When we are minors, we are mentally deficient to be sexual beings. When we are adults, we are also told that we have no control or reproductive choice over what we do with bodies.
I hate to sound like this..because I don’t think of myself as a vocal feminist..I have always considered myself a rational being.
With that hat on, it seems to me that the female human being has no choice or agency and their physical bodies are mere vessels for the male of the species to fornicate, procreate and to be generally unobtrusively abiding by the rules made by the opposite gender.
That’s very upsetting to me.
I could tell a five year old that if they do something Santa will bring them gifts. That could be something completely reprehensible but they have no sense of right and wrong besides what I might tell them at that age.
At age ten, they are more capable of deciding that on their own. As you get older you become better at that and more autonomous. But at a young age the only things you know are what adults tell you is true. That's an extreme amount of power the adult has.
At some point we call people adults because we expect them to now have this responsibility and decide for themselves what they think is best for them because at a certain age we believe a majority of those young people should be autonomous. But that age is a guess and fairly arbitrary. Is it 17? 18? Probably somewhere around there. Is it 5? Nope.
So you have to draw the line somewhere. It sucks if you're an incredibly mature 16 year old, but if you are, then waiting two years to have sex with someone much older than you shouldn't be an overwhelming burden if the social benefit is greater for those less mature or in potentially abusive situations.
I see no problem at all with a rational, vocal feminist. Many people enter the latter category after considering the issue with rationality. It would be insulting towards those people to assume they didn't enter into it rationally.
Being young is not a mental deficiency. There are 17 year olds smarter than a legion of 70 year olds will ever be. Saying all young people have a mental deficiency has no bearing on reality.
I don't event want to weigh in on the age of consent debate here, I've just always hated the constant shitting on young people and their intellect just because their young. I hated it when I was young and grown adults who weren't that smart were clearly threatened by me, and I still hate it now that I'm older.
So you can say that 17 year old exceeds some adults and it may be true, but current neurological science suggests that 17 year old has not yet reached their full mental capacity.
Suddenly I remember why teenage years were so hard.
It isn't that minors are non-beings - it is that they're not fully developed yet, so they need protections. Where we draw that line is up to the law and culture of any location, but it exists.