Age of consent should never be over 18

 I think the idea that any individual, regardless of age, mental status, criminal background, or influence of substances, cannot consent, to be a horrifying, Orwellian nightmare.

You want to make consensual acts crimes in spite of their consensual nature, feel free. Most laws are like that. But to say, openly and officially, that a a seventeen year old with a job and driver’s license can’t consent, is inhuman. You know who else couldn’t legally consent? Slaves.

People are people. We control our own lives. Parents are an important guidepost in young people’s lives, but even with comprehensive legal authority over their children, that doesn’t meant they own or control every aspect of their lives or bodies. Their children are going to do what they are going to do. And outside of extreme abuse, such as by locking your child in a dungeon 24/7, or keeping them in a strait jacket, you simply can’t avoid that fact of life.

The point is, humans consent. It’s a basic, fundamental part of being a person, no matter the state or maturity of any particular organ you might have. Something well over 95% of humanity has had sex before age 25. Are you going to say, with a straight face, that 95% of humans are rape victims, and that their perpetrators were also children, who were rape victims themselves? That we all raped each other, perfectly happy to do so, as teenagers? What sort of conclusion is that?

No, we chose when to have sex and with whom, voluntarily. Most of us voluntarily chose to get jobs before we were 25. We weren’t all slaves. Most of us consented to almost everything we did or had done to us as children, because we had parents who weren’t monsters. Consent is important, it applies to every human being, especially those who are younger than 25, and it’s frankly horrifying that even one person thinks that no one under 25 should have a say in their own lives or what happens to their bodies.