Different Reasons

Chill Uncategorized

I’ve been goofing on it a lot lately, but I have been seriously pondering the desire of many “progressives” to eliminate the idea of consent from those 18+ to attempt to understand it.

In prog circles, it’s starting to move towards the idea that women can only consent if they are 30+ or even older, and anything more than a two year age gap — no matter how old the relationship participants might be — is de facto rape. How does one go about understanding this? It’s senseless and frankly utterly insane from most perspectives, so I haven’t yet fully found the ideological lens that sharpens it for me into any sort of focus.

What Geoff is talking about, where everything is politicized, is part of it, but I don’t think that captures the entire panoply of reasons that progressives want to remove the ability of people to decide what is best in their own lives. The conservatives make too much of the nanny state plaint, but they are not entirely wrong about this and examining it from that perspective provides a few insights.

Another important component is the dominance of neoliberalism. If everyone can be herded away from any natural relationships developing, any actual connection, into algorithmically-approved predictable liaisons, then selling to these people and prognosticating their future actions becomes vastly easier. Apart from politicization, this is a large portion of it I think.

And another aspect that’s not insubstantial is that as women have gained more power, they have of course tended to be older, and thus they have a nice lever to eliminate dating market competition by making larger age gap relationships immoral or illegal.

I suspect in the future that any relationship with more than a three or four year age gap will be made outright illegal, and all relationships will go through some sort of “social review” where they are either approved or denied based on a variety of factors, sociological and educational.

This is the progressive “utopia” (really a dystopia). Now get in the pod and eat your bugs.