Going to Bat for the Age of Consent

I think this diddy blud is Epstein... I think this diddy blud is Einstein...

“Akshually Misty is liderally a hag in da video games o algo”

Recently, I made a poll on which article I should release first, and this one came in dead last. However, the article I was intending on posting first is taking longer than anticipated, while this one has been sitting half-complete for weeks. So, this one is getting posted first.

Recently, Richard Hanania has been making a bit of an uproar over the way we treat age gaps and the age of consent in America. The “age of consent question” has always been very popular among some corners of the Race-Realist sphere, most likely because both topics challenge a belief that is so heavily ingrained in society that criticizing it is tantamount to social suicide. Aside from Banania, Joseph Bronski and J.F. Gariepy have harped on about it as well, and I also see it brought up by Bronze Age Pervert and Nick Fuentes’s orbiters. Because of the taboo surrounding the subject, few people really knew how to make good points against the skeptics. It was like a disease from Europe making contact with an indigenous tribe. There was a time where I was fairly convinced by the arguments put forth by these skeptics. However, as I started to learn more about the origins of the West, and what really makes a marriage pattern “good”, and what makes a law just, I began to change my mind. There are, in fact, a lot of arguments in favor of the status quo, but you just have to actually look for them and think about the argument from a principled perspective, instead of nitpicking minor contradictions in social mores. The sort of ills of modernity that we have always been against would actually be made much worse if men began to date teenage girls, and large age gaps in marriages are a practice of the very civilizations which we are typically most cautious of imitating. Many people on the right have attempted to argue against the age of consent, and the responses to these arguments have mostly been handwaving them away as bad-faith or not even worth engaging with. So, I think it’s about time that someone actually did a deep dive on this. The way this will be formatted is that it will be divided into responses to the various common arguments I have heard for the age of consent being illegitimate.

Argument 1: “Men are naturally sexually attracted to underage girls, so the Age of Consent is anti-male!”

R: It is true that studies have shown that most men are attracted to teenage girls, and cannot consistently differentiate between teenagers below and above the age of consent. However, this heightened sexual response is predicated on the men being unaware of the true age of the woman. When the ages are known, men record significantly less attraction to the teenagers than they do to the of-age women. Interestingly, this pattern was true for UK men but also remained true for people from a country with a lower age of consent (Bulgaria), suggesting that it isn’t merely due to guilt or self-convincing.

Access to invisible information can change whether someone finds something attractive. Many men have attractive siblings, but would likely be turned off if they knew this individual was their sibling, because we have been conditioned both by nature and by society to find incest to be disgusting. Furthermore, there are a small minority of transvestites who actually do pass as the opposite sex, but most heterosexual men could not bring themselves to be aroused by them if they were given the knowledge of the inner mannishness of that person. So, it would be more accurate to say that men are attracted to neotenous-looking adults, which is kind of a nothingburger. It is already well-known that women have more neotenous traits than men, but if you believe these features are worth selecting for then you obviously should support high ages of consent, because it would be impossible to select for the retention of youthful features if you’re selecting people who aren’t actually fully developed.

Argument 2: “The brain is finished developing at [insert age below 18], so that’s when the age of consent should be!”

All evidence suggests that the brain is finished developing at 16, on average, and the processes of brain development that are allegedly observed into adulthood do not stop at 25, and instead go on for much longer. They aren’t associated with an actual increase in good judgment, either. A good demonstration of this is that driving ability doesn’t actually increase with age, it only increases with years on the road. High criminality in people 18-25 is due to two factors. Firstly, testosterone. Secondly, all of the pathologically criminal people haven’t been sent to prison yet. By the time people are 25, the ones who are part of the criminal demographic are already in prison half the time (if they’re even still alive). I’m not talking about Black people, by the way. Yes, Black people commit a disproportionate amount of crime, but when I say “criminal demographic” I mean the repeat offender population in general. This group commits the majority of all crimes. I think it is important to clarify that the brain is fully developed by 16, because so many Zillennials are wasting their youths under the imaginary impression that life begins at 25. What is not mentioned about this argument is that, while the increase in intelligence and judgment from 16 to 20 is insignificant, the increase in intelligence between 12 and 16 is quite dramatic. The average 14 year old is around 0.5 SDs dumber than the average 16 year old, and the average 12 year old is a full SD dumber. Obviously, IQ scores given to people are normed on people their age, so I’m talking about adult-normed scores here.

The age of 16 is only an average age at which mental maturity is reached, so it’s likely that some people reach mental maturity later than 16, and some reach it earlier. However, mental maturity should be treated as an unknown variable, because there’s no real way to measure it before it is complete. Because of this, if you believe it is very important to not have sexual relations with people before they are at the peak of their biological intelligence, you should consider raising the age of consent some years above that. This is one of the great flaws in the arguments that AoC skeptics make — they assume that, because the variance is so great in maturation, we should use the lower tail of the variance as the standard for maturity. This is ridiculous and runs contrary to what is normal in safety measures, which is using the upper tail of the variance as the standard for maturity. The average package of raw chicken does not contain salmonella, but enough do that we avoid eating it entirely.

It’s not just intelligence that determines ability to consent, either. The main reason that people under 16 cannot consent is due to the ways in which we legally restrict U-16s. They cannot drive. They can only work so much. They cannot live on their own. Because of this, there is no possible relationship between a grown adult and a 13, 14, or 15 year old that can be considered on equal footing. Is the notion of quid pro quo woke and stupid in the first place, as some may suggest? Maybe, but the reason most people criticize quid pro quo is because between adults it is often ambiguous whether something is actually quid pro quo. In the case of relationships with minors, it is very clear-cut. Minors are quite literally deprived of the rights that adults have, and are put in the care of their parents. I think there are pretty much two options here. First, someone can accept that quid pro quo is legitimately real and bad, in which case all relationships with minors involve it. Secondly, one can accept that quid pro quo is fake and gay, and that power dynamics are necessary goods, in which case relationships with minors are bad because it subverts the authority of the parents.

Argument 3: “The Age of Consent is modern and doesn’t correspond to history. Large age gaps used to be historically common, and young marriages were normal for women”.

First of all, we don’t live in historical times anymore. In many societies where there were large age gaps between male and female marriages, it was because social institutions existed that essentially exiled young men out of the community or encouraged them to go to war for the first 10-20 years of their adult life. Furthermore, young marriages in these societies tended to be more common among the elites, and were often arranged or semi-arranged. Elite families had an incentive to marry their offspring young in order to capitalize on the fruits of the familial alliances generated by such marriages. Young women were married off to older men because young men were in low supply. Early marriage was also beneficial in the past because all-cause mortality was significantly higher at every age. Yes, it was especially high for children, but even for adults, the chance of either flat-out dying or simply becoming unfit for parentage for any reason was drastically higher in adulthood too. Today, this is a non-issue. Women don’t just die. Men don’t just die. It is very rare for someone to die before 50, and other complications for marriage such as permanent wounds or going MIA are also heavily reduced. Another thing people don’t realize about the past is that for many people, the idea of “age” or concrete time was not obvious. Age binning on paperwork was much more common in the past, suggesting that there was a higher degree of innumeracy. A non-insignificant amount of people literally lost track of how old they were, and didn’t experience the same regimented age-divided upbringing that we do today. I suspect also that malnourishment and disease greatly reduced the consistency at which people started and stopped physically developing.

Secondly… It’s just not very true. I would recommend reading this long article breaking down marriage ages across the world, from the Bronze Age to the present, for the whole story. In medieval and early modern Europe, there were very few regions or cities with data that had an average age of female marriage less than 4 years from menarche. In most of them, the average age was in the twenties, and the rest would have been in the late teens. This is also the case for elites in Germany, Italy, and England, who typically married earlier than the general population.

Historical Female Age at Marriage

We know from Caesar and Tacitus that this was also the case for the Germanic tribes during antiquity. According the Caesar, it was considered disgraceful for men and women alike to have lost their virginity before the age of 20. So, in that case even the minimum age was quite high. “Minimum marriageable age” doesn’t actually tell us much about what the norm is, though. It was typically legal for fathers sell their children into slavery in much of the ancient world. That doesn’t mean it was considered good parenting. So when people bring up low minimum ages for marriage in the Greco-Roman world, consider that in these civilizations such decisions were made only to maintain the theoretical super-authority of the house-father, and don’t actually represent what people thought was healthy. Most Greek medical and philosophical writers encourage people not to marry their daughters off until their late teens, perhaps even later.

Here is a map of first marriage ages by region in Early Modern Europe. As you can see, almost the entire continent had an average age above 20 for women.

Hagmaxxing Danes

You might be wondering about the variance in such marriages. Here is a quote from Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost:

“We have examined a thousand licenses containing the ages of the applicants, issued by the diocese of Canterbury between 1619 and 1660 to people marrying for the first time. One woman gave her age as 13, four as 15, twelve as 16, and the rest were 17 and over, and 966 of the women got married for the first time after the age of 19, that is nearly 85 per cent.”

Societies with low average marriage ages are usually more dysfunctional. One of the great findings of John Hajnal was that non-Western societies, particularly in the Indo-Islamic and Southeast Asian world, had quite low ages of female marriage. The average was often below 15. Meanwhile, an integral element of the Western European Marriage Pattern was relatively late marriages.

Is this the sort of based, trad hebephile society you want to emulate? Moroccan bazaars where old village patriarchs are spitting up money out the wazoo to buy child brides, and young men are prostituting themselves for the middle-aged bachelors? It’s not the sign of a prosperous society, it’s the sign of a hypergamous, clannish shithole. But why is that the case? Aren’t we supposed to be liberating men from the hags? That brings me to the next argument…

Argument 4: “The Age of Consent is anti-male. It was invented by feminist hags to deny men access to beautiful babes”

Response: It is no secret at this point. Women’s tastes evolve as they age. Men’s tastes do not.

This is one of the primary causes of hypergamy in the West — the phenomenon where women have much more sexual privilege than men. There is constantly a larger pool of single men interested in a smaller pool of single women, because male interest is concentrated heavily at that lower level. There is one environment where it is pretty easy for men to get a girlfriend though, and that’s high school. If the age of consent was lowered, then high schoolers would suddenly have to also compete with older men for these teenage girls, effectively destroying the prospect of young love and ensuring the tyranny of the old over the young. Like I said, high schoolers are very low-agency. They cannot provide for anyone, in fact they are borderline legally forbidden from it. There is no way that a 14 year old boy could compete with some 20 year old man with a job and a car, even if he would in actuality be more compatible with a girl of his age.

If you believe in the goodness of young love, you must also believe in the necessity of a high age of consent. This is the only way in which young love can be normal. There is no going back to young love if you are a grown man, and this is obvious if you think about it for a second. What makes being young so great isn’t how the world treats you, it is the way everything feels so incredibly fresh and new. It’s an internal phenomenon. The amount of joy that grown men could extract from a relationship with a teenager does not compare to the amount of joy lost by the teenager whose crush he stole.

Do older women also lose in this scenario? Yes, but who cares? This is “owning the libs” mentality.

Argument 5: “Women hit the wall after 23/Fertility/whatever”

Response: The wall is real, but men and women don’t actually have that much of a difference in visible aging rate before 30. It appears that women begin aging drastically more than men around 30, and then men take the lead in aging rates around 40.

The reason that people may believe the wall starts sooner is because a lot of the most beautiful women in their twenties are already taken. It’s not biology, it’s selection. Also, there is a constant anxiety about women’s body counts today. If a woman is in her late 20s, it is assumed that she has had sex with multiple other men, which is off-putting to a lot of men even if it isn’t reflected in looks. Male value also exceeds female value in the sexual market only after 30 in online dating markets, and this is partially due to a rise in male value as a consequence of men in their late 20s being wealthier than men in their early 20s. I wouldn’t be surprised if obesity also spikes around the transition to adulthood for women, but I have no data on this. Anecdotally speaking, a lot of people from both sexes balloon after high school, but more formerly overweight men end up thinning out for a number of reasons. Obesity is an ailment of AmeriKwan way of life and not a biological inevitability, so it shouldn’t be factored in too heavily to discussions about “the wall”.

Argument 6: The Age of Consent is Arbitrary, and changes from country to country. Women are already fertile after Menarche!

First of all, why does it matter that the age of consent is arbitrary? Is it ever not going to be arbitrary? If it works, it works. Do you know what else is arbitrary? The diagnostic criteria for an enlarged heart. And yet, nobody is complaining about how we diagnose enlarged hearts, because it works. Like I said earlier, the vagueness of it only encourages us to go with the upper tail as the lower boundary. You might say that menarche (first blood) serves as a hard barrier between sexually fertile and sexually infertile, but menarche is really just the first step in a gradual process of period cycle regularization which isn’t really complete until the late teens. By the third year after menarche, 20-40% of periods are still irregular. Again, I must stress, we don’t live in the middle ages. Most women, if they are healthy (which is an ask in modern America, albeit), have a good 15-20 years of high monthly fertility after 18. Many will remain fertile into their 40s. If you’re concerned about mutational load, then you’d be much better off worrying about paternal age.

There is no longer the factor of spontaneous death or debilitating injury to take into account when thinking about marriage time. The reason people don’t have kids is because they don’t get married, or they get married late. And by late, I mean much, much later than the minimum age necessary to get married. It’s very clear that the minimum age of marriage is a tiny fraction of the cause here.

It is true that much of the developed world has ages of consent below 16. In Europe, most countries have it set at 14 or 15. However, as I discussed in my last article, national ages of consent can be misleading. In almost every European country, the age of majority is higher than the age of consent, and several laws exist to regulate relationships involving people below the age of majority. In many of these countries, all that is required to incriminate the senior party is a complaint from the junior party suggesting that the act was a product of manipulation or coercion, and if the senior member is in a position of trust or authority the act is considered illegal from the get-go. The sharing of explicit photos is also universally illegal for under-18s in CoE countries. Clearly, even in Europe, illicit behaviors with people under 18 is considered problematic.

I believe the persistence of low ages of consent in Europe is due to the desire to protect men who unwittingly slept with underage women. The reason American ages of consent developed to be higher is due to the increased reliance on cars in America compared to Europe. The need for a car to get from place to place greatly reduced the ability for young adults to interact with people below 16 in the US, which makes stories of accidental violations of the age of consent much more suspicious. Europeans just walk everywhere, or bike everywhere, or take the train. I could be wrong about this, but if I recall correctly Europeans also had historically lower legal drinking ages. Younger people were able to invade alcoholic spaces, while in America they would be unwelcome.

I say all of this, of course, with the assumption that the person reading believes that just laws are worth following for the sake of it, even in cases where the reason they are just doesn’t apply. I’ve become much more of a deontologist in the past year or so, and I think it has inspired me to take a proactive stance on certain issues related to “arbitrary laws”. Another example I hear brought up is drunk driving. You shouldn’t drive drunk, even if you are so skilled a driver that you are superior at driving drunk than the average joe is at driving sober, because the law against drunk driving is a just one and so breaking it demonstrates a failure of discipline. If you don’t consider it virtuous to follow just laws, then you have no real reason to uphold things like traditional ceremonies or rituals, or pay any attention to culture or history.

So, those are all of the common arguments I can think of that are specifically used to attack the age of consent, and demand for its lowering. If there’s one I’m missing, comment it, and I’ll give my thoughts on it, but let me now make some more points on the topic. Now, for the most important argument… Why? Why bother lowering it? Everyone realizes that people only stay the same age for one year, right? What are all of the “ephebephiles” going to do when their 14 year old girlfriend turns 16, dump them? Obviously, the law should promote people having long-term, monogamous relationships for the sake of social stability, and emphasizing low ages of consent does the exact opposite. People aren’t getting married to 14 year olds. I don’t care what Isekai fantasy land you have conjured up in your head where you believe this will be the case. Parents no longer need to consider it for the reasons they did in the past, and so they won’t. There is literally zero benefit to marrying your daughter off at 14. I imagine that if such people did get married to a teenager, they wouldn’t even be happy. Teenagers are really quite devilish in their attitudes.

The only thing that would result from lowering the age of consent is a bunch of teenagers getting taken advantage of by men only interested in sex, which provides no fulfillment for anyone involved. You may respond with “okay, but let the punishment fit the crime”, and I can’t say I’m particularly concerned about that. In medieval times, non-violent thieves received the same penalty as murderers if they stole enough stuff, and we’re better off for it today. People need to forget about “punishment”. The prison system exists to cordon problematic people off from the rest of society, not retribution or rehabilitation.

Finally, a note on the “Anime Right”, as they are very overrepresented in this debate. If you find yourself being attracted to anime girls, do not take it as a sign to become a Hebephile, for the exact same reasons you shouldn’t take it as a sign to develop Yellow Fever. You will never, ever be able to find a real-life anime girl, because the allure of them is that they aren’t real. They are incorporeal, and this has always been a part of anime since the very beginning when it was taking notes from the very obviously expressionist art of Kabuki. I think it is very telling that much of this demographic almost exclusively watches Moeshit like K-On and Lucky Star, because these shows take Anime characters and just put them in the real world. What’s the point of making it animated, then? Why not just make it live action? Anyways, read more about that here: