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Any plan for combating CSA is going to have to reckon with the fact that teenagers are often horny and feel a desire to explore and express their sexuality and if they don’t have a safe avenue for that which doesn’t involve interacting with adult predators they will find an unsafe one which does
This is not a hypothetical this is not a piece of rhetoric I was a horny teenager who had safe avenues for expressing my sexuality without the involvement of adult predators closed off to me and so I found the unsafe ones
+ if your conception of why CSA is wrong is in any way based on a notion of childhood innocence your actions and rhetoric are contributing to CSA, not fighting it.
The harm that is done to a child when they are sexually abused comes from the fact that they are being placed in a vulnerable situation with a pernicious power dynamic, not from the destruction of some illusory victorian notion of purity
Like idk it’s really fucked that for some people the rhetoric of “that 15 year old seduced me, I wasn’t the aggressor, I’m not in the wrong” is only wrong because they think 15 year olds are like constitutionally incapable of wanting to seduce someone when that’s just like categorically incorrect, when I was 15 I very much actively desired to seduce people and even made attempts at doing it. The reason “that 15 year old seduced me, I wasn’t the aggressor, I’m not in the wrong” is wrong is because you as an adult have power over that 15 year old regardless of what they are or aren’t trying to do and as such if they are trying to seduce you it is your responsibility to not take actions you know to be wrong. It’s not wrong because it’s describing some kind of impossible desire that a 15 year old would never have, it’s wrong because it’s seeking to invert the power dynamics of the situation and place all the contextual agency on the minor while rhetorically disempowering the adult to project an image of innocence. It’s just garden variety DARVO, not some kind of Metaphysically Incoherent Assertion.
Like idk I feel like it should be pretty easy to point out what’s wrong with the logic of “the child told me to commit rape so I did” without inventing a rationale about how children are constitutionally incapable of formulating the idea of telling someone to commit rape
This absurd notion of childhood innocence serves only to put minors in more danger by denying the basic facts of how they experience and interact with the world while simultaneously functioning as a justification for depriving them of useful and necessary information that they could use to protect themselves from predators if they were allowed to have it. When you deny children information about how the world works with regards to sexuality, and deny yourself information about how children work with regards to sexuality, you are putting both yourself and children in a position of having to build a plan on faulty information and you shouldn’t be surprised when the house you build this way crumbles under a stiff breeze.
The whole “no one experiences sexual desire until they turn 18″ thing also just seems completely out of touch with how 90% of the world seems to think about teenagers, i.e. that they (and especially guys) are pretty much the horniest beings in existence. I lost count of the number of times I got told that factoid about teenage boys thinking about sex every seven seconds back when I was one. (I don’t think either of the extremes on this point is precisely correct, but probably the popular conception is closer.)
It’s doubly frustrating because, as OP says, it seems reliant on the idea that to really not consent to sex you have to have absolutely no desire for it, even for sex as a thing in the abstract and not with this particular person. I know that a lot of people opposite me in this debate have heard that an erection doesn’t mean consent and that “she was asking for it by dressing slutty and lightly flirting with me” is a bad argument, and claim to believe them, but in discussions like these it doesn’t feel like they’ve really internalized those points.
Source: xxblackheartbiohazardsxx
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