Tumblr @literallyaflame
not to hop in on the Hottest Discourse but:

age gaps aren’t inherently bad between adults, but they are incredibly suspect in instances where one party has significantly more agency and experience due to their age. a thirty year old dating a forty year old, for instance, isn’t all that big a deal. but an eighteen year old should be VERY suspicious of a thirty year old wanting to get with them. they’ve had twelve years to establish themselves as an adult. an eighteen year old has had maybe a few months to do so.

i’m saying this as a person who briefly dated a thirty year old at age 19 (it wasn’t good lol), and also as a person with happily married parents who have a 12 year age gap. the difference is that my mom was in her thirties when she met my dad; she’d had plenty of time to find a career and a name for herself in the world.

stay safe, love urself, try to make good decisions but don’t beat yourself up if you’ve ever been the victim of an unbalanced or abusive relationship

Tumblr @brujahinaskirt
I need yall to understand that healthy 30 year olds look at 19-year-olds and see kids. Not in a demeaning way – but in a way that automatically removes that 19-year-old from romantic consideration. And even if you “look very mature for your age,” a healthy 30 year old will learn you are 19 and back out of that crush at 90 mph no matter how good your contour game is.

Source

For consent, power matters a lot, and having years-more of adult, autonomous experience over another person — and likely the privileges of autonomy that experience brings — is a critical form of power.

This is why, below a certain age, we talk about assent but not consent. It’s why older people who care about these things know how to swerve much younger people even if they’re initially attracted to them, just like responsible sober people swerve someone when they realize that person is drunk or is going through a mental health crisis.

It’s not about what the law says or a person can expect to get away with; it’s about recognizing that power imbalances change what a relationship can be, precluding the sort that involve peers.

This all extends to lots of other areas: a supervisor, a landlord, a teacher, wealth; but because of the way our society is structured at present, age tends to correlate heavily with a lot of these other dynamics in addition to just having practice manipulating others.

The liminal space of adolescence is not matched by the law with its sudden divisions of “adulthood”, and the fact that the law justifies some abominable thing should mean nothing to anyone who doesn’t worship the state.