I am so fucking tired of people who get “dangerous power dynamic” and “grosses me out” confused.
Some of us are trying to talk about rape and they’re over there all “He’s twenty-eight and she’s forty? Eww!” Just fuck right off.
That’s not what it’s about.
It’s about how children and young adults don’t have the knowledge, experience and (for lack of a better word) mental maturity that older people do, nor the legal rights, nor the power over their own lives that making your own money and paying for your own home gives you.
None of this is a 100% definite guide to whether a relationship is okay or not. And when the younger person is over 25 or so it stops being a useful guide to even “possibly a problem”.
Some of these things are still factors for older people in some situations, and some of them aren’t factors for some younger people. It’s just that a person’s age is no longer even a slightly useful measure of whether they have a stable job, etc. once they’re older than the standard college age.
People who don’t understand that there’s a difference between fictional underage sex, or porn with young-looking adults, and porn of actual children being raped can also fuck right off. One of these things grosses you out; the other is photographic evidence of a terrible crime.
There may possibly be some argument to be made for the not-actually-a-crime ones being illegal too. I don’t know. If there were evidence that nobody sticks to just fiction/fantasy, I might be convinced. But my guess is that’s not true, and I really don’t like the idea of thinking or writing about committing a crime being illegal.
Some Open Space 