WavesInEternity wrote: Sat Apr 12, 2025 10:23 pm
You make many excellent points. I find especially compelling the way you seamlessly integrate into your argument how authoritarian excesses are enabled by the excuse of "protecting children", and how people generally react to teenage criminals as if they were already very much adults.
However, I'm always wary of ascribing complex social phenomena to a single cause. I believe your explanation glosses over the underlying societal changes that made possible such a far-reaching erosion of youths' freedoms, as stated in my first post in this thread.
I'd also add that the motivations for limiting the freedoms of children aren't purely a love of power, they also involve a
fear of what freedom entails. The truest of all freedoms is that of the mind, but having free thoughts will nigh inevitably lead to doubting one's core beliefs. The greatest fear of the antis regarding sexuality is that their children will end up questioning their values and their dreams... that they'll desire a different way of life, a different society, a different world. For people who are afraid of change and novelty, especially those that rely on religious faith for their happiness, that's a terrifying prospect.
aeterna91 wrote: Sat Apr 12, 2025 6:57 pm
In our society, being a child is basically characterized by having almost no freedoms. A child can't do anything; they have to obey adults. They can only follow orders and, if anything, play, but under the supervision of an adult who ensures that they play within very strict limits.
Exactly. The more I think about AMSC, the more I'm led to think that the crux of the issue lies in the way "children" (including teenagers in this definition) are raised, and incidentally how children and adults interact. The fact that young people are taught to "respect and obey" adults, are forced to attend school and follow its often absurd rules, and live in a "world" that is quite separate from that of adults, are the fundamental causes of the problematic nature of AMSC. No matter how much we educate children regarding sexuality, relationships, and consent, it will never suffice without a more general transformation.
As long as "children" are expected to be "obedient" on a societal level, including toward their parents, AMSC will remain fundamentally problematic to at least some extent. In fact, it may well be that the institution of school as we know it today is incompatible with a genuinely sexually liberated world. Young people of all ages, but
especially adolescents, ought to have a lot more opportunities for unfettered, de-institutionalized interactions with adults outside of their family. Adults ought to treat young people of all ages as autonomous beings, and act toward them with a presumption of
competence rather than of
incompetence. Most importantly, adults ought to teach young people,
especially adolescents, that it's appropriate to disobey them, and that they should think freely and act autonomously.
Yeah, probably any social phenomenon this large has many factors to consider, and what I was saying is a simplification.
Your ideas about how teaching children to respect and obey adults can be the central issue of the damage caused by AMSC are very interesting. I don't go so far as to call it "the crux of the issue," but it does seem like an important problem to me, and it might be interesting to reflect on it... maybe I'm underestimating it a bit.
I also believe that disobedience is a value that should be encouraged. I find it relevant, especially given that I believe obedience was a decisive factor in many of the worst massacres committed by humanity, all those people exterminating other people because they were following orders from their superiors...
I'm not sure exactly what society expects of teenagers. I think they're required to obey absolutely in some ways, but in others, there's more flexibility. I get the feeling that, to a certain extent, as long as it's about things they don't consider important, many people do see it as completely normal for a teenager to disobey their parents and other adults, and they don't see it as something negative. It's like a kind of limited permission: you can disobey, but not too much.
At the same time, I find it interesting to know where to set the limits. For example, for small children (and I mean really small children, those who do not yet have the most basic knowledge about the world, still far from adolescence), obedience could be a very important protective factor: which saves them from running into a road where cars are passing, putting their wet fingers in a socket or drinking bleach.Of course, any such prohibition must be accompanied by an explanation of why it's definitely harmful to them, and before long, children no longer need to obey such prohibitions because they have learned on their own to avoid harming themselves. But in the meantime, at first, it may be obeying prohibitions that saves them. So I find it an interesting debate at what age they should start disobeying and what the optimal balance is.
Every time I turn around
