1. You want to criminalize sex

A: Not at all, I only wish to protect young people from being taken advantage of.

2. I had sex as a teenager and I was fine

A: I am sure many drunk people have driven home fine many times, but we still don’t allow it.

3: Why are you comparing teenagers to drunks?

A: New research into brain development shows that the human brain does not finish development until the age of 24

4: Are you saying I was drunk every day until I was 24?

A: No, not at all, I just use the impairment of alcohol as an analogy to the impairment of an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex.

5: I never felt like my judgement was impaired when I was a teenager.

A: That is because your judgement was impaired, so you were unable to realize your judgement was impaired.

6. Not everyone develops at the same rate, maybe I was someone who developed many years before the age of 24?

A: This is true, people do develop at slightly different rates, we just know that for the vast majority of people finish development at 24. If you are someone who does feel more developed, you can always give informed consent for sex after getting an evaluation by a mental health professional.

7. What do you mean by informed consent?

A: I borrow the term informed consent from the medical field, but I think it applies well to the idea of sexual consent. Even thought most states have the age of consent between 14 and 18, we know that a person’s brain has not fully developed until the age of 24. This is just like asking a patient to agree to a procedure without explaining it to them first and making sure they understand. It is not enough to just simply give a patient a paper to sign and that’s it. Doctors are legally required to make sure you understand what you are consenting to. I believe that sexual consent should be no different. A person should fully understand what they are getting into before they have sex, and since we already established that a person’s judgement is impaired before the brain finishes developing, that it only logically follows that the age of sexual consent should be raised to 24.

8: You convinced me, how can I help?

A: Please contact your representative at http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/ and tell them you want the age of sexual consent raised to 24 and point them to this blog. We can do this, but we need your help.