A lot of fuss and pother has been made over the fact that George Jetson "impregnated" Jane when he was twenty-three and she was sixteen. >>Is this a case of Writers Cannot Do Math? >>Or is it supposed to indicate that the future will have a more lax attitude toward the age of consent? >>While this headscratcher can clearly take things into a Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment territory but in 2018 there are a good number of nations that put the age of consent at 16. We may wish to leave it that. What no one seems to realize is that the first season of this show, though set in 2062, premiered in [i]1962[/i]. Imagine if the first season had been set instead in 1962. George, age 40, would have been born in 1922 and served in WWII (as opposed to the US Space Force, as shown in "G.I. Jetson"). Jane, age 33, would have been born in 1929. They would have married in 1945 and had their first child, Judy, in 1946. In 1945, there was nothing stigmatic, nor indeed much worthy of comment, in a 23-year-old ex-GI marrying a 16-year-old girl (perhaps the girl-next-tower?). There was no Pill, no Roe vs. Wade, no women in the workforce, and certainly no c***-carousel in the zeitgeist. When girls were old enough to marry, they either married or stayed chaste as the wind-driven snow, or did things no one would mention in polite society. But most of them married in their mid-to-late teens.
A lot of fuss and pother has been made over the fact that George Jetson "impregnated" Jane when he was twenty-three and she was sixteen. >>Is this a case of Writers Cannot Do Math? << >>Or is it supposed to indicate that the future will have a more lax attitude toward the age of consent?<< >>While this headscratcher can clearly take things into a Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment territory but in 2018 there are a good number of nations that put the age of consent at 16. We may wish to leave it that.<< What no one seems to realize is that the first season of this show, though set in 2062, premiered in [i]1962[/i]. Imagine if the first season had been set instead in 1962. George, age 40, would have been born in 1922 and served in WWII (as opposed to the US Space Force, as shown in "G.I. Jetson"). Jane, age 33, would have been born in 1929. They would have married in 1945 and had their first child, Judy, in 1946. In 1945, there was nothing stigmatic, nor indeed much worthy of comment, in a 23-year-old ex-GI marrying a 16-year-old girl (perhaps the girl-next-tower?). There was no Pill, no Roe vs. Wade, no women in the workforce, and certainly no c***-carousel in the zeitgeist. When girls were old enough to marry, they either married or stayed chaste as the wind-driven snow, or did things no one would mention in polite society. But most of them married in their mid-to-late teens. The much-touted "rite of passage" actually existed to separate those ("children") too young to marry from those ("women") old enough to marry. In the USA, this took the form of the Debut (today called the sweet sixteen), in Mexico the Quincenera, in Jewish families the Bar and Bat Mitzvah. A strict divide with not-socially-acceptable-to-marry on one side and socially-acceptable-to-marry on the other. A girl who had passed through the rite of passage could (and usually should) expect to marry within the year (an exception is made for the Bat Mitzvah, which happens to twelve-year-old girls; most of them are not married at age thirteen, at least in the USA (do Yemenites have a different experience?).). As to age of consent, in 32 of the 50 U.S. states, the age of consent is 16. That is in the current year, after decades of upward-creep. In 1962, you could expect it to be somewhat lower. In [i]Podkayne of Mars[/i], which came out the same year, the protagonist is a young woman "8 (Martian) years old and a few months," roughly fifteen in Terran years, and could legally "contract plenary marriage without guardians' waiver [parental consent]" at age 9 [16.9272 Terran]." For those of you living outside the U.S., the legal age of marriage (especially with parents' consent) is commonly one to two years younger than the age of consent for the unmarried. Which means that, in certain states, you could be legally married at age 14, if certain conditions are met. It seems likely that George Jetson did not so much "impregnate" a sixteen-year-old-girlfriend when he was twenty-three, as that he and his wife were going to have a baby in their first year of marriage, all above board and legal as church on Tuesday.