Last week I addressed a lot of concerns I had with puritans that jump too needlessly to label conflict as abuse and grey areas as fully dark. As someone that believes in peoples’ ability to self-govern and consent, and believes in a person’s ability to enjoy a naughty relationship that perhaps society says they shouldn’t (provided they’re consenting unrelated adults), a clearly growing wave of sexual conservatism worries me. Not just as an erotica writer, but also as someone whose job in the real world used to be to genuinely protect minors from dark corrupting forces in the world. I feel uniquely qualified to talk about certain subjects in this way, and I certainly don’t want to leave the conversation at me defending the grey and nuanced areas. I also want to condemn what ought to be condemned, and as a writer that writes the kinds of stories I do, I also feel to some extent it’s my duty.

Understanding that teenagers are hormonal and will want to boink each other – and that we can never just tell them to ignore their hormones and instead need to educate them on how to responsibly navigate their feelings and be wary of those who want to take advantage of them – is fundamental to this. Sexual conservatism and shaming sexual exploration will never fully work, because (among many reasons) the smart and horny teenager that is having urges and beliefs for someone they shouldn’t who is told to “just stop” will just learn to be stealthy instead. They’re learning to keep quiet and think they’re actually smarter and better for having done so, and you’ll never guess which kind of person benefits the most from that exact kind of teenager: predators. Obviously. Not only will the suave predator be able to capitalize on this person’s willingness to stay quiet; they’ll also praise this person for being quiet, rewarding them with positive reinforcement when others criticize them, and making them feel like they’re mature for their age or something. These teenagers are made to feel special, and perhaps with a master manipulator, begin to believe that the only person they can trust is their manipulator.

Are there grey areas to this? Not in the scenario I just described. When it comes to the broader scope of manipulation, I’m frankly unsure where the lines are drawn (although, for reasons I’ll explain later, the lines need to be drawn regardless). I don’t know how to feel, for instance, about a 25-year-old intern having taboo thoughts for their boss in their 40s, and the boss and them developing a secret relationship. This person is a fully-grown adult, and the relationship can be unhealthy because of the dynamic, but the possibility exists that they could navigate consent and the work-dynamic tastefully. More importantly, to automatically assume the relationship is predatory no matter what and the intern just is blissfully unaware of possible predation or something is… basically infantilizing a 25-year-old, in this hypothetical. It’s assuming this person can’t possibly understand their own sexual situation and needs “real adults” to step in. It’s good to be cautious, but to automatically assume the purported victim’s status, stance, feelings and outcome? For this particular situation, I don’t like it.

But I don’t write a lot of boss-intern stories, do I? Lately I’ve written more student-teacher stories. How does that square? The short answer is that a lot of the lines are clearly drawn and for good reason. Let’s start with the obvious ones: I have written two student-teacher high school stories, as many people in my sphere do, and in both cases the teacher is unambiguously some kind of creep that avoids taking responsibility. Go figure, I side with our understanding of cognitive development on this one – teenagers aren’t fully developed yet. In most circumstances they literally have not developed the ability to cognitively understand the ramifications of what they’re doing. Having a sexual relationship with anyone under the age of eighteen when you’re not their peer is wrong. This is the basic logic that got warped in the story I told in my last blog post; I won’t rehash it here.

I also write a lot of coming-of-age stories that take place in high school. This I do not feel bad for. As a story device, even for erotica, a high school is frankly fantastic. The conventional dating pool is around the same age as the protagonist which gets rid of any typical storyline too complicated, it’s frankly honest to portray teenagers as hormonal and wanting to have sex as a general rule, everyone there wants to act more grown-up than they are, and the hormones mean misunderstandings, drama, hurt feelings, and “idiot plots” all have a seat at the table. A writer has to be careful and write with an air of nostalgia and not fetishization – to fetishize the school-age student theirself is, to my mind, inherently wrong, as it can build a desire to do something about it in real life.

Too often online I have seen the defensive rebuttal of “it’s good that this fetishizing taboo art exists, because at least then people are jacking off at home to it instead of doing it in real life.” Sorry if you believe in that – the evidence says no. Fetishizing art acts more like a normalizing “gateway drug” than a Nicotine patch. On some level, you know this implicitly – think of the first time you came upon a fetish you didn’t quite like, then got used to it over time. Heck, you can do this with a genre of movie you used to not like, or a food or something. Normalization builds an enjoyment of an activity, and the more enjoyed it is, the more a person will want to seek it out in other avenues. Budding research into pornography studies suggests this to be sadly ruinously powerful with taboo art, particularly visual taboo art. Statistically, your local loli art dealer has made more people curious about real-life minors than turned would-be p#dophiles away from them. It’s an uncomfortable truth in sex work. Sex sells. Sex makes people want more.

This is a big reason why I soapbox so much about my responsibility. As a former educator, working to prevent this sort of thing happening in real life is paramount, and I have seen effects to the opposite. The normalization of online porn is another example of this gateway drug effect – a friend of mine that works in a university pointed out to me that the normalization of internet porn and a nihilistic “anything for a laugh” culture have normalized the practice and word “gooning.” Odds are I don’t have to explain to you what that word means, and even that fact is significant given that ten years ago, the idea of the activity of gooning would have seemed absurd to me. Now, if someone describes it, I would go, “Oh, that person is describing gooning.” Welcome to normalization.

This is why I like showing the awkward, sometimes gross, often uncomfortable, side of sex in my stories, especially when the characters are younger and more impressionable. It’s accurate and de-glamorizes the perceived “allure of youth” while still keeping the hormones and feelings we all knew to some extent back then. But what happens when things are more grey and it’s not a question of law? Enter my two college-age teacher-student stories, The TA and the Tease and Here’s My Snapchat.

I’m not going to pretend these weren’t two of my favorite one-off stories I’ve written – while both were commissions and the former in particular had pretty strict guidelines if I recall correctly, both were a blast to write. Jessica and Ryan as a couple were loosely based off of two friends I know that entered into a taboo relationship at work – “Jessica” was the awkward low-level employee and “Ryan,” while not being her boss, had clear authority over her, but she was smitten by his devil-may-care hippie-ish approach to their workplace. “Ryan” was also insanely attractive and was the subject of adoration by many of the girls at his workplace. Like his counterpart, “Ryan” was completely aware of this, and feigned ignorance, and I was always impressed by how he didn’t go for anyone since he had this attitude that if a girl at his work was too head-over-heels for him, if he did too many things wrong she could hate him just as hard. Despite him being sure he could be more of a hedonist, he preferred to keep his workplace drama-free and never even wanted to risk accidentally hurting anyone more vulnerable. The world could use a few more Ryans.

I’m not going to pretend that “two consenting adults” is the be-all-and-end-all of this principle. Obviously fully-grown adults can be starstruck by a rock star and offer sexual favors in a way they never would have offered to a peer. Rock stars can, and historically have, taken advantage of this. That’s a grey area I’m less keen on, and I’m really only okay with that kind of hedonistic lifestyle if the rock star outlines consent and tries to keep friendly with the parties involved including when they’re no longer offering sex to him. That’s my line. In this way, “Jessica” and “Ryan” towed the line, and I tried to recreate that in this story. The story obviously shows two people doing something they shouldn’t, but it was an ethical “shouldn’t” as opposed to a moral “shouldn’t.” The story shows the two communicating and reaching an understanding, shows that the “Ryan” is trying not to take advantage, and even offers a foil in Kylie, showing the type of person who is too eager and showcases the type of person that could be more easily hurt. (Kylie was not based on anyone I knew, so there’s a possibility I misrepresented this demographic, but I think portraying this kind of person too accurately might have been its own kind of problematic.)

As for Here’s My Snapchat… the inmates run the asylum. A time-honored way to do away with the unethical power dynamic is to have the bottom topping. In this case, three female students basically having their way with a male teacher figure, barely even asking him for consent. They’re in control the whole time, and while the consent is greyer, it’s greyer on the side of the one in power. It’s a dynamic some enjoy, so I’m not trying to yuck anyone’s yum, but I think it goes without saying that I would have had so many more reservations if they were the teachers.

In both stories, consent is at the forefront of my consideration. The dynamic is portrayed, but even the tone of the story goes beyond shrugging and saying, “two consenting adults!” Is this me saying that, in real life, these kinds of situations are always okay or always not? No to both. I think what I am saying is that we should measure these cases on harm caused, which sometimes can only be measured in retrospect. I know “Jessica and Ryan” who had a taboo workplace relationship; I’ve known a teacher who dated their former student; and I know a few couples with age gaps measured in two digits. They can work, but there’s a reason we urge caution. It’s just that caution doesn’t abuse make.

The way that we frame these conversations seems to be wrong at every level. For instance, I live in Canada, and where I live, the age of consent is 16. I think this is… terrible. The age of consent effectively lives a double life, as the “official age of consent” and the “colloquial age of consent,” wherein the official one is some number applied legally with history behind it, but the latter is, socially speaking, the actual age of consent, which is fluid and changes within communities to reflect, essentially, “at what point do we start judging?” Ultimately, this colloquial conversation, and the disagreements a lot of people have within it, are both the reason behind a lot of the sentiments of my last blog post and directly caused by the official age of consent being so outdated.

The age of consent should tell us at what point we have to accept that, in general, people have full autonomy to their lives and, even socially, we need to butt out if we want to do anything more than judge. Given this, the fact you can, in my area, still be in high school and you can have sex with a 70-year-old that used a position of authority to pressure you into it several years before you can buy cigarettes and alcohol isn’t just ludicrous to me; it’s dangerous. And heck, my area already has Romeo and Juliet Laws which accept and allow hormonal teens to sleep with each other within their own specified age range (for instance, it’s legal for a thirteen and fourteen year old to fool around without going to jail for sex crimes – it’s not legal for a thirteen and eighteen year old to do the same).

For this reason, I straight-up think the age of consent should be around nineteen years old. If you have sex with someone at the fully-developed age of nineteen, they have a right to say, “I’ve lived through my whole teenagerhood; I understand the risks; I accept them.” And society has a responsibility to accept that, and can judge for sure, but can’t infantilize or claim the person they’re with is a would-be p#dophile for doing it. And you know what? If enough people disagree, fine. By popular vote, age of consent should be twenty, as long as Romeo and Juliet laws accept that teens can’t be found guilty for experimenting with each other as they’re hardwired to do – to not prepare for that is biological entrapment.

This needs to be the start of our conversation, and we can use the colloquial age of consent to inform our decision on what the legal age should be. If age and the power dynamic are at the heart of this, both of these need to be addressed in plain language. More importantly, we have to ask how this addressing impacts people, and who it benefits. And having the age of consent be low enough that it raises alarm bells for most of society – and creeps could take advantage of lack of brain development as shown by psychological research – is something that needs changing. After all, who does having a low age of consent unquestionably benefit? Obviously, the type of adult that wants sixteen-year-olds to be able to have sex with adults, or more accurately, wants adults to have sex with sixteen-year-olds.

You might think power dynamics are the easier aspect to solve, since companies can put in policies to address these relationships, but sadly, that’s something that’s never going to be solved if you ask me. To start, companies write their own policies, even if law and expectations guide them. We likely will never have a comprehensive nuance-friendly policy in inter-office romances that follows a clear blueprint because that requires that blueprint existing across cultures, ideally time periods, and with little allowance for exception. And, frankly, sometimes an inter-office romance can be abusive for one couple and entirely fine for another, purely based on the human beings interlocking. School gets even more complicated because do you ban teachers in a college to date former students? How about if they date students from other departments? And if you don’t ban that and the odd teacher does it anyway, and the optics look bad, are you willing to look like the school that doesn’t care about a possibly abusive-looking dynamic, without even knowing if the couple is healthy or indeed abusive? Does this mean we give the workplace carte blanche to pry into our intimate lives to ensure nothing is amiss? Because that’s an erosion of rights. So do we ban all romances that happen in this dynamic either way? Because that’s also an erosion of rights. But do we do nothing? That could lead to people getting away with harm. This is also assuming that the place of work fully follows its own policy and doesn’t operate based on vibes while largely ignoring its own policies – and to those outside the professional corporate world, bad news, champ. Whether you’re trying to report a high-level person for wrongdoing or if you’re a low-level employee wrongly accused, HR is never your friend.

And to put a magnifying glass on college specifically, if we take a stand on currently enrolled students, what about former students? What about freshly graduated former students? As my most recent piece explores, the dynamic isn’t fully gone once you graduate. If we’re cracking down on creep teachers, what’s the deadline on Creep Versus Non-Creep for dating a former student? And that’s not a hypothetical question: if a length of time determines whether someone is a good member of society or a predator that shouldn’t be allowed to be a teacher, we can’t leave that length of time to be vibes-based, otherwise we basically allow a big enough mob to label someone unemployable in their line of work based on whether that mob likes the person or not. That’s not an answer to “how do we identify and rehabilitate those who commit sexual misdeeds?” It’s an answer to, “how do we make it look like we care about sexual violence victims; how much power to name and shame randos are we giving to the general public to make it look like we, those in power, care about identifying and rehabilitating those who commit sexual misdeeds?”

There’s a reason laws are so specific and have all their provisions and caveats. We need to know what’s legal and what’s not. In this way, the plot has been lost. We know implicitly that there’s something wrong about a boss sleeping with their intern instantly or a seventeen-year-old sleeping with a seventy-year-old. But is an age of consent of sixteen and murky policies that aren’t equally enforced or even clearly communicated to the general public even… helping? If you work in an office, do you know immediately how your company would treat you sleeping with a coworker? If you’re in college, do you know whether your college condemns teachers that do sexual acts with their own students? Their ex-students? Students from another department? If you’re in the art world and you know, say, a famous musician, I mean… god help you if you want to find concrete rules there.

It can be tempting to go, “well I know a creep when I see one,” but people have historically used the same logic to arrest, murder, and mutilate gay people and the LGBTQ community on a whole, to say nothing of interracial relationships and other injustices throughout history. Heck, there are scholars ringing alarm bells about how sexual misconduct policy is being misused unfairly in a biased way against accused trans and non-binary people in cases with the same levels of evidence as cisgendered people. The same policy is being interpreted in a harsher way if you’re in a gay relationship than a straight one; the very definition of discrimination. If certain lines aren’t to be crossed in society, we need to define that line. Because not only can vindictive types try to pull more innocent cases into “creep” territory; but charismatic creeps can use this murkiness to pull themselves back into “good member of society” again. This kind of vibes-based purity benefits creeps arguably more than anyone, and allows them to live in this murkiness and normalize their own behavior. That’s why I think the age of consent should be raised. It’s at least one step towards baking this changing understanding of sexual dynamics and clearly defining where “creep” begins, without leaving it to vibes and this notion “if you think you see a creep, then you know a creep: get them”.

My next thought about this is a continuation of “who does this help.” A lot of the rhetoric I see online whenever people mention that, say, the actor Tobey Maguire (50) is currently dating a 20-year-old… it’s misguided. Not all of it: I like the point that the girl he’s dating was born the same year as his own offspring. I do think that becoming a parent changes you, and on a whole, if someone of that age is in your life as a offspring, that age group should to some extent be seen as an age group you have supervisory authority over, and to make one your peer muddies up that water. I’m not a fan.

“Does this mean you’d see less wrong with Tobey Maguire dating a 20-year-old if he didn’t have a kid but was still 50?” Upfront? Yes! I think the nuances need to be considered and I think being a parent of someone their partner’s age is its own kind of power dynamic, and I see those who think that’s somehow not relevant are either so stuck in their own opinion that nothing will convince them, or they’re just pretending to care about dynamics when it’s a lie. I will say: I’d see less wrong with it, not that I see nothing wrong. I don’t know where my limit on age is, and I think what bothers me more is how far back it goes. But still, I want to abide by my own principle. I already said people get to be autonomous people who have a right to make their own mistakes by 19, so I don’t think the couple here is doing anything ethically wrong… I just personally wouldn’t do it.

But the rhetoric doesn’t only go that far. Time and time again I see people seeing that exact example (Maguire’s) commenting, “omg 20?? she’s a CHILD” on these posts, and like… what are you talking about? Is being 20 a child? If she committed a crime, should she be tried as a minor? If she bought a lottery ticket, would you call her parents on her? If someone who was 20 showed up to a child-only event, would you see nothing wrong with that? No? Then shut up. Using sexuality to infantilize a grown human being as an aspect of control, cloaked in a faux pretend care for sexual conduct, is frankly as gross as it is transparent. It’s never applied when, again, people her age do other harmful things like – in Canada where it’s legal at 20 – smoke cigarettes or binge-drink. If concern isn’t applied across the board, it’s not about concern, it’s about control. There are people who want to control who other adults sleep with, and they have hijacked both the #MeToo movement and even the minds of people who earnestly followed that movement to codify their own preferences about age gaps as an inherently social issue that requires mobilization to solve. And I think there’s a conversation to be had about protecting the vulnerable, but have it honestly. If you call a 20-year-old a child – and only in that specific scenario – it tells me you’re trying to shift the position of the argument not as, “is this age gap between adults okay?” but instead as, “are you okay with this adult sleeping with a child?” It’s transparently dishonest, and in a bizarre twist, it re-invokes the normalization I was talking about earlier. If the rhetoric is always “this person is a child” when there’s an age gap, then hearing “child” in sexual situations is going to seem like more of the same doom-and-gloom as opposed to clearly defined unacceptable behavior that demands reaction. Why, under that kind of rhetoric, I could even imagine a person who was credibly accused of sexual conduct with a minor using this confused haze to bury their own stories and become President of the United States! Could you imagine that? Could you imagine us losing the plot so thoroughly that when all of the documentary evidence clearly outlines their guilt, a straight-up credibly accused pedophile still manages to become the most powerful human being in the West? Golly.

Let’s end this by talking about why we need to see age gaps as inherently worrisome. After all, sometimes I see comments asking, “Wait, what’s the problem if they’re both consenting adults?” Because this is the internet, most of the replies tend to be some kind of mocking “erm you’re STUPID” rebuttal. Fantastic; brilliant debating, lads; no notes. Some comments respond with, “What would a 50 year old and 20 year old even have in common?” I actually don’t like this line of thinking: number one, it’s used way too often and for increasingly stupid things – I once saw a friend be made to answer a friendship with a six-year age age (28 and 22) with that exact question of, “what do you two even have in common?” It’s belittling, self-serving as a question, presumes that it’s inherently breaking a norm because of I guess a lack of shared interests, and is really only used to condescend than to be interested in an answer. But more importantly, number two, if Tobey and his 20-year-old girlfriend like the same movies and music, suddenly the question was… answered perfectly adequately. It hands a victory to a potential creep if that was your argument and it was answered so effortlessly, doesn’t it? I have absolutely bonded with the elderly before via shared interests. Contact across age groups is not unheard of, nor inherently problematic. Ergo, asking that question doesn’t get at the heart of the potential harm, and in fact misrepresents what harm age gaps can cause. Age gaps aren’t harmful because the older person is into Pink Floyd and the younger person is into Billie Eilish or something. In turn, a couple, no matter their age gap, isn’t harmful because they have little interests in common and can’t find a topic at the dinner table.

A better rebuttal to “what’s the problem if they’re both consenting adults” is the fact that consent could have been informed on the part of the younger party by outside influences that act similarly to a kind of pressure. If you meet your favorite celebrity ever and they seem to like you back, you’re starstruck and your brain overrides a lot of its own self-protection measures. So if this celebrity says you two should sleep together, even a guarded person who normally wouldn’t consent that easily might feel too starstruck to think about it too hard. Heck, even if they do think about it, they might feel that they can’t possibly disappoint their favorite celebrity and say no! And: this is not an absolute value that gets turned on and off. It’s a scale. There’s a range of starstruckness that virtually all age gaps have since we intuit that age carries experience and wisdom. This is why healthy age-gap relationships basically only come from good clear healthy communication.

Remember the silly tenth grade and eleventh grade from the last blog post? They’re a perfect example of this scale and how grey the situation is. Is the student who reported them wrong when they tell me that the tenth graders idolize the eleventh graders? Absolutely not. Could this eleventh grader have used that fact to their direct advantage and suggested having sex early on knowing they’d meet less resistance? Yes. Here’s a tricky one: could this eleventh grader be unaware of this factor but still asked for sex early on, and benefited from this dynamic without even being aware at the time that such a dynamic exists? Yes! But does that make the dynamic in any way inherently abusive, or the person that uses that dynamic (not just the eleventh grader; people in authority positions and rock stars too) inherently a groomer? Some might say yes but I don’t feel comfortable saying anything other than no. I think people have a right to feel tricked, but being tricked accidentally doesn’t make someone a groomer. It just makes the situation tricky, and requires us to mandate that kind of sensitivity training to those in power. For bosses and teachers, having a note in policy isn’t enough; we need training modules that adequately explains these dynamics like I just did. For eleventh graders, it requires updating our sex ed curriculum.

So, “what’s the problem if they’re both consenting adults” is, accidentally, a bit of a non-starter. Imagine a boxing match between a heavyweight and a lightweight. The heavyweight, who has more muscles and a stronger punch, is going to win. Suddenly someone from the crowd asks, “what’s the problem if they both have muscles?” They’re being technically correct, but one of the fighters can use their muscles way better, and statistically, not only are they going to win, but it’s unlikely if they’re going to lose unless, say, an angry mob storms the ring and helps out the lightweight. (That’s why well-intentioned but refusing-to-debate mobs storm these kinds of age-gap situations, by the way.) And like I said, it’s a scale: the bigger the difference of their muscle content, the more the match is fixed from the beginning. And if one of them is competing before they’re even biologically able to grow certain types of boxing muscles… yeah, it becomes clear why the bigger issue of age gaps often isn’t, “how big is the age gap” but rather, “how far back does it go?”

Transparently, for my part I’m always willing to listen and see what a couple acts like as long as one is, at bare minimum, 19. I will absolutely be on alert, but I have learned to only act on evidence of unhealthy conduct, non-consent, pressuring, or toxicity. We have to decide where adulthood and absolute rights start, and for me, it starts around then. I wouldn’t enjoy dating a nineteen-year-old – historically, I’ve actually swung the other way in terms of age gaps myself – but I also don’t want to just assume every nineteen-year-old dating anyone over one year older than them is automatically being abused. That’s such an insulting loss of autonomy.

I also want the response to be progressive. I’m getting into some nuanced stuff; I likely have brought up points you yourself never thought so deeply of before (though if you’ve thought about this as deeply as me, hats off to you for being thoughtful and curious). People don’t often think about this particular subject matter too deeply – sometimes that’s the fault of puritans too. Bring this topic up with nuance and some people will miss all of your points and simply go, “erm, why do you have so many thoughts on the age of consent??” And like… I dunno, man. I want to actually fix the issue instead of shame those involved. Not only does this conversation not often happen, but when it does, creeps and puritans accidentally agree that people need to stop talking about it, and stop talking about it ASAP. Nothing gets done. But what if we… did try to do something about it? What would that response even be?

If this kind of dynamic accidentally benefits someone in power, but the person clearly asked for consent and was thoughtful about their partner, I think the response should be education. Not social ostracization, not firing, not rumors, not shame. Shame in particular will only antagonize these people against anyone henceforth that opposes them. If you want healthier dynamics in relationships for the people around you, it’s literally in your best interest not to antagonize anyone who has good intentions but does things you see as harmful. Unless you’re planning on literally killing or jailing anyone that enjoys dating other adults with larger age gaps than you’d like, any response born in shame literally does not get you what you want. You’re not only potentially endangering a human being – who could be innocent and could not – you’re also worsening your own problem. No wonder sexual conservatism is on the rise while the number of genuine creeps appears to be rising. That’s not a coincidence and it’s not a reason to fight harder – it’s because we’re not actually talking and tackling solutions.

This is, frustratingly, a principle we already accept for most people and most wrongdoings. If a child does something wrong in class, should the teacher: 1, hit them; 2, mock them to the rest of the class for doing a bad thing; or 3, gently inform them why their behavior is bad and only invoke punishment if it’s done again? We do this for so many things. First offences, speeding tickets, forgetting a bus pass, getting in trouble at work, et cetera. It’s odd… in a weird way, a taboo dynamic or an age gap seems to be one of the few things that most of society has just accepted that we punish in the harshest way on a first offence, and simultaneously, one of the few things most of society sees as not worthy of explaining and educating about, but instead, punishing through shame. There’s no law against weirdly high age gaps, and yet, people see it as both punishable and inherently known. And I have news: especially if it’s not illegal and has the ability to not hurt people, even people that habitually chase age gaps can be blissfully unaware of the harm it might cause. It does us no good to assume everyone doing that is inherently a calculated predator that knows exactly what they’re doing. So, a genuine question for puritans becomes: why is it automatically assumed everyone doing this knows every single nuance of what I just described? If you’re a puritan happening to read this, did you even think of all of this? Why is ostracizing them your first step? Why did you pick something that has the potential to cause harm, rather than a guarantee, to make that your first step? Do you think this is going to deter creeps, at all?

Of course it won’t. I remember at my high school job when the school unearthed a serious bullying problem – my high school thankfully takes that stuff seriously, and suspended the ringleader outright. There were several members in his little gang, and they took their bullying way too far in a few places. Around the time of my retirement, I asked one of my students in the same year as those bullies if that gang had stopped their bullying. The student shocked me by bluntly saying that our intervention only helped because the bullies were now just afraid of getting caught. Technically, they stopped openly bullying, but only out of fear. Behind the scenes, this student was confident the group was still doing the bullying and gossiping to each other. My school had failed to address the root cause. Again, this likely makes inherent sense to you, reader or puritan. You’re smart; you get why my school failed and why they kept bullying. So why do puritans think that this kind of “swing the hammer” punishment will magically fix the root cause of age gaps?

The heart of this whole thing is that everyone wants a clean answer. Creeps on one end will strategically and purposefully date younger people, often wanting a younger body, but – this often doesn’t get reported – they also like a younger mindset, and enjoy the spirit of youth. Maybe they want to recapture their own youth. Maybe they missed out on their own. Maybe they just enjoy how young minds think and, uh… don’t often argue back. Their accidental apologists will ask, “What’s the issue if they’re two consenting adults?” And then the other side will either respond with “um EW” or “what do they even have in common?” and both of these don’t address the actual issues at all, which leaves the apologist unconvinced.

Have you noticed that no one in that debate particularly wanted to know what the actual relationship was like? Did you notice that literally no one actually cared how the purported victim feels? Let’s go back to ol’ Tobey – you know what’s one comment I literally never saw about that 20-year-old he was dating?

“I hope she’s okay.”

Literally never once. I looked back on a few comment sections for videos discussing Tobey Maguire’s relationship to write this blog post. No one, for or against their relationship, bothered to mention her well-being in a debate literally centered around her. That’s… not just wrong, it’s horrible and unfeeling of us. We’ve framed the most important people in this debate fully out of the conversation. Granted, maybe some victims of manipulation aren’t aware they’re being manipulated until after – heck, some people can be made to feel like they were manipulated after the fact when in reality, they were just in conflict and were able to claw some well-needed power away by playing to a phenomenon of blame (Conflict is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman – amazing book). But on a whole, the reason we’re here is to ensure people are feeling okay in their own relationships, right? Like, that is the most clear, simple reason this debate is even happening. We want people to feel secure, wanted, happy, good, and unmanipulated. That’s why this debate exists. Are we… solving that, through what we do, at all? I’ll repeat it one last time: who are we helping? Because we should always be helping those who need it the most, and that begins with listening and understanding – yes, even listening and understanding to the creeps and what they themselves have to say. Both to be sure of who is a creep versus those who took extra care and just looked at first glance like creeps, and to identify patterns of behavior so we can educate people unaware of this dynamic, phase accidental manipulation out and prevent future creeps from even becoming creeps. We have gotten to a point where we teach basic consent in sex ed (sometimes), and we can do it here too. That’s the next step. Education, and raising the age of consent. That’s the solution, and I think it’s telling that these two things are never – in my experience – potential solutions puritans or creeps suggest or want to implement. The solution is in front of us, but it requires nuance and empathy, something both of these groups lack and want others to lack. I’ll talk to you all soon.

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