• shalafi@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    8
    ·
    10 hours ago

    Well, yeah, me too. I’m 54 and 30-somethings are starting to look like kids, not attractive to me, not in a sense I’d want to be close to one.

    OTOH, I was on my third partner at 17, and she was too. Lost my virginity to a 14-yo, who initiated the thing and rode her bike across town to hook up.

    My 17-gf and I weren’t happy with the whole sex thing until we hooked up. Cue 4-years of fucking like rabbits, nothing off the table.

    So I have a hard time calling the 15-17 crowd “children”. I feel it demeans them, infantilizes them.

    • qarbone@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      25 minutes ago

      I can almost almost see what you mean but I don’t see how litigating specific wordings for sexually-explorative children helps anything. How does pushing for “teen” help in any regard beyond “feeling better”? As I understand it, all you’re saying is “don’t call them children because it sounds weird when I think about ‘children’ and ‘having sex’,” which…yeah, good! That’s a normal reaction and it’d be weirder if you didn’t.

      Leave the kids to explore their own sexuality, safely and with their age-mates, without trying to convert them into “teens”: some nebulous border-age where it’s comfortable and “normal” for adults to think about them as sexual beings and, more often than not, sexualize them.