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Be treated like shit and, at a certain point, you will get hard. You become all rough edges and even when someone comes at you from a place of care, you can't show the softness. We've been beaten down and so it's easy to become defeatist. When someone comes along with an idea to help us, it's easy to look down our nose at it and fling mud at the person delivering the idea. Because we've been hurt and disappointed too many times. Alternatively we might stand aloft on the hill of principle, decrying ideas that are more moderate because they don't stand up to the purity test we have assigned. Hoping for the impossible is another way to inoculate yourself to the taste of failure. I ask you to take a step back and look at the essay with a bit more generosity, though. Look at it as an essay that is trying to help all MAPs, by trying to take the first step forward. Ignore how possible that is for a second and instead assume that progress can be made. Does this essay show a positive step forward or not? When thinking about the viability of positive steps forward, I think it's useful to look at the background. The background in this case is that although the unrestricted age of consent (where age no longer matters) is 16-18 in most countries, the absolute age of consent in many places is 12-13 for minor-minor sexual contact. These jurisdictions with their Romeo and Juliet exemptions are already admitting teen sexuality. They are already admitting an ability to consent. They are already admitting that teens have the information they need to express informed consent towards sex. What BLR's essay offers is a mechanism for reducing the AoC to 12, using existing absolute AoC laws. That mechanism, that how we get from here to a different world, is of crucial importance. If we don't have that, then I agree that taking a more radical, principled stand is better. But if we have a mechanism for moving to an AoC of 12 that we don't have for abolition, then the moderate plan can be thought of more achievable and thus superior. I already kind of highlighted it, but a substantive difference between the moderate position that BLR proposed and an abolition stance already exists. And it is not about who MAPs want to fuck. It is about who is already legally empowered to make decisions about sex. It's not universal, but there are many jurisdictions where 12 or 13 year olds are legally empowered to decided about sex (with peers). There are very few, on the other hand, that allow 10 year olds to have sex (even with their peers). So 12+ is acknowledged by many parts of society and in many legal systems as being "sexual". BLR's proposal is merely to say 1) "these people that we acknowledge as sexual shouldn't have their agency undermined by legally restricting their choice of partner" and 2) "someone who is sexual with someone of sexual age (as admitted by the current legal system) should not be getting a decades long sentence. The idea that pre-12s are non-sexual has no real basis. Yet our society and laws see them that way. Having to fight against the idea of elementary schoolers as "pre-sexual" is an extra fight and one that will take much longer. But minors 12+, already acknowledged as sexual? That is a much smaller battlefield. As for the exclusive LBLs and LGLs? I agree that the proposal doesn't have a lot to offer them. But the status quo offers even less. Movement in a positive direction is still hope. And that's better that the jaded defeatism that some of us seem, unfortunately, to have embraced. |