Originally posted by Cleo671
That's 14-15 years old in these parts. Old enough to marry in many states. Hardly a "child" in the sense you suggest

In what sense is that?
A girl of 14-15, here 8th or 9th grade can be 13-14.
The suggestion you make is that 'heaps' of girls that age are all 'sexually' mature individuals, when the reality is that they aren't. They are still children in the sense that the majority are in SCHOOL, they live at home and I would doubt their 'first' goal would be to be 'married' in all that this entails ie they are minors.
Cleo, while I'm sympathetic to your concerns, I think that "age" is more subjective than the stark mathematical number that age represents. It's a question, I think, of physical and emotional maturity. In some times and in some places, girls of fourteen have been considered quite mature. Juliet, after all, was fourteen, and we don't feel that Romeo was taking advantage of her, do we?

So I think it depends -- just as it does with real fourteen-year-olds, some of whom are very mature (mentally and emotionally, I mean) and some of whom are not.

That said, I believe that the youngest "woman" to appear in one of my stories was fifteen -- but fifteen in a faraway land long ago, where, partly because of much shorter life spans, girls were considered 'nubile' or marriageable at a much earlier age than nowadays.

Personally, I share your distaste for stories which sexualize "little girls", however we define them. It's just that I'm not sure that we can define them with a number. I personally would click to another story if any 'heroine' is describes as thirteen or younger -- but I wouldn't rule out the possibility that someone could write an intelligent story about the love-life, real and imagined, of some thirteen-year-olds.


Boccaccio