My aunt married my uncle when she was fifteen, and they stayed married until he died fifty years later. She wasn’t pregnant by the way and grand dad wasn’t standing there with a shotgun. I think fifteen is way too early to get married, but that was common in the old days. When a girl filled out and was physically able to bear children, she was old enough to marry. These days people wait until they are older to get married. But they mature physically just as early as they used to, if not sooner.
I’ve heard a lot of people argue that girls are filling out a lot earlier these days because of all the growth hormones and whatnot in meat these days. That may be true. My eleven year old daughter is frighteningly developed. By the time she finished the fifth grade she was more developed in the chest area than a lot of full grown women. Now she’s going into junior high and I’m always catching guys staring at her. Like her a lot of girls are starting their periods in the fourth or fifth grade. The scary thing for me of course is that I know that when kids go through puberty they tend to start thinking about sex, a lot. I don’t think girls do as much as boys when they go through puberty, but I do know how much boys tend to think about sex at that time in their lives and if girls think about it even 25% as much as boys do that’s way too much.
Kids these days are probably developing earlier than kids did in the old days, and they’re waiting longer than ever to get married. It is inevitable that a lot of them will end up having sex before they get married. We want to try to keep them from having sex before they get married, but we are fighting against human nature here. They are physically mature enough at an early age to get a great deal of enjoyment out of sex, and we’re demanding that they wait ten years, often more than that, before they start having sex. Most aren’t getting married these days until they are in their mid twenties. A lot of them, most probably, aren’t going to be able to make it that long. Certainly a big part of it is because of all the sexuality in popular culture, but you can’t discount the power of raging hormones, human nature, in all of this.
I don’t think we should start letting kids have sex earlier or anything like that. We should discourage it. We should try to keep them out of situations where it is likely to happen. We should punish them if we find out they are doing it, etc. But should we treat them like axe murderers if they let their hormones get the best of them? Should we put them in prison and make them register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives if they have consensual sex with someone around their same age?
I don’t know what happened in the case that is the subject of this article. It sounds like a pretty creepy party and maybe there was some nonconsensual sex going on. But the thing is, the way that law was before it changed, even plain old boyfriend-girlfriend sex between teens when one was under the age of sixteen (or both it looks like from reading the old statute) was a felony, one that would require sex offender registration. I’m glad to see that changed.
If people are getting married 15 years later and then needing fertility treatments to bear children in their later 30s and 40s, blame those who altered the culture.
Pre-marital sex may become commonplace in that sort of society but the anti-abstinence movement doesn’t see any reason to hold virginity through high school as any kind of virtue. Trade sex partners as you would Myspace friends. “Find out what you like”.
Hormones aren’t raging any harder in the human world.
And if we are going to count “close” as an excuse for breaking the law, should this teacher walk?Teacher Arrested for Sex With Student
a 29-year-old teacher Tuesday who was allegedly having sexual intercourse with a 17-year-old New Cuyama High School student...[ snip ]
School administrators became suspicious of an inappropriate relationship over the past several months after frequent visits to her classroom by male students, finding photos of the victim in Camp’s desk, and greeting cards from the victim “expressing his love for her,” according to Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Erik Raney. After investigating, and recovering emails between Camp and the teenager “alluding to a consensual sexual relationship between them,” according to Raney, detectives obtained a warrant and arrested Camp at Valarie House.