Should the legal age for sex be raised to 30?
Full disclosure on a personal level. I’m 30 and in some ways I do not believe that I am old enough to have sex. I’m a late bloomer socially I have always believed and I feel like I have not seen enough of the world and have a true understanding of the consequences of my actions to be having sex.
The key word there is consequences. Sex can be used as a tool for abuse, as I have seen. but it can also can be a loving way to spend an evening, which I have not seen. There are however wider ranging consequences to “the morning glow”
Lets examine those consequences.
1. Pregnancy, and that has wide ranging consequences in and of itself. Swollen feet, nausea, back pain, tiredness as well as pregnancy diabetes, higher blood pressure, pressure on your kidneys, hormonal imbalance to name a few. Then there is birth, if you are lucky enough to have a natural birth then “all that happens is you are in incredible pain for hours whilst you push a baby into the world” Lets not forget that your body needs to dilate a hole from a few mm diameter to 10cm to allow the pushing even to begin. But lets just hope there are no medical procedures involved, e.g. cutting you “down there” to facilitate, or forceps or inducement, or C-section as in actual surgery. All these are medical procedures where the pain and soreness far outlasts the “15 minutes of fun” you barely remember having 10 months ago. Then lets not forget the bill that is on a financial level £200,000. On an emotional level its just as expensive, if not more so to raise a child.
2. STD’s can live with you for the rest of your life, the most famous is of course HIV/AIDS which can kill you, but there are a whole range of nasties that a casual encounter can give you. To that, I can only encourage either abstinence if you feel empowered to do so until you are in the correct committed relationship as well as regular testing.
3. Miscarriage/abortion. Horrendous things that happen to women or that they have to chose for themselves, the decision to do so lives with them for the rest of their lives. The “what if?” the child I lost was the child to cure cancer? Amongst other things.
4. Sexual abuse. Didn’t know this particular one until it happened to me, when you open yourself up to sex, you open yourself up to sexual abuse. I will not go into details however giving someone the power to make love to you also gives them the power to hurt you in a unique way. You do feel dirty and unclean that someone who “doesn’t look like a rapist” has the power to hurt and abuse you. It will take a long time to get that faith back.
5. I’m sure there are more, however like I said, I don’t know enough about the world to comment.
So these lets say 5 consequences can result from “15 minutes of fun” (highly unlikely to be 15 full minutes but that’s personal experience talking.) Providing you love the child you give birth to, then that makes it worth consequence 1. However 2-5 there are only downsides.
Even as I write this I know that I’m not old enough and most importantly emotionally mature enough to comprehend fully the consequence of my actions. Would I be able to stop my selfish lifestyle because there’s now a child growing inside me? Hopefully. Would I be able to take pills to keep an STI at bay? Probably not I’m awful with medication. I pray that never happens to me. But I’m 30, if I don’t feel ready to appreciate the good with the bad, why do we have 16 year olds having sex?
The reason is biology. You have for the most part completed puberty if you are a girl by 16. No more growing honey, unless its sideways and that’s facts. Your pheromones have kicked in and you are technically sexually available. For men its much later. Hence why even though Bar Mitzvah’s happen when a boy is 13ish men in the bible didn’t tend to marry until 28 take Joseph and Mary for example. Very creepy relationship from a modern perspective. She was maybe 12 and he was late 20’s. And after Jesus was born, he’d have gotten her pregnant “the natural way” as we know Jesus had mortal siblings. Because she was technically ready to “Mate” however we are not animals and society is so complex now it is more important than ever that we are mentally ready to have a child before we do so. So we need to be adults, and the adult in any other situation considers all possibilities and weighs up risk and reward. However when it comes to sex, we don’t do that, we allow people to be “caught in the heat of passion” and other such nonsense for “I let a hopefully 6 inch part of my anatomy with no grey matter do my thinking” or for women “I let nerve endings not even the size of my pinkie fingernail do the thinking” well done idiots, and we wonder why society is messed up. Let the grey matter do the thinking and you will soon find that sensible decisions are made. It’s a lot less fun, people would only have sex if they were emotionally stable and in a committed relationship but we’d have hopefully more stable families and a lot less traumatised people. I’m not saying sex isn’t good. I may not have experienced it personally however I know enough that if the other 7 Billion people on earth are raving about it and constantly trying to get it, then it must be, in the right circumstances good. However what I am saying is that sex needs to be worth it. Worth the risk, worth the trauma in some cases and worth the emotional upset. I don’t think we think to deeply on the cost benefit analysis and I think we should.
Grace and Courage.
Annetta Mother-Smith.