Quote Originally Posted by Kal El View Post
The pure reason why 18 is the "magic age" is just for legality purposes. There is no real age where somebody passes into adulthood. One only enters adulthood when they accept the social challenges put before adulthood and stop acting like a child

I considered myself a child up until around later November of last year, I finally got with the program, started acting responsibility, started planning for my future, etc. Many people are physically matured when they are 17/18, but cannot accept the emotional aspects of being an adult until they are much older than that. I have met several people who are or nearing 30, who act like emotionally insecure 2 year olds.

It is too hard to place a law in that aspect, so, somebody somewhere in time, decided 18 was a good enough age to be considered an adult.
True, in this day and age more than ever, it seems that if anything people reach "adulthood" later. While too many children take their physical maturity at face value and begin having sex even at age fourteen or prior, very few are mentally mature. Case in point, my half-sister. She turns 22 in a couple of months, is in nursing school and has two children, yet she is almost entirely dependent on my mother for support and is the epitome of youthful ignorance. She matured early, was pregnant at age 13 and married by the time she was fifteen. I guess she was an adult by some people's standards back then. Even now, it is all I can do to tolerate her lack of raising. Many young people now lead sheltered lives, taken care of by Daddy and Mommy until they are in their Twenties and not being out in the "real world" until they are well past the legal drinking age. By the time I was twenty I had my first kid and thought I had matured greatly over the previous three years. Even with multiple children I spent most of my 20s kind of gliding through life. In the past couple of years I've finally started thinking about the future and even retirement, reflecting on how much growing I still have to do. Hence, I consider many people even my age to be kids. Heck, my ten year old is occasionally capable of making better decisions than my friends. To say that physical maturation should equal adulthood is ignorant at best.

On child porn, it is a matter of perspective and suggestiveness. The human body is a beautiful thing, but as Kal El stated, there is a fine line between art and pornography. Traci Lords was sexually mature and more than capable of acting like an adult in all of her films, though she started at age 15. The fact that she not only appeared to enjoy sex but actually did so on film to entertain the masses may identify her as an adult to some. Reading her book (Traci Lords: Underneath It All), however, reveals a disturbed teenager making mistake after mistake before finally beginning to find herself at the magic age of 18. She made money, owned cars and lived on her own, but was hardly what could be considered an adult. Still, she managed to fool the porn industry for a few years and was obviously enough of an adult to do so. Clueless (but physically mature) teenagers are usually victims of themselves and perhaps a few unscrupulous profiteers who should be prosecuted accordingly; innocent (and undeveloped) children are almost always victims in the truest sense of the word and their manipulators should be sought and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.