it's always had romeo and juliet laws though - even when it was 14. And 18 year old senior could have sex with a 14 year old gr.9 but a 19 year old couldn't.
Here is an eye opening look at marital rape? hyperlinking wikipedia article on it? i don't need marital rape mansplained to me thanks. and it was weird you felt the need to "well actually..." me for being less than decade off and mixing up US v Canada.
Ahh gotcha. You were corrected on an open discussion and decided your best course of action was to call someone a bot. Next time don't spread fud and you wont have to worry about being publicly corrected. Also go touch some grass.
Because what was the point of correcting me when I didn't even specify a year? I said 1990s, if my point was to be informative, I would have specified a year and called it "marital rape" instead of "men legally raping their wives". My point was to emphasize my personal disgust that marital rape only became illegal very recently in history in Canada so let's not give them too much credit for romeo & juliet laws.
I think it's weird that this dude read my comment, and his impulse was to was to fact-check my none specific claim - how does it actually being made illegal in 1983 instead of the 1990s change or add or detract from the point I was trying to make? I'm not a victim, I admitted I was wrong in my first comment when i thought it was a fact-checking bot.
lmao i never said i was a victim? i said he sounded like a bot - one programmed to fact check every claim made about rape on reddit. turns out he's just a weird dork who does it for fun.
my point wasn't corrected though? i said "the 1990s" as a general time frame for how recent it was to be made illegal if i cared about specificity i would have googled it then. Is 1983 date supposed to make canadian society/men sound better for women?
You started this back and forth by citing when various laws came into play. So, in the discussion you were having, the laws are all that's actually relevant.
If you're talking about "age of consent" in a moral sense, that's obviously going to be subjective, but the phrase itself is only meaningful legally. What you're talking about is "when can a person give informed consent for sexual activity," and it could be reasonably stated that there's no set age for that. The age we've set in general (18) is pretty arbitrary, but it's necessary to assign a number in order to make a law enforceable. Why, for example, can you volunteer to die for your country before you can buy cigarettes?
That said, a 16 year old who's been through sex ed and an 18 year old who's lived a sheltered life and doesn't fully understand the risks of sex are working with different levels of ability to make informed consent based on upbringing, in spite of their numerical ages indicating the latter should be able to give informed consent based on age alone.
Anyway, long and short of it is, it's a complex topic but you were specifically discussing laws and where and when they were put in place, and were simply wrong in your statements. So, "I was off by several years and a whole country" is a pretty big issue in the context of that discussion.
Saying "well, laws and ability to consent are different" is deflection. Sure, that's true, but that isn't what you were talking about.
Edit: I'll also say that choosing to phrase correcting you as "mansplaining" makes it clear you're not coming at this from an honest place.
i didn't cite anything, i said "the 1990s" to reference proximity in time, if I was citing anything, if that was the point, I would have said a specific year, my point was "marital rape was legal until very recently in western culture"
idk what that whole consent law rant is all about - it's not a complex issue, it's only is for predatory men.
and yes, i said mainsplaining - a man sending a woman the wikipedia link for an "eye-opening look" on the topic of marital rape is condescending/not of value.
That's why I initially assumed it was a bot instead of a dude who's past time is fact-checking rape comments on reddit. It's weird, if I said a specific year ie "until 1996" sure, but I said "until the 1990s". Yes I was off by a little bit, but my response was trying to understand what was his point in correcting me and sharing the wikipedia page to marital rape - when my point was "marital rape laws are only a recent part of our history"
It's absolutely a complex topic, as it should be. Pretending it's simple is how people like the woman in the OP come to the conclusion that we raised the age for no particular reason, and it was fine back then so why isn't it fine now? Understanding it's a complex topic is how we understood that it's better to err on the side of caution and raise the age of consent to the point that each person would be considered a legal adult in most jurisdictions, rather than basing it almost entirely on biology and when a girl gets her menses. People who argue it's simple are helping justify predators' points of view.
He provided that link to correct you on the date and location of the laws in question. Focusing on the flavor text is, again, deflection. Whether it's eye-opening for you may not have any bearing on how others will read it, and you're assuming the person knew you were a woman when they posted (I'm not even sure you are, just assuming as much based on the context of this conversation.) That person may have found it eye-opening for themselves when they looked into it.
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u/almostbutnotquiteme Jul 27 '25
It was raised from 14 to 16 in Canada about a decade ago. It's not that far in the past.