You’re talking about emotional impact alone. Someone who lives with you, shares a bank account with you, and owns property with you obviously has more ability to control you and abuse you.

Granted, but my point isn’t necessarily that the magnitude matters. It’s the fact that judging something as a “romantic” relationships generates these gray lines that make moral discussions like this one so blurry. Many people have relationships that blur the lines between romantic and platonic.

Are you trying to claim someone cannot dilute someone else’s agency? that’s the whole problem with a power imbalance in a relationship, that your partner can use their power to isolate you from your agency.

No, but again, you can’t really draw a clean line around this problem. We all have diluted agency as a result of constantly taking in sense data: we’re products of our environments. I don’t think you can cleanly say that every relationship between a 44-year old man and a 19-year old woman is exploitative in nature. Or if you do believe that, wouldn’t you want to push for that to be codified as law? And if so, how would you codify it?

When did I say I wanted to do that?

Aren’t you implying it? It’s not as if Billy Corgan physically abducted Chloe Mendel. She willingly chose to become his partner. Either she’s wise enough and has enough agency to make decisions for herself, or she’s not. If it’s the latter, then you have to deal with the outcomes of that. I don’t buy that this is exclusively a “romantic relationship” problem. If the point is that 19-year olds are too ignorant to realize that a 44-year old man showing interest in them is “predatory,” surely that problem extends to other components of their agency.

That is a big “if” you are relying on. What if that 43 year old was love bombing them and telling you on the side that they were going to eventually leave them a broken mess? How often do you think these relationships are genuine compared to predatory. How do you tell the difference in the beginning?

Literally the person in this photo. They’ve been together for 13 years, right? I don’t know how you tell the difference in the beginning, but if you tell someone they can’t do it (which, you’re effectively doing by publicly shaming their relationship), then how many people are being deprived of a meaningful relationship. Why are you the arbiter of when someone has agency and when they don’t?

You can literally validate any abusive relationship with that same thinking because it’s made to exclude context.

Dang, I actually thought you were capable of critical thought until this comment. This isn’t about validating my argument, it’s about invalidating the argument that disgust is a reasonable tool for determining morality of an action. That’s one of your points, as evidenced in the next line.

When did I say they can’t be happy. What I said is that he is a disgusting and predatory man.

I guess I don’t understand your point at all then. You’re saying that even though Corgan is “disgusting and predatory,” his actions may well lead to happiness for him and the person he way “praying” on? On what planet does the word “pray” mean to make someone else happy? Oh no, I’m being prayed on by the compliment fairy! Keep it away!

I think you’re so focused on the older person here that you are failing to realize that you’re reducing the younger person to an automaton. The 19-year old is wise enough to make other life-changing choices: voting, taking out bank loans, making major purchases, choosing a career, choosing friends, deciding to take drugs, deciding to have an abortion, etc., but they’re not wise enough to decide whether or not it’s good for them to date someone who is older than them? I don’t think you can have your cake and eat it too.

I mean, you can stop engaging any time you’d like, as well.

I can easily explain why fascism is bad to a Nazi. It would eventually ground out at some kind of fundamental difference in our world views. You could do the same here if you cared to, but you don’t.

The reality is that you don’t actually have a moral perspective here. You don’t actually have a problem with Corgan’s actions, you have a problem with his wife and enjoy slut shaming her. That’s the real reason white knights like you jump onto these posts and virtue signal for everyone. “Oh, the poor adult woman can’t possibly think for herself. She’s clearly a victim and a prostitute who is selling her body for access to wealth and power.” And then you’ll ofc, rightly, go on to defend sex workers.

You’re a fucking joke, bud. Zero critical thinking skills. Just whine and cry to everyone else that the mean Internet person is making valid points that you’re too fucking stupid to refute on your own.

So how old does a woman need to be in order to make decisions for herself? 25? 30? If your moral convictions here are so strong, then elucidate them.

Speaking from personal experience, many of my non-romantic friendships have had as great or greater impact on my life than did my long-term romantic relationships. I don’t think that’s so uncommon.

But the impact isn’t really the point. The point comes back to agency. Does a 19-year old have agency? You’re effectively saying that they do not, because they’re easily manipulated by experience and material resources. I’m saying that, while that’s possible, it’s also possible that a 19-year old sees someone who is more experienced and has material resources and decides that’s a good enough reason to be in a romantic relationship. I mean, do you think sometime in the last 13 years that Chloe Mendel could have developed sufficient experience and material resources of her own such that she could have decided to leave? Or do you think that even as a 30-something woman she’s still being manipulated?

I don’t know if 18 is the right age to determine that someone is an adult, but I do think that once we draw that line, we can’t selectively decide what’s good and bad for them. I don’t think you can say an 18-year old shouldn’t be allowed to decide who they want to fuck while also saying they can vote and decide which politician gets to fuck us. Like, if you think a 19-year old is so easily manipulated, then they certainly shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they could be manipulated by some 44-year old into voting against their best interest, right? This is the slippery slope to which I was referring.

I understand the POV that people feel like a 19-year old is being taken advantage of. If a 43-year old started dating my 18-year old niece, I would be pretty disappointed. But if they were genuinely happy together, who am I to stand in their way? This is also the analogy to queer relationships: just because it elicits a disgust reaction in someone doesn’t mean it’s morally wrong. I understand your point is different here in that the power imbalance is the potential problem, and it’s an argument that has merit. But it’s also well within the spectrum of possibility that Mendel and Corgan are genuinely happy together, and who are you to tell them that they can’t be?

So, anyone who doesn’t hold the same opinion as you is a pervert and fan of sex trafficking. I see.

You’ll be shocked to learn that some 19-year old women can actually think for themselves. Gasp! And then 13 years later when they’re married to that person with children, would you tell a 32-year old woman with children that she was groomed? You don’t think she could have realized that at some point in the last decade-plus? Maybe she understood exactly what she was doing at the time and still does today.

Andrew Tate is a sex trafficker. Billy Corgan is a libertarian asshole. I personally have no desire to date someone that much younger than myself, though I have dated someone that much older than me and never felt “taken advantage” of.

But two consenting adults should be allowed to have a romantic relationship. I mean, where do you draw the line, exactly? Is 35 and 25 perverted? 35 and 24? How far do we go? Does it matter that the older person is a man? If it’s always the case that a 19-year old dating a 44-year old is a manipulative relationship, then it should be codified and made illegal, right? And if that’s not the case, then who the fuck are you to judge these people?

There’s no conspiracy here. You just can’t stand that someone would dare to question your claptrap and deprive you of precious Internet points.

Damn, poor Billy aged 6 years just so you could double-down on your ridiculous point.

But why stop at romantic relationships? Every relationship has the potential for manipulation. It’s only fair that 19-year olds only interact with other 19-year olds with similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Otherwise, they could be manipulated to do all manner of things!

If your daughter meets someone who makes her happy, shouldn’t you just be happy for her? You sound exactly like a conservative saying “Imagine if your daughter came home with a woman!” Maybe it’s not about you.

Nit: That that key doesn’t technically encrypt traffic, if I understand correctly. It’s used to verify the identify of a website. So someone with this private key can’t directly read internet traffic. They can set up a man-in-the-middle attack, but they’d also have to compromise DNS to pull it off.