I think Atrios is not totally getting what I’m talking about in his response to my Wall Street Journal piece. First of all, our laws recognize that maturity comes slowly. In addition to the minimum drinking age of 21, the minimum age for entering Congress is 25, and for the Senate, 30. Many jurisdictions make 21 the baseline minimum for holding state senatorial or other government positions, while others use 25 as their local baseline. Several states have a 30-year-old minimum for the governorships, and we’re all familiar with the 35 year minimum that exists for the presidency.

Under what I am suggesting — which is really, at this point, more a general principle for legislation than a fully worked out proposal (I’m no lawyer) — women and men under 21 would retain the right to flash anyone they wanted or take photos for personal use, under the theory that the people a law is intended to protect should not be punished under it. All that would be lost is young men and women’s ability to participate in commercial enterprises looking to sell their erotic images, and the risk of involuntary distribution of their non-commerical images. Women and men would gain a greater right to control their own erotic images until age 21. The anti-porn laws we have now are much, much stronger than the one initially passed in the late 1970s, and what I was thinking of is something a bit more like that initial legislation, which would provide women and men with a tool to control their own images and prevent exploitation, but not result in any kind of massive prosecutorial crackdown per se. The intent would be to expand the zone of privacy for young men and women. The key factors to be regulated would be commercial use of images and unwanted use of non-commercial images.

As for Ezra Klein’s suggestion that we lower the drinking age to 18 and create a category of “impaired consent” under which no one could legally participate in anything, I really don’t think we want to go there.

I used to write informed consents for a major hospital and so recall that once you get into restricting consent based on subjective assessments of competence — and non-medical and retrospective ones at that — you can eliminate the ability of a lot of people to participate in research or even their own treatments. For example, if you are studying drug addicts who are almost always high, is their consent valid? I think the general understanding is that as long as someone is not obviously completely high, you have to treat them as being able to consent. Can a person with mental illness or dementia consent? Up to a point, sure. The same is the case for people who are alcohol impaired. The question of impaired ability to consent comes up a lot in rape cases, and my general understanding of the way those cases have been decided is that the impaired ability to consent argument generally requires much greater levels of inebriation than what one sees in the Girls Gone Wild DVDs. Not all those shoots involve inebriation. Nor are all the images I’m talking about commercially motivated, either.

UPDATE: The always thoughtful Ampersand at Alas, A Blog has more.

UPDATE II: Apparently there is a controversy over linking to Alas, which I was unaware of until now.