Whenever a 21-23-year-old is dating or is having sex with men or women. 10, 15, or 20 years older than them, people on Reddit, TikTok, and X will claim the 21-23-year-olds are automatically “victims” of abuse or “paedophilia”, but that’s just not true for the record. I think big age gaps are weird and inappropriate; however, just because a 23-year-old chose to have sex with a 50-year-old doesn’t mean that 23-year-old is a “victim”. I have a problem with people on social media (or people in general) who treat 21-, 22-, 23- or 24-year-olds who are in relationships or sexual relationships with adults much older than them as the same as adults dating minors.
First of all, actual pedophile and actual statutory rape are horrible; they’re horrible evil things, and when people compare a 33-year-old dating a 23-year-old to a 30-year-old taking advantage of a 14-15-year-old, you automatically lose the argument. A 23-year-old is an adult, and when you call a 21-23-year-old a “victim” for dating men or women older than them, you are taking away their autonomy and comparing these men and women (yes, young men and women, but still men and women) to little boys and girls. You are comparing them to children, and this is literally the opposite of freedom.
While I think it’s weird that a 21-23-year-old dating an older person is really weird and inappropriate, I can’t compare an older adult dating a 23-year-old to a literal pedo who goes after literal children; they aren’t the same. One person deserves to die, and the other doesn’t. The one dating a 23-year-old is a little weird and deserves a side eye; the other deserves to be locked up in prison forever.
Claiming 21-23-year-olds who date older people are “victims” insults actual victims who are actual victims of abuse and pedo, and when you compare a 23-year-old adult consenting to sex with an older adult to an adult r-working a child, you are basically saying that statutory (insert r-word) isn’t that bad.
A 21-23-year-old dating men in their 30s or 40s is weird and gross, but it is not the same as adults R-wording children. A 23-year-old might be young, but they are old enough to consent to this if they want, and claiming they don’t have that right is wrong. Even if their choice is weird to you, it is still their right as an adult in their 20s to do so.
Stop comparing this to a paedophile; one is very weird and gross (but the two people consenting have the right to choose to be weird and gross), the other truly evil.
Don’t you know adult women cannot make choices for themselves? They’re little babies we should protect from themselves /s
Honestly even if they are, there’s a concept of freedom, including freedom to make mistakes, and another concept of what’s natural. Most relationships are flawed one way or another, doesn’t mean we should have state officials deciding who sleeps with whom.
But in any case - when it’s about women, the real reason is usually that the one saying doesn’t want to feel competition from men much older than them, or competition to their son/nephew(-s) from men much older, or something like that. It’s usually people with fucked up ideas of relationships, who’d consider leaking woman’s one private photo as something as bad as rape and warranting murder, but who’d not consider grooming wrong at all, because the groomer is “taking care of her”, letting down a woman even unknowingly as being a bullshit person, but trying to decide for a woman as fine, and things like that. Shit that was normal in Victorian books, but isn’t anymore.
OK, I’m reminiscing on my dad too much. I once heard him talking to a therapist over a video call and starting that “I have a son your age …” (I’m autistic with BAD and, in no small part, it was kinda hard to have relationships having such a closer family) line, couldn’t help cringing so loud he shut the fuck up. The therapist apparently was cold-blooded enough that she advised him to apologize before me, LOL.
Or adult men ;)
Adult men like that live on to be big babies far into their 50s, and then become a bit smarter simply because they have less energy.