The Real Target of Pedophile Hysteria Is Age Gap Relationships

There are costs to lying about basic biology

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two steps to a moral panic.

1. Create a consensus that X is really bad

2. Concept creep: expanding the definition of X to cover more and more behavior.

We saw this happen with racism. As long as I’ve been alive, it’s been bad to be racist in America. But over the decades, the minimum definition of racism went from something like “hating people on account of their race” to “having a private preference for one’s own group over others” to “supporting policies that have a disparate impact on a protected minority” to “not actively struggling to make yourself antiracist.”

Nobody ever wanted to be the guy to stand up and say we’re overrating the problem of racism, or that given its power we should define this word very narrowly. As a result, we got the madness of the Great Awokening throughout the 2010s, culminating in the Summer of Floyd and the events of the next year or two before things subsided and the backlash kicked in.

We see something similar happening with the concept of pedophilia. In recent days, I’ve been arguing that it is of course ridiculous to call Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile, and a lot of responses are along the lines of “you may be technically right but why die on this hill.” I’m convinced, however, that these distinctions are quite important.

Is this pedophilia?

Right now, Jeffrey Epstein allegedly having sexual contact with underage girls two decades ago is the main issue dominating Congress. While it once looked like nothing could ever break apart the MAGA coalition, Republicans have finally revolted against their leader on an issue he cares about. The idea is that having sexual relations with post-pubescent but underage girls is such a war crime that the possibility that powerful men might have known about or been involved in this is more important than health care subsidies or anything else we could possibly be debating. As Michael Tracey has pointed out, many of the Epstein accusers were well above the legal age when they met him, and the fact that nobody cares to point this out is just another sign of how irrational this entire scandal is.

There is no way to call attraction to 17-year-olds pedophilia without also stigmatizing attraction to women who are slightly older than that. We have an age of consent, and it used to be recognized that it was an arbitrary line that we have to set somewhere. But before the last decade or two, there wasn’t this idea that men whose sexual preferences did not exactly line up with the legal minimum in the jurisdiction that they happen to live in were disordered or somehow abnormal. This is a bizarre idea that is frankly inconsistent with people being able to develop realistic understandings of sex differences and human biology.

If men who are attracted to 17-year-olds are disordered, on what basis can those who like 20-year-olds be considered normal? I’ve noticed that most of the women who are mad at age gap relationships are aggressive middle age types who seem to have a deep personal interest in the issue.

Megyn Kelly, for example, has talked a lot about Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriends, expressing anger that “He’s just going to keep banging teenagers the rest of his life.” Until recently, no one thought that there was anything unusual about such a preference. Powerful and successful men were supposed to respect the age of consent laws in whatever jurisdiction they happened to be in. But there was nothing evil about their decision to prefer women who were from a biological perspective the most attractive adults they could find.

In my experience, the people who have the broadest definitions of “pedophilia,” and are outraged that men might be attracted to 17 year-olds, also do not look too kindly upon older men who date 20-year-olds either. The New York Times is trying to stir up a storm over the fact that the age of consent in Massachusetts is only 16. Yet if we imagine a world in which every state sets the age at 18, what exactly prevents people from starting to call for it to be raised even higher? After all, we don’t let kids drink until they’re 21. Is having a beer a more consequential decision than having sex? Before long, college kids will be considered victims of pedophilia.

This has already happened to some extent culturally, as we can see in a recent story in which a group of young people were arrested for setting up a “pedophile sting” in which the supposed victim said she was of age in the state they were in. Read this story, which sounds like it comes out of an alternative universe.

A report filed by campus police said a 22-year-old active-duty military service member connected with a woman on Tinder in October and was invited inside a basement lounge. Within minutes, “a group of people came out of nowhere and started calling him a pedophile,” accusing him of wanting sex with 17-year-old girls, according to the report.

The man told police that he broke free and was chased by at least 25 people to his car, where he was punched in the head and his car door was slammed on him before he managed to flee.

Campus surveillance video shows a large group of students, including the woman, “all with their cellphones out in what seems to be a recording of the whole episode,” the police statement said. They are seen “laughing and high fiving with each other” in what appeared to be “a deliberately staged event,” and there was no evidence to indicate the man was seeking sexual relations with girls, the police report said…

Todd said a review of the conversation on the Tinder app shows the woman says she is 17, soon to turn 18. The man says “that’s fine, you’re in college.”

Recently, six law enforcement agencies in Minnesota came together and carried out an operation that resulted in 16 men being arrested for talking to a non-existent 17-year-old online. The Bloomington Police Chief had a press conference in which he showed the men’s pictures and played “I’m a Creep” by Radiohead. There’s obviously a deep desire here to grandstand on this issue and publicly humiliate alleged perverts. Law enforcement in this case went as old as they could go to create criminal charges, and one might question whether this is the best use of government resources, and also whether pedophilia is a major problem if you needed the imaginary victim to pose as seventeen in order to find enough people to arrest.

It’s true that, as far as I know, no serious person has advocated raising the age of consent to 21. But if we’re going to worry about slippery slopes, I think in twenty years it is much more likely that we’ll raise the age of consent across the country than lower it. I’ve heard people say that there is no downside to keeping the stigma on having sexual relations with minor strong, so there’s no need to quibble over the exact definition of pedophilia. But I don’t think there’s any norm that is less likely to be deconstructed than the cultural taboo against sex with people who are underage. If you’re worried about this being normalized, you can rest easy. We’re absolutely hysterical about this issue, and so desperate for pedophiles to hang that Jeffrey Epstein’s massages dominate our politics twenty years after they happened. There’s already a great deal of anger at age gap relationships, and what people get mad at today sometimes becomes illegal tomorrow.

Even if we don’t ban age gap relationships between adults – and I don’t think it’s likely – the taboo itself poses its own harms. I’m of the position that the drop in fertility is a serious societal crisis, which means that stigmatizing relationships that can lead to procreation is the last thing we should be doing. It is strange to consider a man who is 50 years old a better person if he dates women his own age rather than 20-year-olds. Even if he doesn’t want kids today, the age gap relationship at least has the potential to lead to children. We might just say that adults shouldn’t judge each other’s relationships. I’m fine with that. But if we have to stigmatize something, it’s better to be hostile to attraction to women who are too old on the grounds that it will not lead to family formation. Maybe older men should be encouraged to suck it up and date college girls for the future of humanity, even if, as middle-aged women on social media assure us, this is something that all normal men must hate to do.

And I don’t think it would make sense to say that we should worry about older men monopolizing younger women, and leaving younger men without partners. Young people are becoming much less likely to form relationships with anyone. A woman who wants to get married in her early twenties might rationally believe that it makes more sense to pair up with a man in his thirties or forties who has established his place in the world than someone her own age who might turn out to be a dud. This could be bad for young men in the short run, but it will also give them an incentive to work hard knowing that there’s a real payoff in the end. The point here is that marriage and fertility are falling off a cliff, and this is the social problem we need to be thinking about, not who went to Epstein’s island in the early 2000s.

Another correlation in views I’ve noticed is that a lot of women horrified by age gap relationships and the idea that men can be attracted to 17-year-olds are also not crazy about women getting married in their twenties. They seem to believe that childhood and single life should be extended as long as possible, with everyone eventually pairing up with an age-appropriate partner, maybe leaving a half decade window to produce one or two kids if everything goes well. That’s an aesthetic preference regarding how people live their lives that I don’t believe is consistent with society producing enough children to maintain itself in anything resembling its current state.