What is the age of consent in your world, and what is sex ed like?

(First off, I'm from Reddit, but I decided to change places because of what seems to be going on with the moderators at the worldbuilding subreddit. I used to post Q&A threads on that subreddit, is that acceptable here? Obviously, I'm new here.)

What is the age of consent in your world to do "lovey-dovey stuff?" Do young people tend to engage in relationships early, or do they usually abstain until they are adults? Are there close-in-age exemptions for young people? How educated do people tend to be on sexual topics? Looking forward to your answers.

(I've never heard of a rule against it, so why not? Also, that's a shame about /r/worldbuilding. Last year, I used to be big there and on /r/fantasywriters, until the latter started giving me some bad vibes. /r/worldbuilding always seemed more sane in comparison. But whatever. Anyways...)

I only have this worked out to any real extent for one region of my world- Tefurea, a large confederation of islands scattered across the Rietessian southern hemisphere. Tefurea's age of consent is technically thirteen. Sexual activity and experimentation is not only legal, but encouraged among youth aged thirteen through fifteen so that they can get practice in pleasuring a partner before they marry at sixteen or later, and so that parents can educate them in this as they go along. Sixteen is actually the age of majority and is the earliest marriageable age, period. There are probably laws in place regarding sexual activity between people under thirteen akin to Romeo and Juliet laws, but it's not exactly something I think I'll need to address in any stories.

Since this culture engages in tattooing as a primary form of adornment, all youth, upon turning sixteen, have their adult tattoos completed to signify their new adult status, with even more added once they marry. Boys traditionally leave to seek spouses on other islands, after having the symbols of their father's birth island and their grandfather's birth island tattooed on the outside of their forearms so they know which islands they can't stop on, as a measure to help prevent inbreeding. At sixteen and older, sex outside of marriage is generally discouraged in all but the most cosmopolitan areas.

edited 4th Aug '17 11:32:49 AM by CrystalGlacia

How do you imagine the Tefurea people to look like? Are they Asian, black, Hispanic, Polynesian, European? I personally guess Polynesian would be most likely, since you mention a bunch of islands, but it's your world.

I imagine them as looking Polynesian, or East African- dark skin, stocky builds. They're also a matrilineal society. The fact that the number of reproducing women will bottleneck population growth is not lost on them, so women are traditionally expected to stay on their home islands. But since it'd be hard for a young bachelor to haul property between islands and the women of the family are the ones spending the most time around the family's property, it seems only natural to them to give the matriarchs control over that property, over a patriarch who isn't even from the family.

I'm tired of how most fantasy defaults to white people in medieval or early Renaissance west Europe, with all the attitudes to match.

Edited out the NSFW in the thread title, mainly because the topic isn't NSFW. It'd also be a bad idea to put NSFW stuff in a thread.

I was reticent to post in this thread if it might go NSFW, but since it definitely isn't:

In my Sci-fi universe the youngest age of consent for any of the various human cultures is 25. Which may seem late, but is rather the result of humans having a greatly altered aging process (which follows a sort of bell curve. Infancy lasts barely any longer than in real life, but after that the stages of life gradually take longer and longer until everything equally gradually speeds up again past middle age) and greatly increased life span in the setting.

Puberty tends to start at somewhere around age 18-20 and it usually takes about 4 years (and barring some kind of developmental disorder, never more than 5 years) after that for the sex drive to fully develop. Age 25 is more or less equivalent in physical development to about 14-15 in real life and the cultures that use this number do so not so much because they're completely fine with people who are, to a large extent, still kids having sex, but rather because they feel that with full physical maturity not happening until around age 35 and with the extension of puberty making the hormonal shifts far more gradual, but no less potent, there's no real healthy way they can keep these children from exploring their sexuality before then.

Only two cultures actually have unrestricted consent (that is to say: there's no restrictions in who they can choose as a partner at all) at 25: Earth, which has suffered from a vicious cycle of severe population depletion since the space colonisation boom and keeping things running requires so much effort that most people born there leave before they're 100 (usually once they're raised a few children to adulthood). The people who haven't left aren't exactly proud that they are essentially encouraging the equivalent of teen pregnancy just to keep the population stable, but they can't afford not to.
And Mudhole, which more or less occupies the role of The Friend Nobody Likes (equally types 2, 5 and 8) in the alliance that most of the stories focus on. Mudhole is pretty Orwellian and culturally those in the 25-30 age bracket are encouraged to 'show their maturity' by engaging in sexual relationships with people in the 40-50 age bracket (i.e. young adults) who are, in turn, encouraged to 'educate' their paramours in how to behave as good citizens to the Mother Government during these relationships. (The fact that these relationships are merely encouraged, but not enforced or assigned is an example of the kind of cultural tendencies that make it only pretty Orwellian rather than a complete dystopia and are all that keep the rest of the alliance from just biting the bullet and invading Mudhole to remove its current regime).
Other cultures that have the age of consent at 25 do have restrictions on who someone who isn't an adult yet can legally give consent to, but these tend not to be based on actual age. The Wayfarer's Guild, for instance has an entire department of social workers who are assigned to each child as they enter puberty and whose job it is to teach them about sex and consent, counsel them on how to engage in it safely and sanely and to vet anyone that they want to engage in a sexual relationship with. Without this vetting the relationship is illegal. If both sides are non-adults, such an illegal relationship usually results in counselling for both kids, after which, if it's determined the relationship was harmless, it's retroactively legalized and allowed to continue. Adults who are caught in an illegal relationship with a non-adult are dealt with on a case-by-case basis with the penalty for someone deemed to be actively malicious being life in exile on a prison planet.

Conversely one of the oldest human colonies, Moira's Crossing, doesn't use 25, but rather 30 as it's age of consent. Thirtysomethings who want to become sexually active take a course in school which involves mainly theory and some supervised practical exercises (of the 'putting the rubber on the banana' variety) after which they receive a diploma. Sexual encounters between those aged 25 to 35 without a diploma are technically illegal, but unless it looks like something's going to go horribly wrong, it's usually ignored as harmless. Which is helped by the planet's atmosphere having a natural contraceptive effect. Reproduction always requires conscious effort (by means of a series of antidote injections) for Moirans.

And then there's also cultures that are more rigid or restrictive when it comes to the age of consent. Like Jarlsheim, where the age of consent is 40 and everyone between the ages of 15 and 40 gets a mandatory yearly injection that suppresses any libido they may be developing (and plenty of people choose to continue getting them well past that) and anyone caught even trying to have sex with someone under 40 is executed. (Jarlsheim is the main focus of most of the stories in the setting. But that doesn't make them the good guys.)

Basically I tried to include a wide variety of approaches to sex and relationships in my setting but I purposely made the actual location of my stories pretty conservative when it comes to the equivalent of teenagers having sex to avoid unintentional squick.

edited 18th Aug '17 8:13:08 PM by Robrecht

Imma say, all these laws in your settings seem to deviate significantly from what is common in Real Life. Just noting this.

Wondering if people also have more ... real world-ish AOCs in their settings.

My setting has no gender concept, so Everyone Is Bi (because they don't have a concept of restricting anything to just people with these or those parts), and they've had (and allowed) magic solutions for both contraception and safe childbirth (and disease prevention) for centuries.

There's also no marriage, except when a monarch wants to crown a partner as their co-ruler so they'll feel less Lonely at the Top, but this is done as often with close friends as with romantic/sexual partners, and it isn't tied to childbearing. Heirs are usually chosen from a person's favorite students, not their biological children. Children of various parents are raised in groups, and children are usually not much closer to their parents than to other adults (parents' friends, friends' parents, teachers, etc.). Monarchs, and a handful of other important positions, have their biological children as default heirs in the case that they haven't designated an heir, simply to avoid a succession crisis. (The throne is considered a burden, not something people actually want, or would fight over).

People are also generally respectful and sympathetic to each other, and sex isn't seen as possessive or controlling or anything like that. Basically, they're taught to derive pleasure from giving their partners pleasure, and they're sensitive to when someone's uncomfortable, so they'd stop. They're sort of Perfect Pacifist People, but legitimately so, it's not a cover for anything nasty.

So there... really isn't an age of consent. Social gatherings usually involve casual sex (and erotic dancing), and people are allowed to take part as soon as they hit puberty and start wanting to. The fact that there are two sexes, and that that specific way of doing things between them is what makes pregnancies happen, isn't hidden from children, so there isn't a birds-and-the-bees talk or anything like that.

...Only setting I have where it was relevant: The Theban Jannisaries world doesnt have direct laws for this, but the very strong norm is that nobody engages in anything that could result in pregnancy until they have the financial means to raise kids, which means the answer is somewhere in the mid to high twenties in most places. The adjunct norm to that is that manual and oral stimulation is just about universal and winked at - Everybody knows it happens, even if it is not polite dinner conversation - It is entirely usual for apprentices and students to have been dating within those constraints for going on a decade before achieving their mastery and getting married.

Age of consent on Gaia is...weird by our standards.

You can get married off as soon as puberty hits (exact terms vary depending on region) but to actually consent to sex with someone outside of an arranged marriage is often forbidden until 16 or so.

Sexual education, on the other hand, is fantastic. The fertility goddess Maya is completely shameless about sex and so are her priesthood. Temples to Maya happily perform demonstrations on demand and are fantastically knowledgable of not only the sexual act but also of sexual health and childbirth.

Mayans have been proven to be indispensible to communities which is often the only reason they haven't been run out of town.

That sounds like a pretty normal AOC or so.

The Skyling Convergence sets the standard age of consent at 17.

Their sex-education is very "mechanical", just the facts of the processes of intercourse, conception, pregnancy, and birth. This is because much of their culture is a reaction to the loss of their species wide telepathy when they separated from the sylphs.

No amount of personal attachment ever seems to be enough, skylings are all to aware of the psychological distance they have with each other. As such, close intimacy is seen as an unreachable goal, or at least a "human thing". To most of them, trying to reach it will just compromise one's personal autonomy, which they tend to hold very highly.

Septimus It's actually pretty standard for pre-industrial standards but I'm assuming most people don't follow that.

So...if the don't have species wide telepathy anymore, who does the teaching?

No, I was thinking that 16 is a fairly normal AOC by real world standards.

It's usually 18 with exceptions made for mutually under aged pairs.

Where is it "usually 18 with exceptions made for mutually under aged pairs"?

For reference

x5 That's a good point actually, I'll have to think about it.

Borrowing from my own fictional nation "Ritterdorf" in NationStates, we eschew the age of consent for a more efficient reproduction, and our sex education is full of Mills and Boon Prose in order to get children interested in our compulsory sex education.

Not that the age of consent would matter when our average lifespan is ridiculously low to the point it's barely 27.49 years...

Technically, at that point, our age of consent would be 18 x 0.2749 = 4.9482 = 5 years old, however, the general public would still follow the old standard of treating 18-22 as the perfect age group for reproduction out of decency, despite everyone having a ridiculously short lifespan.

In other words, every single relationship in my nation would become a December–December Romance.

Thank you so much, our rampant environmental pollution for the greater good of military and technological advancements.

edited 21st Jun '18 11:24:44 AM by Mhazard

CONTENT WARNING.

Don't shoot me, I'm not endorsing this social system or the culture, but to really play with audience expectations that futuristic and non-Earth based human societies (for ex. far future human-colonized planets that have hundreds of thousands of years of their own, non-Earth based history and cultural evolution), and also drive home the point about cultural relativism being sometimes uncomfortable even for the militantly tolerant, I included some weird sexual and age-related quirks in Rigelian culture.

Rigelians in my universe are a human civilization, one of millions. They are militaristic, expansionist, aggressive. Not all are soldiers but Rigelian cooks, lawyers, etc, treat their jobs as if they all were warriors. Kind of like Klingons without the redundant organs or the forehead ridges.

Rigelian society is divided by caste and specialized gender roles. They are rigidly traditional and often patriarchal, although women have gained more rights over thousands of years of industrial development. Probably between 85 and 90% of Rigelians are bisexual to varying degrees, to the point this is considered the norm. Homosexuals and heterosexuals are considered "weird" but tolerated, but Rigelian society is notoriously anti-trans. This is because they by and large dont' tolerate ambiguity well, prefer things to be easily classifiable or categorical, and don't like what doesn't fit into their established hierarchical order.

Every male citizen, whether Rigelian or one of the conquered "barbarian" tribes of humans, gets recruited into the military at age 14. They can go back to school later to have second careers after their mandated military service. Women can join the military but even the low-caste women usually become officers, and they don't get forcibly recruited at age 14, they can join voluntarily at 18 or older. Most women don't serve in combat roles; they tend to dominate certain military support specialties like legal services (JAG officers, etc), Military Intelligence, etc. The officer candidates come from the upper and middle classes whereas the low-caste Rigelian boys and the boys conscripted from conquered planets undergoing "Rigelianization" (cultural and economic imperialism) become grunts and low-level technicians.

So you have teenage boys sequestered for long periods of time in training compounds and on training ships where they are supervised by older officers who are usually male.

The Rigelians have a Greco-Roman-ish man-boy love thing going on, not exclusively but especially in their huge, male-dominated military. In these contexts (primarily military, involving males) there are formal institutions and cultural ideals that promote man-boy love. EG the TAC officer or another senior officer responsible for supervising young trainees or cadets might take one of the boys as a lover while he is away from his wife. But on shore leave, he will probably invite that boy home to dine with his wife and kids.

There is no "age of consent" on Rigel. 14 is the "Age of Conscription" for males and the broader society figures that if they can go to war at 14 they are basically "young adults" with the rights and privileges accorded other adults of their same caste.

All male Rigelians are encouraged to marry for traditional reasons despite their bisexual inclinations of the majority, which includes many men (and women) who strongly prefer same-sex partners. Women may engage in same-sex relationships outside of marriage as well, but there are no formal institutions or cultural ideals specifically organized around it.

The Rigelian equivalent of a "ring bearer" is the male child in the bride's family who is closest to conscription age but not conscripted yet, and therefore not actively serving the military. As part of their preparation for the role of "Swordbearer" at their female relative's wedding, they are sequestered in compounds run by the "Guarum" or the "War-Priests," holy men devoted to the mysticism of war who are also decorated combat veterans. The Guarum/War-Priests train the boys (who can technically be any age under 14 but generally by the time this ceremonial role falls on them, they are able to at least walk and talk). The boys stay for many months with the priests, preparing for their traditional and ritual role in the wedding. During this time, the older boys typically form sexual relationships with each other as well as the adult War-Priests.

Which means that, at least for males, there's really NO age of consent. For girls and young women who are still of school-age in Rigelian society, it's not as clearly laid out.

Besides the Guarum's priestly compounds and the preparation of boys for their roles in family weddings, Sex-Ed happens in schools, beginning typically when the kids are around 10 or 11 years old. Lower-caste kids go to public schools or religious schools sometimes; middle class kids could go to public, religious, or sometimes private academies, and upper class kids tend to go to private academies or they have tutors if they are very high up in the social order. Rigelian religions aren't typically "Creationist" or "Pro-Life" like certain influential Christian sects in the US. They typically don't have any objections to teaching sex ed. So Rigelians kids get pretty basic sex ed in early adolescence and learn more as they advance through the grades, it's not significantly different from what we have in much of the western world, although even their traditional religions are not squeamish about sex and they don't give a crap about the politics of birth control, by and large. A few fringe sects might but they are hardly mainstream and mostly lower-caste. In general sexuality is considered less controversial for pre-teens and teens to learn about in Rigelian society than it is in ours, it's not nearly as politicized. However, the boys are girls would typically have separate sex ed programs in the schools. Things hit the fan for the boys when they go into the military though, and they have more "field training" than the girls at that age, who are still completing their education. It's considered more important for women to have education than for men, and the women also get a jump-start on their careers this way, if they don't go into military service and instead go straight to vocational training or higher education after they graduate from the Rigelian equivalent of high school.

If an school-aged Rigelian girl were molested, raped by an older person, it would likely be incumbent on themselves or their family to seek to petition the legal system to prosecute the offender, but as the institutions concerning female sexuality and not nearly as clearly defined or formal as those concerning male sexuality, it's likely that an underage female victim of rape on Rigel or one of its colonies would be subject to some serious cultural, gender and religious bias during the legal proceedings.

YES, this is creepy. NO, it's not a society I would want to live in. It's one of millions of spacefaring human civilizations in my shared universe and the youth sexuality stuff is primarily meant as part of an overall effort in my writing to depict these other planets as being like other countries on Earth with their own culture, history, and social values.

I should also add that other than their Greco-Roman flourishes, and the fact that they are more religiously homogenous (The Rigelian Orthodox Church has similarities with Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and is their biggest, but not their only religion), the Rigelians have many traits in common with how "the rest of the world" sees Americans.

Rigelians tend to be expansionist and take pride in the Rigelian Expeditionary Forces (their military, which LOVES euphemisms). The REF enjoys a major strategic advantage in terms of augmented Faster-than-light capability over all but their closest military and economic rival, another civilization called the Rosenleicht Cargo Dynasty. Rigelians are rigidly traditions and cling to obsolete traditions despite advances in technology, social organization, etc. For example, there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON that Rigelians or anyone should engage in military conflict with other civilizations multiple lightyears away. They don't "need" to for any economic reasons. It's a cultural mandate. They also constantly claim to have "invented" democracy. They are stereotyped as cocky, arrogant, overconfident, with a tendency to impose themselves on others. Their claim to having "invented" democracy is a distortion; they did "preserve" certain elements of a democratic republic, and in a technical sense, their government still is a democratic-republic, although it is highly "illiberal" and stratified with no real separation of church and state and different legislative bodies based on social status. They call this an "Ecumenical Republic." In that sense, they are democratic in the same way that Turkey under Erdogan or Russia under Putin is democratic.

I guess the man-boy love thing is a commentary on the abuse of religious power as well as criticisms of Hollywood and other media being obsessed with selling people an ideal of sexual attractiveness that is uncomfortably based in adolescence.

Edited by FTD on Jun 26th 2018 at 4:24:02 AM

The age of consent in the Black Mythos is 19 because prime numbers are a big deal ( and 18 is no less arbitrary IRL anyway ). Among minors who are romantically and/or sexually active, an age gap of more than two years is considered cause for concern ; an older minor considered to be preying on another will not be jailed as an adult in a similar relationship with a minor but will be "encouraged" to see a therapist at little or no cost to their legal guardians.

In my setting (sci fi opera in a multi-species and multi political entities) that only two civilizations that have really explored: the Vigast Technocracy and the Noreed Suzerainty.

In the Technocracy, with a minimum of 1000 year life span they take a very slow and relaxed rules, with the age of consent of 35 to 48 being normal, with adulthood not being reached until 125/150. The standardized method of teaching happenes in the Technolgical Coligate, with one in every major city complex on every planet or major orbital station they control. Every citizen (that is Vigast) must entire the Coligate and go through their full primary and secondary education, after this point, they specialise into a industry or profession, the most comment being Shapers Guilds (those who terraform world's and work in health care) these are of note because they administer the explanations of sexual activity to the younger generations. And the Mangor Guilds (technological masters, in every research field).

Multiple partners are encouraged but many children are not, with such lifespans the dangerous of over population mean that population growth is controlled by the state, with a couple (or more then one in a household) having to apply for and wait for a "Jaukulko" (or child licence) and the total number of children each household can have is variable based on planetary populations. This makes it very popular for new couples to move to newer and less established colonies. The Capital world is almost impossible to find living space for anything other then two Vigasti. Orbital stations and habities vary wildly based on the region's PCI or Population Capacity Index.

The Suzerainity is by contrast simplified in that you can have as many children as you want, but whom you marry is strictly managed by the kingdoms Geological Department who pairs potential partners together by bloodlines.

Most of the the Suzerainities technology is biologically activated, with some specific family technology being bound to that family, such as family starships and estates. However "families" are enormous multi-generational affairs, with the sexual maturity happening in the Noreed between the ages of 24 to 30 (Noreed live up to 250 years). In the Suzerainity, heavy emphasis is placed on the family unit being something you marry into for life. "Divorce" is practiced but is more a poltical manuver where poltical alliances break down.

Age of consent in my setting is 15. Between minors.

After 20, is definitive.

Basically, they have a vision of "double coming of age". They have turned the dilemma about teenage madurity in it's own law, legally treating teenagers as more than children, but less than adults.

Though In-Universe, is expected that 14 years old have sexual relationships. They have liberal views on sexual relations sans certain groups as the Church of Salvation or The Mountain's People, who are more conservative.

—-

To be honest. I'm thinking on ageing up more my characters. Making them a year older. Thought that ruins the symbolism of some of the years (MC is supossed to be born on the 79 and to be 16 in the '95, where is when the plot starts).

It can be doable if the story ends in the year 100 rather than in the last months of the 99 tho.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Jun 23rd 2019 at 12:23:13 PM

There was no real age of consent in my setting, back when my stories take place (19th century). But a boy could normally not get married until he was 20 years old. Girls could get married already at 15 years old, if it was approved by her father or legal guardian. Normally though, most girls waited with marriage until she was 17 or 18 years old.

Sexual education was not a priority in my setting, because society was very conservative about such matters back when my stories take place. If you were lucky, you could ask your parents or older siblings. Or find a book to read on the subject. But mostly, girls would be just told that getting pregnant before marriage could lead to a disaster. Boys had more freedom to do what they wanted though.

Edited by Kickisan on Oct 27th 2019 at 6:42:46 AM

Medieval fantasy setting, so rules like that would be enforced by social pressures rather than legislation. One of my main races are considered fully "mature" by around 13 years old (equivalent to an 18 year old) so ten year old parents are within the possible parameters in those cases, but they'd be generally expected to wait until they're 12 or so.