Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex - Brain Under Construction: Peers, Pressure, and the Myths About “Bad Decisions”

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

In this episode, we’re unzipping the wild, confusing, and often misunderstood world of the adolescent brain — and what that can mean for risk-taking and decision-making between the ages of 13 and 25.Dr. Sue shares what decades of teaching teens, college students, and future educators have revealed about how young people actually think about risk, pressure, and identity. (Spoiler: they are thinking — just with a brain that’s wired differently than an adult’s.)We dig into why peers matter so much, why “bad decisions” often make developmental sense, and why adults tend to forget what it felt like to be in that stage themselves. We also unzip the mixed messages baked into our laws — from the variation in consent laws, driving at 16, joining the military at 18, renting a car at 25 — and how they fail to reflect what we now know about the developing brain.This episode is all about compassion, clarity, and cutting through the judgment. Adolescence is messy. It’s emotional. It’s confusing. And it’s a phase every single one of us survived — even if we’ve conveniently romanticized our way out of remembering how chaotic it really was.If you have a story, thoughts and/or a topic or question for Dr. Sue and Charlie please share your ideas here:  ⁠Show suggestions

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Unzipping Taboos, candid conversations about sex with Dr. Sue and Charlie. We're here to explore the questions you've always been curious about, but don't always feel comfortable asking out loud. No judgment, no shame, just open, honest conversations. So zip down and let's get candid. Before we get started with today's episode, we have partnered with jackandjilladult.com, one of the top online adult stores. And because you're here with us you get 20 off with code unzipping 20 so now that we've got the business out of the way today we are going to be unzipping the um how do we want to say this the adolescent brain development stages and and and all things really not all things why teens do what they do and why

we don't have laws to keep up with it yeah there it is but the sex angle yeah yes so before we do that you just heard my incredible co-host dr sue how are you i'm doing well how are you i'm doing all right feeling good so that's a good thing we'll see how we feel by the end well uh would you like to give our listeners a little bit about your background? Sure, we get started. So I actually started as a I want to be a health teacher, I want to be a high school health teacher. So I have a bachelor's and master's in health education. And then I thought I'd go into high school teaching. And that didn't happen. Instead, I got a PhD in human sexuality. And I have worked primarily in academia since then so um you know I've done the professor thing I teach I write books like

the professor thing the professor thing um I speak I do all those things um but I always keep one foot in like I know I've joked about this but like I keep one foot in the real world so I do my academic thing my professor thing but then I also press her shtick that shtick over there um but then I also do like I do stuff in the community and I do stuff for everybody from like i want to say like 13 to like mid-80s um and a lot of what i do is talk to teenagers um all along that 13 to see i don't want to say teenager because we're talking adolescent and technically adolescence 25 um so i do a lot of that work on the outside world um and then a lot of what i do also though i don't know their ages um i like to think of myself as a place where people can ask

that sex question that they can't ask other places so folks can submit questions we'll put a link in the bio in the description why do i always say link in bio i'll put a link in the description for that if you want to have a sex question you want me to answer you can submit it and then um every sunday at 9 p.m eastern i post all over social media well the question and my answer not just the question again that might be one of my longest intros with no apologies i know we should just call that a day if you have no idea what that is just go listen to any other literally any any other episode before this but that's me yeah but who you first heard and who's gonna help get us back on track here

is uh our co-host um charlie who's our curious co-host and it's always ready to have those conversations around all those taboo topics that not only that we talk about on the show but just kind of let exist out in the real world. But you should do more about you. I am Charlie. I am friends with Dr. Sue. We've been friends for many years now. And one of the things that sparked our quick and close friendship was this ability and, and this passion to have these kinds of conversations without the judgment and, and have and really have a dialogue, a meaningful dialogue around it and i think part of what what i bring to that is um is my curiosity as as dr sue just said and and my um enthusiasm for challenging um expectations of societal

expectations in in many regards um looking at at how we all are trying to human during during our time here on earth um that you know why why don't we see each other as equal and treat each other as equal regardless of gender presenting gender um relationship status etc so i have always thrived going yeah but why not but why that doesn't make sense that's stupid um and so we thought that was a very special secret sauce to doing a podcast together so here you find us unzipping taboos teasing each other and challenging all those things that we that many of us i think try to strive to deprogram and or have a better understanding of it. Like you don't need to walk away from it if it's something that works for you, but to

understand it a little bit better. So you, you can understand perhaps the impact of holding onto something that could be, that could impact someone else in your life. So that's me. I don't think we're going to do, yay. I don't think we're going to do so much of that at the beginning of this episode but we're going to pull you off the bench for that at the end because we have a plan yes well and I do like I am a self-ascribed psychology hobbyist which will probably make many mental health professionals out there cringe a little bit but know that I'm not I tried to use my curiosity for good and I don't diagnose and I don't all of those all of those qualifiers but there is something about that I have always been interested in regarding psychology and the human

brain and neurological development, et cetera. So, um, this is, this episode is something that piques my interest and kind of aligns with a little bit of what I know, but maybe not from the credentialed expert. The only person she diagnoses is me and that's okay. I get consent first. yeah i'm trying to remember how he's decided to do this episode i don't know if it's because i was prepping for something else that was really close to it do you remember how they it was a little bit of a a windy road because oh go ahead no i remember it but we're not we weren't going to talk about it towards okay okay stay tuned to the end to the end of that actually we don't find out how dr sue and charlie got to this topic well you don't usually have like a plan plan of

where we're gonna go right but this one we this one we had a plan plan because um i don't know why um but we have a plan plan so we actually have an idea of where we're supposed to wind up that may be episode part two like who knows but a lot of the work that i do is um i do teach a lot of teenagers, I'm going to use the word adolescent, even though I don't like using it. But I think it's important to use that word, because we're not just talking about teenagers. We're talking go ahead, we're talking up until the age of 25. And so when I say teenagers, we're essentially losing all those people between 20 and 25. And I think it's important to keep that in mind. But I also hate the word adolescent. So when you're so before we do that, is adolescent

a range like does that start at a certain age i want to say it essentially birth through 25 no no there's there's there's development stages in between that um but i want to say it's around like 13 14 and up okay but i may just be thinking about that because that's a category for a category i don't even know what that word was um for something else but it's somewhere in there um for those of you who may be listening to one of the first few episodes i don't really love numbers um i tend to make them up i do know the hard end is 25 for the upper end of adolescence um but if you hear me like talking you won't hear me talking stats usually because i just make them up so a lot of the work that i do is with i'm back to this word adolescent i don't like it

because it feels infantilizing like oh just adolescence um and yet we're talking about people who can vote we're talking about people who can drive cars we're talking about people who can join the military beginning of their careers right beginning of the careers like out doing adulting things um okay i'm gonna use the term adolescent and i hate it just let's let's own that okay but again so we so we have the common language for listeners when you're saying adolescent you are talking about like 12 ish to 25 yeah definitely 25 is the end point okay now i feel like i want to look it up because you know we like to establish that baseline i know everybody knows what we're referring to as we're talking so using it throughout the early adolescence goes

goes to about 13 so i'm talking like 13 on okay yeah so i was right like 12 13 yeah yeah so like 12 13 to 25 all right and i know there are people out there who may be in that age group going i'm Well, listen, you technically are. It's okay. We all had to go through it. We all survived it. We all had to do it. So I work with this population a lot.

Those are my college students. I don't have, in the job that I'm in right now, I don't work with a lot of nontraditional students, though I used to. And I got to tell you, that was always, always fascinating to see those minds in the room with the 18-year-olds. but one of the other thing i do is i work with people who are studying to become teachers and i work with teachers who are already out in the field teaching them how to do sex education or to be better at teaching sex so um i don't want to name any of the groups that i work with um mostly because i'll be seeing them in the next few days um so so we've had a lot we've been having a lot of discussions because we have like these curriculums and there are some great

curriculums that are out there and there's some really not great curriculums out there and and sometimes we're looking at them and saying like what why like what are they thinking writing this curriculum this way and it's because they're forgetting kind of how the brain works for teenagers for adolescents sorry I hate that word I'm gonna stop saying that as well for So adolescence, there are two things that I usually mark as being very, very different from from kind of the adults. One is the importance of peers and not the peers are not important to me or you. I mean, if it wasn't for our peers, we would you and I wouldn't be on the show together. um but but the importance of peers and what their peers think is much much bigger and much more influential and influential and then how their brain processes risk their brain does because i heard someone be like oh they don't think about it they're thinking about it they're thinking about

it differently because when i first started teaching health you know i'm teaching about smoking and i'm saying all the health educator things like smoking's gonna cause cancer and they're like whatever you know because they're 15 16 like that's not real to them and i remember the day that i finally been like and you're gonna get wrinkles and you're gonna smell bad and then suddenly my mom was like oh no because that was a bigger risk for them like their appearance their smell they're like you you tell i'm sitting here telling teenagers they're gonna get wrinkles and people are suddenly very concerned where i'm thinking i say the word cancer and that does not seem to bother them so they process risk differently it's not that they don't process

risk it's that they're it's just different it's different and i i i get really frustrated when when i hear adults say oh they weren't thinking about what they were doing they were thinking about it with a brain that doesn't work the way your brain does right and so yeah i don't really know where i was going to go at the end of that sentence that's the thing that um that i always that I always aim to keep in mind. Um, and I don't, I don't know if it's easier for me because I, I opted out of parenthood and all of that, but, but having a, a memory of, yeah, I, I was, I was smart enough to, to hear and think about the things, but I also made my own judgments and my mistakes. And I think that's the part too,

you have to hope that they can stumble a little bit to start to build more data, I'll say for those risk assessments as they as they move through adolescence. And you hope you pray you try to protect that it's nothing uber traumatic. That does it but but that's the that's the thing to remember for us, those of us that are in adulthood, you went through it too. You went through it too. And you can romanticize thinking that you would apply what you know now to your adolescent self in that situation that you're remembering or recalling or whatever. But you know, yeah, because you wouldn't have had access to the experiences and the cognitive development that is making you look at adolescents today going why the fuck are you doing that yep I think we

have a little amnesia when it comes to that because I feel like we all I mean I when I talk to my friend you know my friends will talk to me about their kids and they'll be like can you believe they're doing that I'm like yeah yeah I try to take the kids side when I can just because 100% where they're coming from but I'm also kind of like a good auntie yeah but I'm also kind of like did i do them i think i did don't remember hmm um but i do i think we have a little bit of amnesia when it comes to that which is better for our psyche but but like i when i talked to parents um i had a really interesting experience yeah have you heard of these lockdowns like they often tend to be religious like you get locked in with the kids all weekend and then somehow

oh like the church gym or whatever yeah yeah i was part of that with a group that does that regularly with with religious groups um i think we were with like 80 something eighth graders i'm just amazed i didn't kill anyone because yeah um and then so we we meet with them and we were doing a lot of stuff about sex education it was fantastic and we had people come and talk about the religious aspect it truly was an amazing experience for me sounds very holistic it really was and i really wish we well i don't know if i want to be locked in and have the same food as them again but we left early so it was it was a it was a group that does this normally and invited me to be part of the process and then we left early to go meet with the parents and not narc we weren't

narcing on the kids of what they were saying but we wanted there were things that we could share with the parents about what we were seeing and what we were hearing and questions the parents had and and they would say these things like why are they making these decisions why are they making such a bad decision and i'm like and you're having spent like the weekend with these kids and hearing how they make the decision you know when someone's putting pressure on a 16 year old to have sex and they're like you would if you love me no one else is going to want you everyone else is doing that as much as people are rolling their eyes right now as i say those when you are 15 and 16 yeah that is the end of life yeah and you don't necessarily have the ability to understand that

it's not the end because everything is so overwhelming i mean i don't want to say hormones but your emotions too at that point like well everything is changing everything is everything is changing yeah and so it feels crushing yeah and and i realized at that point that we had done this great job with these kids but we couldn't get the adults and like the half an hour we had with them to even begin to understand all the all the we would need to give them to help their kids and i think part of it's protective you don't want your kid to make decisions that you think can harm them but part of what they have to do at this age is they have to fuck up they have to fuck up and they have to learn how to land on their feet um and i know some of the fuck-ups

literally when we're talking about sex some of those can affect you for the rest of your life But it's part of what you do as an adolescent. And I think we kind of forget that sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Because, I mean, at that point, you know, if we're talking, I'm going to do like early adolescence, mid adolescence and late. I don't know if that helps.

No. Okay. 10 to 13, 13, 17, 17 to my sort of close to the age range is there. But so my point, though, is that when you are entering adolescence, your life experience frame of reference is preschool and elementary school. So how are you supposed to assess risk the same way that your parents think you should when your life experience was in a highly likely a highly insulated protective environment you know daycare elementary school all of those things where you're, there's someone making sure, doing their damnedest to make sure that you are

out of harm's way at almost every term, in the best of circumstances. I know that there are many stories where this is kind of a privileged baseline take. I will own that. But that's the thing. There is someone always watching. And that's your life experience. So when you enter this adolescence phase you think well nothing truly hopefully nothing truly catastrophic happened to me so far in my life so why are they why are they making a big deal out of nothing what could happen I mean and and 40s forever away so you know I had a college student once tell me that if you're a woman and you're 40 you may as well be dead because you were like super old age I was like okay and and he really till you get there I know he really believed it and and I I think we

forget sometimes like I know we joke now that like 50 is the new whatever 20 30 I don't even can't even catch up with the slogans but but I just own that I'm in the decade I'm in right have to why do I have to own or like why does it have to be the new decade that I'm really happy i'm out of but i think i think your point's really great like i don't understand that far away i can't even imagine when i'm in um junior high school is what we called it um or middle school like i at that point i can't even imagine like senior year high school how am i supposed to yeah it seems like eons away at that time right and i think we forget that because when especially when we're working when there are kids and I'm not a parent myself like oh like okay high school

and then college and then this or high school and then maybe trade or then go into a job or the military whatever it is they're going into like you're already thinking five steps ahead and this kid's like what am I having for snacks like so yeah I think we forget sometimes so the interesting thing to me with all of that is that the further away we get from our adolescent experience I think that we start to romanticize or um I don't know what the right term is that I'm thinking of other than romanticize but we start to build these kind of heroic stories of how we were at that at that point in our life right and um and in doing so you start to ascribe what you would do as as you now romanticizing or uh making yourself a hero in your memories

from with your adolescent memories and projecting that onto what you think the adolescent in your life should do yeah and that doesn't always work it doesn't always work and it's and the problem is our i'm trying to figure out how to bring the legislation piece in because i really want to do that because i know i know where our goal is um but but it's also like our laws don't know how to our laws don't reflect what we know about humans now you know and a lot of like growing up you know we have laws about when you can drink and when you could smoke but they were written before we really understood the way we do now what the adolescent brain looks like the fact that we say hey you're looking at risk differently up until the age of 25 but nine years

before that let's go ahead and let you drive a car like but then you can't rent one right so it's like this really weird confusing as people are trying to as they're moving through those stages themselves it starts to become really confusing so because i'm a walking cliche i teach sex class i used to teach a drugs class like sex and drugs all day um and one of the questions that we would have is about we would we would often get into is this is about how confusing it is that you can depending on where you are that you can drive for me in new york city it was 17 but i know a lot of places at 16 but if you live on a farm we'll give you access to heavy machinery that you can operate when you're 14 um and and i'm not saying anything no i am saying i want to i don't want to be like

i'm attacking farm people because i'm not i understand you need to work but if like if your brain is not developed your brain is not developed it doesn't matter if you're using it for work on your family's farm like your brain's not developed but the argument from that i would get from students was always well i can drive at 16 but i and i can join the military when i'm 18 unless i get a waiver when i'm 17 and at that point i could smoke cigarettes that you can't anymore which just shows that we can change things for the better in my opinion and then you can't drink till you're 21 but then you can't run for office until you're this and you can't you know it's it's incredibly confusing and my answer to them was you're absolutely right which always pissed

them off like well what do we do i'm like because these laws were written you know we never really used to look at 18 as still being an adolescent if you look at when a lot of those laws were passed it was it was when people were leaving the home and going out and starting lives and by the age of 23 they were married and you know they were doing the thing and now we have and i'm not really a fan of this term as much as i hate the term adolescence extended adolescence i do think that we are going longer and longer before we hold kids responsible for what they're doing humans humans responsible for what they do thank you um but i do think that also reflects what we know like if i'm if i know that your brain is not really interpreting things the way my brain is

until at least the age of 25 then it makes sense that we're trying to protect you but then we still give you the rights of an adult in so many ways so it is incredibly confusing and i just i i don't i can't solve that absolutely you're right it makes no sense that we do this at 16 this at 17 that's at 18 that's a 21 this is whatever i i would i would add that i don't know that necessarily i think some laws some legislation out there is out of ignorance and understanding and being and being reviewed to be updated with what we know now but the other side of that is that they exist to exploit that, that, that, that, that gap or that, that part, that part of the age. So you can enlist, you can enlist in the military when you're 18. You know what I,

my theory is because that's when you don't assess risk in the same way. If you were to raise, raise that age, would you get the same numbers for some of the same specialties? Probably not because people are starting to assess risk in a very different way. So there's, there's a piece where it's not updated enough, but maybe it also exists to capture that kind of sweet spot of, we know you're, we know you are going to need to be independent. We know you're going to need a salary so we will make you eligible for these types of specialties yeah so there's that so with the legislation go ahead no i just yes i'm thinking about it sorry this is me you know i kind of threw you a little curveball there for those of you who are just for those of

you who are listening not watching i i had my thinking face on you can go ahead and go back and see what that thinking face looks like um yes and i i need to think about that a lot more so i'm going to come back to that another time um but we do change laws and i think that's one of the things i want to talk about is that we do change and i do want to get to the laws of consent because that's where we need to wind up because that's a lot of what started this because i do remember now that's where we want to get to yeah yeah um we changed the legal drinking age across the country we withheld federal dollars from states that refused to up their drinking age to 21 five six years ago 2019 december 2019 i think is what we are you talking about the tobacco

yeah yeah i think we confirmed it was december 2019 um the fact that we raised the smoking age to 21 like that's not something when i first started my career i never thought i'd see that happen and that was we know the dangers of smoking i mean we know the dangers of smoking and the fact that we were letting 18 year olds make that decision not to say the 18 year olds aren't smoking or 17 or 16 like they're still getting their hands on cigarettes but but we have been able to kind of take a look at things and say huh maybe we should change that age what we haven't done is do that with the age of consent yeah oh i like that segue i did that really good that was gotta pat myself on the back there is your shoulder okay i don't know

that was fucking seamless and i'm so proud of you yay um and so this is something that is always a little confusing to me like we have an we have a federal definition for rape for statutory for rape not statutory rape um every state's got its own law And so for me, at any given school that I've ever taught at, I have never just had a room of people from the state that we're in or the district that we're in, which is very confusing because now I'm trying to talk about consent laws and I'm talking about seven or eight different states. And it gets truly confusing sometimes. And then, you know, especially when I was living in the D.C. area, you drive, you know, five miles. I'm in a different state. Now I got to think about the laws there. We do have something called statutory rape, which is the idea. Every state has this. It's the idea that below the age of consent, which can vary anywhere from, I want to say, 12 or 14. That I should know and I don't. 18 is the highest in this country. so um statutory rape is when someone who is below the age of consent who is still a minor who has not each reached the age of majority which is when they're considered not a minor anymore the idea is they cannot give consent to have sex so even if they say yes the idea is that you are too young

to understand the ramifications of what you are consenting to so you cannot give consent did you look it up am i is it 12 or 14 it's 12 16 no there's definitely a state oh no that's where we're going is where it's changing okay sorry thank you for the correction um so 16 to somewhere in the 18 range so so that's what the age is the age of consent is basically saying that if you are below the age of x whatever state you're in um that if you're saying yes yes yes guess yes this is what i want this is what i want it's the state trying to protect you at least the way this law is written because yeah because it's not like the da often takes these cases right um it's the same thing whoa your brain is not mature enough to understand

what you're saying yes to so we're saying you can't give consent and that is something that i think people find incredibly confusing also because there's not one age like why is it that in one state at 17 and then five miles away at 16 and then 10 miles the other direction if you're i'm thinking of the dc the dmv area where you can be like yeah but like we're the tri-state area in new york like why is it that i can change states and suddenly like our kids just better at 16 like they understand more in this state and the fact that we're still saying you can't do all these other things until you're 18 or 21 but sex you can do when you're 16 17 or 18 it's it's incredibly confusing especially when you think of the of the ripple effect of the decision to be sexually

active yeah you know pregnancies stis shame being left isolation yeah that's wow our brains are in sink getting a reputation mom and dad kicking you out or mom and mom kicking you out or dad and dad whatever your parental or guardian situation kicking you out yeah yeah having having to transfer schools because everyone's talking about you yeah there's a lot of that social media bullying social media billing harassment feeling like you were lied to yeah when someone lies to you and you have sex with them and they leave you like that sense of i can't trust anyone anymore or i'm gonna prove that what this person said like when they're like you're not good enough or whatever it is it's like well i'll just go out and have sex with

other people just to prove that i am so yeah it it's incredibly confusing and and for me like i sit there and i talk about laws of consent and then i watch us say but we're gonna raise the age of cigarettes to 21 to tobacco to 21 i'm like yeah okay so that's where we get the age of consent from it's this idea that the state was trying to protect youth but then they put in some of the states put in romeo and juliet laws have we ever talked about this on the show before i feel like we have i don't i don't know that we have in depth maybe we've referred to it because i know i learned about this from you from show prep so so romeo and juliet laws are when dr c drops into her radio voice i just these are just it's bonker um so if let's say you have a state and i'm just

going to make up numbers here because i don't i'm not thinking of any specific state right now let's say that you have a state where the with the age of consent is 17 if romeo and juliet law so basically if someone's under 17 and someone's over 17 and they have sex that's statutory rape if romeo and juliet law says that if the person is within if you are below the age of consent if sorry if the other person is below the age of consent but they are in within x number of years of the person who has sex with them it's okay so if the age of consent is 17 and the person under age is 16 but you're within three years of that it doesn't count because we understand that they're both operating with an adolescent brain

then why aren't we upping the age of consent if we understand that they're both operating with this adolescent brain so so romania juliet laws are basically basically loopholes that if you are close enough in age to the person who was under age it is no longer a crime or at least on statutory rape i mean they could go after like screwing with a minor which is not a legal term um so there are ways that they can do that but that's those those laws can't i mean the original consent laws came into being because the state was trying to protect youth from decisions that they were not capable of make that they did not deem them capable of making yeah yeah you bring up an interesting point why why is why is it that they created a loophole instead of just saying

no this is it yeah and then it gets it gets even more interesting i mean technically if you have two minors well i'm not a legal expert we really need to find a legal expert who's willing to get their face on the screen. I mean, I have several who chime in after the fact, but won't put their face on camera. I have to look into that. I mean, it's really and then the issue is it's about whether or not the case will be prosecuted. Like you can sit there and yell statutory rape, but the DA is not going to take it. It doesn't it doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. You know, the other interesting thing, I just looked this up as we were talking about this was so we're talking about the age of consent and what we felt what what i found is as of right now across the state

the very youngest age is 16 across the country for right now 16 17 18 right now yes however what's the minimum age for um marriage oh it depends on the state there it is and do you think it's 16 across the board oh it's absolutely not no it is absolutely not so funny story i'm going to tell this without consent oh i can't tell without consent because consent is the nature of what we do damn it caught by my own consent um i can't four states have no official minimum age oh hey when we get an official minimum age but require either parental consent or court approval or both i love when they start having parental consent for marriage right um remind me i gotta

tell you that sorry i'm not trying to tease the listeners but remind me i gotta tell you something two states the minimum age is 15 so you can't you can't give consent to have sex but you can give consent to get married which then implies consent in many of these cases to sex but also still does not give you consent to do your own finances right yeah yeah yeah yeah Yeah. 20 states, minimum age is 16, 8, it's 17. So there's one place I want to go. Can I just wander a little bit? I haven't wandered too much. Please, please. Before I go down a rabbit hole that's going to piss me off. So there was a case in one of the Carolinas, and I'm not saying it's one place. I honestly don't

remember if it's North or South Carolina. And I may have talked about this somewhere else because i love telling the story because it just shows the hypocrisy there was a boy who was under who who had not reached the age of majority for the state so i think he was 16 or 17 who sent in he sent a dick pic to someone and they arrested him for essentially use there was something of a minor There's a word I'm trying to find here. Exploitation? Yeah, something like that. So essentially he was sharing sexually explicit material of a minor and they tried him as an adult for a picture of his own body that was a minor. I need someone to explain that to me at some point because that's where it gets confusing and that's where the general public, I'm sure the lawyers, the three lawyers who listen to this regularly and give me crap, I'm sure they're going to be like, well, you don't understand the precedent. explain it to me like i'm your average citizen who cannot understand how me taking a picture of myself as a minor is going to get me tried as an adult right so i just wanted to wander down that and then he had to register as a sex offender and then the whole thing got i don't mean there's a

whole story at some point i gotta look up where it was but but it even begs the question like even if that case got dropped what did we put what did the system put that child child child through and also I think it's a very rare story for any human who is going through adolescence to be like oh what's this do what does this feel like what do you have what does that do

does it play fetch why is it winking at me i don't understand why do you have a levity little levity there why do you have an audi when i have an e yeah yeah yeah and i think it's i think it's one of those things and again it's it's confusing for people so if i can't really understand how i'm going to take a picture of my body but i'm going to get it was the word i used exploitation uh something of a minor but then you're going to charged me as an adult but i'm still in high school but i'm you know it's it's my body it's my body and it wasn't even about the fact but this one piece of this action was an adult action

right and that's that's where it gets confusing and that's where you know adolescents not not that adolescents are breaking down the legal aspects of this but it's it's confusing and so when we talk about risk how could i possibly explain that to a student let's talk about the risk of sexting because you'll get busted as an adult yeah that doesn't make sense yeah so here's where this is this by the way is the part where i pissed charlie off here we go so here's the thing we have been extending adolescence hey that's better term um because we could do a whole thing on the fact that these teens are no longer resilient and they can't function and blah blah blah blah but we are understanding we've looked at laws and we've said whoa maybe we shouldn't

allow people under the 21 to have access to tobacco because we understand the health risks, the very long-term health risks. We really are kind of coddling them past the age of 18 in a way that we haven't. And I honestly don't think parents are like, oh, your brain's not fully developed. I think parents are living out their own crap. But in one aspect of life, we are delaying people being made to take responsibility for their actions. And we're understanding that maybe the brain is not as developed as it should be and then there are some people who are currently in positions of power who are trying to lower the age of consent to 14 or 12 which is really what got this episode started yes um was us saying what the actual fuck yeah are you saying that a

14 year old can give consent because there's only one reason you want to pass that law and you want to pass in my opinion you want to pass that law because you want to make it okay for yourself or someone in your near surroundings to have sex with a very young girl because it's not usually about boys it's about girls usually very young girl and somehow make it okay and now I'm gonna let Charlie get pissed off uh-huh is that all you got I mean oh yes these laws and the evaluation of them always seem to be centered around it's very gendered and it is around girls and access to girls and i think this this parlays into an episode that we will want to do um that we talked about before uh before we started recording today um so cliffhanger folks

But the legislation around sex, sexual health, consent, historically is centered around access to girls and women. And if you don't, if you're not beginning to see that as a fundamental issue, and in just everything, then then I, I don't know how to guide you or make space to get you there. because if that doesn't create a visceral visceral reaction in you that there are places that the consent they're they want to lower the consent age after everything we've talked about in this episode that it's really age twins so they want to about what 13 years too soon expose children to sex as far as like consent laws is what i mean like a 12 year old 13 years too soon the delta between 13 and 25 there you go thank you i wasn't math that's okay that's okay um so there's there's not many laws that we have on the books that aren't centered around

legalizing harmful access to girls and women and we need to stop calling 14 year olds young women they're not they're girls right they're girls they are children they are barely teenagers they are girls and and if you didn't know that this was happening this is this has not passed yet in any state because when it does we're going to do a whole nother fucking if it does we're going to do a whole nother fucking episode on this but if you haven't heard about this i want you to think about any children that you have in your life and i want you to and i want you to even if they're not yours they're tangentially in your lives your your blood relatives you're not we're not like you're the guest aunt um i want you to think about whether or not you think those

13 14 year olds are capable of having sex and making those decisions and i want you to think about the and because it's not going to be 15 year old boys who they're not passing this legislation these are adult men usually age 40 and up i want you to think about 40 plus year old men who want access to 14 year old girls and ask yourself why in in a period of time where we're saying huh brain's not quite developed yet at 18 and we're starting to understand this better and we understand that you're on that you don't understand the concept of risk and you're still weighing your weight you do understand the concept of risk you're just weighing it differently than than most people would how is it that we are saying that 14 year olds have the ability to

make this decision because i'll tell you right now they can't they can't i don't really care what if if if they are and get this law changed i don't i will never agree with it i think it's that coupled with the understanding and the continued um the continued conversations of of what we understand of trauma now as well so we've we've done a lot on focusing on development but we would be remiss to not balance that with how we understand how trauma impacts that development and what violation of one's body. I mean, go back to what I said earlier in this episode, by the time you hit adolescence, your entire life experience is a child is elementary school is kindergarten. That's it. You're just like, you still want to sleep. You

maybe still want to sleep with a stuffed animal you still want to play make-believe in you know all of these things and we're saying yeah no you you should 100 be able to marry an adult person or even not get married just have sex with them right well and then that's the other thing that is like in some of these consent laws there's a marriage exception and i think i mentioned that earlier. So if we're simultaneously lowering those, if those ages are already shockingly low for marriage, and then we're going to make a cut, some of those states are going to make the consent even below that we are traumatizing children. Yep. And what that does to their cognitive of development and the way that their brain develops up until 25 you if you are sitting

listening to this getting as pissed like i feel like my my face is turning redder a little bit hard to tell with my pink hair um but you should that should give you a visceral reaction yeah that should piss you the fuck off yep and you should want to get involved if you are in some of these states that are looking at this yep i think we're good i'm gonna let you deep breath everybody deep breath everyone take a drink don't mind if i do so tasty anyway what what else is on your mind i i think we i don't think there's anything we can go after that okay i there's more i kind of want and there's one more thought i have on on how we look at kids but i i think that i i think i want to end it on the anger this time i know i usually

like to dissipate some of that before we go but they're talking about legislation for harm for essentially harming and giving access to grown ass men to little girls and i don't i think that should be the end of that story yeah and the timing of this is go ahead i'm sorry no i don't want it to be the end of the story i want this to be a minor blip that never passes and we can come back in a year and be like oh thank god that never happened but yeah i think we need to be aware of of the push for that and then it's not just one state it's not like it's an anomaly you know these ridiculous laws they try to pass um you know that someone throws out there it's not just one and i think we need to i think we need to highlight it because i think and pay attention

to why yeah yeah like why the fuck do you need it you know yep so if you're pissed off congratulations we got you where we need you to be um if you do live in one of those states we'd love to hear from you about kind of what some of the conversation may be or if you didn't know i feel like maybe we should have named the states but i feel so the problem is we don't know we don't like record this and then air it the next day so i'm afraid that there'll be too much of a lag between the time we record it and the time we we air it but if you're if this pisses you off we want to know there's there's going to be a link in the description um that you can contact us with show ideas or just comments but especially if you're living in one of the states that's

kind of thinking about this we'd love to know what's being said on the ground there so so feel free to share but if you're pissed off um good i think it's okay to live you pissed off today. Yeah. Sorry. Not sorry. Sorry. Not sorry. All right. Well, everyone, thank you for joining us on today's episode of unzipping taboos. We hope today's episode pissed you off a little bit. Yep. Spark will spark new thoughts and we'll open up conversations worth having. Please remember that your curiosity and compassion are the keys to breaking down barriers and embracing a healthier understanding of sex relationships and all the things that surround us that legislate it, govern it, all of those things. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe, leave a review and

share it with someone who might need to hear this. And if you've got a question or a topic you want us to dive into, reach out to us via the link in the episode description. A huge thanks to jackandjilladult.com for supporting Unzipping Taboos. Don't forget, you can get 20% off with your order by using code unzipping20. We also want to give a very special shout out to Ali O'Brien for incredible theme music. Thank you so much, Ali. And until next time, keep the conversation going. Keep unzipping those taboos and everyone. Take care.