These statements were intended to diminish the seriousness of what Ford alleged happened, but, intentionally or not, they also diminish a whole category of humans: teenagers. And many teenagers, as they themselves are proud to report, have a sophisticated, nuanced understanding of sex and consent—one that invalidates the low expectations that so many adults appear to have of them.

As they’ve watched the week’s news unfold, some of them have gotten frustrated. “They just keep saying ‘He was in high school—boys will be boys,’” says Maurielle, a 17-year-old from Houston. “But I’m in high school—I don’t want that to happen to me.” She went on, “It feels alienating reading what's happening, because they’re blaming so much on the fact that they were in high school and they were young.” Julianna, a 17-year-old from outside of Pittsburgh, said she also rejected what she called “the whole ‘But maybe they didn’t know better at that age’ argument.” (I am referring to Maurielle, Julianna, and the other teenagers interviewed for this article only by their first name, to protect their identities.)

"I feel like we have to give teens more credit for being thoughtful human beings,” Ivy Chen, a sexuality-health educator in the San Francisco Bay Area, told me. She teaches thousands of kids and teens across nearly 50 schools each year, and says that her students are “really receptive” to and “up to the task” of conversations about sexual consent.

I talked with several teenagers from around this country this week about the accusations made against Kavanaugh, and their stances on sexual consent were very well thought-out. For example, Julianna, from outside of Pittsburgh, lamented that consent only comes up in conversation when it has been violated. “There’s this unspoken, quiet knowledge between us all that consent is required and healthy and good and everything, but no one will go out of their way to discuss it unless something bad happens,” she wrote to me in an email, adding, “I personally hate that because it feels like we can and should only talk about it when a situation is deemed Bad Enough. Like consent only ‘matters’ if the situation was terrible.”

I also heard from Evan, an 18-year-old Texan who, during some sexual encounters, has “found it useful for us to briefly roleplay a situation in which I make demands and they reject me.” His reasoning: “I want to establish that they have a say in this, that I’ll listen to them, that they can tell me what to do and what not to do.” And one self-described “18-year-old girl woman person thing from a super traditional Persian-Jewish immigrant community” told me in an email that “I have never slept with (or even kissed!) a guy, but when I do, there won’t be any gray area about it— everybody in the tri-state area will know whether or not I have consented.”