A 14 year old boy recently posted on a forum about how everyone feels about the line drawn for friendships between adults and children. His original post was:
People say there should be a line drawn when it comes to kids being friends with adults. Let’s just get something straight shall we. Age is there to say how long someone has been alive for, what age someone dies and also for legal reasons such as cigarettes, alcohol, weapons, and what age people can do stuff such as work, join the army, participate in sexual activity, and so on. Age is not there to divide people for example to say whether or not adults and kids can be friends, best friends, close friends or whatever that’s not what age is there for. We are all humans on this earth and if an adult and a kid become close friends or best friends and like to hang out then as long as it is not effecting the kid or anyone else in a bad way then it shouldn’t matter.
Another thing is when a teenage girl hangs out with an adult man people shouldn’t just automatically assume the girl is going to be raped or something or they are going to fall in love, run away together or have sex because sometimes teenage girls become close friends with adult men but that’s as far as it goes so don’t just assume. Another thing is if and adult man has sex with a 16 year old girls the police get the adult man into trouble and act like its rape and say that a 16 year old doesn’t know if they really want to have sex with an adult man but as far as I’m concerned a 16 year old is perfectly capable of knowing what they want unless they are drunk or drugged especially if they are able to know what they want with someone their own age so police shouldn’t just automatically see the adult as a rapist and it is unfair that they do that even when the 16 year old says she wanted it. And yes the guy could tell her to say she wanted it but that could happen with a girl at any age even adults.
Also you have to be 18 to buy cigarettes and alcohol but a lot of 16 year olds get hold of it anyway so the age should be 16.
My response was:
The line is a social construct to avoid the intricacies of individualism. The laws were created on the premise that a median will be enough for the masses. It’s not created for individuals with their own levels of maturity, objectivity and self-awareness. As time went on, people became complacent with those simplified social constructs.
In many parts of the world, people continue to make age comparisons. Many people are still shocked that a 90 year old can be with a 20 year old. They don’t look at the individuals involved. They solely look at the age difference, then announce that it’s disgusting that when that person was 70, the partner wasn’t even born yet.
Society is a dimwitted collection of complacent ideologies that try to mold everyone into its various shapes. If you do not fit in those shapes, then you are a deviant and must go through psychological therapy to ‘repair’ that damaged part of your brain. In other words, to condition you to become a part of the social machine.
Things like homosexuality and marriage equality seems like deviances because the social machine has followed a set path for a long time. Ideologies clash when communities form within the bigger social machine and want to push those ideals into being accepted by the laws of society. The USA is a prime example of this. It has a population of 319 million. There are tons of individualism, but these same individuals are trying to keep the social machine the exact same as it was back when the USA was first founded. Many people resist and would still love it if coloured people are segregated from Caucasians. Since that is not possible, they recreate what was once considered legally racist in terms of equal rights and freedoms in job and family environments, where it’s considered ‘private’ and domesticated. Therefore, the law can’t touch you there.
On that same note, people will often not relent to the idea that an adult can be friends with children. In today’s social machine, there are too many stories of pedophilia coming to light. People have become paranoid to a point where anyone 18 and above being romantically involved or just plain friends with a 17 and below is ‘disgusting’. There has been stories where a father shot a 19 year old for dating his 17 year old daughter, calling him a pedophile. There has been stories where a father beat the crap out of a guy who simply smiled at his son playing basketball. This is the social machine adjusting itself to create a ‘line’ for the masses to follow. Yet there are those like you who has blossomed out of this social machine who has recognized just how ridiculous some of these simplified ideologies are.
The bottom line unfortunately and quite evidently supported from many responses in this thread, says that the social machine will not relent so easily. It has detected your presence and has quickly countered it with an onslaught of curious adults trying to reason that your way of thinking is ‘lesser’, even if they don’t outright say it.