Playground trauma

"If scientists invented a machine that could scan your brain and know a great deal about your inner workings, it could evaluate, "X is ready for sexual activity with adult Y". Evaluating overall lifetime happiness, costs and benefits."

And I would still reply that this mind-reading future-predicting machine would be the tool of an evil system with oppressive intents if it was created only by one class who exempted themselves from its mandatory use as a prerequisite for consent.

Further, I thought I was the sci-fi weirdo. But even I don't live in a world where such tortured fictions are the preconditions for granting agency. I don't believe that consent, absent of them is a bad thing in adults. Therefore I don't believe that consent absent of them is a bad thing period.

If vulnerable people need protection, then I'd like to be capable of imagining protections I would assent to being treated under when subject to them. I would like to think that if a brain-lesion renders me incapable of acting in my own interests while the neural pathways rewire, that the terms of my conservatorship would not be "for 20 years regardless of capacity." And if healthy, I'd like to hope that the conditions stripping me of my rights not be as simple as "belongs to age cohort X."

I might respect your thinking on the issue more if you were taking your analogies from history, your community or even the fictional genre known as "drama." But taking them from children's fiction, fantasy and sci-fi gives us little to agree with. Do you expect, "Yes, I agree that consent cannot exist without telepathy and prophecy?"

And in what way do requirements for prophecy and telepathy transition into your real world acceptance of adult consent. Are there graduated tests you would allow for lower degrees of psychic accuracy when applied to tweens? "We no longer require 'Nostradamus' class prophecy. We're now content with 'Edgar Cayce' or 'Jeanne Dixon.' "

I'm no more allowing to let kids make mistakes in sex than in any other sphere. But I don't treat sex as some nonhuman activity ruled by magical actions. Further, I think that examinations of the past and other cultures show children to be even more capable of responsibility than they are given credit for in our time and place.

Heck, within my lifetime we've seen a marked lowering of the ability of youth to act capably and accept responsibility in response to "helicopter parenting." This technique is designed to reduce allowable mistakes, and it does so by crippling the child's ability to act independently.

And maybe we might blame a generation who are incapable of accepting responsibility on water fluoridation. But I can't help but see the harm arising out of trying to eliminate all harm.

Given that you haven't advocated "swaddling until majority," I believe you are willing to "allow" some harm as an inevitable and acceptable consequence of growth. I even suspect that we are probably aiming for the same nonzero degree of objective physical harm and trauma ( as conforming to the actual trauma-model. ) But I suspect that we differ the most on whether states of mind such as dissatisfaction count as unacceptable for the purposes of consent. I don't think that mediocrity equalled rape when it occurred in my marriage, and I don't believe that allowing children to have a similar standard is wrong.

You have said that the everyday suppression of children in sex is no more unacceptable to you than their everyday frustration in other regards. I hold that everyday disappointments and "betrayals" by playground alliances are no less unacceptable than those arising in sexual play. Yes, finding that your best friend has a new bester friend can be disheartening. Finding that a kid is playing with you because you have cooler toys can seem like a betrayal. But denying children the ability to have friends or to play because of unacceptable harm seems deranged. And yet we treat sex as the magical exception.

Dante