"Hi Kids! Hiya, Hiya, Hiya!"

--From the original anarchist of the fifties. He appeared here., and was famous for causing mayhem using only the power of persuasion:

"And then you put it in your hair, you do, you do."
--Froggy the Gremiln to Chef Pasta Fazool, of spaghetti.

Of course there's no-one like him out there today. We prefer something either mindless, violent, and formulaic, or emphatically mindless, non-violent, and formulaic. This is because, deep down inside, we want our kids to be quiet, slightly simple people,who will happily stare at the box and never wonder what makes the pretty pictures.

I want an instigator! I want someone to offer kids challenges, moral quandaries without straight-arrow answers.

When was the last kids show where someone important died? Probably this one. Not co-incidentally, this film had a direct lesson for about the uses and abuses of power. But in the marketing frenzy which has since spawned at least two sequels and a pre-sequel, the message has been lost in favour of selling junk to kids.

On a related note, I recently read a badly-written and inaccurate critique of an online story in a place I occasionally visit. The person writing the critique apparently hadn't read the story, as they lambasted the author for creating a sexual relationship between a 17-year-old and a 23-year-old. In the first place, the girl was 18. In the second place--what was wrong with that anyway?

If it's okay for a 17-year-old girl to have sex with a 17-year-old guy, what difference does it make when the guy's 23? We assume there's some sort of maturity gap. That at 17 a woman can't make her own decisions about who she wants to take to bed. Yet at 18 she can?

My opinion.

Besides, there's the usual question of how to stop them. Perhaps we should move back to this time-tested method.

My point is that the so-called "age of consent" is a legal fiction. It's also biased as hell. It was designed to "protect" young women against the depradations of old men. That's fine as far as it goes. But I have yet to hear of a sixteen-year-old-boy actually objecting to sex with an older woman. Caertainly not at the time it happened.

(A dissenting view on one of those instances.)

The difference is that if the boy woke up a few days later and decided he'd been raped, there would be serious questions posed--to the boy. Whereas a girl has a better chance of being taken seriously.

Still, for this reason, it's a good idea to have a mandated age of consent. Canada seems to have a good grasp of this. The legal fiction is 14. But provisions of the criminal code make it illegal for an "adult" (somebody defined as being 18 years old) to mess with anyone in that 14-18 range. I think it's a good idea. The rule is clear: Don't ₤µ¢Ж people under 18.

But this too gives problems. When I was 19, I greatly enjoyed the company of 18-year-olds. No, of course I didn't ₤µ¢Ж any of them--to admit to that would be to admit to a criminal act, it seems. So I won't.

We need to think about a range. Is it reasonable to say that 18 year-olds shouldn't be having sex with 16-year-olds? Perhaps, but I'm not sure. Why not simply say that:

a) The age of consent is fourteen.
b) Persons more than two years older than their partner are committing a sexual offence unless both are over nineteen.

But there's an odd campaign at work to raise the age of consent. It won't do any good, and people will still have "under-age" sex. But it'll make some mother hubbards and well-meaning fools feel righteous.

Not that evangelicals are necessarily fools, but bear in mind this contradiction: Many people who support raising the age of consent oppose sex education. If this is allowed to stand, then we face generations of adults who arrive at sexual maturity unequipped to deal with the responsibilities it conveys.

In the seventies and eighties, the Fraser Valley was known as the Bible Belt. It also was one of the first places to introduce daycare into high schools. Co-incidence?

There's no age limit on prudery, nor on well-meaning idiocy. Perhaps if we offered kids more examples of difficult choices and of moral courage (even the courage to be an idiot in the face of the facts is in its own way noble) at a younger age instead of padding the corners of their world they'd make right decisions. Not "the" right decisions.

Because there often aren't any.