Escaping the Echo Chamber

[Frelga]

Not, like, an actual BAR bar, the kind where you go primarily for alcohol. I don't think...

[Frelga]

This is relevant.

“I am sorry for all the times I stabbed men, just a little, in my previous workplace. After years of counseling, I stopped stabbing men.”

https://twitter.com/KateHarding/status/ ... 0751574016

Do read the replies.

[Inanna]

Not, like, an actual BAR bar, the kind where you go primarily for alcohol. I don't think...

Hmm... what’s an Irish pub then?

[Primula Baggins]

Don't they mostly serve food, too? That makes it not a BAR bar for my money. (And please don't tell me I'm wrong, because my daughter currently works in that kind of a bar, attached to a restaurant.)

[Maria]

I've only been to a bar once, as far as I can remember. I was temporarily stationed at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma for a class, and I went with some fellow officers to an off base bar once. The creepy feeling I got at there was so bad I've never been back to one. In fact, that thoroughly weirded out feeling has been matched only once by my single foray to the local casino when it first opened a couple of decades ago.

It just felt like there was something very wrong with the people who liked to be there and I didn't want any part of it.

[Inanna]

Don't they mostly serve food, too? That makes it not a BAR bar for my money. (And please don't tell me I'm wrong, because my daughter currently works in that kind of a bar, attached to a restaurant.)

They do. I often go there with my laptop & work for a couple of hours - & eat & drink & write.

So... then what’s a BAR bar?

[Inanna]

Don't they mostly serve food, too? That makes it not a BAR bar for my money. (And please don't tell me I'm wrong, because my daughter currently works in that kind of a bar, attached to a restaurant.)

They do. I often go there with my laptop & work for a couple of hours - & eat & drink & write.

So... then what’s a BAR bar?

[yovargas]

If there are waiters serving food, I would not consider it a bar. A restaurant may have a bar, but the establishment itself is not a bar. A BAR bar might have some food but it's usually snacky finger food at most, and usually not even that really.

[Impenitent]

The speakeasy (even needed a password to get in, once we found the hidden door) that Nel took us to in San Francisco is a bar.
50+ page menu, all of it dedicated to liquor, and not even beer nuts on offer.

Sent from a tiny phone keyboard via Tapatalk - typos inevitable.

[Dave_LF]

This isn't really the point, but I discovered this morning that my feelings about whether the woman in question was acting stupid or not vary greatly depending on her age. If she was 45, then I'm prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt and suppose she took a calculated risk that didn't work out. But if she was ~20 (as I've been imagining), then my default assumption is that she was just doing whatever she wanted without thinking about the consequences, and needed somebody (not me) to tell her she shouldn't do things like that. And yes, I would react the same way toward impulsive behavior gone wrong from a 20-year-old man. So I will at least admit to being prejudiced against teenagers and the recently-teenaged. But they deserve it, right?

[Alatar]

The Kevin Spacey revelation has me considering a post on Pedophilia but I'm not sure I have the stomach for it just yet. I've always seen a distinction between attraction to a teenager with an adult body vs a prepubescent child, although that's not to be considered as condoning of grooming or even consensual underage sex. I guess my point is that although we all agree with the modern concept of "age of consent" there is no doubt that there are many young people below that age who are sexually active. So if a 16y/o girl, for example, has sex with her 17 year old boyfriend, its technically statutory rape (depending on country) but most people would see that as a fairly common occurrence that we turn a blind eye to. If the same girl had consensual sex with, say, a 55 year old man we would rightly be horrified. Not sure I have a point here, but I'm trying to get my head round it. Its another of those "gut instinct" things that we don't discuss, because, hey, everyone is against pedophilia. Its not even up for discussion. But where is the line? We're societally ok with two 16 year old having sex, or two 20 year olds, but not if one is 16 and the other is 20.

Please before flaming me for defending pedophilia, please read the post twice at least, ok?

[yovargas]

I pretty much agree with all of that and think that statutory rape laws should be seriously re-thought, while at the same time acknowledging that developing a truly objective, consistent, and universally fair standard is almost certainly impossible.

[Frelga]

Al, I think the difference is that two teenagers can be assumed to both be unable to fully, intelligently consent (among of many other things they can't do intelligently), where a fully grown adult knows exactly what they are doing and can be assumed to be maliciously leading on the unable-to-fully-consent young person.

Which why I find Dave's logic backwards. I would expect an adult woman to be more cynical and suspicious, not the least because most of us accumulate the experiences discussed in the Me Too thread. A twenty-year old can be excused for thinking the best of men. In either case, the blame is firmly with the man who assaulted the woman.

[Sunsilver]

I consider 16 as being old enough to know better! A 16 year old has certainly been warned often enough by her parents - never mind that a 16 year old darn well wouldn't be drinking at a bar in the first place! Biologically speaking, she is sexually mature, and has been having her period for 4 or 5 years already, and is well aware of what might happen if she has sex. (The original post did say something about a bar, right?) Not that this absolves the man of the blame, but I would still be pretty angry if the 16 year old were my daughter. (What WERE you thinking??)

As a parent (not that I am...) I would be more surprised to find a 50 year old had sex with my teenage daughter, as I'd expect the 50 year old to have the self-control, maturity, etc. to hold himself back. A 16 year old having sex with a 17 year old, yeah, well, they'd be getting a lecture on birth control before the two of them even left my house on their first date!! (I'd probably hand out some condoms, too!) It's not so much a matter of the female being 'below the age of consent' as it is of rampaging teenage
hormones!

If the situation involved someone 12 or under, that's a different story. That's TRUE pedophilia. So, yeah, I guess I'm backing up what Al is saying. I don't condone either type of underage sex, but there IS a difference in my mind.

[Maria]

When she was 16, my youngest daughter's first boyfriend was a 20 year old college student that she was helping with his algebra class. Yes, they had sex. No, there wasn't anything we could do about it that wouldn't have gotten her fixated on him, being the contrary creature that she was back then. So, we accepted him as her official boyfriend, and I kept assuring my husband that she'd grow out of him. She did. He wasn't very bright. I'm so glad she didn't feel like she needed to marry him just so she could have sex. He wasn't a keeper.

[yovargas]

When she was 16, my youngest daughter's first boyfriend was a 20 year old college student that she was helping with his algebra class. Yes, they had sex.

It is, IMO, absurd that this is considered a crime, and not merely a not-great thing to happen.

[Sunsilver]

THIS is what the rest of the world should be copying!!

http://www.upworthy.com/kenyas-unique-a ... aking-note

[Frelga]

I was just eighteen when I met my future husband, then 24. When my son turned eighteen, I had to sternly warn him to be careful what he was texting his friends who were only a few months younger, because something previously innocent could suddenly be seen as illegal (not that I had any indication that he was doing anything like that). So yes, I can see the need for a gray area.

On the other hand, I was sexually mature at 14, I was certainly not mature enough to make important choices, and I remember how difficult it was to deal with middle-aged men who suddenly became Very Interested. Luckily, only one of them attempted anything physical. I can easily see some of them pushing things too far, and in retrospect, that kind of behavior clearly was predatory.

[Dave_LF]

Just to be clear, I didn't have age differences in mind in my previous post; in both cases, I assumed the participants were of comparable age.

Which why I find Dave's logic backwards. I would expect an adult woman to be more cynical and suspicious, not the least because most of us accumulate the experiences discussed in the Me Too thread.

Which is exactly why most teenagers-to-twenty-somethings need and can benefit from advice and guidance on these matters (though ideally before the fact, and from someone other than a talk show host), while older adults generally do not. This is the forward or what I said, not the backward. What are we talking about?

[River]

The rule I was taught was to divide the older partner's age in half and add six. If the younger partner is younger than that number, it's considered creepy (full disclosure: my husband is ten years older than me and when we started seeing each other, I was 22 so it was right on the brink of creepy...though it didn't feel that way to us). I think the creep factor is the result of the power differential between the two - the older one's got more life behind them and could potentially manipulate the younger one. Not saying they would, but they could and that, along with the fact that a teenager isn't legally or developmentally an adult yet, is where statutory rape laws come into play. In the case of a 20 year-old and a 16 year-old, the numbers work out, but they're both at such different points in their lives that the power differential is still a problem and it could result in sex that isn't truly consensual. But that's going to be heavily dependent on the personalities involved. Some 16 year-olds are more malleable than others. Some 20 year-olds are more honorable than others. But the difference, and the fact the 20 year-old is out of high school and to a high schooler that's just the definition of cool right there, puts the 16 year-old in a vulnerable position. I certainly would be less than thrilled if one of my kids dated a 20 year-old when they're 16, but depending on how the kid's personality develops I might end up taking Maria's approach and let the nature of relationships at that age take its course (right now, my oldest is still in pre-school so this is a future problem). At least they're both too young to legally buy alcohol. I also feel like that, in the case of a 20 year-old and a 16 year-old, when charges do get pressed its because either the parents of the 16 year-old are completely enraged or the 20 year-old is already in trouble for something else and the book is getting thrown at them.

Now, as far as whether desiring a teenager is pedophilia or not...if we define pedophilia as attraction to someone under the age of consent, yes, if the teen is under age, it is. If we're defining it as attraction to childish bodies, that's going to depend on the teenager. 16 year-olds who've enjoyed a healthy diet tend to be more or less in their adult form. They may grow a little more over the next couple years they've come around the bend with puberty and they don't look like kids anymore. 14 year-olds, though, are typically still in that awkward, transitional phase. I took a look through my high school yearbook from my freshman year and while you could see the men and women we would become we, for the most part, still looked like kids.