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If sex with a minor is statutory rape, then it is, because of a reason or reasons. I would imagine one of those reasons is that we all agree a minor cannot be responsible for certain decisions, therefore the fact that the boy may have 'consented' is irrelivent and my emphasis on that point is not misplaced, maybe misunderstood.

Yes, with a minor statutory rape, regardless of consent, the issue is the penalties for men vs women are different (or at least sometimes seem to be applied differently) even if the crimes are identical.

with all respect, I guess I've just never seen the public policy you continue to refer to anywhere, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, of course, but I do keep up on current events, politics and the like... The statutory rape issue is an example - are you saying that in this example there is a public policy that women and men will be punished differently? Is it codified into law somewhere?

Consent isn't an issue in statutory rape - any emphasis on that is misplaced.

The public policy concern I refer to is the general concern that female sexuality is to be more protected than male sexuality. One reason, as I said, is that women bear a burden from sexual relations that men don't: pregnancy.

Another reason to value female sexuality more than male sexuality is that females are more necessary than males to create future generations. One man may be able to get dozens of women pregnant in a month, for example, and repeat that process the following month. Once a woman gets pregnant, she can't get pregnant again until after the child is brought to term 9 months later.

There are other reasons, I'm sure.

This isn't a matter of codification since laws reflect and advance public policy but don't codify the policies themselves.

In this case, since our culture values preserving female sexuality more than male sexuality, it punishes violations of female sexuality more harshly than violations of male sexuality. As I said several times already, that's not different punishment for the same thing, but different punishments for different things.