myself, although I certainly don’t terminally value it. Are those meant to be rhetorical questions?
… actually, I’m of the opinion that conflating that sort of thing with, y’know, the sort of thing people picture when you say “rape” leads to both overestimation of the harm it causes and devaluing of the suffering caused by violently raping someone. It is, of course, bad, and it should be discouraged with punishments and so on, but I don’t think it shares a Schelling point with “real” rape.
However.
What about this “meaningful consent” that renders it valuable? At what point does consent become “meaningful”? We usually allow parents to consent on behalf of their children, presumably because they will further the child’s own interests; should this apply to sex? What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it? Let’s pry open this black box!
[Side note: I personally am against legalizing such relationships, but I worry that I’m smart enough to argue convincingly for this position regardless of its truth, so I’m not going to elaborate on my reasoning here.]
Which in my experience people picture extremely inaccurately. They picture girls getting grabbed off a park sidewalk by a ravenous stranger. That’s a very atypical case. Outside of prison, rape is typically perpetuated by friends and lovers and dates. This is unsurprising given pure opportunity, just as it’s unsurprising that children are typically victimized by families and trusted friends of their families, not by strangers with candy.
Requiring rape to be “violent” is to require that most extra-penal rape be reclassified as not-rape. There is usually the implicit threat of violence, and the (typically) women in such circumstances are made to understand they have no choice or power. Anyone who looks at this issue will quickly meet people who insist that it isn’t “rape” if the woman did not violently resist and never succumbed, or if there were no beatings involved.
“Rape” is only as meaningful as “meaningful consent.”
Babies cannot give meaningful consent. Children can sometimes give meaningful consent, but it is difficult to determine. We allow parents to make decisions for their children in weighty matters—within strict limits. We do not allow them to give their kids liquor and cigarettes nor restrict them to “alternative medicine” for deadly disease. All of this makes sense: by and large, we do not allow families to stunt and cripple development.
(I give one exception: it is still considered acceptable to give a child a poor diet to the point of severe obesity. I think this should be at least as criminal, if not more, than allowing cigarette-smoking.)
“Meaningful consent” comes in degrees: adults are better at it than young teenagers. Most states have age of consent laws which, while allowing sex with minors, only allows it within a certain age bracket. Differential intellectual capacity matters.
You’ll notice that I haven’t tried to give a definition. With complicated concepts, it is often better to talk about them as if they were meaningful, and notice that they are, that we can recognize their presence or absence from different circumstances. If you are wholly unable to recognize such circumstances, let me know and I’ll try being more precise.
Among my friends this sentiment is encapsulated as “You always hurt the ones you love, cuz they’re the ones in range.”
Consider the examples in this comment:
Which of these count as “meaningful consent” by your definition?
Point.
Still, you know what I mean. Forcible rape, not things-that-are-bad-and-sexual-so-we-call-them-rape.
Well … yeah? That’s not the same thing as it being perfectly acceptable, mind.
Oh, yeah, threats should totally be included AFAICT. But the example under discussion was a sleeping/unconscious victim, wasn’t it?
That is to say not meaningful at all, because you’re treating meaningful consent as a fundamental property of things.
Why not, if they can express desire for sweeties or whatever? At what point do they stop being “babies” and become “children”, under this schema? Are we including toddlers here?
Aha! He admits it! Pedophilic relationships can be OK!
There are some issues where we can safely say we know better, just like, say, an adult consenting to an addictive drug. But how could sex be one of those cases, when it’s only harmful if the person doesn’t consent in the first place? (Ignoring for a minute STDs and such, which parents (and many kids) should be able to take into account.)
Why?
From hence did this meaningful concept come to you? What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?
I wish we could get past slogans.
Ok, we’re trying to determine whether or not “meaningful consent is meaningful”. A question: could you guess with high reliability what situations I think constitute meaningful consent or not?
A scenario: suppose I slip a girl a roofie, slip her into my car, take her home, and fuck her. Then I sneak her back into the party.
Was my crime “slipping a girl a drug”, or was my crime “that and rape”?
This particular slogan was selected for usefulness. It retains it’s meaning when considered as a question solely in the current context.
Sure. All I have to do is check what the culture you live in condemns.
As I have indicated before, I consider the term “rape” to include multiple Schelling points in act-space, most of which I condemn and advocate pushing, but to different degrees. As such, I would appreciate if you tabooed “rape” when asking this sort of question.
Taking my own advice, his crimes were slipping the girl a drug and violating her right to bodily integrity, the same as if he had preformed surgery on her, given her a piercing or tattoo etc.
Note that a crime is not the same a harm; technically the girl has not been harmed, we just prefer to enforce this right for game-theoretic reasons. Also, I note you failed to specify if it was “safe” sex.
When I try to believe that, I become confused. I’ve found in this and other threads that my being reminded of rationalist truisms correlates with something other than a failure of rationality.
Right, which is why you’d be able to guess that I support lowering the age of consent under certain circumstances and relaxing penalties in others. You have a bad discriminant. You are weak at something you shouldn’t be.
That’s another thing. My being asked to taboo something here usually—there are exceptions—correlates not with understandable confusion or ambiguity, but with something else.
So her “right to bodily integrity” extends to penis-in-vagina? We’re trying really hard to not see the obvious. Go on, use the word.
She hasn’t? Under what “technically” are we working? Are “we” just preferring to enforce this right for “game-theoretic reasons?” Are you assuming too much on the part of “we”?
That “failure” was deliberate and appropriate.
Maybe. I was genuinely asking, not censuring you for failing to follow the tenets of our faith.
Are you intending to respond to my question, or just muse about my motives in asking it?
Except that doesn’t necessarily reflect anything real besides the details of the culture in question. See also: witchcraft.
In this case, while I am not confused by your meaning, you are rendering this discussion too ambiguous for me to make my point. If I insisted on referring to homosexuality as a “fetish”, (or “perversion” or something else that boiled down to “sex thingy that’s not mainstream”,) and replied to arguments about how homosexuality is qualitatively different with discussions of “fetishes”, asking me to taboo “fetish” and talk about the facts of the matter would be reasonable, don’t you think? (This is not a hypothetical example.)
I submit that giving someone a tattoo while they’re drunk is not the same as raping them.
OK: I prefer to punish this in order to discourage it in general, even if, in this specific case, it has negative net utility.
And yes, having something happen to you that does not cause physical damage or mental distress (because you don’t know it happened) can reasonably be categorized as not containing “harm”, although obviously there are different possible definitions of the word “harm”.
Well, I guess it’s a good thing I noted it then, isn’t it?
Seriously, though, that failure is not appropriate, because there is a difference in the resulting harm caused by safe and unsafe sex; to whit, possible pregnancy and the risk of STD transfer. Both of these have measurable effects that the victim remembers, and indeed are likely to reveal that the rape occurred (depending on the individual in question.) You are deliberately trying to conflate different things, here. Stop it. Even if it turns out what we care about is identical in both cases, what you are doing amounts to refusing to discuss the question at all.
Just muse.
Except [supporting lowering the age of consent under some circumstances] doesn’t necessarily reflect anything [real] besides [culture], [like witchcraft!] Word salad. What you could have said is, “I was mistaken, as I could not have predicted that,” or, “I was correct, because lowering the age of consent is a really popular right now.”
I think people should have a say in what happens to them, be it politically or otherwise. Would it “harm” a child to keep him locked in a giant playground/amusement park, with everything he could ever want provided, but kept from any education? Would it “harm” the human race as a whole to be kept in a state of perpetual orgasm, kept alive, but forgetting everything else? Is a slave being harmed, even if his master does not beat him and feeds him well?
I’m with the old-school utilitarians on this. Utility is not hedonism. Immediate pleasure and pain are not the sum of all harm. I think that women and men should have some say in what happens to their bodies. That’s why I’m not fond of circumcision, especially fgm. (Another cultural prediction?) That’s why I have no problem with almost any type of relationship between consenting adults. Bondage? Sure. Open relationships? I’ve had them and they’re my favorite. Polyamory? Why not? Homosexual? Obviously. Incest? With some exceptions concerning guardian/minor relationships, but otherwise, why not? I would even support tax breaks/rights for polyamorous relationships similar to those now granted for monogamous couples, the scale of which to be determined after research into outcomes for children and other—to my knowledge—unknowns.
But this is obviously “culture”, which you would have predicted. That’s why it wouldn’t have helped you to use “meaningful consent”, right? If I were to give some other LWer a checklist of predictions about my feelings about sexual relationships, and tell him to use “culture”, he—statistically a `he’ - might use polls. If I tell him to use “meaningful consent”, how much more accurate would he have been?
If your answer is “no more accurate”, I’ll propose an experiment. If your answer is, “yes, significantly more accurate,” then we know that other people understand something that you do not, and that the problem is not the phrase but your own comprehension of it.
No, it’s not. I’m trying to establish that something is an offense, and I’m not interested in whether or not something else aggravates it. I might have cut off her foot, too. Who cares. That’s not “conflation.” What’s clear is that you don’t think that violating self-determination is “harm”. That’s the difference between us. Keep it to the internet, though, because if you touch a sleeping girl, you might find “Schelling points in act space” won’t help you.
Pretty please?
Huh? A minute ago you were complaining I was being contrary because the predictions worked fine. I can predict what you’d disapprove of for reasons of “”informed consent” just fine. I just don’t think it refers to anything in the territory beyond the bit of the map labelled “informed consent”. Or at least, if it does, you seem to be having trouble pointing to it.
As I said, I recognize the right to bodily integrity, which is violated in both cases. I also value, y’know, not traumatizing people (which you seem to dismiss as “hedonism”.)
Also, honestly, I think you probably overestimate the value of freedom and choice and so on. They’re nice and all, but they’re massive applause lights in our culture; other cultures don’t seem to have been so impressed by them.
Thanks for the extra data o pinpoint the precise subculture I should be checking.
Except you cannot explain “meaningful consent” except by pointing to culture/yourself-as-black-box. Why should I treat them as separate theories to be tested? How should I treat them as separate theories, if I haven’t already grown up in our culture?
Hey, it could be worse—your point might have simply sailed over my head.
He could have cut off her foot. In fact, lets talk about that scenario. Lets say there’s a well-known crime, stealing someone’s purse. This traditionally involves cutting off their foot, because people chain their purses to their feet. But sometimes, a cunning criminal tricks someone into giving them the key to this chain, or steals it out of their pocket, resulting in a purse-theft without the loss of a foot.
Is it a good idea to talk about how this gut is a foot-thief just because the dictionary says a “foot-thief” is someone who teals the purse someone attached to their foot, and attack anyone suggesting (say) a lighter sentence or something as defending those horrible people who cut off feet? Is it useful to ignore the loss of people’s feet and increase the penalty for all foot-thefts across the board, instead of punishing them separately?
(Of course, the correct punishment may not be fitted to the damage done for game-theoretical reasons, but I hope you appreciate the idea.)
Considering my repeated statements that such behavior should, in my opinion, be harshly punished, this particular jab falls a little flat.
(Also, if I were to ignore the fact that I don’t want this happening to me so I want to discourage it, I wouldn’t be sadistic enough to tell the victim, harming them again at significant cost to myself.)