Sporadically speaking

Reading over the comments to this post on customers_suck it struck me that either commenters were confusing childhood development stages or that there’s a huge fabricated extension of childhood in the US.

The post itself was about thirteen or so year old girls being obnoxious about the fact that they were buying condoms, to the point at which, as commenters were suggesting, it smacked of being silly about the idea of sex rather than purchasing protection for actual usage. But what was really interesting were the comments that other people had been still playing with Barbies and Ninja Turtles at the age and hadn’t at all been interested in the idea of sexual relations at all. At a first glance I hadn’t really formed an opinion on the matter until it occurred to me that thirteen is about the right age for individuals to begin to show an interest in the idea of sex and intimate relationships in general.

Eleven is that transition period, the first year of high school where individuals may still very well be playing with toys while beginning to develop an interest in other things. This is the transitional age between complete childhood and the move towards adult responsibilities even if all those responsibilities mean at the time are things like making sure that you get the bus in time for school or remembering to pack the right textbooks for the day. It’s a start which is why school sex education tends to occur around that time too, not that anybody would necessarily remember much of it beyond there being a variety available. I certainly didn’t take away any knowledge of what an IDU was from my sex education classes but at least I knew it existed. Of course it depends on the individual and in my case it was just an academic exercise but the information is out there so that while most of my peers felt the same way there may have been individuals to whom this was pertinent information at the time. The information was there, readily available and that was that.

Two years later on the other hand some of that academic knowledge might well have become useful to individuals as an interest in sexual relations developed. Around thirteen is about the right age for it where individuals start showing an interest and though they might be stopping short of actually experimenting, if they did, they’d know how to go about it with a certain degree of safety. Thirteen is the middle of high school after all, just three years away from legally being able to leave the education system and start work, though there are government plans to change that and at least insist that some kind of educational training must occur until eighteen. Sixteen is also the age where you can legally have sex without the danger of your partner being charged with statutory rape so it’s not at all unfitting that there’s technically a reasonable three year gap between the onset of interest and legally being able to.

Sixteen also used to be the age at which you could legally buy cigarettes, though that’s since been raised to eighteen which keeps in on par with alcohol and these days the shops encourage the idea that if you are under twenty-five you may be IDed buying these things anyway. Granted, that last law has produced some hilarious consequences for a friend who, only two years younger than myself, is constantly IDed when she buys cigarettes but that might at least be in part due to the fact that the average Caucasian always seems to have trouble estimating the age of an Oriental. And though the law may have been changed by now I do recall sixteen being the age at which you could legally marry with parental consent, though at eighteen you could marry without it.

Thirteen then is a reasonable age for individuals to be developing an interest because the beginnings of that transition between adult and child have already begun two years earlier and will complete itself in only a scant six or seven years later as far as the legal system is concerned.