This post was submitted by wdf, a German reader
From the dawn of history to about a hundred years ago, women could not give consent to sex. I don’t know about the African plains, nor am I familiar with details of the laws about sex in all foreign cultures, but I’ve read different old writings, namely the Bible, ancient Greek and Nordic mythology, fairytale and legends from different countries, including Asian and African, as well as more modern novels and plays. Not everything written there is meant to be taken as an accurate description of past events, but I think that the values in those texts do represent the values of their authors. It is interesting to see how these writings, spanning several thousand years and different continents, are pretty consistent in their sexual mores: The question was not whether or not a woman wanted sex, the question was whether or not she wanted marriage. There was no consent to sex outside of marriage, nor was there rape inside marriage. And the same applied to men.
Doubtless there has always been consent to sex, both before and outside of an existing marriage; the old writings make mention of this, just as they tell of rape and false accusations of rape. These things happened, but they were considered unlawful, and if anyone got caught, he was punished, and – here’s my point – no matter how much consent there was. Consent was no justification for sex: marriage was.
By now, the system is officially changed from a system being based on marriage to a system based on consent. Consent establishes not only the legal, but also moral legitimacy of sex. Society watches over sexual purity. It did back then, and it does now. There were times when a couple that wished to rent a room together had to prove that they were married, otherwise the person who had rented them the room out was held responsible for their fornication. Which proves another thing: sleeping in the same room was considered to be consent to sex. And if that sex was unlawful, then they were prosecuted independently of what had actually happened in that room. And not only the couple, but also their landlord. Today’s society, in a similar way, watches over consent to establish the legitimacy of the sex, just as it once did over marriage, but strangely enough, entering the same bedroom at night is no proof of consent any more. After all, what would society have to watch over otherwise?
Society watching over consent as the legitimization of sex partially explains why there is so much concern over child pornography, child molestation, and other sex crimes with children: underage persons can not legally consent to sex, and therefore it is amoral. First the obligatory disclaimer: Rape, as in rape, is wrong in all moral systems that I know of. There is no excuse for it, and it has been prosecuted from the dawn of history. The old writings talk about that as well. But consensual sex between teenagers is not rape, nor are teenagers children. The only reason they have no right to choose to consent to sex is the fear that they might not understand the consequences of said choice, like the spreading of STDs, involuntary pregnancies and other problems that I will address later. Sex does not harm them physically and they are able to produce children. Whether they are able to properly take care of those children is an entirely different story, and one of the reasons they are not entitled to sex.
We don’t give children the right to consent to sex to protect them from the consequences of their own actions, and to a lesser degree, to protect the people around them. This is similar to preventing children from signing contracts, or handling firearms unsupervised. But when you look at the proceedings of justice, you don’t see that reflected. Underage people who committed no other crime than being too young for their actions are sent to prison for years and put on a database for pedophiles, essentially ruining their lives. A good amount of community work would be more appropriate, and probably enough to deter them, if they stop to think that far.
These long jail sentences come about by a double standard: either those teenagers are old enough to bear the consequences of their actions, in which case they should have the right to consent to sex, making it both legally and morally legitimate, at least by modern standards, or they are not old enough to bear the consequences of their behavior, and they should not be tried and sentenced under the terms of adults. This is not about protecting children, nor is it about prosecuting criminals: this is about hunting down sinners who committed the grave sin of illegitimate sex. That is, sex without (legally accepted) consent.
This, basically “liberal” rage is partially fueled by conservatives, who finally have an opportunity to crack down on extramarital sex, while at the same time excusing the sexual liberties the grownups in their church take, that aren’t permitted in the bible either, such as divorce, for example, or using sexual denial as a means to win the upper hand in marriage. This is similar to the apparent dichotomy between feminism and chivalry, which seems so contradictory at first, but at second glance is only another justification for the same action. But the official charge is “sex without consent,” not “sex without marriage”, so I talk about the “liberal tribunal” at the moment, although I am well aware that some of this tribunal’s seats are held by conservatives.
To further prove this is no misapplication of the law, but that it was intended to do what it does, bear with me for a moment:
Usually a person is tried and sentenced in the land he committed the crime. When somebody from Germany gets caught speeding in Switzerland, he is fined under the regulations of Switzerland, where fines are higher than in Germany. This is sensible. Maybe the fines are higher because, due to the mountains, the streets are narrower, and speeding is more dangerous than in Germany. Maybe Germans value speed higher in ratio to their safety than the Helvetians do; Germany is in fact one of the few countries in Europe that doesn’t have a general speed limit on the highways. If the Germans choose to live that way, this is one thing, but endangering lives in Switzerland is quite another. Or perhaps the fines are higher because income and prices are generally higher in Switzerland, in which case it was still everybody’s choice to go there, because they obviously thought it was worth it. You can find other examples of the same thing: women from Germany have been fined in the US for tanning topless on a public beach, which is commonplace in Germany. US citizens on the other hand are not allowed to bear arms in Germany even if they have the right to do so in their home country. The same principle persists in cases that received more media attention: Marco W., then 17, from Germany, alleged of date raping then 13 yo Charlotte M. from Britain on a holiday in Turkey, was tried in Turkey. In a similar way John Demjanjuk is being tried in Germany, because the crimes he allegedly committed were under German jurisdiction.
But this rule obviously does not apply to sex with minors in South East Asia, where western countries like the US or Germany prosecute their citizens for breaching the law of their own land. If the laws of that country were broken, then that would usually be prosecuted according to the laws of that country. Maybe punishments there are higher because premature sex is ostracized and the victim looses the prospect of marriage, and financial provision along with it. Or the age of consent is lower, because poverty makes people mature quicker. The age of consent has changed in the West, why shouldn’t it be different in other parts of the world? Or regulations are similar to ours. Then we, as the West, don’t need to make separate rules to prevent our citizens from sex we disagree with. Whichever it is, sex crimes are treated differently from other crimes. Note the fact that legislation was changed to make this even possible.
Do Muslims countries prosecute their citizens if they watch pornography abroad? That is, prosecute them according to the standards of their own country? Honestly, I don’t know. If they do, it would be logical as Islam is a religion and its adherents are expected to honor it wherever they live. In the Muslim faith it is also the obligation of the government to watch over that allegiance. So if our governments watch over our sex lives abroad as diligently, then that shows that we, too, follow a religion that obliges government to watch over the religious practice of it’s subjects. Call it liberalism, call it feminism, call it modernism; it’s a state enforced religion.
Making laws for our citizens abroad, by the way, also shows governments in third world countries that we deem them incompetent to manage their countries properly. While there is often some truth to this belief, divorce was considered a sexual offense for most of our history — even worse than prostitution. In many more remote parts of the world people still see it that way. Even countries as advanced as the US show a distinct discomfort with promiscuity. Tiger Woods didn’t do anything illegal, he wasn’t even charged with anything, and still he’s put in the stocks. In other parts of the world adultery is considered sinful and they have legal provisions to deter people from doing so. Our own governments on the other hand fail terribly to address it. As a matter of fact, I’ve never heard of a third world country publishing a guide to prostitution, but ours publish guides to divorce.
