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.

1. 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.

Just muse.

Except that doesn't necessarily reflect anything real besides the details of the culture in question.

Except [supporting lowering the age of consent under some circumstances] doesn't necessarily reflect anything [real] besides [culture], [like witchcraft!] Word salad. What you could have said is, "I was mistaken, as I could not have predicted that," or, "I was correct, because lowering the age of consent is a really popular right now."

And yes, having something happen to you that does not cause physical damage or mental distress (because you don't know it happened) can reasonably be categorized as not containing "harm", although obviously there are different possible definitions of the word "harm".

I think people should have a say in what happens to them, be it politically or otherwise. Would it "harm" a child to keep him locked in a giant playground/amusement park, with everything he could ever want provided, but kept from any education? Would it "harm" the human race as a whole to be kept in a state of perpetual orgasm, kept alive, but forgetting everything else? Is a slave being harmed, even if his master does not beat him and feeds him well?

I'm with the old-school utilitarians on this. Utility is not hedonism. Immediate pleasure and pain are not the sum of all harm. I think that women and men should have some say in what happens to their bodies. That's why I'm not fond of circumcision, especially fgm. (Another cultural prediction?) That's why I have no problem with almost any type of relationship between consenting adults. Bondage? Sure. Open relationships? I've had them and they're my favorite. Polyamory? Why not? Homosexual? Obviously. Incest? With some exceptions concerning guardian/minor relationships, but otherwise, why not? I would even support tax breaks/rights for polyamorous relationships similar to those now granted for monogamous couples, the scale of which to be determined after research into outcomes for children and other - to my knowledge - unknowns.

But this is obviously "culture", which you would have predicted. That's why it wouldn't have helped you to use "meaningful consent", right? If I were to give some other LWer a checklist of predictions about my feelings about sexual relationships, and tell him to use "culture", he - statistically a `he' - might use polls. If I tell him to use "meaningful consent", how much more accurate would he have been?

If your answer is "no more accurate", I'll propose an experiment. If your answer is, "yes, significantly more accurate," then we know that other people understand something that you do not, and that the problem is not the phrase but your own comprehension of it.

Well, I guess it's a good thing I noted it then, isn't it?

No, it's not. I'm trying to establish that something is an offense, and I'm not interested in whether or not something else aggravates it. I might have cut off her foot, too. Who cares. That's not "conflation." What's clear is that you don't think that violating self-determination is "harm". That's the difference between us. Keep it to the internet, though, because if you touch a sleeping girl, you might find "Schelling points in act space" won't help you.