Sometimes an argument tells you more about the man making it than the subject he claims to be discussing.
“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.”
— Carl Jung
“Chronologically I know you’re young,
but when you kissed me in the club you bit my tongue.”
— Loudon Wainwright III, “Motel Blues”
Note: In On the Safe Space (aka Corner Girl), I wrote about the interior rooms we protect — the places where selfhood gets built without interruption or performance. This piece is about the larger boundary: the one society owes to the developing self.
Opening
Alan Dershowitz has a way of wandering into arguments that look like legal questions but are really psychological ones. Back in 1997, he argued that statutory-rape laws were “an outdated concept,” a position he has never meaningfully walked back. It wasn’t a constitutional insight then, and it isn’t one now — it’s an ethical fog of his own making, clever on the surface, a little out of control underneath, and surprisingly indifferent to the actual developmental reality of adolescence. I’m not a lawmaker, and I’m not pretending to be one. I’m simply an adult who has spent decades in and around schools all over the world, watching young people grow into themselves — slowly, unevenly, beautifully. And from where I stand, there’s nothing arbitrary about protecting the forming self from the fantasies of adults who should know better.
Thesis
Bodily autonomy begins with the smallest choices — what you eat, what you refuse, what you allow into your system. Anyone who has ever fought for control over diet, appetite, or health knows that dignity is never abstract. It lives in the body first. Food, sleep, sex, presence, touch — these aren’t lifestyle accessories. They are the basic architecture of selfhood.
And that’s why autonomy matters.
Not as a slogan.
Not as a political hashtag.
But as the ground of being human.
People like Dershowitz talk about age-of-consent laws as if they’re philosophical puzzles, as if desire and authority rise from the same level floor. But bodily autonomy doesn’t work that way. It has requirements. Preconditions. A forming self needs time, scaffolding, protection — the freedom to grow into decisions that will define a lifetime.
Bodily autonomy is the core of human dignity.
And dignity requires a federal age of consent set at 18 — with room for close-in-age relationships, but no room for adult fantasies about adolescent equality.
Ethical Architecture
Autonomy isn’t a mood or a vibe. It’s a developmental achievement — the slow process of learning to inhabit your own body without needing permission, without coercion, without fear. Emotional regulation, impulse control, identity formation, consequence mapping — none of that arrives early.
I learned that early with food. When I was fourteen, I wanted to become a vegetarian. My mother didn’t approve, and at one point tried to enlist a doctor to shut it down. Decades later, it’s still not funny to me. It was my first glimpse of how threatened adults can feel by a young person’s bodily autonomy — even when the stakes are seemingly mild.
If this is true about diet, something reversible and lower-stakes, it is infinitely truer about sex, where the stakes shape a lifetime. This is why age-of-consent laws exist: not to police sexuality, but to protect the dignity of someone whose selfhood is still under construction.
Psychological Layer
Adults love to project adulthood backward — to imagine that adolescents are simply smaller, louder grown-ups. But when an adult looks at a teenager and sees “maturity,” they are seeing their own desire reflected back at them. It’s projection disguised as equality.
And that’s the shadow: the part of the adult that refuses responsibility.
When an adult insists “adolescents know what they want,” what they’re really saying is:
“I want them to know what I want.”
Desire is real.
But consent requires architecture.
Adolescents feel everything — intensity, longing, hunger, embarrassment — but they don’t yet have the scaffolding that turns feelings into sustainable decisions. They’re still learning how to hold their boundary, which means adults must hold it for them.
Layer on top of that the baked-in authority of adults — teachers, coaches, mentors, older partners — and it becomes obvious that any adolescent “yes” is distorted by fear, approval-seeking, and conditioning. That’s not consent. It’s compliance.
The danger is never the adolescent’s feelings.
The danger is the adult’s refusal to be an adult.
Policy Layer
I’m not talking about university students and professors. That’s not my area. I work in a high school; I work with adolescents. My authority such as it is is rooted in those spaces.
And there are practical reasons for setting the line at 18 that have nothing to do with purity politics. Eighteen is already the age of legal majority — the moment a person can sign contracts, make medical decisions, join the military, lease an apartment, and carry full responsibility for their choices. Consent belongs in the same category: it requires structural independence, not just emotion.
Before 18, almost every part of life is mediated by adult authority; after 18, the power balance shifts. A federal standard removes the patchwork of loopholes and state-by-state inconsistencies that predators rely on. And for the record, I support lowering the federal drinking age to 18. I’m not arguing for innocence. I’m arguing for dignity — and dignity requires autonomy, not surveillance, and certainly not adult desire dressed up as philosophy.
Close-in-age exceptions protect real relationships. They do not protect adults who want to pretend a teenager is their peer.
Why It Matters Now
Silence used to feel like neutrality. It doesn’t anymore. I’ve been in and out of high schools around the world — Tokyo, Kyoto, Singapore, China, Southeast Asia, North America — and I’ve seen enough to know that adolescents today are more exposed than ever. More pressure, more surveillance, more chaos, more online distortion.
Adults can either disappear into clever hypotheticals, or they can show up. The world is louder now than it was in 1997. More invasive. More demanding. Adolescents have less room to breathe, to fail safely, to grow without an adult’s shadow pressing against their outline.
That’s why I’m saying this aloud.
Not because I enjoy the argument.
Because silence, at this point, feels like complicity.
Closing
At some point adulthood has to mean something. Not moralism — responsibility. Adults hold the boundary. We don’t collapse it when it’s inconvenient or reinterpret it because we prefer a clever argument. Adulthood is the willingness to carry the weight of our power without pretending it isn’t there.
Which is why Dershowitz’s old argument still bothers me. It treats adolescents like abstractions in a constitutional seminar instead of actual forming selves. And you don’t need to mention Epstein or anything else to see the flaw — you only have to hear the tone. A man brilliant enough to win a debate in his sleep, is nonetheless a little off-the-hook. Dershowitz is strangely pre-occupied with farmer’s market battles, and often more enchanted by the elegance of the puzzle than the dignity of the child.
But here’s the thing:
I’m not coming for art.
I like Loudon Wainwright. I love “White Winos.” I like “Motel Blues,” even with its sideways energy. Songs are allowed to be messy. Human desire is allowed to be messy. And if the girl in the song is legal and in the club, then that’s that. Adults can make mistakes, write about them, sing about them, and turn them into something worth listening to. That’s art’s job.
But real life is different.
Real life has a boundary.
The line between adolescence and adulthood isn’t drawn to stifle desire.
It’s drawn to protect dignity — the child’s dignity, yes, but also the adult’s. A clean boundary keeps everyone honest. It keeps projection from rewriting the story. It keeps the shadow in check. It keeps the music in the music, not in the courtroom.
A federal age of consent at 18 is not about purity or panic.
It’s about clarity.
And clarity is what lets adulthood do its actual work.
Because the truth is simple:
I can enjoy Loudon’s songs, raise an eyebrow at his more questionable moments, and still believe absolutely in a boundary that protects adolescents until they’re ready to stand on the same ground as the adults around them.
Art can be blurry.
Ethics can’t.
And adulthood — the real kind — knows the difference.
Dedication
For the forming selves,
and for the adults who finally decided to act like adults.
