FTR: If I had any sort of relationship like this when I was a minor (sadly, I didn’t) and someone sued my S.O. / partner over this “meaningful consent” thing, I would have resented them and would still resent them to this day, and would most likely have pressed charges and sued them back into oblivion as soon as I turned legally capable of suing people, over all kinds of privacy breach, life alteration, or whatever other morality-based claims that I could find, in the same way I would sue anyone who pressed charges against me for having sex with my current girlfriend.
Not really. I’ve always found the moral intuitions most people have here rather lacking.
Put a 3-year-old in her mother’s body. The kid wants to have sex ’caus she has her mother’s biosystem, drives and body. Is it okay?
Put a 40-year-old in a 6-year-old’s body. Or better yet, take one of the existing people who just have the same body they did when they were 12. Is sex okay?
Take a 2-year-old WBE that ran at a subjective time factor of 50 since their start. They get transferred to a modified cloned 9-year-old body that has already gone through puberty. Is it okay to have sex?
So yeah. Doesn’t really matter, as long as both parties are aware of the typical downfalls and issues and are capable of enjoying it. (and that they actually do enjoy it, or stop if they don’t)
Put a 3-year-old in her mother’s body. The kid wants to have sex ’caus she has her mother’s biosystem, drives and body. Is it okay?
How, exactly, do you do that? Doesn’t puberty alter the mind as well as the body? You’d have to create a whole new mind, extrapolating what the 3-year-old would be like with “her mother’s biosystem, drives” without making any of the other alterations aging brings.
Put a 40-year-old in a 6-year-old’s body.
Assuming they’re mentally unchanged, I would guess most people would be OK with it, albeit somewhat squicked at the thought. Although some people object to cartoon child porn, so maybe you’d get people claiming it encourages pedophiles or something?
Or better yet, take one of the existing people who just have the same body they did when they were 12.
Holy cow, that’s a thing? What?
Take a 2-year-old WBE that ran at a subjective time factor of 50 since their start.
Are they simulating baseline human biochemistry?
So yeah. Doesn’t really matter, as long as both parties are aware of the typical downfalls and issues and are capable of enjoying it. (and that they actually do enjoy it, or stop if they don’t)
I’m sympathetic to this position—I’m pretty sure these so-called intuitions are just social mores, other societies marry and such much younger—but I think you’re failing to account for power imbalance. We don’t let officers in the military sleep with their subordinates, and with the kind of power adults have over children in our society, the same logic applies.
I’m sympathetic to this position—I’m pretty sure these so-called intuitions are just social mores, other societies marry much younger—but I think you’re failing to account for power imbalance. We don’t let officers in the military sleep with their subordinates, and with the kind of power adults have over children in our society, the same logic applies.
Yeah, power (im)balances is the most important form of many variants of coercion, both implicit and explicit, that come rain down on my ideals of optimal sexual interactions and freedoms. And they can be so insidious or deeply implicit or just so dang entangled that sometimes, even if we do know the full situation, we can’t make sense or trace any sort of natural line. In some cases there’s even no schelling point.
But there’s so much to say here about this topic it might grow into an entire article’s worth of stuff if I keep going, and I’m sure there could be more optimal ways to communicate or use both of our times, especially considering that I suspect many of the issues I’ve thought of have also crossed the mind of most people on LW. Or, at the very least, there should be some significant overlap between any two given people. I don’t quite know enough yet to pinpoint which of my insights overlap and (more importantly) which don’t.
Anyway, power and perceived power can majorly fuck up most heuristics and investigations we’re currently capable of using/doing.
Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing any post on LW about social power balances and the many ways they influence peoples’ decisions or patterns that come up where sub-optimal situations arise because of them (or the perception of them). I’ve seen some things alluding to it or passing mentions as if everyone knew all the aspects of the topic, though. And I’ve found one old post on the current subject too.
However, I suspect the science on this to be rather… incomplete. Thoughts?
Or better yet, take one of the existing people who just have the same body they did when they were 12.
Take a 2-year-old WBE that ran at a subjective time factor of 50 since their start.
Are they simulating baseline human biochemistry?
Why does that part matter? Maybe consider if they are, and then if they aren’t, and see where the difference is? To me there’s no relevant difference as far as I can tell.
Yeah, power (im)balances is the most important form of many variants of coercion, both implicit and explicit, that come rain down on my ideals of optimal sexual interactions and freedoms. And they can be so insidious or deeply implicit or just so dang entangled that sometimes, even if we do know the full situation, we can’t make sense or trace any sort of natural line. In some cases there’s even no schelling point.
In this specific case, I think the socially-constructed adult/child divide might actually work—sure, it’s arbitrary, but it should largely reflect whether the kid in questions views someone as An Adult or just another kid.
Of course, this sorta falls apart when you have to deal with two kids of different ages.
Or, for that matter, “young adults” who view older people as somehow authoritative, although that’s not as pervasive.
Hmm, maybe we should use the infamous half-your-age-plus-seven “creepiness law”?
Regarding that, here’s probably the most extreme case we’ve ever seen.
Oh, I vaguely heard about that. I though that was unique though?
Why does that part matter?
Well, most of these intuitions are dependent on a human biochemistry. You want to fuck a robot, knock yourself out. Unless it’s, like, a sex-hating robot.
That said, a hundred-year-old human in an adolescent body sounds like they would be allowed to have whatever sex as they wanted, within the usual limits. Indeed, I believe it’s a common excuse in Japanese stuff to have that girl actually be a 700-year-old demon in human form.
Hmm, maybe we should use the infamous half-your-age-plus-seven “creepiness law”?
What’s that? O.o
In this specific case, I think the socially-constructed adult/child divide might actually work—sure, it’s arbitrary, but it should largely reflect whether the kid in questions views someone as An Adult or just another kid.
I think in most circumstances that would be relevant, social roles largely outweigh and override this. In most cases, minors are forced into roles by circumstance and because people who already have greater power force them to be in such roles.
For a better intuition pump towards what I mean, think of The Internets, particularly hacker culture. There, age is probably the most irrelevant out of any culture I’ve seen—only maturity, skill, and some online social likeability matter. Some mature 12-year-olds wield immense power (relatively speaking, in terms of social and cultural power within the limited scope of hacker culture) over some of their peers, and this almost certainly leads many major adults to take suboptimal decisions or actions within the context.
Sometimes, gamers can also form similar small groups where young people with the proper, more powerful “role” can wield relatively disproportionate power over the leisure time and entertainment quality of their peers. I’ve sometimes experienced this firsthand, though the worst cases I saw didn’t happen to me personally.
For a toy example of what I’m talking about, consider gaming “clans”, groups of people who for some reason or another end up gaming with eachother and forming a common In-Group mentality and generally acting like a tribe for the purposes of playing videogames (or some small set of games). Often, some gamers will get really invested in this tribe, emotionally and psychologically, and will make friends there, and spend lots of time making emotional attachments, and so on. More often than not, these groups have a “Leader”, who holds rather disproportionate authority, much like a tribe. In fact, these usually work pretty much exactly like a tribe.
Anyway, this emotional involvement can mean that that kid who would be considered a minor and unable to consent due to power imbalances actually has more power over you now, because failure to comply can, in typical tribal fashion, get you kicked out—which, while not as bad as getting kicked out in the ancestral tribe, in many cases will still sound pretty shitty, and may deprive people of otherwise-reliable good entertainment, and generally just lowers the quality of their leisure time quite a bit depending on how much they enjoy the game and the community they play with.
And then all the meta and game-theoretic concerns apply: if I’m wary that failure to comply might get me kicked from the tribe, I may try to implement the same kind of social status strategies we see in other tribelike contexts. This includes anticipating possible things that the tribe leader might care about and conforming pre-emptively, which would mean I’m taking an action that is sub-optimal or that I don’t want to do, based on my anticipation of possible failure-to-comply situations, without any form of intentional coercion from the group leader.
All of this leads up to: Situations like what I just said, where no actual coercion happens but where someone is accepting some action or situation or thinking in some way that they would prefer not to, generally build up gradually. I would not be surprised if this could easily lead a person into thinking in this manner about sexual interaction (given a social culture that has less taboos against sexuality), and make them build this up into eventually accepting or even offering to have sex with someone solely because they anticipate that them not making this offer could lead to eventual bad consequences for them due to the power imbalance, or something.
This all reminds me of situations where, for example, A wants to blackmail B, but C watches closely for any explicit form of blackmail, so instead A will create a favorable situation by removing all of B’s options and power, and then present themselves as willing to help, in a manner where B contextually knows that A is in a position to mess up their life if they don’t offer, say, sex.
From the outside, it will either look as if B just fell prey to A’s superior prowess, which is normal in many domains such as competitive businesses, or A and B suddenly formed a partnership due to friendly human interactions that were apparently fully voluntary on the part of B (since B initiated it, after all).
So merely the perception that offering sex to A is the only way for B to stay afloat¹ creates a subtle blackmail-like situation that in many cases no one could form a legitimate legal case around in most instances. Many variants of this exist or could happen in various situations.
One of my fears about making sexuality less socially taboo is all about how the above dynamics might factor in more strongly, and reduce the apparent rape rates while making such horrible non-choice not-quite-blackmail scenarios pervasively omnipresent.
I word this quite innocently, but it’s generally made implicitly obvious in such situations that “not staying afloat” implies some Very Very Bad Things—such as being forced to live on the streets while pictures of you mysteriously appear on shady websites and so on. Sometimes, the whole situation already happens with the premise that some other group will kill/maim/otherwise-permanently-make-your-life-much-less-interesting as soon as protection from them is removed by A or cut off because you no longer have the ability to afford this protection.
As the name I referred to it by suggests, you divide your age by two and add seven; anyone below that would be “creepy” to sleep with or otherwise engage romantically. Not sure where it comes from, but it’s been featured in XKCD at least once.
[snip social-pressure rape description]
Yup. And in our society, all kids are in these situations, and many (especially younger) kids may assume such a context in pretty much all interactions with adults. Not to mention the fact that, currently, most people who actually do have sex with children are in such a position of “soft power” over the child.
FTR: If I had any sort of relationship like this when I was a minor (sadly, I didn’t) and someone sued my S.O. / partner over this “meaningful consent” thing, I would have resented them and would still resent them to this day, and would most likely have pressed charges and sued them back into oblivion as soon as I turned legally capable of suing people, over all kinds of privacy breach, life alteration, or whatever other morality-based claims that I could find, in the same way I would sue anyone who pressed charges against me for having sex with my current girlfriend.
When you say “minor”—are we talking teens, preteens, infancy? A month below the local AOC? Does it matter?
(Also, good luck with that lawsuit.)
Not really. I’ve always found the moral intuitions most people have here rather lacking.
Put a 3-year-old in her mother’s body. The kid wants to have sex ’caus she has her mother’s biosystem, drives and body. Is it okay?
Put a 40-year-old in a 6-year-old’s body. Or better yet, take one of the existing people who just have the same body they did when they were 12. Is sex okay?
Take a 2-year-old WBE that ran at a subjective time factor of 50 since their start. They get transferred to a modified cloned 9-year-old body that has already gone through puberty. Is it okay to have sex?
So yeah. Doesn’t really matter, as long as both parties are aware of the typical downfalls and issues and are capable of enjoying it. (and that they actually do enjoy it, or stop if they don’t)
Good to know.
How, exactly, do you do that? Doesn’t puberty alter the mind as well as the body? You’d have to create a whole new mind, extrapolating what the 3-year-old would be like with “her mother’s biosystem, drives” without making any of the other alterations aging brings.
Assuming they’re mentally unchanged, I would guess most people would be OK with it, albeit somewhat squicked at the thought. Although some people object to cartoon child porn, so maybe you’d get people claiming it encourages pedophiles or something?
Holy cow, that’s a thing? What?
Are they simulating baseline human biochemistry?
I’m sympathetic to this position—I’m pretty sure these so-called intuitions are just social mores, other societies marry and such much younger—but I think you’re failing to account for power imbalance. We don’t let officers in the military sleep with their subordinates, and with the kind of power adults have over children in our society, the same logic applies.
Yeah, power (im)balances is the most important form of many variants of coercion, both implicit and explicit, that come rain down on my ideals of optimal sexual interactions and freedoms. And they can be so insidious or deeply implicit or just so dang entangled that sometimes, even if we do know the full situation, we can’t make sense or trace any sort of natural line. In some cases there’s even no schelling point.
But there’s so much to say here about this topic it might grow into an entire article’s worth of stuff if I keep going, and I’m sure there could be more optimal ways to communicate or use both of our times, especially considering that I suspect many of the issues I’ve thought of have also crossed the mind of most people on LW. Or, at the very least, there should be some significant overlap between any two given people. I don’t quite know enough yet to pinpoint which of my insights overlap and (more importantly) which don’t.
Anyway, power and perceived power can majorly fuck up most heuristics and investigations we’re currently capable of using/doing.
Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing any post on LW about social power balances and the many ways they influence peoples’ decisions or patterns that come up where sub-optimal situations arise because of them (or the perception of them). I’ve seen some things alluding to it or passing mentions as if everyone knew all the aspects of the topic, though. And I’ve found one old post on the current subject too.
However, I suspect the science on this to be rather… incomplete. Thoughts?
Regarding that, here’s probably the most extreme case we’ve ever seen.
Why does that part matter? Maybe consider if they are, and then if they aren’t, and see where the difference is? To me there’s no relevant difference as far as I can tell.
In this specific case, I think the socially-constructed adult/child divide might actually work—sure, it’s arbitrary, but it should largely reflect whether the kid in questions views someone as An Adult or just another kid.
Of course, this sorta falls apart when you have to deal with two kids of different ages.
Or, for that matter, “young adults” who view older people as somehow authoritative, although that’s not as pervasive.
Hmm, maybe we should use the infamous half-your-age-plus-seven “creepiness law”?
Oh, I vaguely heard about that. I though that was unique though?
Well, most of these intuitions are dependent on a human biochemistry. You want to fuck a robot, knock yourself out. Unless it’s, like, a sex-hating robot.
That said, a hundred-year-old human in an adolescent body sounds like they would be allowed to have whatever sex as they wanted, within the usual limits. Indeed, I believe it’s a common excuse in Japanese stuff to have that girl actually be a 700-year-old demon in human form.
What’s that? O.o
I think in most circumstances that would be relevant, social roles largely outweigh and override this. In most cases, minors are forced into roles by circumstance and because people who already have greater power force them to be in such roles.
For a better intuition pump towards what I mean, think of The Internets, particularly hacker culture. There, age is probably the most irrelevant out of any culture I’ve seen—only maturity, skill, and some online social likeability matter. Some mature 12-year-olds wield immense power (relatively speaking, in terms of social and cultural power within the limited scope of hacker culture) over some of their peers, and this almost certainly leads many major adults to take suboptimal decisions or actions within the context.
Sometimes, gamers can also form similar small groups where young people with the proper, more powerful “role” can wield relatively disproportionate power over the leisure time and entertainment quality of their peers. I’ve sometimes experienced this firsthand, though the worst cases I saw didn’t happen to me personally.
For a toy example of what I’m talking about, consider gaming “clans”, groups of people who for some reason or another end up gaming with eachother and forming a common In-Group mentality and generally acting like a tribe for the purposes of playing videogames (or some small set of games). Often, some gamers will get really invested in this tribe, emotionally and psychologically, and will make friends there, and spend lots of time making emotional attachments, and so on. More often than not, these groups have a “Leader”, who holds rather disproportionate authority, much like a tribe. In fact, these usually work pretty much exactly like a tribe.
Anyway, this emotional involvement can mean that that kid who would be considered a minor and unable to consent due to power imbalances actually has more power over you now, because failure to comply can, in typical tribal fashion, get you kicked out—which, while not as bad as getting kicked out in the ancestral tribe, in many cases will still sound pretty shitty, and may deprive people of otherwise-reliable good entertainment, and generally just lowers the quality of their leisure time quite a bit depending on how much they enjoy the game and the community they play with.
And then all the meta and game-theoretic concerns apply: if I’m wary that failure to comply might get me kicked from the tribe, I may try to implement the same kind of social status strategies we see in other tribelike contexts. This includes anticipating possible things that the tribe leader might care about and conforming pre-emptively, which would mean I’m taking an action that is sub-optimal or that I don’t want to do, based on my anticipation of possible failure-to-comply situations, without any form of intentional coercion from the group leader.
All of this leads up to: Situations like what I just said, where no actual coercion happens but where someone is accepting some action or situation or thinking in some way that they would prefer not to, generally build up gradually. I would not be surprised if this could easily lead a person into thinking in this manner about sexual interaction (given a social culture that has less taboos against sexuality), and make them build this up into eventually accepting or even offering to have sex with someone solely because they anticipate that them not making this offer could lead to eventual bad consequences for them due to the power imbalance, or something.
This all reminds me of situations where, for example, A wants to blackmail B, but C watches closely for any explicit form of blackmail, so instead A will create a favorable situation by removing all of B’s options and power, and then present themselves as willing to help, in a manner where B contextually knows that A is in a position to mess up their life if they don’t offer, say, sex.
From the outside, it will either look as if B just fell prey to A’s superior prowess, which is normal in many domains such as competitive businesses, or A and B suddenly formed a partnership due to friendly human interactions that were apparently fully voluntary on the part of B (since B initiated it, after all).
So merely the perception that offering sex to A is the only way for B to stay afloat¹ creates a subtle blackmail-like situation that in many cases no one could form a legitimate legal case around in most instances. Many variants of this exist or could happen in various situations.
One of my fears about making sexuality less socially taboo is all about how the above dynamics might factor in more strongly, and reduce the apparent rape rates while making such horrible non-choice not-quite-blackmail scenarios pervasively omnipresent.
I word this quite innocently, but it’s generally made implicitly obvious in such situations that “not staying afloat” implies some Very Very Bad Things—such as being forced to live on the streets while pictures of you mysteriously appear on shady websites and so on. Sometimes, the whole situation already happens with the premise that some other group will kill/maim/otherwise-permanently-make-your-life-much-less-interesting as soon as protection from them is removed by A or cut off because you no longer have the ability to afford this protection.
As the name I referred to it by suggests, you divide your age by two and add seven; anyone below that would be “creepy” to sleep with or otherwise engage romantically. Not sure where it comes from, but it’s been featured in XKCD at least once.
Yup. And in our society, all kids are in these situations, and many (especially younger) kids may assume such a context in pretty much all interactions with adults. Not to mention the fact that, currently, most people who actually do have sex with children are in such a position of “soft power” over the child.
I assumed that Randall Munroe had just made it up on the spot.
I’m pretty sure I heard of it before the comic.