Age of consent laws aren’t that difficult of a concept for most people to grasp. But white nationalist and YouTuber Nick Fuentes seems to be having some serious difficulties.
A video of clip of Fuentes attempting to deconstruct the age of consent laws with the apparent purpose of writing them off as idiotic back in March has begun circulating again, and it’s as filled with WTFery as one might expect.
In the disturbing footage, which he shared with the internet on purpose, Fuentes starts off by calling the age of consent “a feminist social construct.”
He rambles on for a while, complaining that there are slightly different ages of consent between different states and even countries, trying to paint the entire concept as arbitrary before accidentally destroying his own point.
“Let’s think about what’s really going on here,” he says. “Age of consent means the age at which an adult can consent.” Yes. The age at which an adult can consent.
Yet Fuentes doesn’t stop there, mocking the idea that if someone isn’t 18 sex is automatically rape, despite that being incredibly reductive and not actually what age of consent laws are about at all.
“Are we really supposed to believe that people, adults, grown adults who are past the point of puberty engage in a relationship and that becomes a rape?” he asks.
Fuentes’s impassioned denouncement of age of consent laws was part of a larger video in defense of Matt Gaetz and the scandal currently surrounding him. The rest of the footage included him claiming no one cares if older women have sex with middle school boys and complaining that “homosexuality…is all perfectly okay” when grown men can’t sleep with young teen girls.
He also made his own arbitrary decision that 15 “is probably crossing the line of too young” after exerting so much effort into denouncing the idea that a single year could really make that much difference in his defense of signing off on middle-aged men having sex with 17-year-old girls.
To say Fuentes’ video didn’t sit well with people is an understatement.
While age of consent laws are not, in fact, about “artificially increasing the marketplace value of older women” as Fuentes claims, Gaetz and Fuentes and everyone else so concerned about the laws would really just be better off finding consenting adult women to sleep with. It’s not a trick. Just don’t be a creep.
