Because I seriously don’t think it’s morally wrong at all for a 26 year old man to have a one night stand with a really hot 18 year old woman because they’re both literally consenting adults. I’m from Calgary Alberta and in Alberta the drinking age is 18. So I don’t see anything morally wrong at all for me to have a one night stand with a really hot 18 year old woman that I met at the bar because me and her are both consenting adults and she has all the same legal rights that I have she can vote, she can join the military, she can purchase cigarettes, she can purchase alcohol, and she can buy a house.
Now when it comes to dating a 18 year old woman. Personally I don’t have any desire to date anyone at all because dating and being in romantic relationship with just doesn’t appeal to me.
But if a 26 year old man met an 18 year old woman at the bar and they both decided that they want to go on a date with eachother then I also don’t see anything morally wrong with that either because they are both consenting adults.
"I then asked whether he had insights about where the figure 25 came from, and he said roughly the same thing as Cohen: There’s consensus among neuroscientists that brain development continues into the 20s, but there’s far from any consensus about any specific age that defines the boundary between adolescence and adulthood. “I honestly don’t know why people picked 25,” he said. “It’s a nice-sounding number? It’s divisible by five?”
Kate Mills, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Oregon, was equally puzzled. “This is funny to me-I don’t know why 25,” Mills said. “We’re still not there with research to really say the brain is mature at 25, because we still don’t have a good indication of what maturity even looks like.”
https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/brain-development-25-year-old-mature-myth.html
i appreciate you posting this, i like learning more about things and i’m glad i know better now than to just assume the brain is finished developing at 25
so i did a little more reading and the following points still seem clear:
so, instead of just looking at their age, we have to look at their age gap, and ask the question, is there a disproportionate imbalance of power here?
let’s take a moment to define this: the definition i use is roughly, does one person possess more of a handful of traits than the other? these traits are: life experience, career/financial experience, social experience, and general brain development (ability to assess risk reward, understand long term consequences, ability to communicate one’s needs effectively, etc; which is informed both by growth and experience)
obviously, we can’t make a generalized comparison that will be true for every 18 year old and every 26 year old in the world. however, we can understand that, in most circumstances, the 26 year old will have more of each of these attributes in spades than the 18 year old
reversing that argument also makes this very clear: for it to be acceptable, the 26 year old needs to have a comparable maturity and reasoning level to an 18 year old, someone nearly a decade younger than them. which is why i said it’s not something i would brag about, personally. either you’re saying you’re immature as an 18 year old, or you’re saying you’re comfortable, to some degree, of engaging in intimately dangerous behavior with someone who is significantly less experienced and developed than you are (or, i suppose, very rarely, you’ve hooked up with an 18 year old who is not only pretty mature, but who’s been living on their own and supporting themselves for a while. but you didn’t include that in the parameters of the question, so i don’t think that’s what you meant)
to be clear, i understand that the current economic situation has made attaining those life experiences quite difficult, even for people in their mid twenties. however, most people who cannot attain those life experiences, are also generally not hooking up with people, because there are a number of practical barriers to entry there (financial, location, transportation, etc); i don’t think it’s something to be ashamed of! but notably, in this situation, one would be bragging about something very much not worth bragging about, either (and i would hope they were still sensitive to the idea that there are still some differences between them, robbed of the opportunities to spread their wings as an adult, and an 18 year old, who has simply not been alive long enough to do so)
invalidating the question of whether a brain is completely mature at 25 doesn’t mean that an age gap becomes acceptable because “we can’t tell”, it just means we need to apply a more nuanced standard of scrutiny to the situation
which, maybe you agree with, but i wanted to make my position in light of this new evidence very clear