Reasoning about the Age of Consent

You raised several great points. This post is reminiscent of a college paper I wrote about regarding age of consent.

Could you elaborate?

Elaborate on the paper I wrote?

yeah like what is your opinion?

2026-03-17.

Given that the level of civilisational development is positively correlated with generational length, the age of onset of puberty, and negatively correlated with the rate of maturity, it seems like a bad idea to use historical, more primitive, age of sexual consent standards as a baseline for the present, more advanced, civilisations.

Still, for practical reasons, such as countering dysgenics and sub-replacement fertility, the age of sexual consent should not be set too high.

Here is an interesting video related to this matter: https://youtu.be/aSjefoG1DCY.

And, even if the level of fluid intelligence is sufficient for such by the age of 15, I do wonder whether such peoples’ emotional regulation/conscientiousness, crystallised intelligence (practical wisdom/cumulative knowledge), and foresight is sufficient.

And regarding the issue of the age of sexual consent of younger children, I think that the hypothetical base possible minimum age of sexual consent should be for above the pre-pubertal stage, which means that the age of sexual consent should never be set before that. This is because evolutionarily speaking, there is no reason to have sex with them, which means that those who do or wish to are deviants and simply want only hedonistic pleasure, which is not a sufficient justification.

Regarding Epstein’s situation, he obviously was not a paedophile, as the latter pertains to pre-pubescent children. So he and his clients were ephebephiles at most.

Though you do make a good point about the differential ages of male-female sexual attraction, where the age gap should be positive, whereas contemporary society irrationally disregards and does not optimise around this.

Here is an interesting video related to this matter: https://youtu.be/aSjefoG1DCY.

Quite an intelligent video, and largely correct. The legitimate part of the age of consent debate is bickering over a handful of years, a few percent of a human lifespan at most. It really is a debate that comes down to 730 days, I think, because that’s how off his data is. He gets a range for the AoC of 16-18 in the data. That’s only the range in the United States. Among white countries, the ranges is more like 14 to 16. 17 and 18 are United States outliers. 14 to 16 fits psychometric data well, but it doesn’t fit physical brain development data. Luckily, I showed the physical brain development data is crap, so this video is off by a little bit of Garbage In, Garbage Out.

The question is, why argue over 2 years? Well one I love arguing over anything that gets people engaged. Two, it’s in the news. Epstein’s original conviction in Florida was based on an 18 law that involved a violation with a girl that was literally 1 day from her 18th birthday. Literally the “she was 17 and 364 days old you sick fuck” meme. If Florida’s laws are pöbel bullshit and off by at least 730 days, that nullifies the logic behind the conviction. So that’s a huge topical practical application to the news cycle of proving that the maximum reasonable age of consent is 16. It becomes extremely hard to convict Epstein of anything whatsoever, all of it relies on overestimates. And this is true for a supermajority of age of consent violations, the vast majority involve teenage girls over 14 and men under 21. If it turns out 14 is a very reasonable age of consent scientifically, most age of consent prosecutions become scientifically nullified, the laws they relied on based on low IQ state and federal politburo safety fag guestimates instead of real data.

Also with IQ tests existing you have the obvious extention of just setting an IQ of consent which filters out basically everyone pre-puberty and returns a median of probably 15 or 16 with a standard deviation of 1 year or something like that.

There are a few errors in what you wrote:

1. the median/average age at marriage for women ranged usually from about 18 to 25, not 16 to 18. In my post on the topic, I found only two ancient or medieval cultures with mean female ages at marriage below 18: Ancient Rome (elites, not general population) and Ancient China. On the other hand, there were 7 with mean ages above 18 and 2 (Rome, general population, and England, only elites) where it might’ve been slightly lower. So, 16-18 is wrong; 18-25 is much more reasonable. The early modern data also matches this. Most early modern societies had mean ages in the early to mid 20s.

2. 12-14 wouldn’t be the legal age for marriage. This would usually be the age at which a girl/boy was considered to be able to consent to sex, such that, if somebody had sex with, say, an eight year old girl, he would be convicted of rape if it were just proved that they had sex, since she was considered unable to consent. That is what “age of consent” means! In England, the legal age at which a girl could be betrothed by her father would be 7, at which she could consent to sex, 10 (or 12, it varied), and at which she could choose her own spouse, 20 (I think). Even on the topic of 12 year olds consenting, though, the law was somewhat schizophrenic. For example, this is the 1275 Westminster statute against rape:

And the king prohibiteth that none do ravish, nor take away by force, any maiden within age [i.e., below the AoC] neither by her own consent, nor without; nor any wife or maiden of full age, nor any other woman, against her will

It would be illegal to have sex with a girl under the age of consent even if she consented to it. But obviously, the point is that she is too young to consent, so this should be an impossible hypothetical if the king understood the legal philosophy behind it. I think the point of the laws was just to make it easier to persecute rapists of little girls, since proving that there was no consent is usually the hardest part of prosecuting rapists; the logic itself makes no sense (presumably, there is an SD of the age at which one becomes able to consent), but it is helpful when your goal is just to make rape less common. But, anyway, the point is that this age is mostly unrelated to the age at which marriage becomes legal. That would either be much younger (if you include betrothal by your father) or much older (if you only include choosing your spouse).

3. I’ve shown that IQ continues to increase until at least around age 50, and does so to a significant degree, though slowly (e.g., perhaps half an SD increase between 20 and 50). But, either way, a person on average deviates from the mean IQ by 15 points, which is perhaps the difference between a girl at age 12 vs age 15. If about 16% of girls are as smart at 12 as the average at 15, and 16% at 15 are as dumb as the average at 12, it makes little sense to base a specific age on this.

My conclusion is basically that putting a strict number on these things is useless. The common law model is to classify 10 or 12 year old girls as incapable of consenting. This works because a) almost no normal person is attracted to these anyway, and b) these really do probably almost never consent to sex. This makes prosecution of rapists much simpler in these cases. Then, when it comes to marriage, the common law allows fathers to betroth their daughters as young as 7, and for girls to choose their spouse themselves at age 20. Of course, a marriage that occurs at age 7 would not be consummated until much later. (Even among aristocratic girls in medieval England, consummation rarely occurred before around age 15 when they were married off earlier.) This seems somewhat reasonable.

the median/average age at marriage for women ranged usually from about 18 to 25, not 16 to 18.

I disagree with that summary. In your article, you say for ancient Egypt there was a median of 18, in Greece it was 17 to 19, in China it was ~15, and in Babylon it was 23, but only for slaves.. So, in antiquity, the median age of female marriage for non-slaves was in the teens across all societies observed.

Now for medieval England, you show data consistent with a median of 19 or 20, with peasants being a bit higher (20 or even 21) due to their poverty, and wealthy people being around 19. So this is still teen marriage. You write:

Kowaleski (1998, Table A1) also provides more data from three groups of elites. She refers to these as the “Bristol elite”, “London merchant elite”, and “London elite”, with sample sizes of 18, 41, and 17, respectively, and with averages ages at marriage ranging from 16.8 to 19.1. The weighted average of these figures is 17.42 years.

For Germany:

Among the patricians of the town of Frankfurt, the average age of 43 brides was 18.8 years.

Italy:

The most major study was published by Herlihy & Klpaisch-Zuber (1985) in their analysis of the 1427 Catasto (a type of census). Their figures show a mean ages of girls at marriage of 18.86 and 19.28 in the urban and rural populations of Tuscany, respectively (pp. 205-206).

France:

“French data suggest that in medieval towns and cities, women generally married around age 20”. … In five cases, a woman’s age at marriage can be roughly calculated, typically with some assumptions, based on how the woman was identified in court records (e.g., married for x years, aged y years). Karras calculated a lower bound estimate of 17.25 and an upper bound of 20.75 years (fn. 89) … In ten cases, a woman’s age at (premarital) deflowerment is known. This can be an indicator for age at marriage because this was typically done under the intention of marrying soon after. The ten ages range from 16 to 25, with an average of 17.5 years.

So for every society you cover up to the year 1500, all of them display median ages of female marriages consistent with the number 18. Broadly the reasonable confidence interval here is 17 to 19. The simplest model is that every society had a default median age of female first marriage of 18, plus or minus a year or two based on contingent factors. This model fits every society observed except for Babylonian slaves; this indicates mid-twenties marriage is a part of slavery by historic standards. Free people have a natural right to marry 16 to 20 year olds by ancient and medieval standards.

As for early modern societies, most did not marry in the 20s. Only MWEMP societies did. Aka Hajnal line societies, a minority of the globe. See my article here.

In England, the legal age at which a girl could be betrothed by her father would be 7, at which she could consent to sex, 10 (or 12, it varied), and at which she could choose her own spouse, 20 (I think). Even on the topic of 12 year olds consenting, though, the law was somewhat schizophrenic. For example, this is the 1275 Westminster statute against rape:

21 is when she could choose her own spouse, if she wasn’t already married. 12 was the age at which she could marry with her father’s approval.

But, anyway, the point is that this age is mostly unrelated to the age at which marriage becomes legal.

No, it was about the same, and that makes sense, because shotgun marriage was a response to alleged rapes, especially when the girl defended her “rapist.”

That would either be much younger (if you include betrothal by your father)

Betrothal was just a contract for future marriage. It could be broken pretty easily. The girl would not have any contact with the groom until she was of marriageable age. Often the groom would be another child, or a young teenager, and the betrothal would be arranged by two fathers.

Of course, a marriage that occurs at age 7 would not be consummated until much later.

A marriage would not have occurred at age 7. A betrothal could have. The marriage would be in the girl’s teens and would be consummated immediately upon the fulfillment of the betrothal contract.

it makes little sense to base a specific age on this.

I agree, I think it should be replaced with scientific standards using physical and mental examination plus rape charges. So if someone has sex with a 10 year old, it should be pretty easy to show a jury at trial that it occurred because the girl’s hymen was broken, that the girl was not old enough for it physically because she has not finished puberty, which usually happens at 15, give or take a year or so depending on the person, and that the girl could not consent mentally because her WAIS scores put her in the retard bracket in the adult range (eg the average 10 year old has an IQ of 70 or so on the adult scale). This is the kind of evidence I expect to convict someone of a capital crime like rape, not just defining a number out of thin air, which becomes extremely unrealistic as we have seen in the last 100 years when they make it 18 and prosecute a 21 year old for sleeping with a 17 year old, for example.

You may be right that 18-25 is a bit off. Maybe it should be something like 17-20; I’ll look at the data again. I wrote a post today about the age of consent, specifically about how pedo hysteria evil and retarded, though I don’t really talk about historical age at marriage, etc. I just focus on how modern law abuses the term age of consent, which confuses probel who think that the laws are not just correct, but also literal (i.e., the girls are literally incapable of consenting to adults, but somehow able to consent to people their age). It comes from a gay definition of rape, namely, sex+power imbalance

Is the post public yet? Link?

not yet, I will send when it is

sorry, took much longer than I thought because I had to keep rewriting it; I find it hard to like the final product when it’s not long.

https://hereticalinsights.substack.com/p/law-and-pedo-hysteria?r=41gpfo

Speaking of subjective evidence and lived experience: I had multiple female friends who were in their teens at the time, mostly below 18 (I’m 20 rn), either casually mention or let me know in other ways that they are open to the idea of being in a relationship with an older man, meaning 30s or even higher. I was actually really surprised, given that I was under the impression that young girls are grossed out by that. Apparently the amount of young women who are voluntarily either open to or directly attracted to the age gap relationships might be higher than the societal taboo formed by older feminist women leads to believe. Tho important context is that I live in Eastern Europe.

It’s well known in the evopsych literature that women don’t start considering age to be unattractive until the man is more than 10 or 15 years old then themselves. They like men 4 to 10 years older the most and this is true in the teens.