“Hey should the rich and wealthy be able to rape children as long as they pay them afterwards?”
What a weird fucking question to ask.
I think it must be fairly normal to wonder things like this. Once I saw a video of a man standing on a busy sidewalk offering passersby the opportunity to shoot a staple gun into his bare chest for a dollar or so. It was immediately fascinating. The proposition was so direct: pay money to inflict pain. And people were taking him up on it!
Interesting, sort of in the same way that this Twitter guy’s question is interesting. The same way other moral thought experiments like “the trolley problem” are interesting.
why are people obsessed with coming up with scenarios in which it could be okay to have sex with children
Be… because they want to have sex with children?
No because 14 is not old enough to make an informed decision about that and involving the parents will increase the likelihood that they will pressure their kid into doing it for the money.
The thing that gets me is even when you up the age to 16, a common age of consent, you still have consent issues. 10 million dollars creates a consent issue for any poor person of any age. Are they truly making a choice? And I get that this is what sex workers already face.
But for fuck’s sake our society seems far more willing to entertain this than just having a society where nobody needs sex work to not starve.
Dude I’m poor and I’ll appreciate that $10M choice any day.
With $10M on the table, my poverty is now a choice.
Sure, just like a promotion becomes a choice for a woman under a misogynist boss when he propositions her. Consent cannot exist in such a power imbalance. And it’s not your fault or her fault. It’s us, it’s the system making that shitty situation real. We can and should change the system so that nobody faces such a choice.
It can’t exist? As an exaggeration, is there no way for a woman to meaningfully consent to an offer from her male boss to swap packed lunches? After all, he might take offense and pass her over for the promotion if she declines.
And if consent is possible in that scenario, what makes it immediately impossible in the scenario where sex or romance is involved?
It seems obvious that consent has to exist on some kind of spectrum like almost everything else. But it’s spoken about and thought about in a very binary way. That seems problematic given how big a topic consent is lately.
Funny you should bring up food. In the military leaders are trained to eat after their troops, to never gamble with them, and in general never ask anything from them that isn’t related to doing the job.
Because consent cannot exist in a power imbalance. So yes the lunch swap has the exact same problem. Just with less trauma counseling.
Don’t you think taking that hard-line stance kind of corners you into taking some nonsensical positions?
For example a physical power imbalance will always exist between two men of different sizes. Because the imbalance is there, you have to answer with a hard no when someone asks: “is it possible for two men of different sizes to consent to sex with one another?” But if someone asks “is it okay for two guys of different sizes to have sex?” you would presumably say yes.
Now you have been forced to say it is okay for sex to happen despite the impossibility of any consent having being given.
