Mastodawn

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116240274811219588

One can generalize my thoughts about "junior engineers" to "adolescents" in many cases. Children *are* different from adults, but far less different than popular discourse would have you believe. *Most* of the idea that they are a special class of person whose agency should be tightly controlled by their betters, is a self-soothing fantasy *by* those "betters" about their own deficiencies, not about risks to children.

To wit: "age gating" anything on the Internet is solving the wrong problem.

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V 2d ago

@glyph adolescents as a meaningful social category('teenagers') is also largely an artifact of modernity and post-industrialization education and social reforms.
For most of human history, most teens would have been considered more or less 'adults who haven't been through as much shit as the rest of us just yet.'
Which is not to say that was better - but that, the difference between a 'teen' and an 'adult' is not as clear as the current social-cultural context likes to pretend it is.

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V 2d ago

@glyph Some cases of categorizing them differently are reasonable - it's a vulnerable period, and having some protections to keep predators away is useful.
... but they're also basically just adults that don't have as many decades of experience yet, and pretending a 16 year old more closely resembles an 8-year-old than a 24-year-old only serves to fuck them over more.

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Glyph 2d ago

@miss_rodent this kind of discourse is extremely fraught because it's easy to veer into accidentally agreeing with the "it's actually ephebophelia" crowd, but broadly speaking I agree with you. every day, a kid is a bit less like a child and a bit more like a really naive adult. some arbitrary thresholds are reasonable but the ones our society has constructed are not particularly well thought-out

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@glyph Yeah, that kind of veer is why I pointed to 'vulnerable to predators' specifically as one of the cases where sometimes it *is* useful to consider them in a distinct category.
My point isn't that every 16 year old should be given a beer, a job, and a car, and treated like any 30-year-old - *some* of the limits and protections make sense - but shit's complicated and drawing strict lines often does more harm than good.