And rape can still be rape even if the victim seemed to consent at the time. Outside of the most brutal examples, rape is one of the hardest crimes to prosecute. This stuff can be very tricky.

Which is why it's important to teach people of all ages to make a point of saying "no" to a person making advances to them if they do not want those advances, so that no ambiguity is present. Also, guys need to be taught to stop making advances on girls (or other boys) if they do not react in a favorable way but otherwise do not protest, but just sit there.

It's not nearly as simple as just overturning the laws and taboos, and even if that were possible it would not be an automatic indicator that kids were truly better off. Many kids will often go along with expectations, even if they don't agree with or like what is expected of them.

And this usually happens when kids are not given a choice in the matter. They rarely, in practice, follow expectations that they are compelled or coerced into following, and sexual activity if hardly the one major exception to this rule. Kids are notorious for not doing what they are expected to do, when they are expected to do it. If they blindly followed expectations as often as some people seem to think, the detention room at schools and the truancy rate would never have been as large as they were, because kids would be overly concerned about losing the respect and approval of their teachers.

And for the record, you know I have never been supportive of simply overturning the laws, and nothing else. I have always discussed at great length the many things that I think need to be done. That said, I do not believe that people of any age are ever truly better off with less civil rights rather than more, because the greatest amount of abuse and coercion is able to go on in the absence of rights, not the other way around. Too many people in our own community ignore the strong casual relationship between the power our society gives to adults over kids, and the very thing that leaves young people most vulnerable to abuse of all sorts.

What I want to see is kids fighting on behalf of their own emancipation, and not just a handful of them. When they begin to openly defy cultural expectations en masse, or at least in large numbers, then I will stop worrying about any movement to liberate them.

I have told you numerous times what a ridiculous statement this is, and it's notable that you make it so often. So again, I remind others reading this, since you may never choose to "get" this yourself: there are important and very obvious legal reasons why young people cannot take to the streets and demand their rights in "proper" political fashion. They are not legally permitted to rebel in most positive ways. Currently, they cannot legally form protest groups, or register said groups with the system in any way, or acquire a city license to hold rallies and parades of their own, and they are being increasingly segregated from adults who may be able to help them do so as a result of the limited participation they are allowed on socnet sites and other online forums--at least in the sense where they can be open about their ages.

Yet they do display their defiance of expectations in many ways however they are able to, with the powers-that-be continuing to come up with excuses to limit their ability to do so. Go on YouTube and watch many younger people creating channels and making videos and even series in defiance of what society expects of them, going against all of the popular culture paradigms of today. And they do this despite the mean, unsupportive comments left by adult viewers, who often say things like "Where were the parents?" Moreover, youths display their dissatisfaction with their status in many negative ways, such as the huge rate of kids who run away from home, commit suicide, or rebel in an extremely anti-social manner, since they are denied the legal outlets to protest that are usually open to adults.

Also, it's important to remember that kids are conditioned from the time of their birth not to see themselves as a distinct minority group, but to perceive their oppression as part of the "natural order of things." The same situation existed for blacks and women for a very long period of time, and it was numerous generations before they began to question society's expectations of them in large numbers; in fact, the oppression of youths as we know it today is a fairly recent phenomenon in world history, yet we already have a fledgling youth liberation movement that is proceeding precisely the way the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements did in their early days. How often in the pre-Civil War days did you see black people en masse questioning their status as slaves, or walking around the plantations where they were the legal property of their white masters carrying protest signs? There were a few notable slave rebellions here and there, but they were often thwarted in part by slaves loyal to their white masters who fully accepted their lot in life. Initially, the abolitionist movement was filled mostly with whites, just as the women's suffrage movement was not filled with women in large numbers during its early days, and it was heavily marginalized for a long period of time, with many prominent voices in society, including many women, arguing over whether it was truly a bad thing for women to be held in subservience to men. The situation that youths find themselves in today is very similar to previous emancipation movements, and the fact that a growing number of prominent adults on both the Right and the Left are starting to openly embrace it--including Michael Moore starting a section of his website dedicated to giving high school students a voice in political matters and a platform to fight for their civil rights (including Moore's vow to print letters written by students for their high school newspapers that the principal demanded the censorship of)--is a sure sign that in the future more and more younger people are going to grow an awareness of themselves as a minority group, and as they begin to study history in greater numbers they will discover that this is not the natural way of things in human history, thus prompting even more of them to action.

What you do not like to admit is that due to a combination of personal factors and the fact that you were born and raised in this time period, you find yourself having difficulty shedding your loyalty to the present status quo, which is hardly an unusual phenomenon even amongst members of minority groups during a time of their oppression. You also do not seem to realize that emancipation movements take time, and they usually tend to occur in steps, not overnight.

As it stands right now though, I do worry that any liberation won on their behalf would come with a set of expectations from their liberators that kids would be ill prepared to meet. Take that how you will, but I know human nature. We do not give away anything of real value without some expectation of getting something in return.

Which is why freedom and liberation are rarely given away due to mere generosity, but instead tend to be fought for and taken by demand rather than asked for nicely and politely, which was the basis of every civil rights movement in history. This tendency to resist oppression and eventually overturn it is another powerful aspect of human nature pervasive throughout human history, but one that cynics like to ignore because it doesn't help validate their worldview; whenever they say "I know human nature," they always define it as a tendency for humans to do bad things. To do otherwise would be to note the potential that humans have to overcome great odds and improve themselves, and a cynic has no place for such acknowledgement in their world. The reason that kids are ill-prepared to meet certain expectations of freedom is due to the fact that we raise kids a certain way and only allow them to receive education that benefits the gerontocentric aspects of society and the status quo as it presently exists--which is precisely why youth libbers put so strong an emphasis on fighting for educational rights and freedom of access to information for kids.