What’s the context of this picture?
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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CW: mention of sexual assault
and they’ll always change what they use, too
a 16 year old activist is a girl
a 16 year old who got raped is a young woman
the words change, the only constant is the intent of not taking us seriously
A 16 year old shite rapist is just a boy, his whole life agead of him!
A 12 year old black kid shot for holding a toy is an "armed youth"
We must also bomb Iran because War is Peace! Lock up the immigrants because after all Freedom is Slavery for the Proles! This was always the case, every record in the Ministry of Truth confirms it.
no link to source or alternative text fallback
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ITT: White knights infantilizing young women because they weren't getting laid in their teens.
Look up "age of consent map" for the USA. Next do Europe! (You likely won't like it. Oh god, not a bit.)
My daughter will be there in a couple of very short years. She's going to be pretty, like her mother and grandmother, and I'm scared shitless, no idea how to approach this thing. But when my wife and I talk to her about sex, we're not going to treat her like a child. How fucking insulting.
No one can defend older guys manipulating teens, no one. But maybe show a little respect to the teen in question? Yes, they're naive, but they're exploring their sexuality and acting like they have zero agency until the day they turn 18? What happened to "my body, my choice"?
So you’re cool with someone like Donald Trump fucking your teenage daughter then?
I don’t disagree that there’s no magical switch that flips at 18, but as a society, we have generally agreed that teenage sex be between teenagers. There is an imbalance of power and mastery of manipulation that comes with age when old men pursue young women.
It’s wrong and you damn well know it.
Your logic is the first step in what we call "blaming the victim". In reality minors often end up in bad situations, but you don't get to blame them for older people's actions. Be careful here.
I mean… that’s not true though. I wouldn’t call someone older than 12 or at most 14 a child; after that they’re teenagers.
“Don’t mind me, just arguing semantics in a discussion about pedophilia. Carry on.”
Autism in a nutshell
Edit: Although actually not quite. I think you're weakening your case when you just make false statements like that. And especially with something that gruesome and awful, you shouldn't do that. You can just… use correct semantics and have a stronger point.
Are teenagers some netherworld age between child and adult?
In the US, you're an adult when you turn 18.
Yes, there are exactly in a weird place. 18 is that age of majority in America. Age of consent varies a bit.
Boy oh boy, you might not want to see Europe's map.
There's some nuance not present on this map.
In some places, the age of consent listed on the map only applies if the older partner is reasonably close in age to the younger one.
In Kentucky, for example, the age listed is 16. However, there are age-based restrictions that stipulate that a 16-year-old is not legally capable of consenting to a sexual relationship with someone more than 10 years older.
Other states require closer age gaps of maybe 3 or 4 years for 16-year-olds.
Aka, a child
The older I get the older kids are in my eyes, i look at a 20 year old and think back to myself at 20 and go “what a fucking dumb kid”
Well, yeah, me too. I'm 54 and 30-somethings are starting to look like kids, not attractive to me, not in a sense I'd want to be close to one.
OTOH, I was on my third partner at 17, and she was too. Lost my virginity to a 14-yo, who initiated the thing and rode her bike across town to hook up.
My 17-gf and I weren't happy with the whole sex thing until we hooked up. Cue 4-years of fucking like rabbits, nothing off the table.
So I have a hard time calling the 15-17 crowd "children". I feel it demeans them, infantilizes them.
I'm not advocating for anything to do with relations with minors, just to be clear. I am saying that, at least colloquially, we do tend to distinguish between children and adolescents/teenagers/young adults in our usage of language. Children's books are not for teens. Children's clothing stores are not for teens. Children's medications are not for teens. There are certainly exceptions to this, for example the nearby Children's hospital serves kids up to 17 years old. But generally speaking, when you say "child" no one is thinking you might be speaking about a 17 year old. We tend to recognize that there is a transition period between childhood and adulthood, not a sharp cutoff point, and our language reflects that.
That being said, none of that changes the absolute grossness of referring to minors who are victims of sex trafficking as "underage women", obviously. That sort of language is both attributing more maturity and agency to them by calling them "women" and implying that they are somehow in the wrong for being "underage" like they are responsible for doing the things that were done to them as minors. We tend to use the term "underage" to refer to things kids do before it's legal for them to do it, like "underage drinking", and so that word has a connotation of wrong doing on the part of the minor, doing a crime rather than them being the victim of the crime. And "women" has the connotation of referring to adults that are responsible for themselves, have the capacity to concent to these sex acts, etc. Neither term should apply to these girls.
that is the ‘it’s not pedophile it’s epiophile(sp?)’ argument that pops up on 4chan that I’m pretty sure is not a joke
my response is this doesn’t really need nuance here, for the sake of fucking 40year olds they are kids
fuck half the 20 somethings I meet, viewed through that lens are still kids even if it’s not illegal
like saying ‘they’re ice not nazis’ and wondering why people are looking at you funny
I wasn't being pedantic about the technical definitions of words like "pedophile". I'm saying, outside of this type of assertion, we almost never use "child" to mean "teenager". And I don't care for its usage in this particular context, not because it's technically/ colloquially incorrect in itself, nor that they're only using that word to load the sentiment with emotional weight. I think it SHOULD have emotional weight, regardless of the victim's age.
My care is that, in attributing the "wrongness" of the action to the incorrect fact that they are "children" as that word is typically understood, you make an easy target for someone with an opposing view. You undermine the very valid sentiment you are attempting to make with someone who will likely see your choice of words for what it is, an emotionally manipulative exaggeration, and then shift to arguing semantics or simply disregard your point because of that blatant exaggeration.
I do recognize the apparent irony here that I'm the one arguing semantics in this case. But I am on the same side as the person in this post and yourself. I'm not negating the point being made that these were vulnerable girls who are in no way to blame for this. I'm critiquing the technique of making that point by borrowing the emotional weight of words where they don't belong. Similar to how Isreal throws 'antisemitism' around to dodge criticism of their government. That word means something else entirely but it would be convenient to your side of the argument if they let you apply it here. It's a bad strategy and it makes those words ultimately meaningless and thus powerless when they're applied to anything convenient.
You undermine the very valid sentiment you are attempting to make with someone who will likely see your choice of words for what it is,
Yeah, and what you do with those people is you call them pedophiles and stupid and then you throw rocks at them.
Why are you capitulating to the enemy? You know they will deliberately misunderstand you at every turn, yes? There is no magic word spell you can cast that will make them see reason.
How is choosing your words accurately capitulation?
You're letting them control the conversation.
You yourself said we should choose our words carefully because they would otherwise click their tongues at our methods. They're wrong, who cares what they think? Just call them stupid. Say they're deliberately missing the point because they're pro-pedophilia. Get other people to do that and bully them out of the community.
You talk about strategy, but think about what you're doing here: you're bickering with people you ostensibly agree with, and not with them.
The battle is not for the minds of the people that are pro-pedophilia. It is for the minds of the young people that will otherwise end up being indifferent to the pro-pedophilia people becuase they get convinced that they aren't actually pro-pedophilia, but just think the victims are partially to blame. "Why did she get in the car? What was she wearing? Maybe she really wanted it."
You talk about strategy, but think about what you're doing here: you're bickering with people you ostensibly agree with, and not with them.
In my very first comment, I called out them for the bullshit term, "underage women", that they used. I call out "them" all the time on their bullshit. I also call out poor strategy on our side because how else to you improve without feedback and constructive criticism? Two things can be true.
People indifferent to pedophilia are concerned with the subtle differences between teenagers and very-young children—a distinction the law does not make because in the context of a 40-year-old predator it is irrelevant? What are you talking about?
If they say the child victims are partially to blame, you know, uh... rocks.
I called out them for the bullshit term, "underage women", they they used.
Are any of them here? This discussion is only about strategy, and I'm telling you, this is not a direction worth going in.
Nobody likes tone policing. People do like big lawn chair moments: that is, when wrestler A gets tossed a lawn chair from the audience and uses it to beat wrestler B to the ground. Then they do like a big "hoorah" or something.
Cool, been out there throwing a lot a rocks and lawn chairs? Talking awful big game. Let's see the action then. Put up or shut up, as they say.
C'mon. I'm not trying to make enemies of you.
What I'm saying is that you are diluting the emotional strength of the message under the pretense that a message too emotionally strong will be too much for some people to hear—which is ridiculous.
You said the message should carry emotional weight, didn't you? If our opponents are against emotional manipulation, how can you guarantee 'teenagers' isn't still too powerful for them? At what point do you cut them off as enablers of the wrong moral position?
By trying to play the semantics game early, before they've even said anything, you're already ceding the argument that these semantics even matter. You can just skip the game entirely. If they try to play it with you, don't.
I personally think the loss of nuance is kind of scary. There are massive, continuous attacks on our freedoms in the name of 'protect the children'.
It's inaccurate language like this that's used to justify those changes.
People are acting like this is supposedly undermining the horror of rape, but that's like saying we only care about rape if it's happens to a 9 year old. We should be horrified at rape period, no matter the age of the person it happens to.
Treating teenagers and young adults like they're children isn't helping anything and is just a cover to push these restrictive laws on us, much like how the pro-life arguments are done in bad faith and just used to further their pro-birth ideals.
there is a massive gulf between putting trump and the other wealthy behind bars for trafficking kids that are 15 year olds and attacking freedoms in the name of ‘protecting the children’
it’s really not hard to navigate the difference
We should be horrified at rape period, no matter the age of the person it happens to.
Child rape happens even when the child consents because morally the child cannot consent. They are a special case for a reason. Their age is not irrelevant.
is just a cover to push these restrictive laws on us
Uh, what restrictive laws are you concerned about, hm? Is there something specific you're concerned about not being allowed to do?
I mean steam just had a bunch of games delisted because of draconian porn rules (save the children!)
UK passed an insanely invasive adult content ID law
All of this 'save the children' stuff starts with arguments like this. Erode nuance, make the attack on children seem bigger and more menacing. Erase the difference between teens and children, so everything is treated as if it was done to a five year old.
Are you under the impression that anti-porn advocates are just confused about the differences between being 9 and 16 years old?
Like, if you corrected them, they would say, "Oh, that's fine then. Porn is all right."
Do you think that explaining the difference between pedophiles and ephebophiles to the Paypal board of directors will convince them to stop pressuring Steam to delist porn games?
How does this conversation work in your mind?
"Your honor, my client isn't a pedophile but rather an ephebophile."
"That's great, then he can spend infinity minus one days in prison."
An ephebophile can legally fuck under 18s in most of the first world. See my map comment here:
https://old.lemmy.world/comment/18329932
(I feel that may be off a bit. I remember seeing Italy at 13 and thinking, "C'mon guys!")
My daughter is 12, and man what a weird place. She's has breasts! Being that her mom and grandma were flat as a board, and we're all skinny, very strange. Not passed menarche yet! Haven't spent much time with her since last summer, so every year is a revelation. My 11-yo son is still a whiny little bitch though. :)
Yeah, she's a total child playing with her younger brother, but she shows signs of maturity now and again that are jarring. When we're alone, or she's alone with my wife, she often comes out with "adult" thoughts and feelings. Weird.
So I'm with ya. Depending on the person, getting past 12 is a strange place. Not a child, not an adult, and it sucks for most of us. My stepson was very frustrated at 14, told him, "You're getting adult emotions (not only meaning sex), yet you're treated like a child, yet you're not supposed to not act like a 'child', supposed to be more 'grown up'. It's just a sorry place to be and we all went through it."