America Can't Decide What An Adult Is

What is an adult? America’s laws usually say an adult is an 18-year-old — if she wants to vote, fight in a war, have sex, and take on debt — or a 21-year-old if she’d like to enjoy a beer or cigarette. America’s citizens can’t seem to make up their minds either, as we saw last week after a picture of Leonardo DiCaprio sitting next to a 19-year-old Israeli model at a party resurrected the “age-gap” discourse. The “age-gap” discourse is an eternal internet argument in which one side posits that legal adults can have sex with whoever they like, and the other side posits that if the age between two consenting adults is too large, the relationship is predatory on the part of the older person, and effectively non-consensual on the part of the younger.