Unclear Description: Jail Bait

^ There's UsefulNotes.Consent with the section "Consenting Adults"

dp

Edited by eroock on Mar 16th 2021 at 7:20:35 AM

I don't know.

My gut feeling is that ages of consent are a little too specialized topic for them to have an Useful Notes page here. They are also a super Flame Bait topic and people get them often wrong, to boot. Folks who follow my TRS activity may know that I've dallied with making a Hollywood Age Of Consent trope but I was never certain it was a good idea.

UsefulNotes.Consent is quite America-centric. I know back in 2011 someone raised the question of whether this type of information really belongs on TV Tropes.

Doublepost, I know, but it seems like what folks linking to this trope are looking for is Hebephilia Taboo or Underage Sex Taboo or whatever you want to name it. Trope being, sexual/romantic relationships between minors and adults being viewed as inappropriate.

I guess these would be our options?

• Make “A Relationship between a minor and an adults is seen as inappropriate ” it’s own trope and disambig Jailbait

• Rename and redefine Jailbait to be “A Relationship between a minor and an adults is seen as inappropriate ”

Edited by MacronNotes on Mar 19th 2021 at 1:17:06 PM

So it would become a subtrope of Age-Gap Romance to be listed at the bottom of its subtrope list where it currently mentions The Jailbait Wait?

I think overlapping trope more than subtrope, because it doesn't necessarily need to involve romance.

^^That would work, but I think we first need to decide whether we want such a trope.

Would we run into problems with such a trope?

That's a good question.

Reasons that might make an Underage Sex Taboo/Paedophilia Is Bad trope a good idea:

• It's quite common in mainstream works, including the oh-so popular Police Procedural like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit where it often drives character actions.
• Many problems can be dealt with page locks, like we already do on Pædo Hunt etc.

Reasons why it might be a bad idea:

• The paedophilia taboo is very widespread across societies all over Earth. That might make the trope a little too obvious / People Sit on Chairs to work.
• I kind of wonder how people will perceive a "paedophilia is bad!" page.

I'll ask 5P folks and the rest of the staff for input.

^ Not sure this is going in the right direction. Paedophilia îs about attraction to prepubescent children. Jail Bait is about relationships with late-adolescent minors who straddle the line to become adults. At least that's my take on it.

That's always been my take as well.

That's my understanding as well, but the medical concepts are one thing, societal opinion tends to look down at, say, sexual relationships between adults and 13 year olds in the same way as it does for sexual relationships between adults and 6 year olds. So I am not sure how separatable they are for troping purposes.

There's also Romeo and Juliet situations, which laws/fiction doesn't always distinguish from an Age-Gap Romance. I'm working on the assumption here that the child is post-pubescent because such instances in fiction are usually treated differently than their prepubescent mirrors. What's more, the age that society says is appropriate for marriage changes. Modern American society generally frowns on marriage before college, despite it being fairly common a few decades ago. Fiction reflects that situation, too. A story where a teen marries a twenty-something is different when they do it in secret vs when the parents arrange it. The former might involve this trope but the latter wouldn't.

Perhaps the line should be drawn where there is consent, meaning the minor is actually willing to pursue a romantic or sexual relationship with the adult.

Technically, minors can never really consent because they aren't developed and might not understand the consequences (or be manipulated/groomed for it). But I guess if works claim these relationships are consensual...

<suppresses the urge to complain that we don't all live in Hollywood California...>

There is also an ephebophile trope that may be related. I am not sure that I feel at ease with making consent the dividing criterium, here.

Edited by SeptimusHeap on Mar 21st 2021 at 9:38:18 AM

Same, for the reasons I've outlined. Consent in real life works much differently than in fiction.

Well, we don't actually have to create a demarcation line. Just saying that a trope called Paedophilia Is Bad sounds out of line with what we try to cover here. Underage Sex Taboo on the other hand is a contender for a name change (which we want to have since Jail Bait sounds too much like a character trope). Although, Underage Sex Taboo may imply that it covers two minors having sex.

Edited by eroock on Mar 22nd 2021 at 3:05:09 AM

Perhaps Hebephilia Taboo/Ephebophilia Taboo would work instead?

Ephebophilia Taboo is closest to what I'm envisioning; conflict is created due to rules about consent.

Anything more snappy would be appreciated.

Even just Jail Bait Taboo might work.

I think the suggestions with Taboo in the name (including Discar's suggestion of just adding it to the current name) are all more clear than the current and would be worth putting on a crowner.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 28th 2021 at 9:57:39 AM

I like Jail Bait Taboo.

The idea is specifically that girls in their late teens look like adults, and are youthful and attractive, but are not "legal", and are thus Forbidden Fruit. It doesn't have much to do with pedophilia, and I don't think it's a universal, People Sit On Chairs thing. The concept is very much driven by the fact that some places have laws that make these relationships forbidden, while in other places and times it was perfectly normal men in their 20's, 30's, or even older to marry teenage girls. 19th century literature is full of aversions (Marius and Cosette, Kitty and Levin, etc), where relationships between older men and teen girls are portrayed as normal and romantic.

That seems like a reasonable scope, although I'd disagree that paedophilia has nothing to do with it - colloquially these kinds of relationships are often referred to as paedophilia. It's misusing medical concepts, true, but we are discussing tropes here not medical standards.

I am thinking we could make such a trope and then disambiguate Jail Bait between No Yay and that trope. Anyone got a description ready?