theanimalawake:

While your point of “I’m not young enough to know everything” is valid in some cases, you seem to hold some idealized view of ‘the adult world’. People do not magically receive personality transplants at the age of 18, and that’s a fact, and the maturity you’re speaking of only occurs when there’s a mind capable of maturing in the first place.

The “vast majority” of everything is crud, haven’t you heard? Idealization of one category of people while disparaging the other is not an adequate picture of reality. Neither is MTV reality shows (or whatever it is that is your source of information about the majority of teenagers).

Also, as far as I know, experience is measured by genuine understanding of and interactivity with life, not by smugly reveling in your facial wrinkles. “Age is high price to pay for maturity” and all that.

I’ll cut it down to the point, there’s a biological and scientific reason, mainly because although development doesn’t end until your twenties, you’re considered capable enough and to have lived long enough to have received guidance from their parents, had enough experiences, and so on, to take care of themselves in some basis. They don’t magically get smarts at any age, but 18 is pretty fair and there for a reason. 

Look, the argument has originated from reducing feminist issues to that of ageism, and that they should shut up and stop complaining. That’s what the origins of that post was. I don’t hate kids in any serious or political form, but honestly, the rare minority that would be mature enough to survive on their own before 18 (much less post-18) are hardly enough to justify lowering the magical age of 18 for adulthood. 

Yes, I’m an angry writer and I make mistakes. You’re right on a lot of those things. Don’t get me wrong. But teenagers in America just need some years to grow up and shape up and slowly meld fully into the adult word, and that’s what those precious years from 16 (driving, getting a job)-21 (booze, which should be lowered arguably) are. 

captainjackjohnson:

jiggaboojeeves:

captainjackjohnson:

Why Misogyny Is Not As Important As Ageism…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKUZ42T9diU

Or maybe it’s because they’re fucking young, and stupid, mainly because they haven’t lived long enough to have significant experiences with the outside world to form coherent opinions and understandings. 

You’re going to look back on this post and realize exactly how dumb you sound. You’re also still a rape apologist trying to talk over women and tell them how to behave, which if you can’t see the problem with that then I don’t know what to tell you. 

Welp, just read your comment, watched your little video and reread my post and yet, strangely, all it’s made me realise is that I need to talk about this a lot more for as long as there are still ignorant fucks like you out their telling young people that it’s their fault they’re in an abusive relationship with their parents because being young makes you dumb, when being smarter than your ignorant/conservative/dumbass parents is a common problem among intelligent teenagers. Unlike in Harry Potter with the mana boost that occurs to all wizards as they enter adulthood, there is no sudden revelation that suddenly turns adults into geniuses with otherworldly knowledge that teenagers lack. Adults can be dumb and teenagers can be geniuses, and until you and the rest of society starts to realise that, I’m going to have to assume that you’re one of the dumb ones.

Wow, really? The vast majority of teenagers are dumb as shit and bitch about incessant things, like cellphones and videogames and curfews and oh god really? Yes, there are kids who need serious help and there are outlets for them through their school and social services, thanks to, believe or not, fucking socialist ideals of the government providing services to its consituents.

Harry Potter references? Mana boosts? What? What are you? Are you high? There are no sudden revelations, but that eighteen years there, is for you to grow and develop and get some handle on who you are and how to take care of yourself. It’s for their safety, more than anything else. You know how many fucking kids growing up think they’re so smart thinking they should be allowed to vote then grow up and realize how dumb that is?

The vast majority of them. Because you can’t mature past that hump doesn’t make you enlightened or smart or special. The vast majority of teens are inexperienced children and the vast majority of adults are smarter and more responsible than them - your raging against the machine here isn’t helping anyone or anything. 

But what’s really great is how you’re putting women and their issues on the same level as children. Why don’t you go tell every woman in your life that you consider them on the same level as children and see what reaction you get. Oh, wait, you’re a self-centered straight white male who couldn’t care less about other human beings and their experiences, so why don’t you go drown yourself in your imagined oppression and self-righteousness about how hard you supposedly have it. 

captainjackjohnson:

Why Misogyny Is Not As Important As Ageism

Feminists are obviously quite insulted, and in denial, when I point out that their cause is inferior to that of fighting ageism; after all, when some devotes your entire time to studying inequality, learning that a worse form of inequality has passed right under their noses can be quite an insult to their intelligence. Insult is not my main goal — though, damn is it fun. I hope to educate, but something I believe the internet has come to term “butthurt” tends to get in the way.

The reason ageism is not noticeable, even to feminists, is because society has internalised it in an attempt to justify it, in the same way that misogyny was internalised, accepted and “justified” at the turn of the century. Nobody questioned the plight of women except women themselves, and nobody listened to those women anyway. Ageism is so accepted and internalised in our society that even I find myself having to remind myself not to do it; when I see someone young saying something stupid, I have to remind myself that “You’re young and don’t have enough life experience to understand” isn’t a valid argument.

If you want to experience what it was like to live as a woman before modern times, you simply have to imagine that you are an average teenager. Of course, some people will have been lucky enough to have had lovely parents, but the majority — and I mean that — will have experienced much of the following:

• It is assumed by adults that the opinions the young can be ignored simply by calling them a child, because popular belief is that children are stupid. I’m sure the majority of people can admit to having been told that how they feel or what they want doesn’t matter “because you’re a child”.
• It is believed that, because of this, teenagers are mentally incapable of understanding what sex is despite being fully capable of engaging in it.
• There is a voting age. This could only ever be justified if it were believes that teenagers were less capable than adults at understanding politics — I’d like to point towards the re-election of George Bush and the election of David Cameron as proof that being an adult doesn’t guarantee that you understand anything.
• In the majority of states — and not just the United States — it is legal to discipline a child with violence, and despite it having long been recognised that doing the same to a wife is immoral.
• And because this violence is legal and accepted, abused children often find it difficult to distinguish the line between discipline and abuse, and therefore do not report abuse because they would feel guilty if they reported what was “justifiable discipline” as child abuse. 
• Whether they voice it or not, parents consider their children their property, as husbands once did their wives.
• The highest percentage of rape victims are children; if rape demonstrates misogyny then, by feminist logic, this must demonstrate ageism.
• Despite being scientifically proven not to exist, the “hormonal teenager” is popularly used to reinforce the ageist belief that ignoring the wants and emotional needs of teenagers is justifiable. This is exactly the same as the also disprove ”hysteria” that was once believed to effect women with the same symptoms as “hormonal teenagers” have.
• There is a separate minimum wage for those under 18 that is lower than everyone else, and those under 16 have no minimum wage at all. While this kind of discrimination is no longer acceptable based on gender, it is socially accepted when it is based on age because of the privileges assumption that all under 18s are able to live at home. This minimum wage difference is designed to counter-act ageism against job applicants by making younger workers cheaper, but all it achieves is shifting the blame away from corporations and onto the government, rather than actually addressing the problem.

Now, simply replace the words “child” and “teenager” with “woman” and you can see what I’m demonstrating here: that while feminists have managed to create a world in which the modern woman is considerably better of than she was a hundred years ago, the treatment of children is still very much Victorian, and wrong. 

Of course, the primary criticism I will probably receive will be somewhere along the lines of “These things don’t happen”, but isn’t that the point? The fact that people genuinely believe that these situations are at all uncommon simply contributes to the problem. Just because something hasn’t happened to you or has gone unreported by others to you doesn’t mean it isn’t happening; it is simply, to use the feminist term, simply a sign of privileged ignorance. These things happen and they are not only incredibly upsetting to experience, but emotionally and psychologically damaging.

In the modern day, ageism is a far more viscous form of discrimination than sexism will ever be again, and yet it goes unaddressed. The reason for this is that while a woman will always be a woman, a child or a teenager will eventually grow up, and once they have grown older and overcome the setbacks of ageism, they will forget about the problem. And because no one is there to make a noise and point out that it is an issue, they will simply continue to repeat the cycle with their own children.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKUZ42T9diU

Or maybe it’s because they’re fucking young, and stupid, mainly because they haven’t lived long enough to have significant experiences with the outside world to form coherent opinions and understandings. 

You’re going to look back on this post and realize exactly how dumb you sound. You’re also still a rape apologist trying to talk over women and tell them how to behave, which if you can’t see the problem with that then I don’t know what to tell you.