In article <1992Jan5.080021....@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu> jaro...@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu (DE Robertson james an 301-740-9172) writes:

The big social question here is: "When and under what conditions are
people capable of giving their consent?" This is a really good question,
it is hard to argue that say seven year olds are capable of giving their
consent. It is also hard to imagine that anything other than an overblown
sense of parental protectiveness, can be used to claim that someone's
16 or 17 year old son or daughter is "really a child" and has to be kept
close watch over. There is some base for this legally as in most states
the age of consent is 16. There are some incredibly immature individuals
that this would not apply to, but it would be rare. My sort of perverse
method of establishing age of consent is to find the lowest age anyone
has been prosecuted as an adult and set the age of consent there. That
I suspect would make it about 14. If someone is going to perform legal
magic and say: "Well you really acted as an adult, you knew or should
have known what you were doing..." then it seems only fair to let people
decide at least what they do with their bodies themselves. Just as an
issue of human freedom.

The same with the concept of consent in other areas. It is easy to say
someone is compromised if someone has fed them 500ml of 100 proof vodka,
but it is much more difficult if someone has had one beer. All of this
is what makes certain areas such emotional mine fields that people have
to navigate around in. In some cases it does seem that people want really
stringent definitions of things enforced not out of care for other humans,
but because they want to promote a secret anti-sex agenda. And of course
the further it is from the most vanilla heterosexuality, it is odd that
the clamour does up, as if mere distance from "vanillaness" somehow caused
the behavoir to become bad in magic prima facie manner.

Now there is the reasonable desire of parents to protect their children
from some of the more dangerous things in the world, but one sometimes
call a spade a spade, and not a club or a diamond, and say, that some
protectiveness emenates not from a desire to protect but from a desire
to control. Many people come to conclusions that are different than those
of their parents. This is not to say that parents don't often have
valuable things to teach their children. In addition, though it is hard
not to see that sometimes what is happening is grasping after the straws    
of control as they slip away. a

I remember tales of one set of parents who came home to find their
17 year old daughter on top of her boyfriend "having too much fun"
and they were a little dismayed, but crept quietly down into the den away
from the action. When asked later by fellow parents why they didn't
stop the events they replied: "What were we going to say? What are
you letting our daughter do to you??!"

                        Thanks and Be Seeing You,
                              Sends Steve

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