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Desrtopa comments on Open Thread, October 7 - October 12, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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While I'm not particularly in favor of age-of-consent laws setting such high bars as they do in most states, I suspect that this particular environment selected for a significantly higher-than-average degree of emotional maturity for that age range.
I would suggest that our teens would be better off if adults would offer them guidance in how to handle sexual relations responsibly, given the exceptional potential they can hold for interpersonal strife, rather than simply declaring them off-limits until a certain age and then assuming they're mature enough to conduct themselves responsibly, except that it occurs to me that most adults probably aren't competent to offer good advice on the subject even if they were willing to discuss such matters with teenagers.
The lore — I have no sources for this; it was word-of-mouth at the time — was that when psychologists had once tested the student body for emotional maturity, what they found was that entering students were no more mature than comparable teenagers, but that graduating students were as mature as other college graduates. IOW, it was believed to be not a selection process, but an "if you treat 'em like adults, they'll act like adults" process.
(Of course, this also neatly fits the institution's founding ideology, which was opposition to the sustained infantilization of mainstream schooling.)
I once saw someone on the Internet proposing that ability to consent should be granted after an exam, rather than after a given age, much like we don't grant everyone who reaches a certain age a driving licence.
You want to make it easy for people to know whether another person has the legal ability to consent. If consent is about whether the person had taken an exam, it would be hard to know.
A twenty five year old woman who doesn't want to have sex before marriage for religious reasons could simply avoid taking the test. People who take the test before getting married could be expelled by the local church.
The proposal seems to give fundamental Christian's a ugly tool for charging people who engage in premartial sex with rape.
Although you raise some compelling arguments against the proposition of an exam, I'll note that in cases in the vicinity of the borderline, legal ability to consent by age is already quite hard to judge; people rarely card prospective sex partners.
Actually it was written by a self-declared pedophile (who had chosen not to act upon his urges) who argued that arbitrarily young people should be allowed to consent to sex provided they demonstrably know what they're doing.
It must have been taken down, because I've found that blog but that post no longer seems to be there, and the blog is not on archive.org.
If everyone had a built-in car automatically activated at puberty, there would be no driving tests, either.
I was going to dispute that, but you know, you're probably right. The death toll would be tremendous, but it wouldn't be the government's place to regulate people's god-given right to use the cars they were born with.
Written exam, or practical?
:-)
Oral (no pun intended!) IIRC.
Yeah, I was carefully avoiding that one.