YOUTH, SEX and GENDER
July 15
VOTE on YOUTH SEX
1. In May, New Hampshire police arrested a man for statutory rape of his fiancee, because she is 15.
The mother of the girl approved their successful plans to get the girl pregnant, but social workers turned them in to cops.
In July, a 37-year-old woman in Massachusetts was arrested for raping a 13 year-old boy.
By law, a minor cannot consent to sex.
Why the age of consent should be legally lowered to 13.
1. We have too many people in prison anyway.
2. These socially approved cases of sex with teenagers are the exception, but they prove
the
existence of double standards. The prosecution of the
bio woman is the exception not the rule and cannot
succeed in breaking down gender roles within the
current context.
3. The argument that 13 year-olds don't know their
bodies is age oppression. Some adults never come
to desire sex; there should be nothing remarkable
about discovering or not discovering such
desire. No one should be traumatized one way or another;
such is religious tomfoolery.
4. Opposition is paternalist. So what if a kid
makes a mistake at age 13? Adults make them too.
Boston Globe, July 11, 1993, p. 23.
July 15
2. Sex ed under dictatorship of the proletariat
Sex education will be mandatory by age 11. Instruction will include all birth control devices and STDs.
Parents who attempt to endanger their children's health through ignorance will be forcibly repressed if necessary. The health rights of children including health education are non-negotiable.
An example of the potential death penalty for a parent would occur in the case of Christian Scientists who allow their children to die through a refusal to let the child have modern medicine. Currently, Christian Scientists allow their children to die from time to time and they are no different than parents generally who regard their children as property.
Under the dictatorship of the proletariat all efforts will be made to
publicly educate children, but in those instances
where the superstitions of adults interfere,
we will not hesitate to make examples
of some of these would be slave-owners known
as parents.
"MIM supports lowering the legal age of consent to 13. Where the legal age of consent is already lower than 13, MIM does not currently support raising it." Insert this immediately before the sentence, "Why the age of consent should be legally lowered to 13.
July 22
4. 1. In the imperialist countries and their
internal semi-colonies, age is principal over gender in
the statutory rape and adolescent sexual rights
and responsibilities issues.
July 22
5. 2. If age is principal over gender [as it was so voted--ed.], we want "adult" ideas of bourgeois consent to apply to 13 year-olds. [The vote was in increments, 16, 15, 14, 13--13 was the lowest age approved by the party majority--ed.]
July 22
VOTE:
6. Under the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat, we will
still have a sense in which children live in pre-bourgeois
social relations, unable to consent as is appropriate for
economic and sexual intercourse in the bourgeois exploiters' and
oppressors' world. For this reason, we will still have laws
specifically protecting the group of wimmin so oppressed.
We will recognize such laws as a relic of class society, but not all repressive laws can be abolished in the first stage of socialism. That can be achieved only under anarchist communism, when the species has reached a much higher level of civilization. We shall instead seek to push back the age of legal consent further and further as socialist education progresses.
July 26
VOTE
8. 1. MIM does not see a qualitative difference between any two sexual interactions so much based on how those interactions are carried out so much as what social groups are carrying out those interactions.
We see qualitative differences amongst sexual interactions
all of which are rape based on at least three categories.
1. Socially constructed men raping socially constructed men.
That is gender oppressors raping gender oppressors.
2. Gender oppressed people being raped by gender oppressors.
3. Gender oppressed people raping gender oppressed people.
9. 2. In addition to 1, if 1 passes, we will also distinguish between the social group of gender (net) oppressed people who enjoy conditions of bourgeois consent and those who exist under conditions of pre-capitalist oppression, especially children not allowed to choose their oppressors. The distinction between pre-capitalist gender relations and capitalist gender relations will be deemed qualitative.
Contact MIM by writing mim@mim.org