This is the kind of thing that I generally post at my site. In fact, I did.
I know that this has every possibility of generating some serious flames here at GNXP. This is why I’m posting it here too: We aren’t a blank slate when it comes to our feelings about sex. Culture has a lot more influence over sexual practices than it does over IQ. But there is still a general template that is substantially genetic.
(To throw some h-bd into this, I will mention that Sir Richard Burton once said that polygamy was a function of climate. To carry that a little further, climate is a function of geography. Which may mean different selection pressures for different ancestral groups, which themselves vary by geography.)
The main point is that we have prejudices about how sex should work that are part of our nature as much as they are part of any rational belief system.
This is what I posted to my site.
CNN headline: Pupil raped by teacher: ‘I love her’
Once again the case of the sixth-grade pupil having sex with his female teacher is in the news. The story is an absurdity; the above headline strikes most people as an absurdity, a legal fiction. We moderns cannot admit why.
Boys are different from girls.
Our laws are made to protect young girls from older men. They are on the books in a gender-neutral fashion because that is how we make our laws. But no one (unless ideology makes them rationalize their way to it) has the same gut feeling about an underage boy having sex with an older woman as they have about an underage girl having sex with an older man. Actually, we don’t like the idea of underage girls having sex period, but it has been about two decades since we could admit that as a culture.
Before anyone raises the obvious objection, let me state a corollary to the bolded statement above.
Heterosexuals are different from homosexuals.
It’s not that we feel comfortable with absolute sexual freedom for young boys. We have a strong gut dislike for young boys having homosexual sex with older men. Or homosexual sex at all, if we can help it.
Since older women generally don’t look at younger boys nearly as often as older men look at post-pubescent younger girls, this sort of thing rarely comes up. It does not really impact on our cultural radar. But the gender-neutral approach that this issue’s relative unimportance allows does have one serious consequence. We do not admit that, owing to the problem of sexual abuse, adult men have precious little place in the child rearing industry (i.e. the schools).
Posted by Thrasymachus at 08:51 PM