Living in a poor country is quite eye-opening. Hygiene is hit-and-miss; you will regularly encounter poor food handling, along with no running water in places that really ought to have it. Even locals get sick quite often, but it's just something that happens, like catching a cold. Electrical safety is alarming; exposed wiring and outlets that spark in buildings with no grounding are common. Most aspects of daily life are essentially a step away from disaster, and yet... absolute disaster rarely happens. If you want to drive yourself insane, you can try to predict bad outcomes as much as you like, but you'll be in a constant state of nightmare simulation. And in spite of all that, something completely unexpected will get you, to which a recent minor injury of mine will attest. Wherever you are in the world, and regardless of what you do, bad things will always happen no matter how many cautious steps you take. That's why tragedies occur even in the most risk-averse developed nations, the ones that terrify themselves with silly trivialities.

Prior to his imprisonment, fellow MAP activist Fragment posed a question of which I am now reminded. He asked what percentage risk of a negative reaction would be tolerable for AMSC to be deemed acceptable. An initial response from those who have not thought very much about it would be a resounding "zero!" That is, if there is any risk to the young person, it's a firm no. But even consensual adult-adult encounters do not come with zero risk. And the inevitable retort, that at least adults know what they're doing, is probably very optimistic in terms of how it treats young adults, as well as pessimistic in its implied cynical judgment of the competencies of younger people. Ultimately, if the risk of harm needed to be "zero" for sexual contact to be legal, sex would have to be a crime even for consenting adults, and nobody would ever legally have sex... not even evangelical Christians doing missionary with the lights turned off!

In 2022, Bruce Rind - yes, that Rind - conducted a study in which he analyzed the reflections of adults who had engaged in sexual contact with others as minors. This included both minor-minor sexual contact and adult-minor sexual contact. There were many variables in play, and I am not going to be crunching them all in this Short Take. The key takeaway for the purpose of this discussion is that no sexual contact is risk-free, including minor-minor contact that is de-facto legal in many jurisdictions that would happily burn MAPs at the stake.

The numbers do indicate very clearly that sexual contact between an adult woman and teen boy is very unlikely to lead to negative reactions, which should be a surprise to no-one. There were other non-surprises; sex initiated by a young adolescent boy, with an adult male as the partner, was less likely to lead to negative outcomes than other forms of man-boy sexual contact. It's almost as if sexual experimentation is something that boys of that age do naturally! Essentially, the more contrary to standard youthful desire - and with a smattering of secondary effects likely rearing their ugly head - the greater the statistical risk of harm.

So what level of risk is acceptable? If adult-adult and minor-minor contact has a non-zero risk of harm, the answer cannot be zero in the case of AMSC. Even outside of the remit of sexual risk, one can point to a plethora of human actions in which things have gone terribly wrong but usually haven't. And yet, we don't ban garage springs, washing fruit with tap water in developing countries, or jogging without clearance from a cardiologist. That kind of world would be an unrelenting nightmare! If being over the age of eighteen (or whatever the local age of consent is) doesn't wave a magic wand of sexual enlightenment - and evidence clearly indicates that it does not - there comes a point at which one must say that sex happens; just prohibit the cases where it is not mutually wanted. Of course, "sex with a person under (arbitrary age) is rape" is essentially a codified meme at this point, invented by the very same species that burned witches, gassed Jews, and constantly exploits other silly human emotions for profit. Logic won't easily get around that, but by dealing with these issues logically, and still failing to persuade, at least we can shine a light on what the prohibition of AMSC really is.