Alex Sundstrom suggests this answer to the statutory rape problem (again, note that I do not necessarily endorse any of the readers’ views that I post here):
I think the most justifiable statutory rape law would apply only to men sleeping with teenage girls (retaining the standard 4-year age gap). My reasons are utilitarian ones, based on a market theory of dating.
(1) Statutory rape laws protect the future happiness of girls. Teenage girls tend to go after lower status males than they will be able to get later in life. They do so because (1) it’s socially unacceptable to date teenage girls, so more responsible men/better mates will avoid doing so, (2) even a 30 year old alcoholic might seem more desirable to a teenage girl than the pimply and immature teenage boys she encounters at school, and (3) because teenage girls have a low supply of potential suitors with money, and because women like men who spend money on them in general, it’s cheaper to impress a teenage girl — a 15 year old is a much cheaper date for a 30 year old alcoholic than a 25 year old woman would be.
This is bad for girls because the likely consequences — extensive sexual contact and potential offspring and/or longer-term partnership with undesirable mates — will make them unhappy later on, when they realize they can do better. If you restrict a girl’s options to sex with age peers, she might make dating decisions she wouldn’t make later in life (when all the dumpy social misfits have become attorneys, and can buy her things), but her dating choices will more closely track her future choices than without a statutory rape law.
(2) Of course, the law might affect what’s socially acceptable. If this is the case, then it is bad for society to change the statutory rape laws and encourage men to sleep with teenagers, reducing the problem outlined in (1), they will be less likely to start stable families, and grown women will suffer.
This effect seems plausible to me — the age of consent in Ontario is 14, and my girlfriend’s parents, who live there, see nothing remarkable about a 22 year old dating a 15 year old. [That’s a hypothetical 22-year-old; Sundstrom isn’t dating a 15-year-old himself. -EV] The talismanic effect that turning 18 currently has also seems pretty artificial: every red-blooded male knows that men are very much attracted to 16 year old girls, but just pretend not to be until those girls turn 18. A change in the statutory rape laws might affect this attitude (or it might not, considering the fact that sleeping with 17 year olds is already legal in many states).
If repealing statutory rape laws causes an increase in men sleeping with and dating teenage girls, they will increasingly choose to do so. Setting aside whether teenage girls are better looking than older women, sixteen year olds are at the very least much less prone to obesity than older women. So some men who place a value on thinness will choose to date a younger, thinner girl than they otherwise would have before it was less socially acceptable to do so.
These encounters are probably going to be of the casual-sex variety, because (1) intellect, maturity and potential for long-term companionship are not what grown men look for in teenage girls, (2) a shift in social mores would probably occur first among people who are already having casual sex with older women before it would occur in a marriage context (in no small part because of (1)). Because an increase in social acceptability of sleeping with teenagers would increase the supply of attractive girls more than it would increase the supply of attractive, marriageable girls, more men will be able to engage in commitment-free sex with attractive partners, and more men will thus choose to do so. They will be doing so instead of getting married and raising families.
None of these concerns apply to a situation where teenage boys sleep with adult women.
(I take it his point, by the way, isn’t just that sex with teenage girls affects their future happiness in some small way — obviously, not all things that make teenagers unhappy should be criminal — but rather that it potentially has very large effects.)
Note again, please, that I probably won’t be posting responses to people’s suggestions; but if you have your own suggested framework, that you can defend in some detail but not at very great length, and that isn’t too similar to what’s been posted yet, please do pass it along.
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